"Continue the tour!" Blake shouted as he ran. "Is there anywhere that critter can't go? Take me to that!"

Tree-limb-acid-face started loping forward like the ugliest gorilla known to man.

"Apologies," said high tech Lumiere. "But I've no idea where the critter can go or where it can't! The first room on the tour is the dining room. If you could just come right this..."

"Is there an armory?" Blake shouted. "Take me to the armory!"

"That would be highly unusual," said Lumiere. "The tour is the tour, designed carefully to explain the history of the Maker's Hall and end on a high note of..."

"Take me to the damn armory, now! Or I'll leave your critter forever!"

"Oh very well. It's down the Hall of History, second door on the right."

Blake ran and tried not to look back, ready to start launching himself forward with Telekinesis. But he suspected he needed his mana. Second door on the right, he thought. Simple. Couldn't be too far. Second door on the right.

Apparently the Hall of History was fucking enormous. The first door turned out to be nearly 500 feet away, the second at least a city block. In tree-demon-chasing-you-at-high-speed terms, that was about fifty miles.

Blake fucking hated the apocalypse. He remembered seeing the movie Zombieland and all that talk about cardio. And he thought about Mason running every single day, and how damn fast he was now. If Blake lived through this, he decided, and ever told the story, he was really going to get another I told you so.

He ran at full speed, faltering and nearly stumbling in panic as Lumiere sped right by.

"The Hall of the Makers shows every phase of The Grand Project,” it said like a demon wasn’t chasing them, “from portraits of its founders to the many stages of the project. If you look on your left, you can see the failed early designs of their very first creatures. Which, as you can see, look nothing like the triumphs of today! What day is it, by the way? I’ve lost track completely."

Blake would have liked to have been fascinated. He truly would have. Instead he looked at zero of the portraits, his legs and lungs burning as he sprinted, desperate to look back and see how close the creature was. All he could hear was the thump thump thumping of the thing's limbs like some evil metronome, whacking the stone in perfectly spaced repetition.

Then Blake was at the second door, which thankfully wasn't a door but an open arch that he instinctively through himself in without stopping, just as the demon's arm swished exactly through where he'd been standing.

He landed harshly and rolled across the tile, but so did the demon. It tumbled and flew out of sight as it ran past the door, crashing and screeching as Blake rose and looked around the room.

It wasn't exactly what he was hoping for. He wanted a whole bunch of swords and spears and axes lying around—a room full of projectiles he could toss at his enemy and pray he at least blinded that eyeball-hand. Instead he found...statues? Some kind of ancient robots?

Shit. Shit!

Then he saw something like lances or spears in a row on the far wall, and thanked whichever God was listening.

'Lumiere' was still bloody narrating as the demon entered, hand forward and eye searching as it gestured around the room. Blake hid behind one of the statues, activated Telekinesis and seized a spear, and threw it at the hand.

And bloody missed. The spear smashed into the demon's body, at least, sticking it about a foot and causing the creature to shriek in rage. It loped forward with one arm and both legs, the eye-hand held forward as it searched.

Blake lifted more spears. He had most of his mana and a full Mana Gem, and he intended to stick every single one of them into that ugly bastard until...

A voice blared over the room.

[Disturbance detected in the armory. Locking down. For your own safety, please don't stand next to the gates. Thank you for your cooperation.]

The open archway slammed with a metallic clang as a huge iron grate dropped from the roof. Even the demon was surprised, stopping to look back and examine with its eye. Blake didn't waste time or energy worrying about it—he just seized two more spears and hurled them at his now stationary target.

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Both stuck in about as deep as the first, three giant quills sticking from one ugly ass porcupine. The monster growled and seized the spears one by one, pulling them out with no blood or really indication of much damage at all. Blake just threw more spears.

For several seconds they stood maybe thirty feet apart, the beast growling and pulling out spears, Blake lifting them and piercing them back in. Finally some black ooze was dripping from the creature's wounds, and it gave up and charged towards Blake's statue.

He scrambled away, mana less than half now as he ran to another statue and tried to target Telekinesis on the move. It worked well enough, the spears almost 'fire and forget' once he told them his target.

But their aim on a moving target was…kind of shit. They seemed to fly almost to where the thing was the second he targeted it. Which meant he might have to lead it or make straight shots.

The only thing that saved him was the creature's terrible vision. After every statue it had to stop and look again, following him with his arm but smart enough to protect its eye and close its fist when it could.

Blake considered trying to push a statue over to land on top of it, but the things were way too damn big and heavy looking, with a couple exceptions...

One statue was vaguely humanoid in size, a little like The David if Michelangelo had put the man in a sci-fi exo suit and a helmet. Blake ran behind it and activated Telekinesis to touch the statue, just looking for options.

[Arcane affinity activated]

Blake blinked in confusion, his Telekinesis blanking as if it had worked but the spell was somehow...absorbed. Or wrong.

The demon lunged, and Blake barely jumped to the side as its arm slapped into the statue with a solid crack. He scrambled up and ran to another, intrigued and terrified and still not sure what the hell to do. His spears had hurt the thing, but it seemed very much fine. He'd need a sword or something to hack it apart—the piercing weapons just weren't wrecking its body.

On something like whim, he activated Mental Influence and focused on the statues. They all lit up.

"What the fuck does that even mean?" he whispered, trying the small humanoid. He picked 'Loyalty' then 'Trust' then 'Anger', all vanishing like his Telekinesis as if into the ether.

The demon was still coming and Blake had to run. He had to choose now whether he kept shooting spears and hope for the best, or gamble on these damn statues. But he knew really he had no choice.

Option one just wouldn't work. Logic told him no matter how unlikely, option two was all he had. He scrambled away and bought himself a second, turned on the statue, and activated Mind Control.

* * *

The statue was like a bottomless pit. Blake clutched his Mana Gem and poured his spell into the thing, trying to find some sign of a mind he could bend to his will. He felt vaguely insane now, throwing precious mana into a thing that might just be completely wasting it.

But it felt somehow right, it felt like a chance. And over he years, Blake had learned to trust his gut.

His mana pool vanished, and his gem was halfway gone before he almost gave up.

[Mana threshold reached. Activating, intoned a mechanical voice from the statue's direction.]

Blake fist pumped in triumph, and the demon smashed him in the side of the head.

His Mental Partition flared, and Psionic Shield surrounded him in purple light as he bounced across the room. The Mana Gem in his grip went cold, and though he was unhurt he knew he was completely drained. He looked up, for the moment unafraid of death, obsessed with just wanting to see if he'd been right.

The humanoid statue stepped from its pedestal.

"Dimensional entity detected," it announced from a jaw that moved like claymation from that old Christmas movie. "Responding."

The creature turned and growled, eye inspecting its new foe with cold assessment. Frankly Blake didn't care what happened as long as they left him alone a minute. He looked for somewhere in the room to climb, but saw nothing useful. There was no obvious way to escape.

With something like a desperate hope, he held his now burning knife-wound and watched.

The demon charged, and the statue held up its hands as if to catch a naughty child.

"Halt," it said, bending its knees but making no other aggressive movement. It was either very confident in its own strength, or it was about to get smashed like a…

The beast crashed into it, lifting and carrying it forward until it struck the wall with a horrible crack.

"Ah hell," Blake said, getting up and moving around the wall, looking for something else to help him. He heard more growls and cracks and was pretty sure he could hear the demonic thing ripping his desperate hope into little pieces. With no other plan, he finally lifted a spear with his own two hands and ran over to stick the bastard.

He found the ‘critter’ and statue hadn't moved from the wall. The beast was still holding the thing, thrashing against it with what looked like increasingly slow movements of its arms. Blake stared and came closer, finding the statue was just holding on. But something felt...hot.

As he came closer, Blake found the statue's hands were pressing against the creature's bubbling flesh. Its arms moved closer and closer together, until it had buried its limbs into its opponent’s body. The monster finally twitched and sagged against it, very clearly dead.

[Planar Entity: Carnagura demon killed. Experience awarded.]

[You have earned enough experience to reach level nine! Please select your new power.]

Blake dropped his spear and sagged to the floor with mental and physical exhaustion, extremely happy to see his level. The statue made no move to get up. Its legs were half smashed, and the jerky movements it had made seemed entirely stopped as it seemed just like a statue again. Had it used up all the mana Blake gave it? Maybe the ‘demon’ just destroyed it?

He lay back and took a few deep breaths, seeing the gate was still very closed. But at least he was alive. Lumiere drifted over his head, causing him to squint against the bright light.

"Apologies, Pest Controller. But I'm afraid that will have to be the end of the tour. Thank you, and goodbye."