I was pleasantly surprised when no one tried to ambush us over the next few days.
No bounty hunters were waiting for us when we stepped through the portal back into the cavern where we had assassinated a golem. No one jumped us when we climbed out of the pit Glaustro reopened briefly, back into the desert.
When three days passed with no interruptions to our routine, and we were rapidly approaching another wall of sand in the distance, something inside me finally settled down. I let go of the ambush anxiety, leaving me with just the regular anxiety about attempting to destroy another weapon of mass destruction.
You know, just the everyday jitters.
I couldn’t say those few days were all bad, though. For one thing, I got to fly to my heart’s content. I did slightly miss Mia’s company, since she always found a way to cheer me up during the endless marching, but there was something immensely freeing about cutting through the sky all alone with my thoughts.
Up there, so far above the ground and all its worldly concerns, I couldn’t even find it in me to worry or stress or overanalyze everything the way I usually did. It was just me and the uplifting sense of freedom.
Well, almost only me. Methialia regularly accompanied me on my flights, first purely as a precaution against crashes and accidents, and then because Glaustro ordered her to.
She didn’t complain. She also didn’t look quite as rough as she had recently, either. Direct exposure to the desert sun seemed to rejuvenate her a little. That, combined with the three days of rest, had almost eliminated the stress and exhaustion lines from her face. They were still there, and she was still clearly struggling with something, but at least she seemed to be enjoying herself as well.
Of course, all my fun evaporated when we reached the storm front and had to venture back into the embrace of the howling, sand-chucking winds. Except, this time, things weren’t as bad.
It wasn’t that the intensity of the storm had lessened, or that my new armor made that much of a difference. Rather, the toughening I received from the close-up mana blast was doing wonders for my overall resistance. Even my wings were more resilient. The sand’s impact was more or less back to what it had been shortly after my arrival in Lagyel: annoying and distracting, but by no means harmful or actually painful.
It was, in a way, ironic that I’d had to claw back a degree of my resistance after boosting my ascension, but at least I was now getting the best of both worlds. New and useful inhuman features, combined with mortal toughness in the face of the sand, were a go!
I was almost, almost tempted to try flying in the storm again. Thankfully, I managed to resist the urge, proving that my brain was, indeed, capable of pattern recognition. It was a small improvement, but every little bit counted.
Besides, I didn’t need to carry quite so much of the stress-load about our little expedition anymore. Sand or no sand, all the demons were leagues more motivated than they used to be. Some even signed up to make use of their more unique talents in order to guarantee our success. Souls were, as always, the true key to a demon’s heart.
This proved to be invaluable two days into the storm, when their newfound motivation allowed us to dodge what could have been a disastrous encounter.
One of the demons, a weaselly-looking individual by the name of Ophis, slunk ahead of us only to return several hours later in a panic. He convened briefly with Glaustro, who then marshalled the rest of us and rapidly conjured another giant snake construct to ferry the whole unit into the ground.
When I tracked down the commander at the head of said construct, he looked both supremely focused and supremely unwilling to be interrupted. Bronwynn was sitting off to the side already, so I decided to bug my old mentor instead.
“That demon, Ophis, he was scouting when he ran into a group of jinn,” Bronwynn explained. “He didn’t spot a city in the vicinity, so they seem to be patrolling this stretch of the desert. I don’t know if they found out about the golems we destroyed already or if this is a routine habit of theirs, but it does spell trouble. Our target might be better defended than we thought.”
I decided not to push for more information after that. Bronwynn didn’t seem too chatty, his eyes focused on Glaustro’s scrunched-up grimace, but he did assure us that our commander had worked on making the passage of his construct all but untraceable. So long as the jinn weren’t paranoid enough to have constructs peppered all over the underground, Glaustro was confident we could slip past them all with relative ease.
It turned out the jinn were not, in fact, paranoid enough. Their lack of thorough preparation, in addition to their apparent ignorance of all demons could do even within an adverse environment, ensured our safe passage.
But Glaustro did not look particularly relaxed, even when we were nominally past the patrol Ophis had noticed. If anything, the sergeant looked even more tense, his attention constantly split between moving us in the right direction and covering our tracks.
Our travel persisted in this fashion for another day, before the great snake construct suddenly went still. Only then did Glaustro slowly unwind, tension seeming to bleed out of his frame. Bronwynn was immediately by his side, handing him an odd, fizzy drink that radiated mana.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Thank you,” Glaustro said quietly. He sipped the drink, smiled, and began talking much louder. “From what I can tell, we are almost directly under the golem. This means it’s on the surface, and likely guarded by the jinn. There’s a decent chance our original target didn’t have guards only because of its hidden location. I need a group of demons skilled at stealth and earth magic to scout the surface.”
To my surprise, more than a few volunteered immediately, eyes bright and eager. I wondered at that, but then realized that in addition to whatever Merits they could earn from the task, there were also jinn-souls potentially on the line. That was a powerful motivation for a group of demons who were mostly stuck traipsing around the desert while a war was being fought.
Glaustro quickly chose the most promising prospects for his scouting mission. The weaselly demon was picked immediately, followed shortly by another five individuals I wasn’t familiar with. All of them had a shifty look about them, which explained why I didn’t feel the need to get to know them better. Still, that spoke well of their abilities where this particular mission was concerned.
In spite of my recent experiences, I hadn’t quite mastered the art of sitting still while other people did things. A part of me wanted to be out there, tunneling through the earth and sand to spy on the jinn, even if I knew I would get caught immediately.
So, I spent a painful hour fidgeting. Every few minutes, Mia got sick of my nonsense and batted the back of my head forcefully enough to hurt. And every few minutes after getting scolded, I went right back to fidgeting. Over and over, like clockwork.
At long last, our scouts began to trickle back in. I wasn’t the only one who drew a little closer, but Glaustro did nothing to stop us overhearing their report.
Ophis was the first to speak, fingers fidgeting like he was tempted to snatch something up at every moment. “There’s a group of ten jinn just patrolling the area or idling. All of them seem to be capable of using the earth elements, though most of them are some variation rather than a pure earth jinn. That’s probably why they didn’t notice us, really.”
“Ten… that’s not the worst number,” Glaustro concluded. “What about the terrain? What’s it like out there?”
“It’s some kind of pit,” another demon reported. “Most of the storm doesn’t reach the inside of it, but you can still feel the winds a little. It’s massive and… I think it’s a graveyard. Full of bones, at any rate. They’re huge. I don’t think they belong to any local species that’s still kicking about. We’d have noticed them otherwise.”
Glaustro spent a bit more time grilling them for information. He was particularly interested in whether the jinn were guarding specific points or if they patrolled the pit freely, but none of the scouts could give him a definitive answer. The jinn seemed to be allowed to do whatever they wanted, so long as they didn’t leave the site they were guarding.
Eventually, Glaustro hashed out a plan. He divided us into ten different groups, with a minimum of two earth-mana users in each. There was also a single demon who would be acting on his own. Glaustro handed him a mana device of some kind and ordered him to activate it at the highest point of the pit as soon as combat broke out. It would, apparently, serve as a sort of signal blocker for mana communications, meant to stop the jinn from calling in reinforcements.
Typically, the sandstorm would take care of that well enough on its own, but none of us knew for sure whether the jinn were as hindered in their use of mana as we were. They sure didn’t have trouble using the sand in their spells, after all.
When we set out, Mia and I ended up in a smaller earth construct with Glaustro and another thirty demons, tunneling towards the very core of the area we were assaulting.
We came out of the ground in a spray of sand, accompanied by the startled shouts of jinn all over the ‘pit.’ I wanted to curse the scout-demons. Not only was the so-called ‘pit’ more like a massive crater, but it was absolutely filled to the brim with bones so large, they looked like they belonged to primordial titans.
While I was distracted, the demons in my group pounced on the nearest jinn. Honestly, it wasn’t even a contest, especially since the crater provided some shelter for their spells from the swirling sand. A single jinn was barely an appetizer for thirty demons. A wave of infernal magic obliterated the poor fellow in seconds.
Before the proverbial dust could even settle, Glaustro was already racing ahead to our target. I did my best to follow in his footsteps, flanked by Mia and Bronwynn.
This golem core had been placed inside of what was once the skull of some horned behemoth. Thankfully, the runic matric setup seemed entirely identical to what we’d seen underground. Even with the difference in terrain and the slight incline that made things tricky, Glaustro set up his own matrix even faster than the previous time. Knowing the schema would actually work did wonders to speed up the process.
While I waited for him to activate the cylinders and give me the nod, I eyed the other battles happening across the crater. We were winning, of course, but I spotted at least one battle that got close to messing things up.
Upon seeing that he was surrounded, one of the jinn burst into pure flames that scattered all over the place. The demons pursued, but didn’t catch up to the many clones of the jinn before one managed to weave a spell and shoot it at the sky.
His eyes tracked the projectile with considerable satisfaction, at least until it impacted a dome of mana that briefly flickered into visibility before fading from view again. The signal or message or whatever the spell was supposed to be fizzled out, and then the jinn was wiped from existence by a concentrated demonic assault.
Finally, the moment came, and Glaustro motioned me forward. This time, according to a new part of the plan, Mia surged forth alongside me. While I savaged the glowing golem core, she positioned herself and braced for the incoming mana wave.
When the core imploded, just like the last one, we both managed to hold our ground, making the most of the mana surge. It tingled through our bodies, reforging and strengthening them.
That wasn’t all that happened this time, though.
Just as the wind and sand died down far above, lightly showering us in golden grains, the very earth shuddered beneath out feet. Something fundamental about the world shifted, then settled into a new configuration.
Even as we all reeled from the shock, the same golden chains that had ensnared us upon our arrival in Lagyel shimmered into view around us. Then, without warning, they started to shatter.
I staggered as a piece of me I hadn’t even known was locked away suddenly returned. Power and emotions slammed into place, threatening to overwhelm me. All around, demons were reacting similarly, though they welcomed their lost power with far more joy than I could muster in the face of my growing instability.
A quarter of the chains binding us down shattered. The remaining chains faded away again almost instantly, but we all knew the change was significant in ways none of us could properly put into words.
And not all those ways were good.
We had taken a step closer to wrestling the world away from the jinn, but we had also made our golem-strategy clear. The jinn would know exactly what we were up to now.
Who knew what they might do in response?