Isa opened her eyes into darkness.

What happened? she wondered. Where am I? And why can’t I see anything? I have dark-sight; I should be able to make out something.

Standing up, she turned this way and that, but she was surrounded only by an impenetrable dark.

“Rai? Rocky? Sun Knight?”

There was nothing but silence once her words faded away. She took a step forward, and with a wrenching sensation that she recognized as teleportation, she could suddenly see, albeit in the black and white of dark-sight rather than the full color of normal vision. She stood on a stone floor in a large room some sixty feet to a side. It was almost entirely empty, but there were several pillars and an altar in the middle of the room. White paint made a circle around the altar, which had runes carved along the sides.

She tried to summon a light, but the spell refused to activate. Activating her equipment ring worked just fine, however, and she took comfort in the sensation of the wood of her halberd’s haft in her hands. A loud pop sounded from behind her a moment after, and she whirled around to see what looked like a muscular horned human standing as tall as the Sun Knight. Tattoo-like markings covered his exposed skin, and black armor with spikes protected his chest, shoulders, and groin, but he was otherwise naked.

He crossed his arms, and she spotted his long, white claws. He grinned, revealing teeth that more closely resembled her own than that of a human.

Isa stepped into a battle stance, her weapon’s blade coating with blood. Her scales failed to magically reinforce themselves when she tried to silently cast Enhance Scales. She forced herself into Berserk Mode, not wanting to take any risks by waiting until she was hurt.

“Oh? Quick to combat, I see,” the entity said in a strange tongue. “A saurian warrior. I haven’t fought one of your kind in a very long time.”

“Well, I’ll be the last one you fight, demon,” Isa snarled. “Savage Silver Rush!”

She charged. The demon lifted his right hand and a flaming sword appeared in it, which he used to parry the first, nearly vertical blow. Her follow-up upward diagonal slash, however, sliced across his stomach, spraying blood. Her aura punched him in the chest an instant later, deflecting off his breastplate. Her eyes widened slightly as she saw the wound she had just inflicted – which was far less deep than it should have been and unaffected by her acidic blood – start to heal.

“Decisive!” he said happily, swinging his sword in a zig-zag. The initial slice cut across her chest and she angled her body away, deflecting the second and third strike. “I like that!”

“Dragon’s Wrath!” she cried, bringing her halberd down with reckless abandon.

The demon expertly deflected her halberd again, and the axe head buried itself in the stone floor. She yanked it out, but her divided attention cost her: the demon plunged his sword through her chest and out her back, then slashed her across the face with the claws on his other hand, which burst into flame, narrowly missing her right eye. He stepped back, pulling his sword free, and grinned.

“Bone Breaker!” she screamed, thrusting her halberd forward. He tried to parry but didn’t use enough force, and the halberd smashed into his breastplate, crumpling it. Beneath, the demon’s ribs shattered, and he let out a surprised and pained gasp at the effects of her fourth tier combat art. He swung his sword, but with a cry of “Sword Breaker!”, Isa shattered with her halberd. The pieces dissolved into wisps of flame. The demon backed up and she chased.

“Wrath Strike!”

Her halberd nearly bisected the demon horizontally across his stomach, its blood spraying out, and her aura finished the job, punching the top half off the bottom. Both halves hit the floor, blood rapidly pooling around them.

Isa dropped out of Berserk Mode and held up her hand in front of her face. “I hope this works…”

She failed to cast Healing Blood.

“That’s… not good,” she said worriedly. “I’m pretty badly injured, even if I’m not bleeding out from the giant hole through my chest thanks to a combination of the cloak’s healing, which only works while I’m in Berserk Mode, and the flames on that sword. Dragons, I have no idea how super toughness that allows me to keep functioning with a wound like that even works.” She touched the wounds on her face and winced.

“I need to find Rai and the Sun Knight. I’ve used up a lot of my qi, though… should I rest here to recover qi, or should I get moving?” She glanced around and finally spotted an archway on one of the walls. “Let’s get going…”

-x-

Rai sat on a ledge overlooking a long drop a hundred feet. Behind him, the tower extended both down to the sands below and up a couple hundred more feet. When he had opened his eyes, he had found himself here, on the outside of the tower, with no way in, up, or down. None of his attempts at casting spells worked, which meant that he couldn’t fly down.

“Yi-meep!”

Something landed on his head, and he was so surprised that he nearly fell off the ledge. Reaching up, he grabbed the thing, which was quite soft, and brought it down in front of him. He stared at the strange creature, which hung limply in his grasp, not attempting to struggle. The cyan-furred being resembled something like a cross between a fox and a rabbit, with long ears and a luxurious tail, and it had a red gem embedded in its forehead that looked like a large, faceted ruby. It was the size of a kitten, being about nine inches long (plus another nine inches for the tail). It stared back at him cutely.

“What in the world are you?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

“Yi-meep?” it replied questioningly.

“You’re awfully cute. How did someone like you end up here?”

“Where did that carbuncle go?!” a feminine voice yelled in exasperation in an unfamiliar tongue from up above. Rai leaned back and looked upward to see a red-and-black-skinned woman with curly black horns on either side of her head lean out of a window in the Tower. The only clothing he saw on her torso looked like black armor, and it barely covered her chest, leaving her stomach completely exposed. She looked up, then down.

She spotted him.

“Oh! A human!” she said delightedly in the common tongue. She jumped out of the window, revealing that she had black feathery wings. She drifted downward and outward until she was face to face with him, floating a good dozen feet out from the Tower’s wall. “Hello, human! I haven’t seen your kind out here in the desert in… gosh, I don’t think ever! I see you found my carbuncle. Mind handing it over to me?”

The creature in his hand made a distressed “Mee-meep! Mee-meep!” sound. He lowered it into his lap and cupped it in both hands. He looked between it and the winged woman. The beast tried to hunker down and hide inside his hands, continuing to make distressed noises.

“Carbuncle? Is that what this is?”

“That’s right. They’re pretty special creatures. Their magic stones – the ones on their foreheads – are incredible magical catalysts. Truly out of this world.”

“And you plan to use the catalyst? Does that hurt the carbuncle?”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Removing the catalyst kills the carbuncle, but you have to make sacrifices for the sake of gaining power, you know? I can tell you’re a pretty strong mage, so you should understand… though you can’t cast spells here, can you?”

Rai frowned. “Are you a demon?”

“Sure am! Did you want to sell your soul to me for more power?”

“I’d like to keep my soul, thanks. You know, I was always taught that demons are evil. And not just evil, but a threat to all life.”

The woman grinned, revealing sharp teeth. “So what? All life eventually dies anyway. It’s what you do with it that matters, right?”

“True, but…”

“You feeling sorry for the carbuncle?”

“Yes.”

“Why? It’s not like the carbuncle is you.”

“Because I have this thing called empathy,” Rai said dryly.

“That thing where you care about the feelings and wellbeing of others? That’s for weaklings and idiots. Since you’re not a weakling, you must be an idiot.” Her expression changed, turning into a lazy, self-confident smirk. “Now hand over the carbuncle.”

Rai scooted back and stood up, holding the carbuncle in both hands. He stared the demon in the eye.

“I don’t think I will.”

A green bow apparently made of solidified wind appeared in the demon’s hands. When she pulled back the string, an arrow appeared.

“Then you’re going to die even sooner than I was planning.”

“We’ll see about that,” he replied and jumped off the ledge.

Wind rushed past as he plummeted. He switched to holding the carbuncle with one hand and adjusted his position, landing on the sands on three limbs – one knee, one foot, and one hand. A plume of sand erupted around him and he felt his bones protest. He lost balance almost instantly, falling forward, but he managed to keep the hand holding the carbuncle from smacking into the ground.

“Woooow!” the demon said as she descended. “That was gutsy! If you weren’t so intent on keeping the carbuncle from me, I might actually spare your life and turn you into my living puppet! I wonder if the undead version of you will be so daring?”

Godsdammit that hurt! Rai thought. I’m lucky I didn’t break anything.

“Little guy, are you okay?” he coughed, climbing to his feet. The carbuncle jumped out of his hand onto the sand.

“Yi-meep!” it said enthusiastically.

Rai activated his ring, equipping his sword. He looked up to see that the demon had descended to about thirty feet off the ground. Her bow was still pointed straight at him. He shifted into his combat stance and felt the pain from his landing slowly start to recede.

“Die now!” the demon said cheerfully, unleashing three arrows in quick succession. The first hit him in the side in an explosion of wind, ripping through his flesh to leave his side a savaged mess, but he managed to jump back from the second, which hit the sand in front of him, and jump to the side to avoid the third.

“No,” he replied, slashing with his sword. The demon let out a scream as a gash opened up across her torso from hip to just below her armor, despite her position up in the air – courtesy of his fourth-tier art Hyperdimensional Strike.

“Bastard!” she shouted, firing off another three arrows. Using the second-tier Silver Parry, he knocked the first arrow out of the air, and the explosion of wind from the impact sent the following two arrows off course. He activated his weapon’s ability to phase through armor – usable twice daily – and stabbed; a hole appeared all the way through her chest, hidden beneath her armor. She coughed up blood.

“Die-die-die!”

He parried the arrows again, then slashed with Dimensional Strike, the weaker second-tier distance-striking art. Combat artists had limited qi, and it could only be expended in limited ways; he didn’t have enough qi left to use fourth-tier arts any further. Still, the damage from the attack wasn’t light, and the demon looked like she could barely keep to the air. With a shriek, she unleashed another volley, and this time Rai mistimed his parry; his torso turned into a bloody mess as the arrow of wind exploded against him, some of his flesh stripped from his bones. In her fury, the demon lost her aim, and the other two arrows missed.

Another desperate swing of his blade cut off her shrieks and she plummeted to the ground. Her wounds were still slowly healing, so Rai staggered over and stabbed her through the heart, using the second daily activation of armor ignoring to pull it off. The demon’s healing stopped.

He dropped to the ground, somehow not losing any more blood, but now suffering from sand on his raw exposed flesh. It was all he could do to lie there and cry until he remembered that he had one healing potion left. He fished it out and drank it, dealing with the worst of his injuries so that his bones were no longer exposed, but he was still hurt quite severely.

He resumed crying.

-x-

“Do you have any idea where we are?” Rocky asked the Sun Knight, looking around at the partially sand-filled, tilted room.

“I can’t understand you, Gatherer,” the Sun Knight replied. They climbed over a stone table that was half-buried in the sand, then made their way to the stone staircase and climbed to the next floor. “Ah, an exit to a balcony. Good.”

The Sun Knight walked through the tilted doorway and out into the sunlight. “Hm. We appear to be in the middle of a partially sunken city,” they said, looking out over the pieces of buildings sticking up out of the sand. In the distance he saw a tower reaching hundreds of feet into the air. “Tower Era. It seems that it was real after all. If Scholar and Warrior are here somewhere, they should gravitate toward the tower, so that is where I will go as well.”

“Hey, knight! I’m talking to… oh, goddess. We’re in the middle of the demon dwellings. This place is filled with undead. I don’t know where the demons get the corpses, but this place is dangerous… I was only supposed to escort you all to the outskirts, not go inside with you! Knight, we need to leave, now!”

“I already told you, I can’t understand you.” The Sun Knight pointed at the tower. “We’re going that way.”

“No! That’s the heart of demon territory!” Rocky cried, shaking his head vigorously. He pointed the opposite direction. “We need to leave!”

“I cannot protect you if you go that way. I need to go this way.”

They jumped off the balcony and proceeded to steadily walk across the sands.

“You crazy knight! Argh, I’m coming!”

The two of them only about a thousand feet before zombies and skeletons of various types, from human and elf to gnome and dwarf to even kobold and saurian along with those of animals (giant lizards and bears) began to rise from the sands all around. Several hundred feet off to the side, a demon with long, gangly limbs and a thin frame sat atop one of the buildings, watching with a sharklike smile as the three dozen undead closed in on the duo.

“We’re dead! We’re so dead!”

“Time to slay evil!”

For every humanoid skeleton or zombie that reached them, the Sun Knight crushed the animated corpse with a single blow. They lunged and slashed, often felling zombies before the corpses got close enough to strike. While they didn’t use arts offensively, several times that opponents tried to attack Rocky, they activated a defensive art, intercepting with their shield. The giant horse-sized lizards and enormous bears, of which there were eight (two zombies of each kind and two skeletons of each kind) didn’t start reaching them until after most of the others were destroyed. The lizard skeletons arrived first, biting and swiping with their tails, but the Sun Knight’s armor and shield protected them.

They made short work of the lizard skeletons, taking down each with a pair of solid blows. Then the bear skeletons arrived, one targeting the Sun Knight and the other targeting Rocky. While the Sun Knight was focused on the one attacking them, Rocky was cut down by claw and tooth. They yelled in anger, striking at the bears even as claws and teeth made their way past shield and through armor. The four zombies reached them almost simultaneously, surrounding them and striking all at once.

“Healing Light! Solar Evil-feller!”

With a powerful swing and a sword blazing with light, one of the bear zombies was destroyed. Another round of attacks hit the Sun Knight.

“Healing Light! Ha-yah! Yah!”

Another bear went down. With only two zombies attacking, the Sun Knight found it easier to defend, and soon the lizards were destroyed as well.

“I am sorry, Gatherer. I failed to protect you,” they said sorrowfully. They placed their hands on themselves and began to glow as they channeled the healing power of the sun. Their wounds severe; blood had leaked out all over their armor, which was full of holes and dents, and they were unsteady on their feet. The armor’s dents popped back out as their body healed underneath, and over the course of nearly half a minute, they were fully restored.

Then, in a flash, the demon stood in front of them.

“I see, a holy knight!” it – for it was too alien to assign sex or gender from appearance or voice – said. “Are you all healed up for your last battle?”

“Demon! Was this your doing?!”

“I am one of those who summon the dead, yes, and this particular batch was indeed mine, so yes! You performed well… but you could not protect the innocent gnome at your side.” It grinned widely. “That is truly a horrid failure for a holy knight of the Sun God! Hahahaha! Pathetic!” It lifted its clawed hands, and lightning surged down its arms. “Time to go apologize to your patron in person! I’ll take good care of your corpse!”

It attacked, moving with surprising swiftness. It ripped part of the armor away from them, then took advantage of the newly created opening to strike twice, inflicting heavy damage to their torso.

“I will smite the wicked! Solar Evil-Feller!”

Their sword shone blindingly bright as it came down and carved through the demon’s chest. The demon stood, dazed by the sacred power, and they followed up with a horizontal slash.

“Solar Evil-Feller!”

The demon swayed, the second dose of divine power keeping them stunned, and they attacked again, striking swiftly in an X-slash. The demon fell in pieces.

The Sun Knight used their Healing Hands once more, only partially healing themselves.

“I must save some of the healing energy in case Warrior and Scholar need it,” they said, and once more set off for the tower.