It was a Demon, Galukar recognised as much instantly. He’d slain men by the thousand- undead, perhaps, by the million. Killing, butchering, his way across the continent for so many long, savage decades of murderous devastation. If any man in all the world’s history could claim to have made himself a weapon, it was Galukar.
And he had only ever fought one Demon, one time. Thirty years gone, now, he and all his sons back before they’d been taken from him. There had been twelve of them in all, eleven near-Heroes and one who dwarfed any other man in living memory to bear even that title. Plus the army at their back.
By the end of it, there had been only ten sons, and half the army. Galukar shivered at the memory. The Dark Lord hadn’t summoned that one, he hadn’t unveiled any when last he and Galukar fought. He’d been taking things easy, Galukar realised, hiding cards up his sleeve.
And now he’d conjured the darkest nightmare of Galukar’s entire memory to face Shaiagrazni.
He shivered, because it was not a memory anymore. The Demon was storm and chaos. Around it, the air was a gestalt vortex of deranged motion and fluctuating mass. It wasn’t just that waves of heat rippled through it, like atop the ground of a desert. The world was twisting. Its very substance changed, warped. Surrendering before the madness inherent to its invader.
The Demon’s form was long and irrational. Almost serpentine, were it not for the incongruous bulges haphazardly situated across its length. Three great wings beat atop its back, each in a different direction. They seemed avian, at first, but Galukar soon realised that each one of their apparent feathers was itself a wing- smaller, insectoid, and composed of glinting black metal. All of these smaller ones flexed so fast that his eye could barely follow.
Blood vessels ran visibly along the surface of the entity, sometimes even opening out through its skin to waste ichor as acrid rain, pouring down and searing great welts into the ground below where they ate at its substance. The stuff was dark grey, at odds with the violent pink of its carrier’s skin. More at odds, still, with the Demon’s teeth. Each one was a rounded, flexing mass that Galukar could make no reason from the composition of.
He shivered, because this Demon looked nothing alike the one he’d seen all those years ago with its twisting form and its mismatched limbs. But they were identical twins in contrast to everything else. Two beings of polar difference, made undeniable kin by their stark defiance of all the rational laws and principles which governed physical anatomy in all other creatures.
Prince Nemo’s pet had distracted Galukar, taken his mind from the world’s true constants. There were the Dark Arts, and then there were Demons. And the latter was closing on his army.
There may have been some fascimile of tactical cognition propelling it, or it may simply have been that the Kaltan shield wall holding the hill was closest. Either way, the Demon chose that as its first attack. A sound ran through the battlefield, cutting Galukar to his core. Crying children- screaming, even, in terror- and he knew instantly it was the closest thing this abomination could come to crying out.
A moment later, it was on them.
Tendrils of power tore down from its body, blasting through the oaken barricades and the meat of their wielders. In moments the Kaltans separated, ranks frayed to pieces, panicked survivors sprinting away. Shafts of iron struck the Demon, where Rangers fired on it, but they might as well have hurled bee stings for all it did. Galukar was stunned for almost half an instant.
But his instincts were always more favourable to fighting than fleeing. He gave an order, the most important thing of all. Men did not run so easily when they heard an order boomed out regardless.
“HOLD!” He roared. “CASTERS FORWARDS, TARGET THE DEMON!”
Demon, Galukar almost regretted even naming it, but they all knew damned well what they were staring down. Nothing but the abominations from beyond the veil could do what they were seeing now. Perhaps not even Shaiagrazni himself.
Flames spat outwards in the air as the great weapons- cannons, Shaiagrazni called them- fired. Five hundred yards from their target, ballistae or trebuchets would have been wholly useless at such a distance. These projectiles, though, flew true. Galukar saw many flit closely by the Demon, and several impacted.
Its body was not entirely mundane, not fully bound to the world. Raw strength and impact force could only do so much. Galukar winced as he saw it discorporate partly, then weave its shattered form back together and streak across the battlefield for the source of its new attack. They’d gotten its attention, at least. Now they just needed to survive it.
“READY!” He declared, glancing at the Necromancer beside him. She wasn’t freezing up, at least, but the woman looked far from ready for death. That was fine, it might make her fight all the harder against it. “CAST!”
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
Galukar’s final command came when the Demon was just shy of the range at which it had obliterated the formation, and Galukar knew from long experience that it was far past the killing distance of most casters. Even trained magi. A good spell, thrown well and with considerable power, might reach two hundred yards and kill a man at half that. Accurately, though, it was unlikely to strike a human target beyond fifty.
The Demon’s sheer size saw a few of the attacks scoring notches into its esoteric form, regardless of its twenty-fathom height skyward, but Galukar saw instantly the difference in power. Fireballs struck like pinhead embers from a flame, jets of water like raindrops. Enchanted thorns broke against it as if they were cobwebs, where hurled boulders seemed to crumble on impact like flecks of dirt.
Something was happening, the Demon was registering contact at least, but…Nothing substantial.
There was simply too little power within human magic to wound such a thing. Too little to even hurt it. How in the world had Galukar ever slain the one he’d fought before?
Help, distraction, and…A miracle.
God was nowhere near him, these days. There would be no miracle today. So help him, Galukar almost believed it before he saw the black streak which had spelled death on so many other occasions. He looked up just to see it land the luckiest hit he’d witnessed in years- splashing dead centre in the Demon’s chest.
It was not half the equal of Silenos Shaiagrazni’s, but the Necromancer Sphera’s shadestuff proved more than a nuisance if nothing else.
Another cry, children giggling this time. Galukar took a moment to realise the perversion for what it was. Pain was joy, to a Demon, and joy was pain. They’d hurt it. But one Necromancer could throw only so many gouts of shadestuff, and now the Demon’s altitude had shrunk to its own offensive distance.
The energy built, and seasoned magi were blasted to limbs, viscera, ash…Then even that was scorched even more, until it was reduced to nothing but clouds of pitch-dark ash swirling in the unnatural winds of too much heat concentrated in too small a patch of air.
Galukar roared, his impotence striking more than their death. He was not a caster, not a Ranger. Magic could touch the thing, and he held more magic than any other in the battlefield. But it was a fucking sword. Within the reach of his Godblade there wasn’t a force in existence able to withstand him, but the Demon was beyond it now. Hovering out of God’s light, and delighting all the more in its savagery.
There had to be something he could do. There had to-
A cannon fired, a projectile tore a wing fully off, only for it to reform before gravity had even dragged it an inch downwards. The idea came to Galukar before the screaming metal had even flown clear of sight. He glanced at the weapon responsible, at his sword.
No, that was stupid. He glanced at his legs instead, then flitted his gaze further around the battlefield.
“Necromancer.” He snapped. “Call the grotesqueries over and have them throw me, quick!”
The Demon was running out of casters to kill, and it would not remain near to Galukar for much longer after the rest were dead. Fortunately, Shaiagrazni’s apprentice was, after all, his apprentice. She understood fast and the things lumbered over in moments. None were the Fleshcrafter’s biggest work, they would have been slower if they were, but the largest of them was still close to ten times Galukar’s own height, and over a dozen times the average. In moments he felt abominable flesh close around him, then the acceleration of strength employed with impossible abundance.
The wind screamed in his ears. Galukar screamed back, louder. He hit the Demon like an arrow fresh from the string.
When Galukar had been a boy, he’d been taught to stab a man by bracing the butt of his blade against himself and charging in. Pinning it between their bodies, using his own weight and momentum to drive it through mail and meat. It was not a technique he’d used in some time. For one thing, it had been coined for smaller weapons. Long knives or shortswords. For another…It had been redundant. When swinging the Godblade, one rarely considered the prospect of finding it denied an enemy’s death by durability. It either hit, or the fight continued.
Galukar employed that long-neglected technique an instant before impacting, and he actually felt himself close to winded as his ridiculous velocity transferred between physical mass and the impossible angles of what his blade now kissed. Metal dug in an inch, a hand, a foot. Magic crackled and screamed. He felt taloned limbs close around him, gasped at the almost novel sensation of skin parting, muscle parting- everything parting almost like a normal man raked by normal claws. Then they were spinning, falling, thrashing. He dragged the Godblade out, grabbed a talon and swung.
Iron sizzled and spat where it caught the not-flesh of its target, and there rang out a great sundering noise as light flashed and churchbells seemed to ring out. A gash appeared in the Demon. The sort a normal sword might leave in normal flesh, but a damned start. Galukar cut again, severing one of the abomination’s arms, then raising the limb up to clog its opened maw when gyrating teeth moved to clamp down on his head.
Blood hit his skin, grey blood. It burned, and Galukar snarled, then the Demon dragged him closer as it spat out its own arm. Galukar wrestled the thing’s strength, and realised it exceeded his own. More talons dug in, gouging, tearing. The Godblade worked back and forth- like a saw, at this close range, not a cutter- and both he and his enemy brought the other closer to death.
Like a normal man fighting a normal beast. Lion, bear, tiger. Death for the human, almost without variation. But sometimes, with a sword, will and surprise, it was death for the animal too. An animal was certainly present, and Galukar heard it as his lungs convulsed into a long, snarling scream. He butted the Demon to free his arm just enough to drive the Godblade upwards and inwards, digging down to where the neck veins would be in a sensibly designed body, then moving back to sawing.
Children laughing, a greater joy than he’d ever heard his own feel. The death rattle of a thing that shouldn’t have been at all, finding the wrongness of its existence rectified. No longer were the talons scything, the jaws snapping, the unnatural not-muscles convulsing at odds with their motions. No longer was the Demon doing anything at all but coming apart. Body to limbs, to viscera, to ash. Then to nothing at all.
Galukar had just the chance to smile, as widely as his enfeebled face could even muster the strength for. Then he fell back down towards the earth.