Chapter 171

Luke didn’t exactly rush back to the village, but he didn’t wait for the soldiers to get organized either. As soon as the captain assured him that no more blood hunters would be spewing out of the carrier, Luke left the farmhouse behind. The entire battle had only taken ten or fifteen minutes, including travel time, but that was plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong.

Normally, he would say that Zea could handle it, but with her one arm practically useless and limiting her ability to use [Ghost Script] and many of the weapons she’d built already expended, her ability to defend herself was sharply limited. That wasn’t even factoring in how she was light 250 AP from buying ranks in [Bloodline Purification Ritual]for him.

She still had her whip, but Luke had seen how little damage that had done to the gargoyles. Of course, no one had an easy time fighting those. That’s why it took a whole group of villagers pinning one down and beating on it with sledgehammers to kill it. If something had gone seriously wrong, he’d have seen or heard it. The village proper wasn’t that far away.

The village was still standing when Luke got back, though fire had completely claimed four of the houses now. Only two of them were still upright and burning, but that was more than enough to take care of the last three tongue fuckers still fighting. The gargoyles had either all been killed or fled somewhere.

“Huh… I was kind of expecting there to be some sort of surprise disaster,” Luke said. “But… Uh… Hmm. Everything looks fine.”

He walked over to where Zea was standing near one of the burning houses. She was flicking her whip out in tight arcs to slash at the tongues coming out of one of the demons that had been forced into the flames, but not quite far enough to keep it from lashing out.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Lost a few people before the soldiers got there. I don’t think anyone else died once they were able to secure the house and I took care of the rest of the demons.”

“Not a great day for this village,” Zea said. She paused to give her whip another flick that sent its length out to slash through a new tongue-vine that was attempting to punch into the ground and drag the bulk of the demon’s corpse back out of the flames. The whip sliced through the appendage easily. “I suppose it could have been far, far worse. It’s probably lucky for them that we encountered the Jigon-Sai on the road. If they hadn’t turned back, they wouldn’t have seen this village in trouble and gone to help.”

“I’m sure they don’t feel lucky,” Luke said.

“Luckier than this thing,” Zea said, gesturing the tongue demon. Its tongues had stopped thrashing and were instead flopping weakly as its main body was consumed by flames. Luke could see more tongue tentacles moving under its skin, reacting to the heat perhaps. But there was no escape for it.

“No problems while I was gone then?” Luke asked. “I notice all the gargoyles disappeared.”

“About ten of them took off south a few minutes ago. There might be more hiding in the smoke, but if so, nobody here can spot them.”

Luke took a step back to get a better angle and peered into the smoke-stained sky. If there were any gargoyles, he didn’t see them. Considering the condition the houses were in now, he wasn’t willing to jump up there and test his weight against the roofs again. Besides, even if there were gargoyles left, they’d be flushed out eventually and the villagers were well equipped to handle them.

“I think we’re probably safe from any aerial attacks, at least unless another batch of blood hunters shows up,” Luke said.

“How bad was it?”

“Pretty bad,” Luke told her. “They weren’t exactly heavy, but there were a lot. Kind of galling that they don’t give any XP. I probably would have gained another level or two for wiping them out.”

“Another good reason to avoid them in the future,” Zea said. “Assuming we can. I was talking to Shenha about it. Apparently the Melthor Province was practically evacuated outside the major fortresses because of how thick the demons are there, and no one’s getting through the wall between there and the Imperial Province, which is a problem for us.”

“Shenha?” Luke asked. “Oh, the woman with the sword?”

Luke had never been good at remembering names, and with [Analyze]allowing him to just look them up whenever he needed, he’d gotten even worse. He’d seen her name when he’d first checked her out, but had immediately forgotten it and hadn’t bothered to fix that.

“That’s her. Her brother was part of the empire’s military. He sent her a book he was a part of writing based on all the observations made so far against the demons invading the continent. Apparently, it’s been copied thousands of times and distributed all over the empire, so we should be able to find a copy in the next big city. Hopefully it won’t be too expensive.”

Considering how many tricks every demon they’d met already had at its disposal, Luke was inclined to agree that such knowledge would be an excellent investment. He had only a vague understanding of the geography of the eastern continent, a problem he would have made more effort to correct if he couldn’t just have System point him in the right direction, but his understanding was that they needed to go through several more provinces. If border gates were impassable and the countryside was filled with demons, travel might be impossible.

They could just try to wait it out. There were probably some good grinding spots he could hit to bump up his levels while they let the military fight it out with the demons. Luke wasn’t expecting to have any problems with the church, which didn’t seem to exist in any form he recognized on this continent, but that didn’t mean the Pantheon had given up on killing him. That having been said, leveling up was the perfect response to that, so spending some time hunting monsters, the kind that gave XP, at least, was about the best possible thing he could do besides going straight to the God Machine itself.

Really, it all depended on whether they could find a way to their goal. If the demons themselves were too strong or too numerous, they’d have to wait. Even if they weren’t, it might just be impossible to there until the native population relaxed their security. Luke supposed that they would just have to make some effort to plan out a more secure route.

“We should get going,” he said. “That captain as much as admitted he still suspected us of being demons in disguise. He might have changed his mind, but I don’t think the free healing is worth the hassle at this point. I’ll turn off [XP Mask] as soon as we leave and take the time to grind out some levels and pick up [Matter Generation] if we run short on cash.”

“Yeah. Having no XP presence at all is too dangerous here,” Zea said. “Back home, it was a curiosity and people just mistook it for being level 1 or 2. Here, they’re actively on the look out because of all the demons that aren’t connected to the system.”

The demon Zea had been keeping at bay finally finished succumbing to the flames and the pair walked away. “That’s all of them, I guess,” Luke said. He frowned when he noticed a crowd of villagers around one particular house. “Or maybe not? What’s going on over there?”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure they can handle it.”

“Probably,” Luke agreed. “Wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit more about these demons. Never know what scrap of information is going to save your life.”

Zea gave Luke a suspicious look. “That’s an unusual attitude coming from you. Maybe you’ve been replaced and really are a demon after all.”

“Hey… I think ahead, sometimes.”

“You hate studying.”

“Sure, math and history. Learning how to effectively kill demons could quite easily be the difference between life and death. These things got tricks. Like, what if I swatted one of those tongue fuckers in the head, then got hentaied by all the tongues that popped out?”

“Got what-ed?” Zea asked.

“Never mind that. You don’t want to know.”

They came up to the crowd and Luke peered over their silver-white hair into the house they were all gathered in front of. There was a dead tongue fucker in there, or at least the purple skin suit they wore if he assumed the tongue tentacle monster was the real demon. The tongues themselves were suspiciously absent, probably in that hole that something had broken through the floor.

“Think it’s still alive in the basement?” Luke asked one of the villagers.

“We don’t know,” the villager told him.

Luke pushed his way through and peered down into the darkness. His perception had long passed the point where a lack of light could hinder him, and he could easily make out the contents of a cellar. It was lined with rough wooden shelves full of glass jars, though two of them had been knocked over and their contents scattered across the floor.

There was loose dirt everywhere and a matching hole to the one that had been made in the ground floor. What there wasn’t was a many-limbed tongue-vined demon. “Can those things dig?” Luke asked.

The villagers glanced at one another and a nervous murmuring started up. People started looking around, and the ones at the edge of the crowd peeled off. One of them went running, and a few moments later, the sword wielding woman came over. Luke frowned. What was her name again? Zea had just told him. Shay-something? No, that wasn’t it.

Luke used [Analyze] to remind himself. Shenha.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“One of those tongue demons appears to have escaped underground,” a villager told her.

“They can dig?” Shenha asked, surprise in her voice.

If she didn’t know that, then Luke didn’t figure there was much more information to be gained in the village. As long as tongue-vines weren’t about to erupt out of the ground all around them, he didn’t see any reason to stay. It wasn’t like he could just hang around forever just in case there was another attack. If anything, that was a job for the Jigon-Sai soldiers.

Luke made his way back through the crowd to Zea. “Guess we’re done here,” he said. “Let’s see about getting to Heishin before it gets dark and getting your arm fixed.”

* * *

Peishan Jo wasn’t thrilled about having to bunk in the village. Enough houses had burned down that everything was crowded, but his men needed time to rest and recover from the attack, and there was still the fear that the single lasher demon that had escaped would come back, perhaps with reinforcements. Day had turned into night, and nothing of the such had occurred.

The two foreigners were long gone, of course. He’d expected that, encouraged it even. If they were demons, they were the strangest, most cunning ones Peishan had ever seen. But he was convinced he’d been mistaken in his initial impression. The pair was just what they seemed, two foreigners, one of whom had a bloodline skill that accomplished an otherwise impossible feat.

The house he was staying in started to shake and Peishan was on his feet in an instant. He drew his sword and ran outside to see what was going on, only to find enormous rents being torn through the ground. One after another, until hundreds of them surrounded the entire village, enormous tongues emerged from the ground. Each one was thicker around than his waist and hundreds of feet long.

Without any further spectacle, the tongues started smashing through walls and grabbing the humans hiding within. Peishan charged, bellowing as he ran for his men to defend the village. His orders were cut short as one of the tentacles smacked into him, turning him into a bloody smear across the ground.

* * *

Fluerian wasn’t pleased with the results of his attack on the fleshy, weak pink things. There were too few of them to justify coming so far, and the one he really wanted hadn’t even been there. Maybe it would have been a different story a few hours ago, but Fleurian hadn’t been close enough to respond immediately. This had been a waste of time.

He glanced up and saw one of the stone watchers perched on a tree. A moment’s consideration was given to crushing it, if only to snub Ginaxian. Their children often hunted together back home, but they’d been falling out of that habit here in this world.

In the end, the fact that stone watchers weren’t good eating saved its pathetic life, and Fleurian sank bank beneath the ground to resume his swim through the earth in pursuit of that most elusive of prey.