Sirens and emergency alerts had been going off every ten minutes for hours as the portals slowly got bigger.
I was hoping Denise could just go portal to portal and close them with her faerie stuff, but none of her usual tricks were working.
I called to check in with her and make sure Lydia was safe, and she told me what made these portals so hard to close.
“DMA has been trying to figure this out for months. Daniel could have spotted this in ten minutes, but the rest of us didn’t figure it out until Malachi Stone plotted these current portal positions on a map.”
Denise pulled up a graphic and I recognized it immediately.
“That’s ptah,” I said. “That’s a sustaining rune. If you connect the dots, it’s like a giant rune written on the city. This whole shape becomes a sustaining rune to reinforce the portals and keep them open. This is… brilliant. God, if demons really are this smart, the human race is fucked.”
“Why didn’t I spot this?” I grumbled, pulling up my own map of the portal attacks. Then I laughed. “I didn’t see the rune shape because three of these test runs were mistakes! The rune wasn’t obvious until he finally got it right. Smart but not perfect, thank god.”
Whoever was responsible for this, they had done their homework, and they were spending some serious magic here.
And just as I was hanging up with Denise, the demon Titus walked out of the portal closest to me, still dressed in a black suit with a gold sweater, hands in his pockets, walking around with his black horns and tail out like this was just a casual stroll.
I yelled, “Demon!” and hit him with an artillery spell that passed right through and sailed into the empty space beyond.
“I’m not physically here, idiot,” Titus said. “You’re the only one who can see me or hear me, and you can guess why I’m here. Last warning. Just follow me through this portal and I can shut this whole thing down before it starts.”
Randy was screaming in my ear. “What the fuck are you shooting at?”
“False alarm,” I said. “Demon fooled me with a projection. Randy, this thing is making me an offer. Says if I surrender to them, he’ll call off the attack. Cecilia told me not to do it, but if you think I can save lives this way, I’m ready to give myself up.”
“He’s lying,” Randy said. “Typical demon sacrifice trap. It’s not a real offer. It’s never a real offer. Even if he follows through with the first promise, he’ll just make you do something worse tomorrow. This is Demon 101 shit, kid. Just tell him to go fuck himself.”
Instead, I said, “You really will call off the attack? If I walk through that portal right now, nobody gets hurt?”
“My first priority is to get you. Once I have you, the entire attack becomes pointless.”
“So, if I surrender to you, you will shut down all these portals and abort this attack? Give me your Word.”
Titus said nothing.
“I said give me your Word that you will call off this attack!”
Titus just stared at me with his hands still in his pockets.
“You lying piece of shit, you almost got me. I’m so new at this, you almost got me.”
“Your last chance to stop this was twenty-four hours ago,” Titus said, “before we spent half the magic in Hell opening these portals. If you had come along like a good boy twenty-four hours ago, I could have called it off and saved my Master a fortune. But now we’re committed. A lot of people are going to die today, and you really could have stopped it.”
The image of Titus turned around and walked back through the portal.
* * *
And then, every demon in the world came pouring through the portals all at once. The assault drones responded instantly, raining bullets down on them from the air.
Assault bots that had been positioned in front of the portals opened up with heavy machineguns, destroying fifty, sixty Hunters at a time before they ran out of bullets.
Our job was to pick off any demons who got through that robotic front line. The DMA had set up force field projectors to try and slow them down, but these projectors had been designed to deflect bullets, not bodies, and they were quickly overloaded and overwhelmed.
Randy and Phil took positions to either side of me, spraying the Hunters with bullets, lasers, particle beams, and fancy grenades filled with shards of silver.
And as expected, any demons who got through that ended up charging straight at me. At first, I felt like I was playing football - kicking, punting, smashing and tossing Hunters left and right, throwing them into our lines of fire, watching them get chewed up and vaporized as fast as I could throw.
We made it through that first wave with no problem at all. The second wave was a mix of Vultures and Hunters, and the third made me work, as Randall and Phil both started to run out of ammo, switching to older, weaker calibers that they had more bullets for.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Phil was picking up the slack, giving Randy time to reload, plugged into some kind of infinite energy source that let him send a constant stream of laser fire at the bad guys. The spacing between them was so precise, it looked like he was killing them with hyphens. Jade was assisting me, using her claws to rip through any demon that I couldn’t immediately handle myself.
All our robots and airborne drones died, but we made it through that third wave and braced ourselves for the fourth. There were only twenty or thirty Hunters this time, and we thought these might be the last of them, but these were just cannon fodder, distracting us while they gave the next wave time to close.
The fifth wave was Enforcers, two dozen eight-foot demons in all the colors of the rainbow, sporting snake heads and ape heads and crocodile heads, and big knobby cantaloupes that didn’t look like heads at all.
The Hunters had all been colored black and gold, but these Enforcers had been purchased or stolen from a bunch of different princes, designed by a dozen different Masters.
And while the Hunters had charged us like mindless beasts, these Enforcers knew how to fight, and they were a lot harder to wear down.
Phil’s laser firehose was still tearing big chunks out of them, but assault rifle bullets barely slowed them down. Randy had to step back behind me and Jade to give himself time to switch weapons and reload.
The armor piercing rounds did more damage, but you could tell this ammo was older, being fired from a weaker gun. Randall had burned through half a dozen modern weapons and thousands of rounds of modern ammo, until he was down to an ancient MG5 firing 7.62.
I had three Enforcers in my face and Jade was soaring through the air in the wrong direction, after being plucked off an Enforcer’s back. If I hadn’t caught her with levitation, she might have landed in the river.
I yelled “Blasting!” into my radio and started using my low-power shotgun spell to knock them back, hopefully giving Randy and Phil time and space to take them out.
Two of them went down and I put a fist through the head of the third one just in time to see five more, stumbling over the corpses of their comrades as they all came for me.
And while I was bracing myself for that charge, Randy yelled “Hunters!” and started firing off to his right, trying to stop a new wave of demons that had come out of nowhere to flank us.
Not out of nowhere, of course. The DMA checkpoint blocking Avery had been overwhelmed, opening the way for a hundred fresh demons to charge in from the east.
I couldn’t block for my teammates with five Enforcers in my face, so Phil and Randall had drones drop emergency barriers to try and slow them down.
I didn’t register the constant background noise of distant gunfire until it stopped. I couldn’t hear anything firing from the east anymore, and only a slow stutter of fire to the north, as thirty more Hunters came charging across Beacon Street.
An Enforcer smacked me hard enough to knock my head to one side, just in time for me to see a terrifying flash and hear the rumble of a mini mushroom cloud over the waterfront, as another group of defenders gave up and called in air support.
The only direction I didn’t have to worry about was west, as Nergal’s miasma kept the demons off my back.
I didn’t feel myself weakening yet, powered by a constant stream of rage and desperation, but I was getting overwhelmed by these Enforcers, as Randy and Phil focused their attention on stuff that was trying to flank us.
Jade put a claw through the back of an Enforcer’s head, forcing me to jump back as it fell to the ground. Jade jumped to one side to get clear of it, and another one moved faster than I had ever seen an Enforcer move, grabbing her leg and slamming her to the ground, full strength, hard.
I heard Jade make an angry grunting sound, right before her body went limp. The Enforcer still had hold of her leg, clearly about to pick the unconscious catgirl up and smash her on the ground again.
I jammed my palm in its face and blew its head apart with an artillery spell, simultaneously catching Jade’s body with levitation, cushioning her fall before I had to drop her on the ground.
I still had two Enforcers in my face, but now I had a friend in trouble, putting me in touch with a whole new kind of anger, and a whole new kind of power. I put my right fist through an Enforcer’s chest, while clawing at the other one with my left.
The left-hand strike wasn’t even a punch. I just grabbed his face and ripped a chunk of his head off, blinding the demon long enough to come around and crack its skull with my other hand.
Phil and Randy were mowing down waves of Hunters to my left and right, when three more Enforcers popped out of the portal in front of me and started to charge.
I dropped to one knee and hit Jade with a healing spell, fast enough to make her yelp with pain, but she was alive, and she was conscious, and she only needed a second to register where she was.
The first Enforcer reached for me while I was still kneeling, and she cleanly sliced its hand off, giving me time to pop up and take its head off with my left.
And then it was two on two again, with me tanking Enforcers while Jade jumped on their backs. They went down quicker this time, as I was hitting harder, and Jade was getting better at finding weak spots.
It was starting to feel like we had the Enforcers under control when a hundred fresh Hunters came pouring out of the portals in front of us, while Randy and Phil were still trying to deal with waves on our left and right.
“Randy, it’s too many!” I shouted into my radio. “I’m their primary target! There’s a good chance they’ll chase me if I run! Please, let me break off!”
“Negative!” Randy shouted. “Stay right where you are! Kovak, if you die today, I want you to die standing right in that spot, you hear me?”
“Sir, I— Yes, sir.”
“And if you’ve been saving any fancy wizard shit, now would be the time!”
I did have one trick up my sleeve, but I was so scared of it, I hadn’t even bothered to learn this thing in advance.
I tugged on Lydia’s golden tether and yelled, “Lydia! Can you hear me?” in my head.
“Timothy, yes! I can hear you! I’m safe in this fortress but I can’t leave! Your people are losing this battle. Can you come to me?”
“No! I need the name of a spell. The Armageddon spell my grandfather used to kill all those people. Where did he get it?”
“It’s from Stefan’s part of Taltorak, a wide area attack he used in naval battles. He called it Blitzkrieg.”
“Of course, the SS officer called his big spell Blitzkrieg.” I rolled my eyes. “What the fuck else would it be?”
“Jeeves, pull up Blitzkrieg from Stefan Kovach’s portion of Taltorak!”
And then it was just there, with the runes hovering politely at eye level in my HUD.
“This thing is only eight symbols?” I said, incredulous, as I knocked another batch of Hunters back with my shotgun thing. “This mass murdering doom spell is only eight symbols?”
“It’s uncontrolled magic,” Lydia said. “That’s why it’s so dangerous. It should only be used over open sea.”
“Well, I’m looking at an ocean of demons, so I’m gonna call that close enough. Stay where you are and watch over Denise! You two stay there and stay safe, please! No matter what happens to me!”
“Timothy, I—”
But I was already casting.