Chapter 166

It turned out the captain did not want to test Luke’s claim. Instead he ordered his men to assist with pushing the tongue demons into the flames while he joined the villagers fending off the gargoyles from the sky. The woman with the black sword seemed to recognize the captain, but Luke couldn’t follow their rapid-fire conversation.

“Stay close to me,” the captain said, switching back to Standard as he turned to face Luke. “You do not need to fight here; this is not your battle and these are not your people.”

“That’s cool and all,” Luke said. “But I’m not just going to stand around and let people die when I could be helping stop it.”

“No, stay here where I can keep you safe,” the captain said, but Luke was already scanning for his first victim.

“You good with your whip in your left hand?” he asked Zea while he figured out where to start.

“Yeah, it’s all controlled by the enchantment anyway.”

“And you’re sure it’s up to slicing through these demons?”

“Should be fine,” Zea told him.

“Do not attack those demons,” the captain insisted.

Luke ignored the man and asked Zea, “And if these soldiers try to kill you?”

“I’m not too concerned about any of them besides the captain,” Zea told him.

“Alright, stay safe. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Luke took off at a run that turned into a leap twenty feet into the air, where he brought his mace down in an overhead chop on the first demon. A chunk of its skull broke off and its head was driven down into its chest cavity. There was no notification ding, but the thing dropped like a rock and hit the ground hard enough to bounce. Luke had to assume it was dead, but if not, at least it’d be an easy kill for someone else to finish off.

If that was as bad as the demons got, Luke had nothing to worry about. Any level 20 with a sharpened piece of metal could kill these things. For Luke, it wasn’t even a challenge. The truly hard part of the job was chasing the gargoyles down when they flew into the smoke cloud of the burning buildings. They were practically invisible inside the cloud.

After the first one went down, the rest retreated. Not about to let a threat live, Luke followed them into the smoke. He could easily hold his breath for hours if he needed, so other than stinging his eyes a bit, his only real concern was getting ambushed. He advanced cautiously, eyes straining to sense movement in the smoke, ears trained for the sound of air sliding across gray, fleshy wings.

Other than the surprisingly loud crackle of multiple homes around him going up in flames and the background noise of the villagers still fighting the tongue fuckers, it was silent. Luke peered through the smoke, mostly scanning rooflines for motion. Nothing. He picked out the least burnt-out looking house and leaped onto the roof, where the smoke was actually thicker and he could feel the heat coming up from below him.

Extremely aware of the danger of falling through the roof into the burning house, Luke advanced slowly. He almost tripped over the gargoyle before he spotted it in front of him, still as its namesake. It was no wonder he couldn’t hear them; they’d completely frozen up and if he wasn’t mistaken, their skin color and texture had changed to perfectly match the smoke. He had to assume some sort of camouflaging ability, because they’d definitely been a lighter shade of gray when he’d seen them against the smokey backdrop.

The only reason he’d spotted this one was that the hot hair was carrying the smoke in a contour around its body, kind of like a smokey outline. Even that was difficult to spot, so much so that the gargoyle demon was barely two feet in front of him. It hadn’t moved despite his approach, and Luke wondered if it was waiting for him to go by so that it could attack from behind. If he didn’t cooperate with that plan, would it just sit there and let him punt it off the roof?

There was only one way to find out. Luke lifted the mace and swung it at the gargoyle’s head. Just before it connected, the demon threw itself forward into the air and spread its wings to glide off into the smoke. That was pretty much what Luke had expected to happen, though he was surprised at the speed it had moved.

It was well within his capabilities to match, though, and he wasn’t afraid of falling twenty or thirty feet anymore. He jumped after it with a [Burst Step] to close the distance and clobbered the fleeing gargoyle. Its body went into an uncontrolled spin and it struck the ground hard. Luke landed nearby and walked over to make sure it wasn’t going to get back up.

The demon looked dead, but months of waiting for the kill notification, a lesson only reinforced when he’d had to deal with Lath again after the ants had gotten ahold of him, had made him wary of just assuming things were dead because that’s what it looked like.

It had what appeared to be some sort of pasty wet sludge leaking out of its body and staining the grass. The blow Luke had dealt it had practically torn off one of its wings and pulverized its side where a rib would be on a normal person, but it didn’t seem like the gargoyles actually had bones. He was starting to wonder exactly how they reacted to physical damage, and a quick glance toward where he’d left the first body showed him that it was gone.

“Shit, you fuckers know how to play dead, don’t you?”

Luke pounced on the downed gargoyle, his mace leading the way. This time, it couldn’t just tip itself out into open air and its last-second attempt to dodge was far too slow. The mace slammed down in the middle of its back and flattened it back to the dirt. Luke didn’t let up the pressure. He didn’t know where this thing’s weak point was, but it obviously wasn’t the same as a human’s.

More blows rained down on it, targeting limbs, joints, its chest, anywhere he thought there might be something special like that seed he’d once ripped out of a tree elemental. Its skin cracked and tore and more of that heavy sludge rolled out. It reminded Luke of liquid concrete, except a much darker color. After twenty or so strikes, the gargoyle was reduced to a fleshy sac covered in rips in the middle of a puddle of its concrete-blood.

If that wasn’t enough to kill it, Luke didn’t know what would do the job. It was no wonder the villagers were having such a hard time of it defending themselves. Between it taking a dozen of them to prod the tongue fuckers over to the burning buildings so they could torch the bastards and the gargoyles that took forever to kill harassing all the humans, it would be an all-night job for him to clean this up himself.

Fortunately, there were also eight soldiers and one Zea to help the village out. They weren’t doing a good job of killing any of the gargoyles, but they’d taken some of the pressure off by freeing up a bunch of villagers when they took over herding two of the tongue fuckers. Now that the clumps of humans were thicker, the gargoyles had less opportunity to snatch people off the ground. It didn’t hurt that Luke had chased a lot of them back into the smoke and they had yet to emerge.

“Luke!” Zea yelled. “Could use some help over here!”

He glanced over and saw a crowd of six gargoyles had descended upon the group consisting of Zea, the black sword woman, and the captain. They weren’t doing so hot at fending the demons off, and he could see two more circling around the group to find the right angle of approach.

The ones they were already fighting were covered in scratches and gouges, but that didn’t seem to hinder them. Wherever someone had managed to score a hit deep enough to make the demon bleed, its concrete sludge just oozed out of the wound and then hardened to form a rough patch job.

Luke rushed over and scattered the gargoyles when he leaped into the air and crashed through them. One unlucky demon took the brunt of the attack, and he beat it to death just like the last one while the others swirled away on hot currents of air.

“What happened?” Luke asked after the gargoyle was dead. He pointed at the sword-wielding woman and added, “I saw you dismember one of these things on the way in.”

She grimaced and held up the weapon for him to see. Its edge was chipped and dulled, in far worse condition than it had been ten minutes ago. “It is like cutting through granite,” she said in a heavy accent. “One, two swings, yes. Keep going, and it is impossible.”

“It is why I sent my men to help corral the lashers,” the captain added. “With this kind of enemy, it is better to capture them in nets, then smash them with heavy weights once they are safely pinned down. They are distractions against the true threats.”

“But you don’t have any nets,” Luke guessed.

“No,” the captain agreed. “We were not expecting to find this particular type of demon so far north. They haven’t been seen outside the Melthor Province until now. The rumors of demons coming over the mountains from Hurang did not mention the presence of gargoyles.”

“They’re fucking your plan up,” Luke said, noting four of the Jigon-Sai soldiers struggling to deal with the gargoyles near the burning buildings. They had a tongue fucker pointed in more-or-less the right direction to shove it into the side of the house where it would presumably be burned alive, but a trio of gargoyles were swooping and diving around them, forcing the soldiers to defend themselves from all angles and giving the tongue fucker the chance to escape.

The demons truly were more of a threat than almost anything else Luke had fought. Most of the monsters he’d come across had been animal-like in appearance and intelligence. Sure, they had extra spikes or horns and were usually way bigger than they were supposed to be, but they were dumb and usually it only took Luke a minute to tease out the limits of their abilities before he moved in for the kill. There had been the occasional exception, but if Luke had been in danger, it was more because whatever he was fighting was faster or stronger than him.

Demons all seemed to have their own little tricks, like their concrete blood or the supposed tongue-vine eruption that would happen if he killed one of the purple guys. They were also surprisingly individual in their appearances. Every gargoyle’s face was different. Some of them had longer or shorter wings, or anywhere from three to six claws on each hand. The tongue fuckers were more uniform, but there were still differences in size, musculature, number of tongues, and in some cases, scars on their rubbery skin.

“We need rope to form lassos,” the captain said to the village woman. “Nets would be better, but if there aren’t any, then there aren’t any.”

“Not going to find much in the way of rope either,” she told him. She nodded at one of the burning houses, “General store’s right there. If it hasn’t all burnt up already, it will soon.”

“Too bad your tentacle ball got used up fighting that necromancer,” Luke muttered to Zea.

“No kidding. Would have been perfect. Just throw it into the air, turn it on, and watch it go.”

“You think anyone’s going to risk going into that house for the rope?”

“Not unless they’re stupid. Don’t you go volunteering for it either,” she said.

“I’d rather just kill them the hard way anyway,” Luke said.

The conversation was interrupted then by a chorus of screams coming from the north side of the village. Whatever was happening was hidden around by the burning houses, but Luke could hear a snapping and cracking sound, barely audible over the fire and the screaming.

“Probably should go investigate that, huh?” he asked the captain.