Chapter 194

Electric blue sparks rained down overhead as imps tore up the enchanted anti-spider mesh. They provided the only light since the imps had blotted out the morning sun, and in those flickering sparks, Luke saw the trainees struggling against a hundred imps. They were arranged in a triangle with the non-combatants in the middle, but only Jalet was successfully fending off the imps. Sando was getting slowly overwhelmed, and the only reason Asher wasn’t in the same boat was that Zea was focusing most of her support on him.

Smoke was curling up through the roofs of all four buildings and coming out through slats on the inside, and the overall temperature inside the ring of buildings was at least fifteen degrees hotter than out in the forest. More imps kept pouring out through the open doors, with the heaviest concentration coming from the building that held the kitchen.

It was an all too familiar scenario, except the spawners were hidden away inside the buildings and the numbers were so high that even with four people fighting them, they couldn’t make any headway. Maybe if Hakiro hadn’t left early, it would have been a different story.

Luke smashed through the first imp to get inside his range without slowing down. He blew past the knot of people struggling to keep themselves from being overwhelmed and barreled into the dining area, where he put [Area Denial] to good use as he forced his way deeper into the building. A steady stream of imps was coming out from the kitchen, probably using the built-up ash from a week’s worth of preparing food on a wood stove.

As weak as each individual imp was, Luke couldn’t just ignore them. Between the never-ending stream of bodies, the thick smoke that hung in the air from the fires the demons had started, and the dancing shadows from the fiery lights in the back of their throats when they opened their mouths, Luke was starting to find his high perception to be a liability.

He didn’t need to kill every imp in the dining area. He just needed to get past them to the kitchen. Luke swatted away a trio of imps trying to jump on his back as he ghosted past one of the tables that was burning around the edges, then pivoted to dodge an imp that had been crawling across the ceiling to drop on his head.

He was close enough now to use [Burst Step], even if the way wasn’t exactly free of obstructions. He body slammed through at least twenty imps as he blurred forward and clipped dozens more, but when he came out of the skill, he was inside the kitchen. The imps he’d hit when he was moving fell away, most of them dead or close enough to it that all they could do was twitch. The few that were still lucid enough to fight tried to bite down on him, but Luke grabbed hold of them and hurled them away.

Then he laid into the imps that were hurling up chunks of charcoal-colored stone, killing them so fast that they didn’t have time to barf up a single new demon after he got started. He even scattered the ash from the fireplaces. If he was right, without it all piled up together, they wouldn’t be able to produce new imps so quickly.

With that mission accomplished, Luke turned to leave and realized he had a whole new problem. If he didn’t defend the kitchen, it would just fill with new imps. They weren’t exactly smart or even all that coordinated, but enough of them would flood in behind him that they’d just start the spawning operation back up again.

Just like in that clearing in the forest, there was no good solution. Eventually, he supposed the imps would run out of ash, but since they were also actively burning down the buildings, it became a question of whether they could refresh their supply faster than they used it.

The forest really was the worst possible place to fight a demon like this. The only thing that was effectively keeping them contained was the constant rain, and while Luke was sure it would be starting back up again within a few hours, that didn’t help now. It especially didn’t help since the demons had somehow managed to get inside the buildings, where they were protected from the rain.

The only solution Luke saw was to run, but they had people below level 15 with them. It would have to be a fighting retreat, and with so many imps coming at them, Luke didn’t think it was possible to protect them all while on the move. Nothing he had in his tool kit was going to help him in this situation.

It took Luke three minutes to finish clearing out the dining area. Without access to huge piles of soot and ash, the imps couldn’t spawn new demons as quickly, though nothing Luke could do seemed capable of stopping them completely. The coal-rocks just took longer to unfold into an imp outside of the kitchen. Maybe they were pulling ash particles from the air or something. There was certainly enough of it, given that every imp Luke killed seemed to burst apart into a cloud of the stuff.

He fought his way back out into the yard and moved to take the pressure off Sando. With no more imps coming from the kitchen, at least for the moment, the defense had stabilized itself somewhat, though Luke could already see new imps sneaking around the outskirts of the lodge toward the building. The door was gone, and other than standing in the doorway to physically guard it, there was no way to keep the imps from getting inside.

Maybe that was exactly what they should do. Luke and Zea could work on breaking a hole through the wall so the group could escape into the woods while Jalet and his trainees used the door as a choke point. The building was slightly on fire, but Luke was confident he could bust out long before that became a problem.

Just as he opened his mouth to call for the retreat, a glob of hot molten metal dripped down from overhead to splatter against his shoulder. Luke glanced up and saw the imps had finally succeeded in chewing a hole in the mesh and were now busy widening it. “Fuck,” he yelled as he tore the sleeve off his shirt and flung it away. Most of the metal went with it, and what didn’t he flicked off with his fingers, leaving an angry red welt on his skin.

It was painful, but not enough to stop Luke from fighting. “Back up to the kitchens,” Luke yelled. “I’ve got it cleared out for now!”

“We need to get out through the gates,” Jalet yelled back. “If we stay trapped in here, they’re going to wear us down with sheer numbers.”

“We’ll go through the wall,” Luke said, rushing forward to grab one of the servants just before another chunk of metal landed on him. That section was at least still solid and didn’t splash when it landed.

“You can’t go through the wall. It’s enchanted.”

“I bet I can break it anyway,” Luke said. “And if I can’t, we have an enchanter right here who can.”

Zea was busy directing her whip through an insane display of precision that killed imps coming in from three different directions, but she said, “I can’t do shit if I’m fighting like this. Get me somewhere with some cover and I’ll work on it.”

“See?” Luke demanded. “Let’s go.”

The argument was interrupted by a sharp crack overhead. Something gave in the mesh and a huge piece of it slammed down, taking thirty or forty imps along for the ride. It broke the group’s defensive formation as Asher was caught underneath it, and the imps immediately swarmed over him. The intact part of the mesh might have protected him from being bitten or clawed at, but it was glowing with heat and he immediately started screaming.

His screams were intermingled with the cook’s, who’d been holding a butcher’s cleaver in one hand and a frying pan in the other. The cleaver went into the skull of the first imp to approach him, and he bashed another with the frying pan just by swinging it wildly. Then six more imps all leaped on him at once and started tearing him apart.

It happened so fast that by the time anyone could react, the cook was already dead. Maybe if there hadn’t been other imps taking up Luke’s attention, he could have gotten there in time. Maybe not. It didn’t matter now because more chunks of the mesh were coming down on top of them, and no one had time to spare to help anyone else. Luke grabbed Zea and one of the servants and used [Burst Step] to get them into the kitchen just before the mesh hit the ground.

It glowed molten yellow where it hadn’t liquified completely around the edges. Jalet managed to cut himself free, though not before he was burnt all over. Back on Earth, Luke would have said that would be it for the man, that he’d be dead from his injuries almost immediately. On Aros, things were different. Despite the horrific burns, Jalet stood tall and laid into the imps around him with his sword.

The rest of the staff was not so lucky. Both trainees were under there as well. There were a lot of screams for a few seconds, and then things were silent except for the sound of Jalet’s ragged breathing as he laid into the imps with his sword.

That brief lull was enough for Luke to say, “Clear out any imps left in here. See if you can get us through the wall and out of the lodge.”

Zea nodded and ran deeper into the smoke-filled dining area while Luke planted himself in the doorway and smashed down any imps that came at him. He tried getting Jalet’s attention, but the man ignored him and kept trying to fight his way through the mesh to where his two trainees were buried under it.

Then the imps did something strange. One of them puked up a charcoal stone onto the liquid metal of the mesh. Then another did the same thing. And another. Soon, there were thirty imps all dry heaving as they ejected spawning stones from their mouths. Things got worse as the stones started to soak up the liquid metal like a sponge and glowing bright brownish-orange.

The stones themselves became liquid, and soon the glops of it were clumping together. Over the span of no more than ten seconds, almost the entire mesh liquified and congealed into one giant bronze-colored blob of molten metal.

Then an arm sprouted out of the side.

“Oooooh shit, that’s not good,” Luke whispered.

The blob started to lift itself into the air on a pair of long, thick, muscular legs. A second arm appeared opposite the first, and an amorphous sphere stretched out of the top. It had no facial features at first, but that quickly resolved into a pair of eyes and a nose and cruel, smiling lips. The metal person kept getting bigger and bigger until she was fully formed.

Standing almost twice as tall as Luke and wearing some sort of toga-looking thing, except it went up to both shoulders instead of leaving one bare, was a woman made entirely of what appeared to be molten bronze. She had an Amazonian build, her limbs thick with muscle. Luke could have easily pictured her in some sort of Greek art gallery as a museum if she wasn’t alive and moving.

A malevolent presence filled the area, and the woman held up one hand. Molten bronze surged down her arm and into her open hand, where it formed into a bar that resolved itself into the shape of a jewel-capped scepter.

From start to finish, the demon’s formation took less than three seconds. Then she leaned down, swung the scepter, and dashed Jalet’s brains out across the ground in a single blow.