"Talk to me, Volex," I said, patting the pocket where my reliquary was. "What's your read on the situation?"

"We got ambushed," Volex 'said,' directly into my mind. Telepathy was supposed to be an easy-to-intermediate trick for Occultism, and considering she was a Succubus, I was more surprised this was the first time she was doing this, rather than that she could do it at all. Except... No, she had done this before- back when I was fighting the King of Thieves. "You got hit by regular broadhead arrows, but everyone else was hit with alchemist darts loaded with a knockout drug. Then the cultists moved in, loaded the girls into the van, and a few of them took off with the van, with a bunch of them on horseback following it. Only a few cultists stayed behind to bury you, and then they left on horseback too."

"...Alright, that's less helpful than I was hoping," I admitted, before cresting a sand dune and flying through the air, only to land on the downslope with a puff of black sand before the wheels kept on tearing through it. "Well, I just gotta hope my horse is faster than theirs are; if this was solid ground, it'd be no contest, but here..."

"You should be fast enough," Volex said. "At least, if you stop showboating and stick closer to the tracks. They already carved you a path of compacted sand to ride on, Joseph."

"It's less compacted than you think," I said, even as I started following the tracks through the dips between dunes rather than just plowing straight ahead. "Also, if I keep getting high vantage points, I can see farther, and avoid getting snuck up on."

"Fair enou- oh, look."

"I see it," I confirmed, before following the small set of tracks that diverged from the main trail. "Let's see what we've got here, yeah?"

---

Behind an unusually tall sand dune, a handful of cultists and an equal number of horses had made camp. They didn't look like demon cultists- or at least, the drawings you saw on the covers of dime novels and comic books- but rather, like ordinary cowboys, albeit ones who wore face-covering bandannas and glass-and-leather goggles along with their wide-brimmed hats.

From my vantage point just behind the crest of the dune, I could hear them talking, and for the most part, they seemed to be complaining about being out in this stupid desert for so long.

"Look," one of them, who seemed to be the group's leader- either officially or just because he was the biggest and/or most charismatic- said, cutting through the chatter. "None of that matters now. Just another day or two in this shithole, and then we can get out of here, and ride with Paimon's army against those Paladin shitheads. Okay? We've put up with it this long, we can handle another two days of being in this stupid desert. So shut up and get those tents packed up."

I took that as my cue to move, and with the grace and speed of a trained Mage-Knight, I leveled my gun at them, and perforated their horses and their bellies, dropping everyone to the ground. The leader, who had a glowing red pendant hanging around his neck, began to cast some sort of spell, but I put an end to that with one shot through the pendant and another through his hand- it took a lot of training to cast spells without hand movements, and I reckoned this guy didn't have that training.

"Hello, gentlemen," I called out, standing up and slowly walking down the dune towards their prone bodies. "If I'm not mistaken, you're the ones who shot me and my friends yesterday, correct?"

"Who the hell are you?" one of the cultists demanded weakly, barely managing to lift himself up enough to turn and look at me. "...That damn elf..."

"My name is Joseph Ironheart," I said smoothly. "Grandson of Artorias Wind-Caller and Terpsichore Ironheart. The people who destroyed Paimon's last cult. Now, here's how things are going to work, gentlemen: I don't have the ability to heal you, and quite frankly, I think you can fuck yourselves. What I'm offering in exchange for answering my questions is an instant death, rather than me simply leaving you here to slowly bleed to death in the desert."

"Fuck... you..." another cultist rasped out. "Fucking... knife-ear..."

I kicked him in the head, and started ignoring him.

"So, basing your cult out of the Black Desert is actually pretty clever," I said, starting to pace. "Nobody lives here, so nobody's going to notice the telltale signs of demon magic. I am of course going to have to kill all of you so that the idea doesn't get out to anyone else, but in the meantime, it was actually a good idea."

"Why are you bothering?" the leader rasped out. "Just kill us and be done with it."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Well, that's the thing," I said, squatting down to get a closer look at him. "I am unusually pissed off at you assholes, for the whole 'shooting me in the back, kidnapping my friends, and stealing my van' thing. And it turns out, when people are angry, they tend to get mean and even downright cruel!" I grinned at him, tilting my head to the side a bit. "But hey, you could make it up to me by just telling me what's going on, here, and then I wouldn't have as much reason to be so mean to you. So! Who wants some forgiveness and mercy?"

"Fuckin... Rich bastard," another of the cultists ground out. "Don't know what it's like to- mmphm!"

I kicked him in the teeth, which did, in fact, make him stop talking.

"I've heard enough indignant speeches from assholes that start that way," I said calmly. "Well, if nobody's going to talk willingly..." I pulled out Volex's reliquary, and hummed a little tune as I drew upon her power and skill.

See, every evening on this stupid road trip, I'd been spending time with Emily using hypnosis to teach her the foundations of Arcane magic, and Volex had been spending some of that time drilling me in an Occult spell for putting people into hypnotic trances far faster than could be done with mundane inductions- at least, on the un-prepared; one of the basic skills of hypnosis was implanting triggers in people that would put them back into a hypnotic trance very quickly without having to use a normal induction.

The hard part about the spell wasn't shaping my magic in the right way, but in learning how to actually carry a tune with my voice; I was not a very artistic person, and even Uncle Frederick, who'd imparted some artistry on me, hadn't made much progress on my musicality. Which was a shame, because he was the son of a famous Bard, but oh well; I only had so much time in the day, and some skills simply didn't get learned. I was an elf- I'd have time for it eventually.

After only a minute or so of wordless singing of a melody I recognized as a traditional elven lullaby, the cultists were all entranced, and I was able to get to work.

"I am a senior priest within the Cult of Paimon," I asserted, mostly addressing the leader. "Your mission has gotten off-track, and now I'm here to fix it. But to do that, I need you to tell me what you know about the plan. Your only concern right now is telling me the plan, so I can make it work. You'll get healed at the end of this, and be hailed as heroes without any more work on your part. You just have to answer my questions. Tell me you understand."

"I understand," the leader said quietly. "I need to tell you the plan, so you can heal us and go fix the plan."

"Good," I said. "Now... On the count of three, I need you to wake up. One, two, three." I snapped my fingers for emphasis.

His head jerked, and he looked at me with deference, shame, and a little fear.

"I'm sorry, sir, we couldn't-"

"Enough," I said coldly. "I don't need your excuses, I need answers. What was the plan, here?"

"It was going well to start with," the leader said. "We did that ritual to make the sandstorm-" Ah, so I did have a good reason to hate sand and decry it as ontologically evil. "-and force the party to stop. We waited for nightfall, when they were all distracted by their campfire, and shot 'em all with tranquilizer darts. Aside from the boy- wouldn't be a good sacrifice, so we just shot him with a regular broadhead, and left him in a shallow grave."

"And after that?" I asked.

"We were gonna take the girls back to the Ziggurat," the leader continued. "Strap the Duke's daughter to the altar, cut her palms into the runes, and open the portal that'll let Paimon through. He'll be really weak when he first steps through, since most of the power is coming from him, but after he eats her soul, along with the other two girls, he'll have enough strength back to get things rolling."

"Remind me where the Ziggurat is," I said.

"It's in the middle of the desert," he explained. "I've got it marked on my map- in my pack. You take it, it's no good to me anymore."

"Alright," I said, nodding. "How far is it to the Ziggurat from here?"

"About a hundred miles or so," he said. "It'll be a full day's ride to get that damn caravan back to the Ziggurat, and if we don't get the caravan back there, we can't summon Paimon."

"Now... That elven Mage-Knight who's following us... What do we have to slow him down?"

"Mostly just a bunch of crossbows and lightning wands," he said. "But we do have a for-real Hellknight with us, and if he can't take that damn Mage-Knight, then there was just no stopping him to begin with."

Fuck. I knew what a Hellknight was, and when Frederick first told me about them, my first thought was 'Wow, I sure hope I don't ever have to fight one of those.'

"Good work, soldier," I said. "Now... Go to sleep. We'll get you fixed up soon enough."

He nodded, and finally collapsed back into the sand, his eyes shutting.

I made a quick search through their belongings, grabbing whatever looked valuable- a silver hip-flask, a pair of cheap mass-enchanted lightning wands, and a handful of small power crystals the size of my thumb- along with the map he mentioned, and finally, I took his goggles, his bandanna, and his hat, putting those on my own head to keep the sun and sand out of my face.

Once I was confident I had everything worth taking, I put the cultists out of their misery with a few more bullets through their brainpans, loaded some more bullets into the magazine, and got back on my motorcycle.