So there we were, five heroes in the middle of trying to defeat a neigh-invulnerable mega-golem and a horde of demon-spawn, when the apparent parents of said spawn jumped out on a cliff, offering us a very dramatic (if tactically unsound) reveal.

Actually... I frowned. We've seen and fought the children of the demonic mole, but nothing from the duck. Are they hiding in the darkness, plotting some kind of move of their own? I let my attention flicker from the mole to the duck, then spread it back around, making sure we won't get ambushed in the meantime. I can sense the others doing the same, as we can't allow ourselves to be distracted by a demonic duck and mole combination.

A moment later, Steve's Armory--this time, I notice, a warhammer--comes down on the Grand Golem's shoulder, the impact forcing it sideways and almost tipping it over, but the massive creation just pivots on one foot until its weight is back over its feet. So far, I haven't seen any sign of it actually attacking, but given that it was being reinforced by the spectres, it's hard for any of us to imagine that it's still neutral, much less on our side.

{ Hey, hey, hey, } the mole's screeching mental voice echoes through the chamber, emitting from the seven hell-portals. { Who here is a hero of fuckin' hugh-man-it-TEEE? } Above us, the mole writhes around in what's probably a pathetic dance of some kind. { Hey, that's right, it's YOU losers! And who here is representing the forces of evil? That's right, bitches, it's D.J. Moleman and his best buddy of all time, the Master Quacker himself, comin' to you fuckin' LIVE from only the biggest, bestest concert arena in the whole fuckin' WOOOOORLD. Hey, Duck-style, give these homies a taste of your fuckin' opera voice, yo? Given em something to fear! }

There was a beat, and I admit, I turned my attention up to the demonic duck. He was staring at me. For just a moment, I knew, every eye in the room was on the duck of the damned, and his attention was focused entirely on me.

{ Quack, } the duck said into the awkward silence. That wasn't the sound of a quack--it was the word quack. Which, of course, was an onomatopoeia, but the point is... it clearly wasn't a lack of translation. He actually said quack. With his mind.

I get the feeling that even the Grand Golem shifted its enormous head to look at the damned thing in response to that.

{ Frigging... } the mole's voice lost most of its energy. { Why you gotta rain on my parade? This is a thing I'm doing! Making them fear us, keeping us the center of the whole fight! Come on, man. Just dunk on em. Call them bitches. Say you're gonna fuck em up. Something. }

The duck spared me its withering gaze for a moment, turning its full attention on the mole next to it. { Quack. }

{ Bitch are you serious? }

{ Quack. }

{ We're fighting these bitches, homie. Don't hold back. }

{ Quack. }

{ Listen, I know you're doing this on purpose. You're making me look bad. Come on, man. Let them hear the sound of their doom. Like... HEY! } Suddenly, the mole shifted his attention back to us. { Hey losers! This time for real, DJ Quacks here is gonna fuck yo' shit up with just the sound of his voice! He's a goddamn menace, and he's here for you! You ready for this? }

The duck stared at him for a long moment, then turned back to us, this time focusing his stare, I think, on Alice. { Quack. }

{ MOTHERFUCKER. } The demonic mole finally seemed to have had enough, and he brained the duck in the back of its feathered little head, knocking it down off the ledge and towards us, below. { Alright, fucking FINE. We can make this a one-mole show, just me and my baby bois and guuuurls, is that right my chill-duh-reeeen? }

I shivered as a round of squeals came from seemingly nowhere, immediately refocusing my attention on the ground. Now I could feel it--somewhere down and beyond my ability to sense, there were the trembling of several sets of demonically-enhanced claws were carving tunnels through the rock, but not towards us; they were circling like sharks, and probably screwing up the stability of the whole cavern. I frowned, closing my eyes to keep my focus below, noticing immediately when one of the moles stops circling and starts a charge directly at us.

I Fabricate a diamond blade hidden in the rock directly in front of it, and the mole charges straight into it, the reinforced gemstone slicing the body nearly in half before its momentum died away. Hidden beneath the rock, nobody else should have been able to even tell that the mole died, and yet I think everyone did--for sure, the other moles all paused in their circling, and DJ... no, I'm not calling him that. The demonic loser-mole paused in the middle of his tirade.

{ Shit, } he said, sounding actually displeased. { Alright, motherfucker, now YOU'RE on my list. Hope you're ready for this, because you have my undivided-- }

And then John shot him in the head with a Phantom Arrow.

I think we were all prepared for that to be the end of that. Alice, I noticed, was currently standing there, looking at the Demonic Duck, who was standing right in front of her, looking back. There was... a lot about that which was terrifying, but I could feel even without the power of the bracers that being so close to the overwhelming power of the Orb of Purifying Light was making it difficult if not impossible for the duck to mount any kind of attack. And yet... it didn't seem cowed or hurt by it, either. It stood there, stoically, just looking. And Alice stood there, looking back.

And then, Alice took two steps forward and nudged the duck with her foot in the chest. The duck, too many moments later to count as anything but terrible acting, fell over sideways.

{ Oh no, } said the duck, his voice the very definition of 'dry monotone'. And yet... { You have mortally wounded me. I lay on death's door even now. }

Alice cleared her throat, leaving no doubt in my mind that she was also acting, and poorly. "As Hero of Light I formally offer to spare your life in exchange for three wishes."

{ My pride as a lieutenant of the Demon Lord requires I refuse even on the brink of death. }

"I hereby threaten to torture you and kill you."

{ Alas, my will is broken, and under duress I accept your terms. }

The orb above pulsed slightly, and a shining white collar appeared around the duck's throat. The duck, stumbling suddenly to its feet, stared again at Alice, and then at me, and then at the others. { I will get revenge, et cetra. }

{ Oh come the fuck ON! } From somewhere among the rubble, the demonic mole appeared, his gaping headwound already healing from, I realized, the massive amounts of energy he soaked up from the portals before Alice had blasted the power away. { You fuckin' ought to know I'm gonna rat your ass OUT-- }

Another Phantom Arrow, this one much larger, exploded into the demonic mole, ripping apart much of its lower half, and when it landed on the ground it opted to burrow instead of standing and taking it, which suggested it was still alive. Knowing as I did that John could phase through solid ground, I put the creature out of mind and focused on the ones below, and on the golem above.

Below me, the circling demon kids made several feints at us, but twice they committed and got a diamond blade for their troubles. The second--third if you count the first one, I guess--tried doing a lot of evasion, but it took very little effort from me to simply surround it with a bladed cage that it could not escape at the speed it was moving.

Stolen novel; please report.

Above us, Steve and the golem were now standing face to face, Steve having turned the Armory into a ridiculously long spear that pierced the floor and ceiling at a slight angle, and he stood on a protrusion along its middle, staring at the massive construct. It stared back. I couldn't help but feel irritated; this was our first major boss fight?

I shouldn't have been so glib, of course.

The mole suddenly shot out of the ground and burrowed into the Grand Golem, and moments later, many more of those sickly threads of black demonic magic shot out from him, controlling the limbs of the thing. It shuddered, but without giving us any real time it react, and with speed and flexibility that it had so far shown none of, the five-story golem, tried to suckerpunch Steve straight out of the air.

Steve twisted the Armory into a shield, and landed nearby unharmed.

{ Alright, you fucking assholes, we're done with this. DONE! } The mole straightened, and turned towards us, again with a speed that made no sense at the construct's scale. It didn't even seem to react to the ways in which its weight was thrown around by the movements, as though the massive amounts of magic in the air were ignoring the laws of physics at will. { No mole fuckin' games. I came here to fuck bitches and fuck bitches UP, and well, you've already seen my kids. }

The Grand Golem crouched forward and then did a frog-hop at us, which might have been intimidating for people that didn't throw around building-sized pieces of dirt and stone for fun. I grabbed the Fabricate and Telekinesis powers together, forming a massive hand and arm out of the ground and grabbing the golem around the throat with it. To give us some extra distance, I funneled more power and stone into the arm, lengthening it and bodily hurling the enormous hunk of stone into the wall on the other side of the room.

Jess lobbed what was probably an even dozen plasma spears at the construct, then another two or three similar sets; I didn't really stop to count. It became clear as she tore away at it that the black metal underneath the stone stopped even these narrow, intense bolts of power, but they did so by heating to cherry red, and they didn't cool off all that quickly. They were definitely not invincible, just... highly resistant.

The golem smashed into my magical chokehold with both of its big, stubby hands, and for the first time I felt my control over a substance completely shatter. It dropped, then started to charge, but Steve was there, upside down with the Armory forming an oversized golden axe, and he threw every ounce of his muscle and power into swinging vertically upwards into the golem's face.

Finally, between his momentum and its, the golem's visage cracked fully, revealing a black metal skull underneath. With more opportunity to look closely, it was clear that the metal was intricately engraved, and I frowned, trying to form in my head a stone fist with the sharpest possible diamond knuckles. But, before I could do that, John finally appeared before us, in the dead middle of the room.

The shadow powers of his Phantom Arrow were boiling around him, and I watched them all get sucked into the arm guard I'd made him, Jess' enchantment compressing what had to already be unfathomable power into a single needle. His phantom bow sprung to his hand, and he drew back, gave the golem a once-over with his eyes, and released.

The single arrow split into dozens, and those dozens flew into structural points on the Grand golem, areas I could tell did instead of didn't have the black metal skeleton. Where each needle passed, after a few heartbeats, there was suddenly a hole, but not a needle-sized hole; each hole was the size of a leg, and cleaner than the plasma-cut holes that Jess had formed with her spells. There was no melting, no fraying of the surface; the material was just gone.

I just frowned at him. "Couldn't you have started with that?"

John was just turning to look at me, with a smirk on his face, when time seemed to stand still. My bracers--no, all of our artifacts shouted a warning at the same moment, but none of us made it in time.

A pitch black and blood red mole shot up out of the ground and tore straight through the heart of the Hero of the Phantom Arrow, leaving behind a gaping hole that seemed to widen even as we watched, flesh and viscera flaking into black dust and then dwindling to nothing as we stood there staring, each instant passing like a full minute.

What followed felt like a fever dream, and I could feel all of our artifacts rumbling in sympathy. Whatever we might have thought about this--that maybe Alice could have saved him, that maybe we could have stopped the creature before it was too late--the five godly items knew to the core of their being what we were witnessing. And it's not like we stood still; none of us, not even John, though without his torso, there was little he could do.

It just happened too quickly.

Fourteen broken lines instantly connected seven hell-portals, and John--by whatever stroke of bad luck or damned fate--stood exactly in the center. No; he was close, but the mole was in the center, at just the right moment.

A lump of reddish flesh in the creature's maw shined with indelible darkness, and a pillar of night and nightmare made physical punched out of the world beneath the massive glyph, overwhelming even the Orb's divine light; I could feel the formerly one-sided battle against the darkness switch over from being won to being lost, as the light was pushed back like a fountain of steam being blown away by the wind. Alice, for her part, whipped the orb into position between most of us and the black column, though Steve was far out of position and had to duck behind a massive Golden shield instead.

I tried to reach out with my powers, and so did Jess, and so did Alice, and I know that Steve must have as well, but the beam of darkness that shot out of the opening was as far beyond us as our powers were beyond normal people. It was like a laser of magic power, and it ripped through the ground above us, dispersing solid stone like it was fog, revealing what should have been an early-afternoon sky. The walls of the cavern melted like wax, and the possibly-crippled remnants of the Grand Golem were flattened against the wall like it was an empty soda can instead of a mass of solid stone.

The evil ground-rat got a full dose of it, and not in the way any of us would have wanted.

{ HELLS FUCKING YEAH, BITCHES, WE GOTS OURSELVES A MOTHERFUCKING DEMON GENERAL UP IN THIS HI-ZZZOOOOUUUUSE! }

With that proclamation, the portals snapped shut, the blood heptagram vanished, and the all that was left was a black and red creature hanging in the air. It was now no longer recognizable as a mole; it looked more like a grotesque demon worm of some kind, having stretched lengthwise but not grown much in any other direction. Its skin was covered with pustules, no longer fully covered by the thick hair the creature had previously had, and it dripped oily black mana from its body so thick that the shed drops bent light around them as they fell to the ground.

"Shit," I said into the quiet, as much because I'd just watched a friend die as because I--we all--were now faced with a much deadlier opponent than any of us were ready for. The creature, seeming to bask in the attention, straightened up into the sky, its body releasing a truly egregious shriek.

{ Alright, motherfuckers, now we play the demon game. And that is, how many of you are going to get away with all of your limbs, and how many will be trapped in my stomach for~e~ver? }

With the incredible power of the demon vent sealed, Steve launched himself back over to us with a single leap, even as we all couldn't help but step back from the furry demon mole-worm.

"What now?" I asked, not entirely sure how any of us could survive this.

"I don't..." Jess was staring at the monster, but tore her eyes away. "I don't know."

"We can't fight this yet," said Steve, his voice cold and hollow.

"We aren't meant to," said Alice, as she turned and stepped towards it.

The rest of us panicked, but Alice had reigned back in the power of the orb, and stood in front of the beast as it flailed around in what was probably a dance of some sort, again. When it looked back in our direction--or, well, moles were blind, right?--she attracted all of its attention.

{ Oh, a pretty little sacrifice? Don't mind if I do~ }

Alice just gestured forward, and from her shadow came a small figure, which walked straight up to the big ugly worm, with an admirable--I might even say completely insane--lack of fear.

The mole stopped flailing and found its attention entirely fixed on the demonic duck.

{ Hey, asshole. } The demonic duck's mental or spiritual voice was, for once, slightly on the warmer side of monotone. { I've got a surprise for you. }

The mole twisted its grotesque body so that it was mostly upright, then came back down to be face to face with the duck.

There was a tense moment as the two stared at each other--again, assuming the mole wasn't somehow blind, which... moles were? Some part of me, among all the parts frozen with fear and disgust, tried to make the facts fit, and could only kind of accept that they... didn't.

Either way, the duck and the mole stared at each other for a long moment, a moment that I realized late was actually stretching on far longer than it felt like, as we were all enraptured by the scene.

{ Quack, } the duck finally said, and a black-edged portal appeared behind the mole, some kind of twisted black hand pulling him into it with all the finesse of a hot-dog vender snatching the next in a long line of meat-tubes out of storage. One moment he was here, and the next...

...gone.

The duck, for his part, found this hilarious, and he tilted his head back and laughed and laughed, his quacks echoing in the melted former cavern that was now nothing but a shattered hole on the ground, visible to the evening sun overhead. The clouds, I noted, were all rippled and torn; the whole sky, in every direction, showed signs that it had been affected by something here. It was, I realized, probably a lot more obvious from other directions than the center; anyone looking at those clouds would be able to point to the center of the disturbance.

I looked up at the sky, at the walls, any anything but the severed head and limbs of the man... the friend who used to be a Hero.

----------------------------------------