Chapter 169

It was a journey of a little over a mile. The Jigon-Sai soldiers were just slightly over half way there when the silo-shaped thing erupted out of the ground and started spewing mosquitos the size of labradors into the air. They were moving at a good clip, but they would not reach the farmhouse in time to save the injured villagers from being attacked.

Something about [Burst Step] kept it from being constantly on, but Luke could still use it every few seconds. That, combined with strength and agility both close to 70, saw him blurring past the soldiers in seconds. They gaped at him as he sped by, and the captain started to say something, but Luke was well past their group before he got the first word out.

It took him just under a minute to reach the demons, and Luke figured he could maintain that pace for upwards of an hour with regular uses of [Burst Step], and probably all day long without it. Luke wasn’t even breathing hard when he reached the silo-shaped demon, which up close looked more like some sort of giant grub or worm.

He didn’t bother trying to navigate the broken earth around the demon. Instead, he turned his forward momentum into a running leap and brought his mace around, at speed and infused with [Power Strike], to slam into the side of the demon. Flesh rippled out from the point of impact and an ear-splitting scream filled the air, though it was hidden under the rumble of cracking and breaking ground.

Luke rebounded off the demon and landed thirty feet away, precisely where the tremors were the worst. The entire silo was falling backwards, and though it was bending at ground level, more of the yellow flesh that had been hidden underground was forced upwards to break free of the dirt. More important to Luke, the point of impact looked like a spot of bad road rash with a big chunk of flesh torn away.

The demon wasn’t dead by any means, but Luke had hurt it. If he could hurt it, he could kill it. It would just take time. Unfortunately for the injured, he didn’t have that time. The Jigon-Sai would catch up in a minute or so, but until then, someone had to defend the villagers from the giant mosquito demons.

There was a villager on the porch wielding a shovel in both hands, but he was doing little more than keeping a trio of the giant mosquitos, presumably what the captain was referring to when he started yelling about blood hunters, back. That was working for him, except that he hadn’t killed any of them and more were entering the house through the windows.

Luke snagged a passing mosquito by one of its back legs and heaved backward to keep it from joining in the attack, but instead of stopping the demon when he pulled, he inadvertently ripped the leg off. The blood hunter let out a loud, angry buzzing sound as it tumbled forward, but it quickly righted itself and fled from Luke. He regarded the multi-segmented leg, which dripped a syrupy yellow liquid out one end, then tossed it aside and chased the blood hunter into the house.

It was a big old farmhouse, one of those sprawling things that had been added onto multiple times over its life and which housed three or more generations. Luke landed amidst a heap of broken wood, what had once been the shutters before the first blood hunter in had blasted through them. Two men were on the floor on simple blankets, both wrestling with blood hunters to keep from being stabbed by hose-like proboscises that tapered down to sharp points.

The blood hunters weren’t strong, but the men they were attacking were already weakened from injuries, and despite their battles being only seconds long, they were losing. Luke brought his mace around in a sideways swipe that slammed one of the blood hunters into the wall, where it splattered as it skidded across the wood and left a long yellow smear behind.

The other injured man still under attack got a foot up under the blood hunter and kicked it up into the air, where it wobbled for a second before stabilizing with a flick of its wings and diving back down. Luke intercepted it and killed it with a single blow.

“Get up if you can walk. You’ve got to get everyone out of here now,” Luke told them. “The Jigon-Sai are coming down the road, but they’re not here yet. Meet them out there.”

Then he was gone before either of the injured villagers could reply. There were plenty of other people in the house, mostly in other bedrooms, and the blood hunters were everywhere looking for them. The demons weren’t strong, but they had the numbers to swarm whole towns, and they were still small enough to gang up on the average adult in groups of three or four.

Luke suspected that they wouldn’t fare well against a city, or really any group of people that was prepared and in good health. There was a reason they’d targeted this farm house and not the rest of the village. As he tore through the halls chasing the blood hunters down, he found then focusing on the wounded villagers and only fighting the people caring for them if those people got in the way.

Blood hunters died by the dozens, but there were always more coming in and too many of the wounded weren’t able to get up. That was why they’d been carried out to the farmhouse to begin with. Luke either needed to defend the house in its entirety, something he just couldn’t do with so many possible points of entry, or people were going to start dying.

Two of the villagers already had. While Luke did laps as quickly as he could, the caretakers struggled to do more than hold off the blood hunters and new ones kept appearing and attacking in every room Luke wasn’t in. All he was doing was slowing down the inevitable.

Luke arrived in a room to find a shriveled corpse, completely drained of its blood, and the mosquito-like demon that had done the deed had darkened from a brownish-yellow color similar to the earth-piercing silo monster outside to something with reddish tones. It was busy fleeing back out the window, heading back for its… mobile hive, Luke supposed. He didn’t know what happened when the blood hunter reached home base, but if they wanted it, he opposed it automatically.

He jumped out the window after it, straight up into the air and swatted the blood hunter like the bug it was. An explosion of stolen blood rained down on the grass below and coated the front side of Luke’s body, but at least the demon didn’t make it back to its nest. That was probably worth something.

Luke skidded across the ground as he landed, looked up, and saw the soldiers running toward the house. They had swords drawn and the one in the lead cut down the blood hunters buzzing around the front door, but Luke was afraid it might be too late to save everyone. Even as he glanced over, he saw two more of the demon mosquitos flee out through open windows and head for their hive.

“Kill those!” the captain bellowed at Luke. “If they get the blood back to the carrier worm, more hunters come out.”

Luke was happy to comply, but he couldn’t fly. Given how high up they were, the only way he had to stop them was to throw the mace. That would, at best, kill one of them, and since he wasn’t fucking Thor, the weapon wasn’t coming back after he threw it. It could land a mile away.

They flew fast too, faster than he could run if he didn’t use [Burst Step]. If he did though, Luke thought he could beat them back to the silo-shaped demon, maybe knock it down and block the blood hunters from getting back inside, except that when he looked over, he realized he’d made some incorrect assumptions about how the whole process worked.

A blood hunter he’d missed was already there, and it hadn’t flown back inside the big demon. Instead, it had landed on the outside and stabbed its proboscis into the fleshy outer wall. Color drained from the blood hunter and swirled into the carrier demon like food dye being pumped into water. It spread out and grew too thin to make out against the natural yellow of the demon’s body over the next few seconds, then the blood hunter fell off the demon and started buzzing away.

Luke wasn’t sure what exactly that did, but he had some guesses. Most likely, some of it was consumed as food, and others went to nurturing new blood hunters. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was wrong, but that did seem like the most obvious reason for collecting blood. Even if that wasn’t what the demons did with it, he knew better than to let them keep going.

The carrier demon was still tilted at an angle from where Luke had first crashed into it. It would be steep, but he had high stats and plenty of movement abilities. He raced across the open ground to it, leaped onto its side, gave it another hard smack as he landed for good measure, and then used [Burst Step] to intercept the first blood hunter just as it was reaching its destination.

Luke smacked it into oblivion, hard enough that the demon’s body was ripped in two and its gory cargo left a fresh stain across the grass. The second demon landed at the same time, and even as quickly as Luke had skidded back down the slope of the carrier demon’s body, it had already given up half its harvest before he reached it.

He hit it with a flying double kick that not only knocked the blood hunter loose, it broke off its proboscis and left it behind. Three of its legs also snapped off as it tumbled down the length of the fleshy silo, and when it hit the ground, it struggled to right itself so that it could fly away. Luke reached it well before it got to that point and killed it.

It wasn’t enough. More and more blood hunters were emerging from the top of the silo, which was still too high off the ground for him to access easily. The carrier demon was also still moving, which wasn’t a huge problem for him to handle, but it did add to the difficulty. Worse, as more of the blood hunters poured out, they started actively attacking Luke.

For the first few seconds, it wasn’t too bad. He handled them as they came in, and in those moments, he killed more blood hunters than he’d managed the entire time he was in the house. But then the numbers started piling up. Fighting them became a full-body exercise of lashing out with every limb while contorting himself into increasingly improbable positions to avoid being struck. He didn’t know if the blood hunters could pierce his armor, but he wasn’t willing to put it to the test.

Then the silo lurched and Luke was thrown into the air. No amount of [Twitch Reflexes] could dodge the demon mosquitos then, and all [Tactical Foresight] did was let him know all the ways he was screwed. Luke still fought, of course, and he killed four or five of them before he hit the ground. But he was followed down by another thirty, with more piling on.

As it turned out, steel wasn’t strong enough to stop a blood hunter’s needle-tipped proboscis. The first blood hunter stabbed his stomach, and he swung through two other ones that were trying to pin down his arm to smack it away. It was quickly replaced by another one, and Luke realized with some horror that they were smart enough to target his weak points. With the metal plate there already compromised, they were just going to keep coming at him.

Luke flailed and thrashed, but there were so many that he couldn’t get free. Even when he managed to climb back to his feet, more just kept coming to pile on top of him. There was really only one thing he could do.

Luke triggered [Life Surge].