The trickiest part about figuring out what to do with the demon hearts was realizing that, whatever might happen, they were no more dangerous in the basement than they’d be if Matt kept them close. If the demon lord set off one, they’d all go off. Matt would have to somehow get to ground level and run before they demolished the town, but in the meantime there was virtually no way the tower itself would survive crumbling from the stress. The chances of him escaping were paper-thin if they existed at all.
Once they realized that, it opened their options up.
It was Lucy who had come up with the first solution, mostly by knowing that “pulverize” literally meant to reduce to dust. If the system was saying the hearts could survive that, then Matt, as the owner of an ultra-hard-shovel, was as well-equipped to do it as anybody could be. It ended up being surprisingly easy to crush one of the hearts by smashing it with the shovel head again and again, grinding it to dust against the stone floor.
After that, he just needed pockets. He had that covered.
The second idea had been Matt’s. It had seemed like the demon hearts were a system invention, one that worked on system rules and with system influence. In his experience, very little was capable of making the system fail at what it was trying to do. For that, you needed something outside the system. These hearts weren’t indestructible, so his shovel didn’t make much of a difference there, and there was only one other way for Matt to disrupt the system’s goals.
The demon king was clawing at the floor, trying desperately to reach Matt. But like chewing an aspirin, grinding up the heart had also made it quick-release. Matt watched as every time the demon king began to get his muscles into control, another bit of the heart would send out a surge at point-blank range, filling him with agony and robbing him of control of his body. Matt suspected he would have liked to have dropped his force field and shared the trouble with his guest, but apparently he either couldn’t do that or couldn’t manage it while being actively tortured. As it was, he was trapped by himself in a snow globe of agony.
His skin tore each time a surge moved through him, only to immediately heal. And It really was immediate. Even with Matt’s enhanced PER and a lot of idle time talking to the demon lord, each tear would only light up the slightest amount from Survivor’s Reflexes’ weak point detection function. Then, the wound would more or less slam shut, immediately perfect again. No matter how damaging the surges from the demon heart might be, they were nowhere near enough to fully overcome the demon lord’s impressive regeneration.
But then the fires came. Suddenly, Matt couldn’t see the demon lord at all. He was obscured with a green inferno of his own creation, screaming louder now. And then, suddenly, the fire died, the force field became invisible once more and the screams quieted. Kneeling on the floor, steaming with his own boiled juices, was the demon lord. He was charred, mangled, and apparently frozen in one position.
But he was alive, and his regeneration had already started to kick in. Matt could see parts of his body beginning to shed ash as the skin beneath them grew back and began to spread. Within moments, he had several palm-sized splotches of healed areas, and within almost no time at all, he’d be healed completely.
“Now, Matt!” Lucy yelled, but Matt was already moving. He stabbed his shovel through the force field and put the second part of their plan into play. Eating the heart had not been fun. It had tasted like iron-flavored chalk, so very crunchy in all the wrong ways that he had felt Rub Some Dirt On It! kick in to heal the damage to his teeth. He was, on Lucy’s advice, fully prepared to try and purge his body of it if it didn’t immediately have the effect it hoped. But it had.
Point Explosion
You have eaten the heart of the demon lord, sort of. Not quite a part of a living being and not quite an inanimate object, each heart is packed with an unbelievable amount of power waiting to be unleashed.
Point Explosion is a one-time use skill funneling all of that power into a single point, then releasing it. This release occurs immediately upon activation at the point of contact between your weapon and your enemy, or at the point of contact of your body and theirs in the case of an unarmed blow. The latter is not recommended if it can be avoided.
While the original heart had all sorts of magic and intentional design to funnel the mana in a controlled way, this attack has none of that. Anything dramatic, violent, and absolutely dangerous might happen.
Meta-trait Occupied: Attack
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Matt had to get rid of his arrow-ant charged attack to take the trait. It hurt. The charged attack was by far the best, most useful skill he had ever had. It had saved his life multiple times, and made his life easier dozens more. But given his situation, it wasn’t a hard choice. He gave it up, and took the power from the demon’s heart.
Now, only minutes later, he gave it back. Stabbing his shovel deep past the force field, he made contact with the demon lord. Without full coverage from his black hole skin, the point of the shovel sank in an inch or so before becoming jammed between the demon lord’s apparently equally tough ribs. But that was far enough. Matt activated Point Explosion, prepared for anything.
The demon lord did not scream. Instead, his eyes got wide as his body jerked, then jerked again in a different direction just as suddenly. And then, as he opened his mouth in shock, he detonated.
Matt watched as the initial wave of force from the explosion hit the force field, then condensed against it, somehow bulging the field out before it suddenly and visibly began to change color and buckle.
“Matt! The arm guard!”
Matt activated the force-field function of his arm guard at the same time he burned every single point of stamina he had in a backwards leap. Even with all that speed, his feet had barely left the ground when the explosion caught him.
—
“Everyone, we have to go!” Artemis was screaming. The demons had long since caught up to them outside the gates, pushing them back. Once they got out to open ground and poured out of the bottleneck of the gate, the battle had become that much harder. Now they were being attacked by wave after wave of demon warriors while dodging pinpoint spells from demon mages. The combination would have long since killed them if the proximity of the demon troops didn’t keep the mages from using area of effect spells like they otherwise would have.
“Just a little while longer!” Brennan yelled, impaling a battle king on the point of his dagger, losing it in the process, and switching to the shorter backup dagger he kept in his belt.
“No! Now!” Artemis yelled. “Old man! Take him!”
The old man hesitated to grab Brennan for just one moment, but it was long enough to cause disaster. Fighting with a shorter weapon severely limited Brennan’s options, most importantly by forcing him to try to block blows closer to his body rather than parrying them farther away. Against a single opponent, this might have been a good thing, one that let him work closer to his opponent and launch strikes from inside their guard they couldn’t block. Against multiple opponents, it just threw off his rhythm, shortened his reaction time, and caused him to take a nasty, jagged claw wound deep in his chest.
The wound wasn’t fatal, but the hook of the claw combined with the shock of it sent him tumbling to the ground, where he was almost immediately swarmed by four or five demons.
“BRENNAN!” Artemis screamed. She watched as the weapons arced through the air at him. He was done for. And then, suddenly, they stopped. Every demon on the battlefield stopped with them, an expression like slight confusion on their faces. Then, as one, they crumpled to the ground.
“What in the sweet hell?” The old man paused, glancing too and fro among the downed demons. “I think they died. Why do ya think they died?”
Suddenly, a screaming whistling filled the air, as some terrible new fireball shot out from the center of the stronghold.
“Some ritual, ya think? Drain them to send out a spell?” the old man asked. He and the others looked on, weapons at the ready. At the speed it was coming, there would be no dodging it if it was aimed at them and maintained its speed, as most spells did. But, mercifully, the weapon didn’t appear to be aimed directly at them, instead slowing and continuing on a trajectory to miss them and instead land somewhere behind them.
As it passed overhead, something in the fire caught the sun and glinted. Nothing that could be seen clearly, but just a reflection of light somehow cutting out of the inferno.
“Oh, shit,” said Derek, suddenly in motion. The others may not know the exact color of that glint, but he did. The old man said that people remembered things better when they were scared, often when beating Derek half to death with clubs or sticks. And in this case, he had the memory of the exact way that light reflected off a particular object beaten into him, as hard as anything could have been. It brought him back to the days of lying on his back in the middle of a completely dead planet as a desperate, terrified survivor.
“Derek, wait, you idiot!” Artemis yelled, but he was already gone. He moved over the landscape like a lightning bolt, setting himself directly under the path of the object, which by now had just about burned out. Then, to the others’ amazement, he braced himself and caught it, getting knocked end over end across the ground himself for his trouble.
And before he had even stopped moving, the demons all suddenly hissed slightly, as if something was escaping from them, then collapsed into ash. Just like that, in an instant, they were gone.
That was enough for the old man. He turned tail and sprinted towards Derek, while Artemis finally broke position and ran to Derek. If the demons collapsing and disintegrating was a trick, it was a hell of a deception to pull off. More likely, something else had happened entirely, and there was only one thing any of them could think of.
Matt had done it.
—
Hours later, Matt woke up by a fire. Not an Artemis-fire, concealed from sight and only really visible to her, but an actual, honest-to-god wood fire roaring and spilling light out into the open air for miles and visible miles.
Hoping that was a good sign, he sat up. Sitting next to him, staring into the fire, was Lucy.
“You know, normally when I almost die I wake up to you screaming. What’s the deal? Calming down as you grow up?”
“Oh, I screamed for a while. You were charcoal, Matt. Then the old man shoved some sort of pill in your mouth he said that he ‘traded some old woman for those with a couple of old mementos for’ and you healed right up. Everyone else is asleep, but you should probably thank him for that, later. Seemed liked one hell of a pill.”