I blasted a clear swath in front of me all the way to the portals, while Randy and Phil finished off the Hunters charging us from the left and right.

We enjoyed a minute of eerie silence, and for just a second, I thought we had won. I ran forward and cast healing spells on all my teammates, patching up a dozen bleeding wounds from claws that had been sharp enough to get through their armored suits.

“Did we do it?” I asked. “Did we win?”

And then, like the bad guys had heard me, a hundred fresh Hunters came running straight at us.

I started to cast Blitzkrieg again, and realized I had nothing left. Casting that spell the first time took damn near everything I had, and I had used the last of my juice on healing.

I tried to pull in new magic, but for the first time, I was scared. I had been cruising through this fight on anger and desperation, too damn busy to feel fear or grief, too distracted to think about all the people who had died. But that brief lull in the attack had given me time to think, so when that new wave of Hunters came through, I had nothing left.

My time with Minerva had bumped my baseline and improved my control, so I wasn’t completely useless, but I was fighting at a fraction of my strength.

I had been using my artillery spell to push these packs back and create space for everyone to shoot, but that spell was crazy expensive and using it now would cut into the reserve I needed just to stay on my feet.

I yelled at Randy to deploy barriers and let an array of force fields do my job for a minute, relying on a small army of DMA drones to project temporary walls that would slow the bad guys down, so we weren’t immediately overwhelmed.

Jade and I got in a rhythm and were able to take out a dozen demons who weaved their way through the maze, while Phil and Randy were able to take a chunk out of the rest, but all our conventional backup was gone, and even the flying assault drones were out of ammo.

We were losing this fight in slow motion, and I was out of options.

* * *

“He needs me,” Lydia said, immediately breaking off from Cecilia and heading for the door.

“Demon, stop!” Cecilia commanded, using a voice that had been barking orders at Denise since she was twelve.

Lydia stopped like she had run into an invisible wall, caught by ancient demon reflexes that had conditioned her to obey any direct command.

She was about to shake it off and keep running when Cecilia said, “You can’t help him. Even if you could get to him, are you ready to fight a hundred demons by yourself? Are you planning to pull him off that battlefield and straight into an ambush? That boy made a choice to stay with his team, and that team is the only thing that can save him.”

* * *

Jade went down first.

I was throwing Hunters left and right, trying to hold the line while Jade finished them off, when one of them got a running start and tackled her right out of the air.

I lunged to grab it, but I already had three more in my face, physically forcing me back away from her, with five more coordinating their attacks to surround me on all sides.

Phil and Randy had been keeping the bad guys off my flanks, but now they were overwhelmed, and I was surrounded.

Two Hunters hit me from the front while two others got me from the side, taking me off my feet while the rest went for Jade. For a minute, I couldn’t even see, using all my strength to try and hold this slavering, slashing thing away from my face.

I used a shotgun blast to knock the demons off me, using so much power it was bleeding off my wards. My defenses flickered, and I ended up with ugly gashes all over my arms and legs.

I flipped over and crawled forward to try and reach Jade. She had killed three Hunters, but she still had three on top of her. I tried to get to my feet and my left leg just… failed, weakened by a claw strike I didn’t even remember. An instant of unspeakable pain and I just dropped, screaming involuntarily from god knows what.

I could feel myself weakening, and I couldn’t bring in enough magic to do what I had to do. I used the last bit of magic I had to heal myself and ran forward to try and peel a Hunter off Jade, but she already had one on each arm, immobilizing her so she couldn’t get her claws into them.

I pulled one off her with nothing but my normal human strength, feeling its back claws dig into me as I basically tried to hug a squirming jungle cat.

The blue of my Bluestar polo turned dark purple as my blood soaked through. I wasn’t strong enough to kill this thing, so I sucked in one frantic gulp of magic and made myself just strong enough to throw it away, hoping I could get another one off Jade’s arm before he got back.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

But before I could reach her, another Hunter jumped over Randy’s head and tackled me, driving me down again. I was rolling around on the ground, trying to keep its teeth off my neck, when I saw another one take a flying leap and land on Jade’s chest.

The Hunter knocked the wind out of her, used its weight to keep her pinned, and got its jaws around her throat.

The armor around her neck was too good for the demon to literally bite her head off, but he didn’t have to. The demon bit down like an attack dog and crushed Jade’s throat. Her arms twitched one last time under the demons pinning her, and she lay still.

I screamed, “No!” and yanked on my tether to Lydia, watching my aura go gold as I used a shotgun spell to knock the Hunter off my face and crawl to Jade.

Phil and Randy shot the demons on top of her, then I put my hands on her chest and used everything I had, everything Lydia could give me, abandoning my wards and my fortitude spell, using every bit of magic in my body to try and heal her, but it doesn’t do any good to heal a body that’s already dead.

By the time I realized I couldn’t save Jade, it was already too late to save anyone else, surrounded by Hunters that I was too weak to push through.

I had been healing Jade, wasting the last of what Lydia had given me, when I saw Randy go down, overwhelmed in the fraction of a second he needed to reload.

I watched him fall, and watched a pair of Hunters try to pull him apart, like a pair of dogs playing tug of war with a rag. Then one of them got him by the neck and shook him, confirming that my team leader was dead.

Phil was still shooting, but now the pack that had been fighting Randy was free to switch to him. I watched ten demons overwhelm his portable force field, and then Phil was just… gone. Not dead, not fallen, just… gone. One second, he was standing there trying to keep his energy gun up, and the next, the Hunters were leaping over the empty space where he had been.

Then twenty Hunters turned their attention from my fallen teammates and simultaneously locked their eyes on me.

I still had a trickle of magic left for my wards and my strength stuff, but I was getting dogpiled by these demons, and it was nowhere near enough.

My team was dead. My backup was dead. My DMA support channel had gone silent, and there was a pack of Vulture demons soaring over me unopposed, after they had plucked our assault drones out of the sky.

I was flat on my back again, out of magic, with Hunter demons literally piled on my arms and legs. It took me a minute to realize they weren’t trying to kill me. They had orders to hold me down, until their Master could come and retrieve my soul.

* * *

I squirmed and struggled for a bit, but I had used up everything I got from Lydia, and my composure was fucked. I was able to get little bursts of strength from time to time, but the Hunters just kept piling on me until I couldn’t move.

I was still immobilized when a yellow-skinned demon in a judge’s robe came floating through the portal and leaned over to leer at me.

This was Aleister the Inquisitor, Baalphezar’s torturer and magic expert. I had defeated him in a duel (barely) in the days before my big boss fight, and he had apparently just won the rematch.

Aleister was genuinely horrifying, with sickly yellow skin the texture of old paper, big black horns, and freaky long fingers - delicate fingers, like you’d see on a surgeon or a piano player.

He wasn’t particularly tall, but he used levitation to keep his head seven feet off the ground, with that big black robe covering him head to toe, so he looked like a floating black mass with no feet.

His face had been deliberately made twisted and ugly, but there was a strange bit of mirth left in his flat black eyes. The worst thing about him was his mouth, a gaping black oval with no teeth and no tongue, like his voice was just emerging from a void.

Aleister leaned over me with that hideous face and said, “Well now, don’t you feel silly?”

Then he held his hand over me, and I felt this twisting, tearing pain deep inside me as I started to lose consciousness. Not the peaceful drifting of sleep, but a terrifying, involuntary fading away. I really did feel like I was dying, but I managed to mumble, “Hazel…” as I blacked out.

* * *

Three of her heroes were already dead by the time Hazel got a Mayday from Tim Kovak. Every AI in her cluster had been scrambling to keep up with requests from the soldiers and first responders they were assigned to, struggling to maintain communications and dispatch reinforcements however they could.

But the good guys were outnumbered a thousand to one, as every criminal, every villain group, and every monster lair in the country had been stirred up and cut loose all at once, trying to keep all the Bluestar heroes busy so there was nobody left to help Boston.

Their boys were doing their best, turning homes and hospitals into emergency shelters, hunting down packs of monsters with nothing but assault rifles and hunting knives.

Hazel had been juggling reinforcements all day, repurposing assault drones to try and bail out heroes who were being overwhelmed, but drones were fragile, and the demons had air support, sending entire flocks of Imps and Vultures to clear the air coast to coast.

She knew Tim was on the front lines in Boston, but Tim was damn near invulnerable, and he had a whole team backing him up. The other heroes on her roster were on their own, and now three of them were dead.

Bryce had died in a hail of bullets fired by a dozen robots who had escaped from a storage facility in Dallas. Camila had been overwhelmed by a pack of drowned zombies on an oil rig, and Sebastian had been thrown off a cliff after a Vulture plucked him right off his bike.

Tim’s POV was dead, and all the drones in his immediate area had been destroyed, so she had to reroute an HDI Mosquito to see what was going on. The tiny drone got there just in time for Hazel to see Tim buried under a pile of demon dogs, while a grotesque yellow demon in a black robe reached his hand out and pulled some kind of glowing white thing out of Tim’s head.

The glowing thing looked like a tiny effigy of Tim’s face and body, shrunk down to something that could fit inside his forehead. The squirming white thing flattened into two dimensions as she watched, and the demon folded it like a piece of paper, putting it in the pocket of his robe like he had just retrieved a letter, instead of extracting a man’s soul.

Hazel checked his vitals, and saw that Tim was still alive. Wounded and bleeding, but not on the verge of death. She had never seen anyone get their soul ripped out before, but Tim looked like a man in a coma, and the demons seemed to be protecting him instead of attacking, like they had been ordered to guard his body until their boss got back.

Eight demons formed a protective cordon around him while the yellow demon passed back through a portal, and carried Tim Kovak’s soul to Hell.