Aaaaand for those of you who were thinking
"Oh no, Academia Nut has started a new story, the Open Door is doomed!", I should point out that I started that tale on July 11, and you might have noticed that there have been a few updates to TOD since then.
Here's another.
---
Chapter Thirty-six: Darkness
Darts pattering into him uselessly, Lars stalked forward towards the attackers, the darkness acting as no barrier to senses adapted to the infinite lightless void of the Warp. He might not have been able to see
directly, but he could tell where everything was. When it became apparent to the attackers that their poisons and darts were not working on him, they decided to switch tactics and Lars felt some form of magic wash over him. Unfortunately for whoever had cast it, the spell was keyed towards living creatures of this reality, and
not a daemon like Lars.
He could feel their minds and how they were little better than mortal humans. How
dare they fire upon a goddess and a daemon? Just for the insult Lars would kill them. For the injury to Skuld, he would ensure that it wasn’t pleasant. He could feel the haughty pride in all of them, how their confusion at his ability to shrug off their attacks was outweighed by their own smug sense of superiority.
He would enjoy
breaking them of that belief.
The attackers were clustered on a ledge formed by what was probably a tunnel exiting into this cavern. There were four beings arranged in a firing line, with two behind them, each with lines of magical energy leading into them. It however was nothing like how Lars or any other daemon or psychic would perform sorcery. It was too… tentative, in comparison to the ‘Seize the Warp by the throat before it causes your head to explode’ style of Warp sorcery he was used to.
Before these creatures knew what was happening Lars had leapt up to where they had formed their battle lines, causing the front four to jump back a step in surprise, dropping their little hand crossbows to draw their melee weapons. For two of them, it was not enough. Grabbing the centre two warriors by their heads, Lars hoisted them up and hurled them over the edge, causing them to go screaming face first into the hard stone below, their cries abruptly silenced by wet crunches.
Then one of the two rear line creatures finished its spell and hurled a bolt of lightning straight into Lars’ chest. The blast caused some amount of heating damage, but since Lars didn’t have a nervous system or for that matter proper
matter making him up, the vast majority of the damage was superficial.
Lars’ retaliation was…
disproportionate. A single lance of psychic power straight into the sorcerer’s mind was all he did, but there were a few things that made this a little off scale. The first was that Lars’ abilities were oriented around psychically shouting across distances so vast the concept of distance as a concept meaningful to three dimensional creatures broke down. The second was that the last time he had calibrated his psychic attacks it had been against demons who had managed to fight deities capable of direct reality editing to a standstill. The third was that he still had a huge amount of energy stored up from his stay in Hell and that was both supercharging him and making him not give a damn. The fourth was that he’d had a really lousy past two weeks and he really didn’t feel like going easy on someone who had just shot him with a lightning bolt.
The impact tore through the relatively fragile defences of the mind with a degree of violence similar to a berserk Evangelion going to town on a beached whale. The creature’s psyche simply tore like wet tissue paper, the remains of its soul vacating its body with an agonized psychic scream. The shock was so great that the other creatures around it suffered, their brains temporarily thinking that they had died and causing total muscle relaxation for a moment. While it didn’t quite cause them to keel over, it did disrupt the other sorcerer, and more embarrassingly, it caused them all to soil themselves.
Recovering before the warriors, the sorcerer said in a feminine voice, “Kill it!” before she began to chant again, casting a new spell. Shaking off their shock, the warriors finished readying their weapons only to discover Lars was quite capable of blocking their blades with his bare hands and that getting bitch slapped by him knocked out teeth. Knocking a shield aside, he thrust the heel of his palm into his target’s chest so hard it was killed by shards of sternum perforating its heart.
Then the female sorcerer completed her spell and Lars suddenly found himself feeling rather a great deal of pain as the universe tried to violently reject him only to discover that it had nowhere to really put him, so it settled for just warping the fabric of space-time around and within him.
Staggering back, Lars had his guard opened up so that the final remaining warrior managed to bury its sword in his neck. This stung a great deal, but considering that it trapped the blade there and it couldn’t actually kill Lars, it was actually a net loss for the being that had once wielded the sword.
The sorcerer tried something else now, releasing a burst of oddly formed energy that felt a great deal like certain flavours of the Warp tinted with an aspect of psychic command, but Lars batted that aside effortlessly with his mind. Reaching up, he snapped the blade embedded in his neck in two before breaking the arm of the warrior trying to finish him off with a dagger.
He could
taste the remaining two creatures’ fear and confusion, and he revelled in it. This was what it meant to be a daemon. Bloodshed and insanity! Destroying the minds and bodies of his enemies and then feasting upon their flesh and souls after. As the warrior reeled back, in pain, Lars plunged his hand into its chest and the chain mail that offered absolutely no protection against his warp sharp claws. Gleefully, he ripped out its heart, cackling with delight at the dying screams of his victim.
The last remaining member of the party cast one last spell before Lars could turn his full attention on her. Space and time buckled and a hole opened in reality, allowing the sorcerer to leap through, but unfortunately for her Lars found the twisted path easy enough to follow, much to her surprise.
She had not gone far, but she had picked her target well. She stepped through her little hole in reality right next to where Skuld was sleeping under the influence of the dart in her gut, and with lighting quick reflexes managed to get a dagger next to her throat, just in time to enter into a Mexican stand-off with Lars, who had his hands around
her throat.
“Take the knife away from her,
now,” Lars demanded, using his ability to pluck languages out of thin air to good use.
Her arrogant pride quickly returning, the sorceress said, “The fact that you have not taken my head off yet indicates that you are somehow bound to this top-worlder, as I thought you might be. Are you compelled to protect her?”
Suppressing his rage, and suddenly feeling rather disgusted with himself for losing control so spectacularly, Lars thought about it for a moment before he replied, “I am compelled to protect her.” Technically true as his compulsion was that he didn’t want to see the brat get killed, but he left the words ambiguous enough to perhaps let this creature think that he was defending her beyond his own will.
“Then take your claws off my throat,” the sorceress ordered.
“Take your blade off her throat first,” Lars counter demanded.
“No,” the creature replied, pressing in deeper, eliciting a whimper from Skuld in her sleep as a tiny prick of blood was drawn.
“I said
off, not away. I know who has the upper hand here,” Lars demanded.
“No. I saw what you did to my wizard, and while I do not know your breed demon, I am not willing to risk that you might be able to do it again in short order. If I die, goddess only knows where my blade might go as I twitch,” she replied.
Muttering obscenities in Finnish, one of several dozen languages he knew from the souls within him, Lars said, “Just remember that she is only as good as a hostage while alive. She dies,
you die.”
“Release me,” she ordered, and Lars reluctantly replied. Practically purring with smug self-satisfaction, she then said, “Good. Now back up several paces.”
Lars backed up several paces, growling in frustration. The sound was not pretty, and it was not entirely audible as it also had a psychic component, but he could do nothing at the moment
but growl.
Sitting down, the sorceress set Skuld on her lap so that she would be able to keep her unconscious hostage between her and Lars while keeping her dagger at her throat and leaving one hand free. Reaching into a pouch, the sorceress removed a scroll that was curiously imbibed with energy to Lars’ senses and then she spoke a few sharp syllables, followed by a quick message.
“Encountered demon and human. Demon bound to human. Demon wiped out rest of team. Have human hostage, demon at bay. Request back up. Locator activating.”
Carefully observing, Lars felt the message head off into the ether. He could have easily intercepted it and destroyed it, but that would have distracted him and potentially tipped the sorceress off. As the message was sent, the sorceress dropped the scroll and turned something around on her chest, activating a small psychic signal and generating a low blue glow.
Finally seeing his quarry for the first time with actual eyes, Lars discovered that the creature that had Skuld hostage was a humanoid with sharply edged features and pointed ears, somewhat like the descriptions of the Eldar, only with ebon black skin and far less of an alien air. She was adorned in chain mail and a black tabard with spider web filigree, while her cloak seemed to drink what little light there was, helping her to blend into the background. Her white hair was tied back tightly and kept out of her face by a tiara with a single black diamond at the centre. Strapped at her side was an unpleasant looking mace with a definite spider motif going for it.
Lars on the other hand looked like a human sailor wearing a yellow rain coat. While he had looked like that all through the fight, except for his fingers, and the dark skinned creature obviously had some way of seeing in the dark, she was definitely taken aback by his incongruous appearance when fully revealed.
“You think you can unnerve me by concealing your true form?” The sorceress asked with contempt.
“Well, considering the fact that I already made you soil yourself, I doubt I can unnerve you more than I already did without driving you permanently insane,” Lars replied nonchalantly.
Hissing with enormous rage, she spat, “And for that you will
pay demon.”
“Oh, I doubt you can make me pay more than the rest of the multiverse already has,” Lars noted dryly.
“Do you chafe under the dominion of this one?” She asked, obviously sensing an opportunity.
“She’s not exactly the sort I get along readily with, but I don’t particularly have a choice as my superiors would be
displeased should I let anything happen to her,” Lars stated, which was something of an exaggeration as he would probably be able to get away with his neck intact and unsealed in a sword, but the gods wouldn’t be exactly
happy with him letting a young girl like Skuld get killed.
Okay, so as a deity she was probably a couple of centuries old, but she still
acted like an adolescent, which was the important thing in his gods’ eyes.
Incorrect enlightenment passed across the sorceress’ face and she said, “Ah… so the little surface dweller is important to your masters?”
“In a way. I do not attempt to comprehend their plans or plots; I simply do as they tell me. Should you kill that girl, I will have failed their commandments,” Lars explained. Once again, everything he said was not an actual
lie, it was just that his statements were not related to one another in the way he let on.
“So no actual magic binds you to this one?” The black skinned woman asked, tilting the knife slightly.
“Stronger things than mere magic compel me to do what I do,” Lars answered, leaving unsaid the fact that said ‘things’ were compassion, duty, and honour.
“So it would seem. You must protect this one, no? So if I ordered you to do something upon threat to her life?” The sorceress asked.
Lars glared at her and replied, “It would be noted that the
threat is more important than the
action. Push me too far, or into something that might make me disobey the commandments of my lords, and you will see what such actions bring you.”
“But you…” She began.
“Some orders are stronger than others. Attempt to divine them at your own risk,” Lars replied with a growl.
“Duly noted,” the sorceress replied. “However, a demon of your calibre would make a formidable ally to my house.”
“So I would. Just remember that you will have to keep the blade at her throat at all times or I will take my revenge,” Lars replied.
“We will see. If no magic binds you yet, then that simplifies binding you to us,” the sorceress sneered.
“What makes you think you will succeed?” Lars countered. While he had little doubt that these creatures knew how to bind
demons, if they thought their methods would work the same on
daemons, they were sorely mistaken.
The sound of others arriving at the ledge where the battle had taken place ended the conversation, the dark skinned woman finishing by saying, “We will see.”
---
I like Lars. He's fun to write.
I love learning. Teach me. I will listen.
You know, if Christian dogma included a ten-foot tall Jesus walking around in battle armor and smashing retarded cultists with a gaint mace, I might just convert - Noble Ire on Jesus smashing Scientologists