When another half-day passed without me hearing from my friends, I checked in on them. Since they had been on a quest to find a mithril halberd, I was half expecting them to have already gotten through the dungeon, or whatever, and coming back with the metal in hand to get more armor made.
The vague sense I got when I sent my mind chasing after Alice was that of a narrow corridor of old and broken bricks--I thought maybe sandstone, but it was hard to tell. Confusingly, though, she was alone, and creeping carefully through the darkness. Instead of pushing her, I backed off and tried to reach Jess.
She was chained to a wall, alone and unconscious.
I hissed, wishing I had some way to teleport over there like she did, but backed off and went looking for John. Unsurprisingly, the Phantom Arrow had not been captured, and he was squatting on a high edge deep in a cave, looking intently at something.
I touched his mind a little more strongly. [ John? ] And then, a second later, [ Talk with your mind. ]
[ Colin. ] There was only a momentary sense of relief, and I thought that was more because he wasn't sure what was going on for a moment. [ Got ourselves in a spot of trouble. ]
[ I noticed. ]
[ We'll get out of it, ] he thought at me, with maybe a little defensive edge to it, [ but I wish you were here. Steve and I have to figure out a way through a bunch of traps so we can free Alice and Jessica. ]
[ Alice is free and sneaking around, ] I offered. [ Jess seems unconscious. ]
John seemed interested. [ Where is Alice? ]
How could I possibly answer that? Instead of responding immediately, I tried to meditate on what my bracers could and couldn't do or tell me, eventually settling on something else. [ Let me see if I can connect the two of you. ]
That, like so many other things, turned out to be easier than it should have been. Once I touched Alice and gently nudged her to let her know that I was there, I brought together my connection with her and the one with John, then began a third thread to reach Steve, who was pacing behind a large rock, clearly wanting desperately to charge in and be the Hero of the Golden Armory.
Having the three Heroes in conference seemed to put them all much more at ease, though I found that my own concentration started to be strained.
[ ...I'm sure that they were both Demons, ] Alice confirmed. [ But a lot of their... minions, I guess, were just bandits. I was able to Turn one of their hearts, but I could feel the Demon noticing, and he was taken away. This whole area is trapped with magic, I think. ]
[ Maybe that's why I'm having trouble, ] I offered, [ because this feels like it should be easy, but it's giving me a headache. ]
[ Maybe, ] John returned. [ Jessica said something similar. I'm sure she wouldn't have been captured if she were at her best. ]
[ Can you tell us where you are? ] Steve's voice was tense, angry. [ How to get to you? ]
[ The jail is on the far side of the throne room, and down, ] Alice replied. [ We were taken through a side room and then through a hole someone dug through the walls. There are... a lot of dug holes. I think a monster did it. ]
[ I'm not afraid of monsters, ] retorted the Hero of the Golden Armory. [ I'm worried about that black power. ]
That piqued my interest, which I think John noticed, because he shifted his attention to me.
[ It has to be Demon magic, or even Demon Lord magic, ] he said. [ It's a nasty black power, greasy and oily. It corrodes metal and cloth on touch, though less so on the armor coated with nylon. We didn't try it on flesh, or on the Armory's armor. I can get past it; the Phantom told me, and I have already tried, but I can't win a fight against all the monsters that are hiding down there, and I'm not sure I can carry everyone else through it. ]
[ I can fight an army, ] reminded Steve, [ but the Armory warned me about the black power. I can't just rush through it. ]
I concentrated on what was interfering with my communications, and I did notice thick black spiderwebs that I'd pried apart when connecting Steve to Alice. I frowned, noting the webs seemed to be trembling, but disconnected that line and tried to hold everything together using John as the center.
[ I think my link was running into some of that black power, ] I agreed. [ They might know we're talking, and they might be able to find Alice, or Steve, since the link was between them. ]
[ Shit. ] I dimly sensed John and Steve doing something physically in response to the bad news, but didn't focus on it. [ Okay. New plan; Steve and I are going to rush in. Alice, be careful. Colin, do whatever you can to keep us connected, okay? ]
I completely recognized that this might be a difficult proposition, but sent an assent, while also standing and moving towards my basement, trying to split my concentration as best I could. [ If you can get Jess up, I can work the teleport beacon on this end, but I can't pull you through on my own. ]
[ Got it. ] The three signals faded, as each of them began focusing on the real world instead of the link. I took the opportunity to rush to the basement, ignoring Carli, who had somehow found me and seemed to be looking on in concern. Once I was down to the teleport circle, I sat down, and began to focus once more on Jess, then--once I had all four technically connected to me--I focused as intently as I could on the link itself, searching for signs of the black spiderwebs.
The area around Jess was full of them, of course, though they weren't touching me and I couldn't get any . Alice's corridor had none, and Steve and John were still getting into position. The more I focused on the links, the more I could sense relative position; it was hard, given the distance, but I felt that Alice and Jess were close. [ Can you get to her? ] I pushed at Alice, quietly.
[ Haven't found her, ] Alice replied. [ But she has to be close. ]
[ There are a lot of those black strings where she is, ] I warned. [ The first thing you'll want to do when you get there is burn them away, or you might get caught. ]
[ I learned that lesson already. ] Alice's mental voice had an edge, but I just nodded.
[ Just making sure, ] I replied, civilly, then backed off. I wanted desperately to help, but what could I do at this range? I tried to split between holding open the connections and meditating on the Bracers, to see if they had any further insight, but I knew that I wouldn't realistically be able to do anything to support them.
Soon enough, I felt the first trembles of combat, as Steve and John ran into a trap they couldn't sneak past. I didn't get a good look, but the fight that followed seemed like a bunch of bugs and animals got dumped on them. They cleaned house quickly, but the black tendrils around them soaked up something that came off of their artifacts, probably some kind of divine mana or whatever. I tried to study where the energy was going, but at a distance, it was hard.
Their encounter did pull the rest of the... dungeon? Castle? Whatever's attention to them, and only a few moments after the combat died down, Alice found Jessica, and with a flash of purification power, burned away the webs in the room.
I took that opportunity to reach out to Jess, who started waking up slowly, then snapped back to consciousness all at once with a mental yell that made me--and the other heroes a moment later--all flinch.
[ Gaah! ] John was the only one who thought to reply over the link instead of complaining out loud. [ Quieter, Jess! Please! ]
[ John? Colin! Steve! ... webs and ... ] Jessica seemed to be woozily switching between talking out loud and communicating mentally.
[ Once everyone's together, can you teleport here? ] I tried to cut through the haze with a kind of magically-enforced calm as I spoke through the link, and I could feel a slight chill spreading, one that brought the feverish panic of the rest down, slightly.
[ We're not leaving. ] I was mostly surprised--though maybe I shouldn't have been--when Steve spoke up, his voice echoing slightly in the mental space with a hint of the Armory's influence. [ You need to find a way to bring Colin here. ]
That sounded like a bad idea, for several reasons--not least that I wouldn't be able to return, since the teleport anchor on this end wouldn't be powered if I wasn't here. Even if I wanted to scramble and link it up with a mana crystal, or something, I wasn't sure how to do that and still provide the teleporter key.
All I really managed to put into words, though, was, [ But...? ]
[ You can return at any time, ] Steve said, the gold power behind his words firmer than his own convictions. [ You have 'A Creature Familiar'. ]
I blinked, understanding his meaning immediately. [ Okay, maybe I can get back. But why force it now? ]
[ I can feel it. ] Steve's voice lost the slight echo of golden power. [ I think we all can. This... This is a place where a Demon General is to be born. ]
There was a sudden silence from them all, a silence that I... I admit, it felt almost itchy. Like there was something to what he said that I ought to know, but which the Bracers were unwilling to tell me. It was something that I knew I needed to know, but... I couldn't learn it sitting here and waiting for them.
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[ Fine, ] I said, clearing everything from my mind and trying to grasp the power of the Bracers of Jade Will firmly. [ Anytime. ]
It took Jess a few moments to gather up the concentration to teleport me... but only a few moments. I could feel the moment she slammed her Staff of the Diamond Mind into the ground, and it was like an infinitely long worm reached out from her to me, passing through who knows how many miles of dirt, sand, and rock. When that worm's gaping maw passed through me, I was already there.
In a sad, decrepit stone-walled dungeon, its walls lined with filth and the air thick with fungus. The contrast between this place and my home irritated me, and I flexed the Bracers, pushing back everything and replacing the room with a sterile stone box filled with clean air.
A moment later, Jess had teleported Steve and John from nearby into the room, and I let go of the psychic threads that had kept us all in contact at a distance.
"Oh, that smells better," said Alice, her voice still too preoccupied with worried to sound really appreciative. For my part, I didn't care.
John immediately turned and looked at me, nodding meaningfully, then faded away with the power of the Phantom Arrow, disappearing from the room. Grudgingly, I reconnected us all with the telepathic links, noticing immediately that since we were closer, the link seemed to tear through the black threads of demon magic without trouble.
That was only half the trouble, of course.
[ The black threads can't weaken the link anymore, ] I told John, [ But I bet for sure they could use it to track you. Should I...? ]
[ This won't take long, with all of us here, ] John replied. [ I know about where they are, and we're coming to them, don't forget. ]
Again, something itched at me. I turned to look at Steve, noting that his face was sterner than usual. Jess looked worried, and Alice was staring at me, as though there was something that I ought to know, or be doing. But... I shook my head. "As soon as we know where to go, I can make a passage there," I said. "But I don't know what I'm doing."
"All the more reason we need to do things like this," Steve said, but to my surprise, there was no accusation to his tone. "Whatever happens, it's going to take all five of us to win this fight."
I frowned, looking at the three of them. Alice was now looking at Jess, worried, and Steve had closed his eyes, and was kneeling down, his face in intense concentration.
[ I found it, ] John's voice reached me. [ Join me here. ]
I didn't have any kind of psychic map of the whole place, but I could point a finger at John's position reliably, so I just created a tunnel edged in clean stone straight from us to him. From the moment it started forming, Steve was charging down the hallway, an intensity to the golden weapon in his hand that made me nervous. Jess raised her staff slightly, and it reshaped into a much shorter rod even as she and Alice suddenly were glowing and hovering slightly. They charged down the hallway after Steve, and I, having finished in but a few moments, brought up the rear.
What we found at the end of the tunnel was terrifying.
We were underground still; I really didn't understand where we were, but it was some kind of basement to some kind of castle, from everything I could tell, and that basement bordered on a network of underground caves. The room John found was a stone-brick room with a half-height wall looking down on a much larger natural cavern, in which an enormous golem was perched and waiting.
This we knew; Alice had told me, when I checked in on her earlier, that they were hunting a mithril halberd in an armory protected by a 'Grand Golem', which must be this. What we were not expecting, though, were the legion of undead surrounding the golem, along with seven bodies laid out in a series of bloody heptagrams on the floor--each body within one rune, which pulsed and poured out black-speckled magical fog that filled the low-laying caverns and seeped down and beyond our sight. The seven heptagrams themselves formed a larger heptagram, with the Golem at its center, but the lines that formed that larger circle were incomplete, and they showed no signs of growing, as though they awaited some final sacrifice.
The undead were mostly wraith-like forms that seemed to rise up from the seven heptagrams, though those wraiths were transforming. Some of them seemed to suddenly convert into a zombie, skeleton, or shambling abomination mid-flight, splatting on the ground and then rising again moments later. Other wraiths dove into the floors while still ethereal and rose again as small stone or mud golems, while others disappeared into other things on the battlefield--the small golems, other undead, each other, or the Grand Golem itself. Where they vanished into something small, I got the impression they joined their powers to it, making it stronger, if only a little at a time.
The Golem, of course, was clearly a great magical working, and from what I could tell, it wasn't the sacrifice the great array was waiting for; if anything, it was absorbing a lot of that evil energy, plus a large number of wraiths, in order to wake up from decades or centuries of sleep, its form warping slightly as it did so. I noticed after a moment of study that all of the smaller golems that were being raised were also gathering at the thing's feet, and at least one jumped onto it as through trying to merge with it, though I saw no sign it succeeded. Either way... it clearly looked like the upcoming fight was going to revolve around that thing.
"Well," John said quietly, gesturing to the corpses making up the evil array, but keeping his tone as light as he could, "at least we don't have to worry about the bandits."
Instead of answering, Steve just looked to Alice, who was staring at the whole scene with a strange look of finality written across her features. "How much of that magic circle can you disrupt?"
Still, she shifted her gaze to the Hero of the Golden Armory without hesitation, and spoke clearly. "I could resist it forever," she said, "but as long as the demons that produced it are alive, I can't erase it. They are portals to... to the underworld, I suppose. Until the demons die, we don't win."
Steve just nodded, looking to everyone. "This has to be how it goes. Alice gums up the working, Jess is with her doing ranged offense. Colin, you keep them safe, and I take center stage and attract the attention. John, you find the demons and do whatever you have to do, to flush them out where we can finish them."
"Sounds like a plan," John said, with more optimism to his voice than any of this deserved, and he faded away, already moving.
The two casters looked to me. "Cannon ball?" asked Alice, and I just raised my eyebrows, but shrugged. Alice flicked her staff back and forth, and I felt several defensive spells wind around us, and then I grabbed all four of us with the Bracers' power and flung us up into the air, then again, straight down into the center of the array.
Before we even landed, Steve managed to push off of the power--to my surprise, but clearly with the Bracer's permission--and leap into the fray, the Armory becoming a golden sword so massive that it defied physics and good sense. It reminded me of several different fictional swords from various media that were greater-than-man-sized simply to represent the otherworldly, overwhelming strength of a character; for my part, though, I could tell that his physical strength meant nothing. It was all the power of the Golden Armory, and it was every bit as overpowered as the Bracers were, just in its own way.
As we landed a ways away from the Grand Golem's massive feet, the creation stretching at least five stories high above us, Steve's massive golden sword hit the side of the working's head with enough force to have knocked my tower into the air--it might have even sent that tower a fair distance, depending on the angle and how much my creation broke up from the impact. The sheer physical impact resonated through all of our artifacts and all of our bones, and I felt a surge of raw sound energy disturbing the black energy fog that coated the area around us.
The golem's head was moved slightly to the side, and then, with a certain macabre fascination, I watched the thing turn its head to look at Steve, as though only just now registering that the man was there.
As I caught us safely on the ground, a necklace on Alice's neck expanded into the full original form of the Orb of Purifying Light, which raised into the air above us and then suddenly went off like a nuclear blast. It was palpable; one minute the battlefield was one way, and then the next, there was the certainty of death, as every wraith within sight was obliterated, and every embodied undead was reduced to rapidly decaying crumbles of bone dust, all in a single pulse of unfathomably intense light. The smaller stone golems melted, but seemed to resist being completely obliterated, and they turned to look at us with a clear failure to understand.
Jess's staff reshaped once more, this time into a wand, and she raised it like a conductor's baton, tapping it three times on nothing, then gestured with it and her off-hand together. Above her, a shining light appeared, turning into a large ball of burning, roiling plasma, which reshaped itself into a spear ten feet long and a good two inches thick, and with a gesture, it launched itself straight through the golem's chest and out the other side.
All of which did about as much to the Grand Golem as Steve's broadsword broadside had done--which is to say, it got the Golem's attention and confirmed that we were it's enemies, and little else.
All of a sudden, I felt something strange coming at us, and Fabricated a stone wall in plenty of time for something large to burrow through the ground like a gunshot, popping up into the air and aiming straight at us like a big, fuzzy bullet. It didn't exactly splat on the wall, but I got a sense of impact, as though my bracers were still reinforcing it, and that was the only reason why it had not dug through my stone wall as easily as the stone of the cavern.
I reshaped the wall to have a look at it, and found that it was a giant mole--large enough to have left a man-sized hallway through the rock behind it. Its coloration wasn't the severe red-and-black of the Demon Fox and Demon Mouse, but it was reminiscent; large swaths of its fur were dark gray with black spots, or amber with blood-red spots. This, I figured instantly, had to be a child of a demon mole and regular moles, and I grimaced, realizing that it must have grown exceptionally quickly, and that if that demon fox had left behind any offspring...
Well, this was no time to worry about that.
The mole was a bit confused, and it squealed in protest, but it didn't seem to really know how to react to a stone wall it couldn't immediately penetrate. So, feeling no pity, I Fabricated a giant stone fist above its head and telekinetically smashed down. That... wasn't enough to kill it outright, but I formed another stone fist, mirror to the first, and caught the beast between the two of them, and that was enough.
Then I caught the trembling of the floor as two more launched out of nearby walls at the spellcasters behind me.
They were fast, but since I already had the two giant stone fists under my control, I simply gave the two flying moles one uppercut each. One smashed into the Grand Golem, and to my surprise chipped a bit out of its chest, while the other slammed awkwardly into a stalactite and let out a terrified squeal.
I drew back the stone fists, unsure how to finish them, but Jess managed to toss another plasma lance through the one by the Grand Golem while it was still in midair, cutting another chunk of the construct's body away at the same time, while a phantom arrow from seemingly nowhere got the one by the ceiling.
So I drew the fists back the rest of the way, keeping my concentration on searching for more. Behind and above me, there was another devastating impact as the Golden Armory and the Grand Golem collided, and this time, I felt and sensed the golem forced back a full step. I glanced at it for a moment, watching Jess twist her wand with smooth and purposeful motions, and giant plasma blades flashed out at its limbs, as though to simply cut it down to a useless torso.
The blades passed clean through the stone--in some places. In others, a black metal frame underneath it was revealed, one sturdy enough that the plasma blades simply were not enough. I nodded to myself, then tore my attention away. It would be too easy to gawk; every last one of us was incredibly powerful.
Which is, of course, when the battle took another turn.
I suddenly turned to look, without quite knowing why, at a nearby ledge, to find that standing up on top of it were two creatures in the distinct black-and-red of full-blood demons. As I had started to expect, one of them was a mole, though regular sized and not at all like the giant ones I'd killed. It was standing on its hind legs and raising its forelegs into the air, chittering with delight or simple battle mania.
And beside it, looking as distinctly unimpressed as its species was wont to, was... a Demonic Duck, of some sort. It was looking at me. I looked back, confused.
And then the Mole's mental voice rocked the cavern, amplified by the seven sacrificed bandits, the blood runes around them, and the hell-portals they had spawned. It was shrill, twisted, and oh so gleeful.
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