“That person the demon ate,” Enkidu said after some hours of uncomfortable silence. “He was Branded, wasn’t he?”
Calaf nodded.
“Curses.” Enkidu looked at the cocoon and sighed. “That’s going to make this more… difficult.”
“What… what did the creature do with those two?” Calaf shot Jelena’s lax, entranced form a nervous glance.
“Demons are what they eat. It’s going to have an interface designation when it comes out. Its scaling will be…” Enkidu clicked his tongue. “… prodigious.”
Above, the night remained both moonless and cloudless. Calaf strained to see even via Interface-based highlights around key objects, though Enkidu had no such limitation. The cocoon gleamed in the low lighting. Enkidu warned Calaf from getting anywhere close. And after those hands had erupted out of it in search of a snack, the Squire was in no hurry to investigate further.
“How much longer will it be in there?” Calaf asked.
”When its music stops.” Enkidu said, letting out a growl in the cocoon’s direction. “Burns the ears. Gah, does it burn.”
But Calaf heard only eerie, dead silence over the dunes.
“What music?”
”You can’t hear that?”
Calaf shook his head.
“No matter. Possibly an hour. Possibly centuries. If there’s no movement by sunup you can carry some VIPs back to camp. They won’t be released until the demon is slain, but if they’re further away they run less chance of getting… eaten.”
From her position near the back of the pack of enthralled caravanners, Jelena let out a soft sigh.
Calaf gulped. “Could we involve a priest? A deacon?”
Surely high-level clerical spells could lift this demonic charm. Slaying demons was the church’s specialty. Killing their towering beast of a command unit was the founding action of the Church of the Menu!
“Maybe, given untold days or months of treatment.” Enkidu shrugged. “Doing so would leave Jelena in the hands of the church.”
Calaf grimaced, conceding the point.
The smoldering pitcher plant sat on its side off in the distance. Enkidu wouldn’t let Calaf investigate further until the cocoon issue was resolved. This even though there could still be others trapped in there.
“You probably don’t want to lay eyes on anyone currently in that thing,” Enkidu said. “This cocoon can hatch and kill us all at any time. At least wait for the threat to go away.”
The faint desert breeze shifted nigh-imperceptibly. Enkidu’s ears twitched, equally imperceptible.
“It comes.” Enkidu adopted another defensive crouch.
Calaf held his shield up. Still, the cocoon did not stir. Until all at once, the shell collapsed in on itself. In low light only an abnormally long, prehensile bit of brunette hair peeked out over half an eggshell.
Elongated, skeletal hands reached out and cracked the remaining shell into two slender pieces.
What emerged from the cocoon was an unnaturally tall, humanoid figure. It had inherited the old demon’s spindly stick-bug frame, but with pasty human skin stretched over the carapace. The creature was nude but without identifying sex characteristics. It hadn’t gotten around to completing in its morph. As of now it was more… blank.
Unlike the original demon, this creature possessed an Interface designation:
“How does it have a Menu designation?” Calaf asked with a rasping gasp of disbelief.
“Because it consumed someone who did.”
The creature held massive slivers of its eggshell in either hand. Both pieces looked so incredibly fragile, but it cocked its head at Calaf and adjusted its stance in imitation.
“It’s adopting the cadence of that which it fears most,” Enkidu said. “Judging by the imitative use of shields, that’s you. Shield up.”
The demon lunged, putting all its weight into a full-force shield bash. The shell impacted Calaf’s redstone shield with a dull and hollow clang. The demon’s offhand swung for a follow up attack, forcing Calaf back, lest the creature climb atop him and stomp him into the desert sands.
Those shield bashes must have left an impression on the fiend, for a dual-wielded imitation of Calaf's bash was now the creature’s primary mode of attack.
“It’s supposed to be level one,” Calaf protested, receiving another full-force blow that sent his heels digging deep into the desert sands.
“It didn’t brand itself anew. It adapted. This is about as close to the old demons of yore as anyone is like to encounter in the modern day,” Enkidu said. “Just keep it distracted. Let me focus on putting it down.”
Enkidu leaped in from the wings, but the demon moved its right hand to block a barrage of blows from the wild man. The creature appeared ambidextrous, with a bias towards neither of its jagged shields. Despite their brittle and thin appearance, Enkidu’s sword chipped before the shield did. Regardless, it was enough for the Piper demon to determine that Enkidu was the primary threat on this battlefield.
"It will continue to evolve exponentially fast until it reaches the pinnacle of power under the Menu," Enkidu said mid-battle. "Kill it here, in this valley, or it will rapidly become too powerful to contain."
”Meaning?” Calaf asked.
“Left to its own devices, it will evolve until its power rivals another Demon King.”
The creature turned, hunched over as if the weight of the shields and its own lanky physiology were acting against it. Still, it surfed on the sand to close the distance and smashed Enkidu against the ground. Again, the creature struck, juggling Enkidu in the air.
“H-hey! Over here.” Calaf raised his shield and kept his spear leveled, ready to strike.
The entity turned. Its eyes were a dull red quite unlike any human figure. It slunk over with its unnatural gait and raised both hands high.
Calaf braced, and the beast smashed both its shields against Calaf’s own. The Squire held on for dear life as the creature repeated the motion. Tension broke as the two slabs of red stone that made up Calaf’s shield unbound themselves. He held on desperately to his now half-a-shield. With another blow, even that, too, was dashed across the sands.
Down to just his spear, Calaf two-handed his weapon and thrust between a gap in the demon’s shields. The spear pierced through the creature’s chest, causing it to exhale in a long but unpained stream of putrid breath. On the Interface, HP ticked down six points.
At least the creature wasn’t going to be moving around while it was impaled.
Another flying leap and slash courtesy of Enkidu tore the flesh off the creature’s back alongside another chunk of sixty hit points. Now properly Of the Menu, the fell devil’s gap in power compared even to a ‘natural’ level eighty-nine human was evident. Those eighty-nine levels represented a lifetime of battle-hardened experience, but even a particularly constitution-heavy Paladin would be hard-pressed to match this lowly Bard.
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The beast’s flayed back revealed more of that off-fleshy carapace in place of muscle or blood. It truly had stretched a thin human fa?ade around its original body.
Undeterred, the demon jerked back, dislodging itself from Calaf’s spear. A roundhouse punch from the demon’s fists felt like getting smashed upon the breastplate by a boulder. Calaf was left thanking his hearty Endurance stat, the sole reason he had any health left.
Twin shields blocked the next flurry of blows from Enkidu.
Calaf topped up with a heal to himself, keeping well above fifty percent HP at any given time. Then, he watched Enkidu and ‘Piper’ do battle at a frenzied pace the Squire could never hope to match.
Rather than sit there doing nothing, Calaf muttered out a spell:
Piper the demon looked down at its knuckles. A paltry five HP of damage was restored.
“Why would you heal it?” Enkidu asked between deep breaths.
“It’s an unholy fiend. I figured holy magic would hurt it.”
In an instant, the demon loomed over Calaf. At a crouch, it still dwarfed Calaf’s height standing. The demon stashed its leftmost shield behind its back. Ridges in place of its spine morphed to accommodate the item. Its free hand motioned to Calaf…
Calaf felt fractured bones set themselves into place under his armor.
Why did it heal me? Never mind that. How did it use holy magic!?
There would be no answer. The same arm that had cast a heal upon Calaf then thrust forward like a battering ram, rending Calaf’s armor. Fingers sunk deep into Calaf’s flesh, fishing for something as Calaf could do nothing but tank the blow.
And then, with a snap, Piper severed a rib.
Calaf screamed as a Shattered Bone status marked his Interface and his vision turned red. The demon opened its mouth wider than strictly natural and let out an imitation scream—a combination of a laugh and a dire-jackal’s screech. The trill overpowered Calaf’s pained cry.
Rather than suffer the fiend’s mocking as it dismembered him from the inside-out, Calaf thrust his spear forward. It slid harmlessly off the demon’s bare chest as the beast continued its manic laughter.
Enkidu stabbed again; the blow deflected off the cocoon shield at the creature’s back. Piper swatted the swordsman away with a smooth motion from its right hand. Then, it ran after Enkidu before he could recover and continued beating him down, sending forth great plumes of sand as the demon smashed a visible depression into the desert.
Everything was spinning. Calaf struggled to stay conscious and couldn’t rise to his feet even with his spear as a crutch. Instead, he started spamming his own Intermediate Heal well past his max HP limit. He continued to cast until his lungs couldn’t keep up the mantra any longer and the Shattered Bone status finally disappeared. All the while, Piper took long, gangly steps toward its collection of sleepwalking victims.
They hadn’t even shaved off three hundred hit points.
How did the Ancient Heroes of Yore deal with an army of these creatures? They were said to have bested entire fields full of fiends built for combat.
Again, Piper opened its mouth, and again, an ear-splitting and discordant song emanated out of the ether:
Another spell, Of the Menu. Only that incantation was scrambled and indecipherable in some demonic dialect. The creature’s damaged human disguise began to stretch back over the areas where Enkidu had torn it apart. The skin didn’t sit right after being ‘healed’ and, notably, the demon’s HP did not tick back up.
The demon took three quick steps, which brought it over to the nearest somnambulist. It grabbed the random desert trader in both hands and pulled its victim into more digestible pieces. The demon’s jaw unhinged and swiftly disposed of the meal. HP restored itself far faster than any clerical heal.
Calaf was left wrenching, having only just barely reached the point where he could stand. Even so, he couldn’t let the demon get to the rest of its victims. Jelena was three rows over, and the fell devil’s hunger was infinite.
“H-hey,” said the Squire, voice raspy. Then, with more conviction, "Over here!"
Provoke! The demon cocked its oblong, not-quite-proportionate head in the direction of the Paladin-aspirant. It took another step in Calaf’s direction and then, as it so often did, it found some new distraction.
Once more, Piper opened its mouth:
This song ventured high over the dunes. Carrying further than even the song that had captured so many. Still, Calaf could barely make out a low hum, for the tune was not meant for human ears.
A dull clang came from the crater where Enkidu was half-buried. The swordsman had climbed back to the surface, and dropped his sword blade-first into the ground.
With an inhuman screech and a crack of his knuckles, Enkidu ran forward and punched the demon full-force in the chest. The low-frequency song disappeared in an instant, as did the demon.
“I just hate bards,” Enkidu said, his upper body wracked with tremors as every bone in his hand settled back into place.
Where had Piper gone? It took Calaf a moment to connect the dots between the now-vanished demon and the plume of dust erupting vertically along a far dune. Sand shifted, and the dune was all at once bisected.
“It’s coming back,” Enkidu said, then swiftly swung again as Piper was upon him.
A mutual blow sent the pair both flying back. Piper’s shields had finally worn down past feasibility, which Enkidu took great advantage of to continue sneaking punches past the now minuscule eggshells and deliver carapace-cracking body blows.
Fisticuffs sent the pair through the field of sleepwalking bodies. Many were inevitably knocked over.
“W-watch it!” Calaf pleaded. “It can heal by consuming its victims.”
“Protecting them is your job, Shielder,” Enkidu said, moving almost as a blur.
Protect them, Calaf did. For what little he was able. He rushed through the field of captured sleepwalkers in the pair’s wake, looking for opportunities to provide first aid. He found that those who’d been knocked over merely fell asleep there on the floor.
Calaf breathed a sigh of relief. He returned to his position and guarded Jelena even without his shield.
Enkidu and Piper smacked each other from dune to dune. The demon’s health was now measured via the Interface. Each punch from Enkidu, superpowered though they were, took off minor chunks of a dozen hit points here and there. Representative of Enkidu punching the hard bricklike carapace beneath the demon’s skin. Indeed, the unholy fiend had grown stronger with integration into the Holy Menu.
With punches providing diminishing returns, Enkidu settled for grappling the fiend and then pulling. The creature’s arms snapped off for a chunk of hundreds of HP each. Only, these limbs grew back in an instant. Again, Enkidu sheared them off as soon as he could wrangle them. This, too, produced diminishing returns as each new arm took off a hundred HP, then eighty with each tear. Piper countered with an ear-splintering shriek, the designation of which Calaf couldn’t suss out as the shockwave alone scrambled his senses.
Enkidu said something – again, Calaf still could not hear – and hopped back. He grabbed his sword, having returned to where he’d begun this dance, and brought it to bear. The bard-demon ran after Enkidu, only for the swordsman to slice a great wedge into the demon’s exposed shoulder. Enkidu hacked and sawed until the sword was poking awkwardly out from the fiend’s ribcage.
Reading lips was not a skill provided via the Menu. But Calaf thought he heard a growling, single syllable word. Then, as Enkidu pulled the sword out, two more words of near silence, two syllables for one word, a single syllable for the other.
The Piper demon wobbled. Still smiling, its top half fell backward while its bottom half took three steps towards Enkidu before falling forward.
The demon was slain. Its slayer swung his sword about, testing it for damages.
Victorious, Enkidu walked towards Calaf nonchalantly.
Despite barely doing any damage to the implacable feral fiend, Calaf got enough scratches in to obtain credit for the battle.
Level up! Level up! Level up!
A torrent of experience from slaying a high-level demon flowed through the Squire…
Not at all how he’d expected to ever breach level fifty, but he would not complain. High-value experience dire-beasts were few and far between at this range. And the stat boosts were a surprising haul for this level, especially in the ever-furtive Arcane category – not that a Paladin-aspirant had any use for that rare stat. Arcane boosts did come at the cost of Charisma, which was relatively low for a Squire on the verge of walking the path of Paladin. Even so, the triple level-up did nothing to dispel Calaf’s winded state.
Enkidu, of course, had no need for levels and was unbound by the Menu. He stepped forward, wholly unaware and uncaring of the leveling bonanza Calaf had just gone through.
“What was that?” Calaf asked after he was sure it was over.
“As I said, a demon from before the time of your old heroes. It had gone feral over centuries without orders.”
“I surmised that.” Calaf stood in front of Jelena still, instinctually. “But the Menu and the human skin suit. And those people it consumed…”
Try as he might, Calaf found himself struggling to recall victim’s names or faces.
Enkidu snarled but did not respond.
“Are we sure it’s dead?”
“Indeed.” Enkidu nodded. “To the extent that life and death are proper descriptions.”
Calaf raised his eyebrow and cocked his head at Enkidu.
“You want to explain how you were able to move like that? How you knew all about the inner workings of that demonic creature?”
A sudden wind gust kicked up sand between the pair. The gaggle of charmed subjects in the Piper Demon’s collection swayed but did not stir, with the death of their enchanter.
“No.” Enkidu tucked his hand-me-down sword behind his elbow. “I don’t have to.”
Nightmare Slain.
You there, reader. We're well into Volume 2. How's the story/pacing/whatever going since Jelena and Calaf shacked up? (either way, elaborate in a comments!)
