Mob Sorcery 4 - Ch11

Spellfire roared from the right-hand side of the atrium. A flame laser seared the air, while icicles gouged holes in the floor tiles. A crackling line of lightning burst through Vince and blinded him. Loud booms followed, as a wind lance spell blew a hole in a wall behind them.

“Fuck’s sake,” Vince snapped, blinking lights from his vision.

His dragon shot into the atrium, melting loose pieces of the building frame that got in its way as it charged through. Unable to precisely see his opponents, he relied on another technique—one he could only reliably use with his dragon summoned.

Body heat detection.

With his dragon summoned, his magical senses were greatly enhanced, but they focused on fire magic. How to control his dragon, extend its magic into the world, prevent its flames from burning the city down, and also stop opposing fire magic dead in its tracks.

The flame laser never had a chance as a result, and the hail of small fireballs bombarding them in a volley amounted to nothing more than a nuisance. He erased them with his magic before they even struck his barrier.

But to retaliate, he used those enhanced senses not just to detect magic, but all heat. Humans had a lot of it, even if they weren’t the strongest sources of magic.

His dragon unleashed a wave of flaming nets in the direction of the six heat sources he detected close by. He ignored the massive number of perfectly spaced-out vertical heat sources further in. Those were assuredly the ventilation ducts for the servers, pumping heat out of each of the server racks.

Shouts of surprise greeted his spells. Curses flew freely, while Ashley laughed.

Then hundreds of small black rocks and shards clattered to the ground around them. They pelted Vince by the dozens, bouncing harmlessly off his barrier. He looked over at Ashley, his vision recovered enough to see that she’d summoned an aqua-colored barrier around herself.

She pointed a hand up while smirking. Vince saw nothing above them, then realized that was the point. Whatever had been there wasn’t.

“Thanks,” he said.

She snorted, her tails beating the ground behind her. “Don’t waste your breath. The big stone block would have exploded harmlessly on your head. Only amateurs think gravity is a powerful force. I can punch a lot harder than gravity.”

He saw that. The first security enforcer lay dead nearby, his body scythed apart by a wind claw spell, if he had to guess. His head had rolled a good dozen feet away.

Doors began to shut, and Vince saw one of their assailants dragging somebody in a fire net back. None of them wore the security uniform, but he guessed these were the independent enforcers Sanchez used to guard the place.

An icy mist blew through the air. Looking up, he saw a young catgirl in cheap casual clothes blowing into her hand. Her eyes glowed bright blue.

Before Vince could even think up a fancy nickname, Ashley blurred forward. She stopped directly in the path of the mist. Her arm erupted with a surge of blue light.

A solid lance of ice formed through the mist from her arm to the source, turning the rest of the mist into thick snow that clumped on the floor. No more mist fell. The catgirl stared vacantly, her head impaled by the lance of ice that had shot through her hand, mouth, and the wall behind her.

“Wind and water magic,” Vince said, looking away from the brutal scene. “Not quite the elements I expected.”

“Let me guess, you expected me to specialize in fire magic?” Ashley asked, rolling her eyes while cracking her neck. “We might both be hotheads, but our magic affinities don’t work like yours.”

Vince’s face remained still, but internally his eyebrows exploded off his face.

Demons said next to nothing about how their magic worked to anyone, except other demons. He’d never found a book with much to say about them outside speculation. Anything and everything he knew came from first-hand knowledge.

Even the fact demons didn’t use incantations and could cast spells far faster had been confirmed during fights with weaker demons. It was a relatively well-known fact, but nothing could be trusted when it came to demons.

“I don’t know much about affinities at all,” he admitted.

“Figures.” Ashley snorted as she scanned the room, then walked forward to press a foot against an enforcer who had been knocked out by one of Vince’s nets. “For mortals, affinities are an intrinsic thing created by the interplay between your essence and your mind. The weaker your magical essence, the more influence your personality has, making your affinities harder to shake.”

“I’m guessing demihumans are less affected,” he said slowly.

“Yeah, less,” she emphasized. “In the world of magically gifted mortals, humans are like peasants and they’re the magical nobility. From the view of the truly powerful, their racial advantage is akin to a small inheritance. They’re not fucking billionaires getting a small loan of a million dollars from their rich-ass parents. They’re the bougie morons cosplaying as rich assholes because they inherited a house.”

Ashley truly was a modern demon.

“So all immortals have minimal affinities,” he said, then narrowed his eyes. “That includes mystic foxes? Spirits?”

“Pretty much. It’s a matter of effort. Learning a new school of magic takes time. Like, you learn math and get deep into calculus and shit like imaginary numbers. But while all that time learning math might help you learn physics, you’re starting from nearly zero. Good luck discovering quantum mechanics before you spend years poring over all the basic shit.” She sneered. “So I learn what I want, when I want. Maybe you’ll be able to one day.”

Again with the cryptic bullshit from these demons.

Ashley nudged the body at her feet again while surveying the room. He followed her gaze to the catwalk and regretted it when he saw the corpse still impaled to the wall by her mouth.

“I counted seven in total, including the bait,” she said. “That leaves four. Not much of a challenge.”

“I came here for a specific reason and to hold up my end of the deal,” Vince said. “Not for a challenge.”

She tilted her head back and shot him a bored look. “Yeah, yeah. There’s probably a demon in here, by the way. No way these chumps don’t have somebody important looking over their shoulder. Seven independents chilling in one place? They’re sucking up a lot of cash. Pretty sure they help Sanchez with his underworld shit, and that means they’ll have a boss clued into that.”

“Dangerous?” Vince asked.

“With both of us here?” Ashley barked with laughter. “Either of us could eat them for lunch. I wouldn’t rate them against the fox assassin that you stomped months ago.”

Striding forward, she ignored the body still in his net. He dispelled the net and checked on the person.

They had a pulse, if a weak one.

“Come on,” Ashley shouted as she walked through one of the open doors. “He’ll go down when we burn this place to the ground. Time’s wasting, and you have a bitch to find.”

He did, in fact, have a raiju to find.

Vince jogged to keep up with the hellhound, entering one server wing. Rack upon rack of towering servers lined the room. The beams of a hastily installed second floor sat above them, with ventilation piping and cooling systems hovering above the servers. An innumerable amount of lights flickered on the many servers. Far more red lights showed than he suspected should be the case.

The damage in the other server wing had probably taken a toll. Vince doubted this place had been set up to handle entire rows of servers blown up in a fight.

“Why aren’t there internal wards?” he asked.

“Same reason the external barrier took so damn long to fire up,” Ashley said. “They’re cheap. An external barrier is cheap, especially when it’s not kept juiced up. Internal wards? Can you imagine how many spell anchors need to be installed in the walls? Let alone the quality of the building itself? I can lean on the wall partitions and put holes in them.”

Even with magic, money made the world go around. Vince could only imagine how disappointing this world would be to somebody who fell into it from a world without magic.

Not a soul interrupted them. The enforcers had retreated further within. Vince kept an eye out for any doors that might lead to a basement, or a utility room, or anywhere he’d expect to find a raiju powering the entire facility.

Unfortunately, all he found were mundane rooms. Kitchens, bathrooms, cleaning closets, spare parts rooms, more server rooms—as if the place needed more given how cavernous it already was.

Curiously, they hadn’t stumbled upon any IT staff.

“Do you know where the actual IT staff might be?” he asked. “A place this big must have at least a skeleton crew who manages everything. They don’t use magical automatons to maintain the servers.”

Ashley frowned. “Been a while since I checked the schematic of this place, but…”

“Wait, you have a layout of the building, but you didn’t check it before we came? Or send it to me?”

“Like we need it. It’s a simple job.”

This fucking woman. He really should have known better to have accepted a job from Ashley without thinking more. Nina had warned him about her.

“I think there was a section carved out on the east side from the old warehouse,” the hellhound said, tapping her lip. Her jet-black skin shined from the lights of the servers. “I’d say we should run into if we keep walking through this wing, but I don’t know exactly where. It had its own dedicated entrance and exit.”

He groaned. Of course the IT staff didn’t come through the oddly empty atrium. If they did, there would have been security and a proper reception.

Everything until now had basically been a waste of time. If he found the IT staff, he could interrogate them about the most likely location of the raiju. Assuming they hadn’t already run screaming from the building. If they had, he’d at least be in the most likely location she’d be held.

“Let’s split up,” he said. “We’ll cover more ground and there aren’t many enforcers left.”

She shrugged. “Works for me. Plus, Sanchez’s goon squad will be on the way here. If we take out everyone here before they arrive, all the better.”

“How many goons?” he asked, alarmed.

“Four or five. Depends on how many he has dedicated to the night-shift, but I know he has a crew to deal with any assaults during the day. They’ll be charging over here.”

Vince really should have asked about this earlier.

Oh, wait. He tried and Ashley charged in before he could.

They split up. Ashley took the west wings, and said she’d go upstairs, while he focused on the east wing they were already in. He wanted the raiju first and foremost. Once he secured her, he still needed to help Ashley, but could worry a lot less about his true objective.

The building turned eerie once she left. Without any company, he was left to the whirs and clicks of the servers. He moved swiftly with his barrier up and looked for an entrance to the staff area.

Minutes later, he found it. A secure door with a keypad and magical reinforcement. Still no internal barrier, but in Ashley’s words, he wouldn’t be leaning on the walls and making holes in them.

He’d been keeping a tight leash on his dragon, trying not to burn the place down or set off the fire suppression system. The constant magic drain forced him to down an infusion. The alternative was being unprepared for a demon jumping him, and Vince preferred living.

Now, he unleashed a concentrated flame laser on the hinged side of the door. The door frame glowed white-hot as the fire incinerated it. It buckled and gave way before he even finished melting one side, and the door clattered to the ground with a series of bangs.

Shouting echoed from the other side. Vince didn’t recognize any voices from the encounter with the enforcers earlier. Which meant the IT staff hadn’t evacuated.

The endless rows of servers gave way to a set of small rooms with beige cubicles and expansive workstations. He followed the shouting, his dragon struggling to squeeze through the doors without melting them. In the end, he left a trail of destruction behind himself.

“Don’t… don’t kill me!” a shabbily dressed man shouted when Vince kicked in the door to a meeting room.

“Shabbily dressed” was a touch harsh. The man wore a t-shirt and shorts, along with a pair of sandals. His beard was scruffy and his glasses were too large and didn’t match any fashion Vince had seen in his entire life.

“I’m not here to kill you,” Vince said.

He glanced around the meeting room. Nothing stood out. The cheapest, most ordinary desk lay in the middle, lacking the fancy features he’d seen in Lionetti Tower. A dying pot plant inhabited one corner, while an aging projector hung from the ceiling.

The office worker cowered in the far corner, well out of Vince’s reach. If not his magical reach.

Vince took a step in, and the worker slipped around the table, as if preparing to make a run for the door. As if it would matter, with Vince’s dragon just outside.

“Tell me where—” Vince began to say.

Only for Daji’s voice to interrupt him. “Why would he be all alone here? We heard shouting earlier?”

He frowned, while the office worker inched closer. The man’s eyes appeared panicked, and his legs tensed. Any second now, he’d bolt.

“Where’s everyone else?” Vince asked, pretending to finish his earlier question.

“I… I don’t know,” the worker stuttered. “Are you looking for something? The safe is further in. I can tell you the admin password. Or maybe you want to know where the circuit breaker is?”

Damn. The man was the picture perfect image of a coward.

“Indeed. Hence why it’s so strange he’s still here when there’s a dedicated entrance and exit everyone else has already used,” Daji said.

Vince’s blood ran cold.

He raised a hand toward the worker, immediately casting a fire net. If Daji’s suspicions were wrong, the man would only be pinned to the ground. If she was right, Vince might be saving his own life.

The worker screamed as the fire net impacted him, only for a pink blast of magic to carve right through it.

An alluring woman burst free of the male office worker’s skin, shedding the illusion like a snake would skin. A pink blade of light shimmered from one arm.

Two curly horns spun around the side of her head, while she wore a flashy silver two-piece outfit that barely covered the important parts. Intricate black tattoos rippled along her skin, moving along it as if alive.

A succubus.

She clicked her tongue and pretended to lick her blade. “And here I thought I had the perfect trap. You’re clearly looking for something if you came right here and left that dumb bitch to go jack off in the blood of my pawns. I guess that makes you the brains, and Ashley the brawn.”

A grin split the succubus’s face. “And maybe she’ll be my brawn if I claim you for my own. It’d be a shame to leave you to Flavius once he finally gets here.”

- - - - -

Commentary: Next chapter will close out this side-adventure. Chapters should come out consistently every 2 days, and then daily in March until the book comes out (expect this book to be around the same length as Mob 3).

Introducing demons as actual combatants is a challenge, because what makes them different and dangerous isn't the same as with other immortals. Vampires have their own magic and immortality. Foxes have their own magic and are intrinsically absurdly powerful. Elementals are absurdly powerful and are masters of their elements.

But demons range from weak to strong. Vince mostly fights the weak ones. Ashley is Nina-level, and is being dragged into a fight against a bunch of stronger ones. Their natural advantage is that they don't use incantations, but that needs to demonstrated (i.e. what does not using an incantation mean in a fight). The affinity stuff is a bonus, but also shows that demons use the same magic as humans.

A side-thing is that demons tend to use different spells. You often see me use a bunch of standard spells, implying that everyone is copying each other or learning from a core set of spells. But demons are old, have lots of time to burn, and can learn from other old fogeys. So their spells will be different - they'll use popular spells from when they were younger, or copy spells from ancient mages etc.