Tilarmus

Tilarmus led his army through the Izimathune Canyon in high spirits. This would be a safe mission for once. The main forces of his dimension had launched an assault on the Prime Material, but not so major as to get the Prime Material’s higher gods involved.

All he had to do was guide his force through one of the inter-dimensional backroads, an intermediary minor dimension filled with nothing but sand, and send all the mortals, i.e. everyone but him, through the portals there.

They would enter into the Prime Material and attempt to infiltrate and gather souls, while he could just head back, getting a full third of the stolen souls for only a few weeks of work.

For a relatively weak demon god like himself, it was the best type of mission—at least until he saw her.

She looked like an old woman, human, with shoulder-length white hair, blue eyes starting to get cloudy, and pale skin. She was wearing a brown battle robe and holding a cane, which she seemed to need to keep herself standing, and, upon closer look with his senses, he could see she was an A rank, not a god. She was a powerful mortal, but a mortal nonetheless, and, judging from her life force, one with half a foot in the grave.

She was standing at the end of the canyon, only a few thousand kilometers away, and, as he looked at her, he saw her throw up a little blood. But, just because she was dying, it didn’t mean there wasn’t danger.

She had done something to the canyon, trapped it somehow.

As Tilarmus looked around at his army, the weaker demons were starting to die and, every time they did, a black and white gas, emanating the power of yin and yang, left their bodies and entered into their neighbors. It only took several seconds for the lowest soldiers to all fall, and then everyone else in the army began to feel the effects as well, especially the weakest demons left, no one able to block the intangible gas, not even Tilarmus himself.

When the weakest demons remaining then fell in turn, the next most powerful demons started to succumb as well, and the process was quick, the entire army dead within a few minutes.

Tilarmus tried to move forward, to attack the woman with the large red claymore he drew from his back, but, even though it only took three minutes for him to flash step in front of her, by that point his body was already full of the gas from his entire army.

He couldn’t lift his heavy sword and the old woman reached up and placed the tip of her cane against his forehead, a light force pushing him onto his back, where he quickly expired.

That small movement seemed to hurt her almost as much, however, and she threw up a very unhealthy amount of blood as she opened her status screen to check her contribution points.

“Just enough.” Speaking her final words, Xara Valin, the Yin Yang Sage, died of old age.

* * *

Mila

“So, your name is Li Mila and you are a Chinese spy.”

As Mila woke in the bed of the Russian oligarch she’d been sent to steal from, on the side of the bed nearer the room’s door, her training kicked in, and she immediately started analyzing the situation.

First, the old man had handcuffed her right wrist to one of the back posts of his four-poster canopy bed. Second, she was only wearing a nightgown, not exactly fighting attire. Third, he was pointing a gun at her, an American made pistol. And, fourth, he had two body guards behind him, both with kevlar vests and rifles, yet neither was prepared for action.

Finally, most important of all, he was standing too close.

As quick as she could move, she launched her body toward him and kicked the gun out of his hand with her left foot, the gun launching itself right toward her chest. Then she caught the weapon in her free hand and fired at the two guards, both shots right to their faces to avoid their kevlar.

“Hand me the keys please, Dimitri,” she commanded in the flawless Russian which had helped her gain access to his bed in the first place.

The old man reached into his pocket, but it was to pull out his phone, not the key, which his body language let her know was not on his person, but on the body of one of the guards.

“Do you really want me to kill you?”

From what she knew of the man, no other guards would come running from the sound of his own gun, as he’d been planning on executing her, so, as he put his phone away before being able to do anything, she had time to question him.

“First, how do you know my name?” The fact he even knew she was Chinese was a surprise. The child of a Chinese man and a Polish woman, with a little hair dye and an ever so tiny bit of makeup, most white men couldn’t even tell she wasn’t fully caucasian. The idiots. They just saw her pretty face and body and their hormones did the thinking.

“Do you know Aalam Alvaro?”

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Mila’s face involuntarily twitched, the strongest emotion she was feeling guilt, followed by anger—mostly at herself—and the oligarch saw, taking a step forward in an attempt at intimidation.

“Of course you do. You were at the very top. Well, your former target sent out a list of all the intelligence assets ever sent to spy on him, a quite extensive one, in an email blast to the heads of the world’s intelligence agencies, including my friend Ivan, and an hour ago he forwarded it to me. It included your picture and I was able to immediately recognize you.”

The last part was obviously a lie. Even with her sharing his bed while he did so, it seemed it had still taken him a minute to place her as the more obviously Chinese woman from any picture Aalam would have had access to, but, as far as she could tell, everything else appeared to be the truth.

“Thank you, Dimitri. That will be all.” She then shot him in the neck, specifically the carotid artery so more blood would spurt out and, as he was close, her nightgown was soon covered.

Then she carefully angled the gun and shot at the cuffs holding her right hand to the four-poster, breaking the chain and thankfully not damaging her arm. Careful not to step in the growing blood puddle on the carpet, she then walked over to the guard with the key and undid the cuff on her wrist before undoing the other cuff from the four-poster and hiding both cuffs under the room’s mattress.

Realizing she wasn’t going to be able to hide the forensic evidence showing they’d been holding her, and that her identity was compromised anyway, she didn’t even try to clean up more and took out Dimitri’s phone from his pocket, downloaded a bit of malware from a website she’d memorized, and set up the phone so agents of her government could listen in on all communications. Then she called the local police and stammered out a semi-coherent string of babble about how her one night stand had been murdered in front of her by one of his guards, saying all the right keywords for them to send more than just a patrol car.

She then put on a pair of socks, the only article of clothing she’d been wearing the night before which was at all practical, and put a few obstacles in front of the door so the other guards would need time to get in once they started trying.

Then, after waiting until she heard sirens, she wrapped her hands in pillow cases stolen from the bed’s pillows and headed toward the room’s large windows, opening them up to the night air.

Dimitri’s room in his palatial complex was on the third floor, but, even before sleeping with the man, she’d already looked out the window and figured out how she could escape.

There was a large tree out there, leaves bare as winter had started, but, due to Global Warming, it wasn’t too cold for the skimpy attire she was wearing, meaning she wouldn’t risk hypothermia by going out.

Using the pillow cases wrapped around her hands to keep herself from getting any injuries which the cops would be able to notice, she then jumped out the window, grabbed onto a branch, and dropped herself down to two others before lightly landing on the grass below, not having a single mark on her body.

Then she left the pillow cases under the tree before avoiding security cameras and the lines of sight of distracted guards while she made her way to the front gate, where she ran up to the cops a blubbering mess.

It was pretty easy to not answer questions she didn’t want to, as almost all the cops were male and her nightgown was made of sheer fabric, but escaping their custody was a bit harder, what with all the staring. She was forced to call several of them perverts and act like she was scared before enough stopped looking so she could escape and make her way to the nearby extraction site, jumping into the backseat of an unmarked white SUV.

“What happened?” one of the two men in the front, the driver, asked in Chinese, and, as he was her handler for the mission, Mila told him the facts of the night.

“Thank you.” The other man, the one she didn’t recognize, turned to look at her, a gun in his right hand and, as she’d just put on her seatbelt, she wasn’t able to dodge as he fired a bullet right into her chest. “With your identity revealed, however, you are no longer an asset.”

* * *

Aalam

“This is potentially treason, Mr. Alvaro.”

Aalam Alvaro looked over at the member of the US Senate, one Mr. Tom Taylor, who looked like a cross between a tortoise and a humanoid blob monster, and shook his head slightly. “Respectfully sir, that’s not how treason works. Even someone like you, who’s been taking money from three Russian oligarchs for the last ten years in exchange for political favors, technically isn’t committing treason. Tax fraud and a few other crimes, yes. Treason, no.

“Do you understand this?”

Tom Taylor looked scared, the C-SPAN cameras catching it, and Aalam internally congratulated himself again for not agreeing to this interview with the Senate Subcommittee on Intelligence unless it was public. He’d at least learned some things from Mila over the last six years.

“Does anyone else have any stupid questions?” Aalam, a young natural born American citizen of half Iraqi and half Argentinian heritage looked at several of the other members, most of whom he also had dirt on. “I put a Trojan into my own computer system, not yours, not China’s, not the Russian’s, nor any of the other governments and businesses whose internal files have now been leaked online. You all stole my research, along with said Trojan, and, through said illegal act, released your own information onto the internet.

“All I did was look at these publicly available documents and then send an email out with the information of all the individuals who have spied on me, including members of the CIA and no members of the FBI, which raises a whole lot of red flags, seeing as I’m an American citizen.”

Aalam moved his messy shoulder-length brown hair out of his eyes as he continued to glare. “Now, I’ll ask again, why am I here? The information about your corruption is already out there, so dragging me away from my research doesn’t seem to serve any purpose.

“In case you’ve forgotten, the world is facing three pandemics and a global climate crisis, but, as you all won’t pay with the money you are exploiting to solve these problems with my current solutions, I need to go try and make everything cheaper.”

“Mr. Alvaro.” Doctor Penny Smith, one of the few senators on the committee without any skeletons in her closet, at least not any Aalam had yet found, sighed as she spoke to him. “Do you realize the implications of what you’ve released?

“I understand you’re in pain. Your girlfriend lied to you for years, your sister is sick, and everyone keeps going after you with a political agenda when you’re just trying to save the world, but the secrets you’ve released. It seems we’re almost on the verge of thermonuclear war.”

“Oh.” Aalam leaned back in his seat, his previous anger replaced by a deep depression as he looked down at the desk in front of him. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Judging from your past accomplishments, you seem to be a very, very smart man.” Doctor Smith looked at him with fearful eyes, but of a different kind of fear from Tom Taylor, or at least that’s how it seemed to Aalam, fear for others rather than fear for oneself, though he couldn’t be at all sure his interpretation was accurate. “Do you have any ideas to stop what’s coming?”

“Hmm.” Aalam seemed to think for a few seconds. Then he took out his phone and placed it in front of him. “I do. But I don’t think you’ll like it very much.”

“Anything you can do, Mr. Alvaro. Anything.”

Aalam messed with his phone for a few seconds, sending out a signal to a half dozen receivers hidden throughout the Capitol building, and, about 20 seconds later, the Capitol building, and Aalam and all the senators with it, vanished in a fiery explosion.