Death After Death-Chapter 235: A Demon in the Dark (3)

This time, Simon’s instincts had been exactly right. He had no idea what this asshole was doing, but he was very clearly some kind of hydra, and every time Simon cut off one of his heads, another took its place. Or maybe each time he dies, there are two more, he thought, unsure of what it was he was facing.

It didn’t really matter. If killing the demon didn’t stick, then he was going to have to go with plan B. By the time Simon reached the torso, it was in the midst of growing another arm and a comically tiny head, whereas the arm had barely started to grow a shoulder and a sternum.

The larger head did not yet have a mouth to speak and it would take another five or ten minutes for the smaller one to start on a second limb, but even so the way this thing continued to multiply was terrifying. He considered using a word of transfer just to drain some of this thing’s excess energy but decided against it. That was both because he didn’t want any part of hell inside of him and because he wasn’t even fully healed.

As well-fed as Simon was, thanks to the nearly eliminated beast men tribes that once ran rampant in these foothills, words of power took a lot out of him as a vampire. The last thing he needed right now was to have to pause to catch his breath.

He was holding the midget demon by the throat so it couldn’t cast any spells even if it revived, but as it reached the headless torso, the thing made a glowing sign in the air with its fingertips, and Simon was struck with shards of solidified air. It did very little damage compared to the black lightning, but it annoyed him deeply.

“What in the fuck is that?” he growled as he reached forward and broke all the fingers in the thing’s hand with a single squeeze.

He had no more time to waste now. He picked up all three of the growing demon pieces and then ran toward the closest boulder he’d undermined earlier, a couple of hundred yards to the west. It didn’t take much to get it moving. He basically just body-slammed it to start the slow roll. After that, he was racing in front of the thing.

He wasn’t taking any chances. He was holding this prick down until they were all entombed under a hundred tons of granite.

Simon ran like his life depended on it, even though it really didn’t. His life depended on killing this asshole hard enough for him to stay dead before dawn, and he had hours to make that happen. If boulders wouldn’t do the trick, then he’d settle for just burying the demon alive forever.

“You think this will be enough to defeat Vargarzeleth? I am a demon prince! I am legion!” a tiny voice asked, surprising him. “If these three bodies are not enough to carry your bleeding corpse back into hell, the ten thousand copies of myself that await my return will join in the fight to end you! I have been promised 600 souls to slay you, and I will not lose them.”

Simon had no time to stop, and his hands were too full of body parts to shift around and deal with the tiny head which had apparently grown just large enough to form a small mouth. All he could do was hope that whatever spells it cast in the next few seconds weren’t bad enough to knock him off his feet.

Even then, we’re all probably still going over, he thought as he considered the demon’s words.

As fast as he was, the wave of stones and dust almost passed Simon as he made his way over the cliff. With an extra surge of speed, he managed to leap a hundred and fifty feet off the sheer cliff, with a waterfall of death in pursuit. He never hit the ground, though. Instead, halfway down, he released his burden as he turned first into a flock of crows to gain distance and then into a mist to avoid the fatal wave of scree and stones that shot out in all directions even as the boulders rained down without end onto the pile of courses far below.

Though the demon’s comically high-pitched voice had robbed his words of any malice they might have had, they were enough to remind Simon of one crucial fact. The demon was not his own weak point. Those were the portal through which he came, the circle through which he’d entered the world, and the bargain that he’d struck with the warlocks in the camp.

Right now, with his opponent out of action for somewhere between a few minutes and forever, Simon had an opportunity to attack any or all of those, and that was exactly what he did. When the rocks stopped raining so hard that they would have knocked him out of the sky, he coalesced intoflock of two dozen crows once more and wheeled once in the sky to regroup before he headed to the heart of the Murian army’s camp.

Nothing had changed there, save that everyone was looking toward the mountain in an effort to understand the fight that was taking place. While Simon could see that no one felt precisely safe, they certainly didn’t think they were in any danger personally, and even as he soared above the camp, studying the people as well as the binding circle with fifty eyes, he decided he would prove them wrong in less than a minute.

Before Simon’s time in the Unspoken’s black library, he’d known only a little about the nature of demon summoning. Now he was somewhat of an expert, even if he never planned to use it. When Simon had taken apart his first portal it had been with the care of a bomb squad veteran. That had been based purely on a normal, healthy fear of what would happen if the situation spun out of control.

Now he knew what happened if things went out of control, and they were ugly. The Librium Malifica had provided two accounts on the subject, but they weren’t the only ones that Simon had read. In one, an apprentice had tripped, smearing the blinding circle's chalk. The poor man had been torn in half by the spatial shifts, but the thing had expanded out until it swallowed the mage's whole tower before vanishing.

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In another similar tale, an overeager witch hunter had killed a warlock and sought to end his vile experiments. He’d sundered a well-made circle that had been composed of wound copper wire around a set of stakes. The result had been catastrophic. Rather than banish the thing, it had expanded for hours, and the demons that swarmed out of it devoured the village and most of the countryside before it ran its course.

As Simon dove for the warlock’s camp and reformed into his hulking, monstrous form, he was hoping for the latter, but he would accept the former. Neither of those mattered as he landed on the closet warlock, crushing him beneath his bulk. He even exploded in a burst of flame afterward, though, Simon shrugged it off.

The man died messily, but the half dozen other mages that saw Simon do it were shocked into silence for only a moment by his sudden appearance. After that, they unleashed hell on him, bombarding him with a dozen flavors of pain. Unfortunately for them, none of them were wood, so he kept right on moving.

Simon went on a rampage then, and no matter how many words of fire and ruin rained down on him, it didn’t slow down his killing spree. He could feel the blows slowly leeching his vitality, of course, but compared to that awful black lightning, it was nothing.

The first man he killed was the luckiest of all of them. He’d merely been murdered. The rest Simon didn’t even bother to kill before he tossed them at the glowing portal to hell that pulsed in the middle of the clearing. It was surrounded by the corpses of the men and women who had already been sacrificed to the dark powers that were called forth, but Simon ignored those for now. He was only concerned with killing the people who were trying to kill him and breaking their circle.

The first two men he tossed at it fell well within its bounds and vanished in the flames without disturbing anything. The third man landed half in, half out of the circle, and even as he tried to crawl away, he was yanked inside by shadowy figures while he screamed for help. There was no one to help, though, not after he smeared three or four runes into oblivion. After that, the whole thing started to unravel in an undulating curtain of fire and spatial distortions that looked like a heat shimmer on steroids.

Simon backed away immediately, even as he’d been about to slaughter another warlock. He was unwilling to take the chance, even for a second. Instead, he leaped back and burst into a flock of crows to escape. Despite how quickly he reacted, the advancing flames moved like a wildfire. He only just managed to stay ahead of it by a few seconds, and was sure that a few tail feathers had been scorched.

He didn’t need to risk it all for a chance to be sucked into hell, there were other fights to be had elsewhere in the camp. He was entirely unwilling to trade his pseudo-immortality for an endless torment, and if he knew Helades at all, there would be no coming back from those infernal depths.

Maybe I’ll even allow myself to feed on the blood of men tonight, he thought wistfully. It had been nearly a year, after all, and his strength was flagging, even as hell literally broke loose. Surely, he owed himself that much.

Simon pondered that slippery slope as he landed far from the action amidst a crowd of soldiers who were woefully unprepared for him. One second, they were gossiping about how the warlocks were going to summon another demon as the flames grew and the screams spread. “It will be even stronger than the last one was,” one man insisted moments before Simon charged from the shadows and ripped his head off.

They thought the light meant reinforcements, but really, it was just the opposite. In a few minutes, Simon wouldn’t be the only predator amongst the woefully unprepared sheep. As far as anyone here was concerned, this was the end of the world, they didn’t know it yet.

They reacted just as every group of soldiers he’d killed before. Some ran like cowards, some fought to the last. A few of those even managed to hurt Simon. No matter how many blades ran him through, and no matter how many slashes tried to disembowel him before the wound vanished.

It was a pitched battle, though, and though the smart ones ran from him, others, running from the flames blundered right into him. It was a tide of humanity, and Simon was soaked in the scents of blood and death as he murdered and maimed. They maimed him too, of course. With so many people stabbing at him, remaining uninjured was impossible.

He’d thought himself safe from the green Murani soldiers and their ineffectual weapons he’d been rampaging through. He never died, though, not until a boy with a broken spear had made a futile last stand and managed to slide that jagged piece of wood between two of his ribs and right through his cold, dead heart.

The young man with a broken spear ran him through in what should have been a futile but valiant attempt to avenge a fallen comrade. That was the end of Simon, for this life at least.

A hundred spears with steel heads did nothing, but a single broken one, and that’s the end of the run, he thought wryly as he felt himself starting to come undone.

To say the moment surprised him was an understatement. It was his own fault. He’d been distracted by rumbling from the hillside as the demon he’d done battle with a few minutes earlier was rising out of the rubble as some kind of malformed giant. Simon had hoped to cut him off from the powers of hell, but until the gate extinguished itself, that didn’t seem likely.

Simon stopped then as the mortal blow rebounded through him. It hurt. It hurt more than any of the other wounds he’d shrugged off this evening, but even as it did, he could feel the rest of his body going numb, and he could see the dull grey-green flesh of his hands already crumbling as it flaked away to ash.

What shitty timing, he thought as his eyes flicked from the pillar of fire to the shadow of the giant and back again. There was so much more he could learn tonight.

Then, there was Ionia to consider. Even without him, though, this screw-up was probably enough to set the invaders back for a long, long time, as long as the demonic activity didn’t reach the fortress itself, but he didn’t think that likely.

In those critical few seconds, Simon let the moment that he could have taken his revenge come and go. He thought about it, but decided to let the boy who’d killed a monster live. That was just what he was supposed to do. Really, on any other night, Simon would have been nothing but grateful as he fell to pieces. The sight was fading from his eyes, and his legs were burning away so quickly in an ugly green fire that he was already toppling toward the young man.

The boy was scrambling backward but he had nothing to fear. Simon would dissolve into dust and ashes long before he crushed his killer beneath his monstrous form. ƒrēenovelkiss.com