Chapter 167

“You need to stay here where I can keep an eye on you,” Peishan snapped at the demon. Or possibly just human, he supposed. There had been reports of demons attacking each other, so the man’s assault on the gargoyles didn’t conclusively prove anything, but it was one more piece of evidence in an increasingly large pile that indicated the man had been telling the truth.

The maybe-demon-maybe-human, Luke, if he’d understood the rambling foreign tongue the two had been speaking in earlier, shook his head. “I get that you’re trying to do your job, but I’m not going to stand here with my thumb up my ass while people in front of me get brutally murdered by these things. I promise I won’t leave without talking to you first after the fight’s over, but I’m going to keep getting involved.”

Peishan understood that motivation. Teaching a new soldier to not act on an immediate problem was always a challenge. It was hard to watch something horrible happen right before their eyes, sometimes barely even a hundred feet away, to see it in all its vile detail, and not help. That was what soldiers were for, to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves.

But sometimes it was a trap, and those victims were just bait or a distraction. Sometimes the door needed to be guarded, and soldiers had to harden their hearts against individual suffering to preserve the greater good. It was a difficult notion to instill in good men and women who had joined the Jigon-Sai.

He was just as suspectable as anyone else. That was why they were in this little flyspeck of a village, after all. Returning to Heishin with two strange foreigners who might or might not be demons was more important than saving a few dozen people who were unimportant in the grand scheme of things. He knew that.

His men were here anyway, and not a one of them had argued against the orders. He’d have to justify that to his superiors later. It would probably cost him some political capital to save this village when it could be argued that doing so put his control of two new potential infiltrator-type demons in jeopardy.

In this situation, with the two foreigners being such unknowns, potentially hostile even, the best thing to do was to remove them from the battle. They were variables that only made it more difficult to predict how things would turn out, and Peishan needed to be able to make accurate predictions so that he could have his men in place to prevent problems before they occurred. That was an officer’s job, after all.

The problem was that he didn’t think he actually had the physical capabilities to stop Luke, especially not after watching the man in action. If he truly wasn’t a demon, then he was incredibly strong even for his level. Peishan certainly would not have leaped into literal fires and blinded himself with smoke just for the chance to pursue a demon. There were so many ways that could have ended badly, but Luke had done it without a second thought. And then somehow, he’d come right back out, completely unharmed and still chasing a gargoyle, which he’d proceeded to knock out of the sky and then viciously beat to death despite the demon’s insanely high resilience to damage.

His companion was less impressive, though Peishan thought she would fare better against the lashers. Her weapon was some sort of magical whip that left deep grooves in the flesh of any gargoyle that got within range, but it lacked the strength to cut through their dense, stone-like skin. Part of him wanted to put her with a group to pacify lashers, since she’d displayed perfect accuracy and he was sure she could slice off the prehensile tongues that made that type of demon so dangerous in their initial forms.

If he could trust them, that’s what he would have done. But they weren’t his soldiers, they were his prisoners. For now, they were willing prisoners. As long as he handled them with a light touch, it might stay that way. As soon as they tried to leave, things would get messy. He was very much afraid that outcome was almost inevitable. Luke was already proving that he was not amenable to following orders, probably not even orders whose goals he agreed with if it wasn’t how he personally wanted to reach those goals.

In other words, he was a typical lordless wanderer. They had different names in different societies and languages, knight errant, ronin, adventurer. But they all stood for the same thing: chaos and anarchy.

It wasn’t illegal to go around fighting monsters, however, not even if those monsters happened to be demons. As long as the two foreigners didn’t attack law-abiding citizens of the Empire, they were within their rights.

All that was to say that while Peishan was sure something had gone wrong with shoving one of those lashers into the flames, he absolutely did not want the foreigner over there making it worse. He trusted his men to help the villagers hold back the gargoyles and kill off the lashers one at a time in as safe and controlled a manner as possible.

“Yeah… So, I’m going to go check up on that,” Luke said.

“No, stay he- and he’s gone,” Peishan said.

* * *

That captain was far too much of a “lead from the rear” kind of guy for Luke’s tastes. He was seriously just going to stand there and watch everyone else risk life and limb while he kept an eye on things, even when something had obviously gone wrong. People were hurt or dying, and the guy just wanted to stand around.

Luke activated [Burst Step] and zipped past the houses so fast it might as well have been teleportation. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find at the north side of the village, but it wasn’t three dead bodies that had been dismembered by dozens of vine-like tongues. At least, Luke was pretty sure there were only three. It was hard to tell on account of the fact that each body was in separate pieces, a leg over here, a foot over there, and an arm off to the side. All of them were held up in the air and being whipped back and forth by the frenzied vines.

Near the burning building was the exploded corpse of a tongue fucker. It had black scorch marks on one side, and there were shriveled black vines in the flames. That was only near one limb though, and the rest of its body had been split open from the inside to release a hundred or more of its tongues, which had immediately grabbed hold of the people trying to force it into the fire and ripped them limb from limb.

Two of the soldiers had been caught at the very edge of the tongues’ reach and were frantically hacking at the fleshy appendages to free their legs. It was a losing battle though as they were dragged closer and close to the center. As soon as a few of the tongues reached their arms, it would be over for them. Even if they managed to prevent that, the tongues were edged in some way and both soldiers were bleeding freely from their legs.

Luke only saw two ways he could help. He could go to the soldiers directly and start hacking at the tongues with his knife, but it was a short blade and while he might do a better job thanks to his higher stats, that would only delay the inevitable. The other option was to go into the burning house itself, grab the corpse from its scorched side where hopefully the heat and open flames would prevent the tongues from attacking him, and haul it fully inside the building. Presumably, as long as the corpse was burning, all of the tongue-vines coming out of it would wither up and die. Maybe he might find some spot inside the body itself he could strike to instantly kill the tentacle monster core.

The obvious problem with that plan was that he had to willingly walk into a burning building which might collapse on him at any moment. Then he stopped to think about it, and realized that it didn’t really matter. His stamina was so high now that standing on the roof of a different burning house in a cloud of smoke had barely done more than make him mildly uncomfortable and sting his eyes a bit. He’d had worse playing basketball on hot summer days.

How bad could it be? Luke quickly located a window that didn’t have flames actively shooting out of it and jumped through. The temperature spiked and it got harder to see, but his ears pointed him towards the sound of soldiers still screaming. Luke ducked low under the smoke, mostly for better visuals, and made his way towards the back of the house.

It turned out it was far hotter in the house than it had been on the roof, enough that he started sweating immediately, but not so bad that it actually hurt. It felt more like a mild sunburn than anything else. Once he’d grown accustomed to the heat itself, Luke’s primary concern was making sure he didn’t knock out any walls that might bring the roof down on his head. Though if that happened, he was pretty sure he could dig himself out.

He quickly found the hole that had been knocked in the wall of the house. Two other demon corpses were already in that room, both charred and blackened. They hadn’t exploded like the one that was still outside the house. Instead, they’d swollen to three times their normal size until they’d split at the seams and ropy tongue-vines had slipped out like entrails.

“Well… Ew,” Luke said as he kicked one of the bodies off to the side.

His plan seemed to be working, as far as he could tell. None of the tongues were attacking him inside the house at least. He approached the body that had sprouted a killing field, reached down to grab the charred limb, and heaved it into the fire. It didn’t make any noises, but his action definitely got the attention of the tongues.

He wondered if they were able to sense him as they started whipping through the super-heated air inside the house or if they were just flailing blindly. Outside, the panicked yells of the soldiers increased in volume, but Luke thought that was more from being dragged closer to the flames themselves than from any increased aggression from the demon. If anything the tongues had gone wild from the flames and any that weren’t already touching the soldiers were ignoring them.

Luke dodged the vines easily enough. [Twitch Reflexes]was especially good at getting him out of the way. He wasn’t sure how long it would take them to die, but there wasn’t much reason to stick around to watch, not when there were other demons in need of killing.

Just before he turned to leave though, Luke paused. The body was sliding across the floor, so slowly that he wouldn’t have noticed without his high perception and [Detection] to point it out to him. While most of the vines were flailing around, some of them were pushing against the floor and jerking the body back and forth. It looked random, but over a few seconds, the whole thing got a few inches closer to dragging itself out of the fire.

Whether it would make it back out on its own before succumbing to the flames was another matter. Luke wasn’t willing to let it try. He hoped those two soldiers were just about done freeing themselves, because he snagged a handful of writhing tongues and heaved the entire mass deeper into the house.

Screams laced with renewed fear came from the soldiers. “Whoops,” Luke muttered. “Guess they weren’t ready after all.”

There was no way Luke was leaping over that knot of tongues to help them. That was just asking to get snared and dragged down. He picked the most damaged looking wall and hoped making a hole big enough for him to walk through wasn’t going to bring everything down, then activated [Burst Step] and slammed into it.