Chương 17: Giant Engagement

The first recorded demons to have appeared were overwhelmingly drawn from the furred beastkin peoples of northern Vyrmgaard: deerkin, elkkin, bearkin, wolfkin, and other coldland races adapted to the continent's long winters. As they all lived in the furthest of the furthest north where the Lead Rift opened in 527 AN, they were met with the strongest and most concentrated wave of astral lead corruption almost immediately. There was no chance for them to run away.

Most likely, they didn't even realize a rift had opened over their heads before they started feeling unwell. Beastkin bodies, already powerful, furred, horned, clawed, and thick-boned by nature, prove to be especially suitable vessels for astral lead's violent reshaping. That is why even after decades and centuries have passed—after the astral lead corruption has spread all across the Vyrmgaard Continent and is now threatening the rest of the world—beastkin demons remain the foundation of all demonkind.

—Excerpt from 'On the Beasts of Tragedy', Written by Naghari the Sage Orland hit the slope hard and nearly lost his feet within the first three steps. The hill down into Zimnerudik was steeper than it'd looked from above, with loose soil, wet leaves, and hidden stones all trying to betray him at once. Fortunately, he was used to running through the woods. He lowered his body, kept his arms spread for balance, and let gravity drag him faster and faster towards the town.

Somewhere above and behind him, Kazimir shouted something that sounded a lot like a warning, but he had eyes only for the demons in the town below. Citizens fled past the foot of the slope in clumsy, terrified waves. A woman with soot all over her face dragged two children by their collars. A miner limped with blood running down one arm, still carrying his pickaxe.

A few townsfolk saw Orland barrelling down at them and jumped aside, shouting in panic, but he hit the first street hard enough for his knees to ache, then kept running towards the town square where the fighting was fiercest.

"Fear… not?" he shouted, trying to recall any line he could from Baba Marza's storybook.

"I'm here?" A few soldiers had formed a ragged line near the mouth of the square, trying to keep the elkkin demons from spreading out and into the homes, but they were being battered apart club by club. One demon in particular towered near the edge of the formation, its antlers capped with metal growths and its shoulders patched with shimmering lead. A soldier lay before it with one leg twisted and his shield split down the middle.

The man still tried to crawl back, but the demon raised its bone club with both hands, snarling in fury. That guy! Go! He shoved mana into his gauntlet and threw his right arm back. The street answered. A huge wad of earth tore from between the cobblestones, clumping and hardening behind him into a crude ten-mana earth fist about the size of his head. As the demon started bringing its club down on the fallen soldier, he snarled back and punched his gauntlet forward.

The earth fist shot over his shoulder and slammed straight into the demon's face, smashing it back with a wet metallic crunch, and the demon toppled without rising. A grin crawled across his face before he could stop it. That wasn't so hard. But then he remembered this was the same ten-mana earth fist he'd used against Kazimir in the Belograd Manor. It was about the same size, and he'd swung it with just about the same force.

If it killed the elkkin demon in one swing, but only brought Kazimir down to his knees for less than ten, maybe twenty seconds… His grin faded a little as he glanced around the street, looking for the middle-aged man. He hadn't gotten around to asking, but what the hell was Kazimir's grade, anyways? A flash of frostfire cracked several streets away, followed by the sharp scream of a demon and Kazimir's distant orders of evacuation. Oh, whatever. I'll just ask him lat—"Look out!" the soldier at his feet rasped.

Orland whipped his head around. His dramatic entrance had attracted attention. The five nearby elkkin demons had stopped smashing through buildings, carts, and the already weakened formation of soldiers to glare at him with dull silver eyes. There were four of them. Their antlers dipped, their shoulders, and their fingers tightened around their bone clubs, making Orland tense as well. Then one of them charged. It came at him faster than he expected.

Its hooves cracked against the cobbles as it lowered its head and raised its club, and Orland planted his feet, ripping another ten-mana earth fist from the ground and wrapped his entire gauntlet around in it. Defense is for losers! With a sharp exhale, he punched forward again, throwing his earth fist straight at the charging demon's face—but this time, the demon simply headbutted his fist and shattered it into a dozen fragments, its head barely snapping back. Orland blinked.

Not good— The demon reached him, club swinging at his head. He jerked his gauntlet up to block. His regenerating clothes didn't do much against that, and neither did being stubborn. His gauntlet absorbed most of the impact, but the force still hurled him sideways, and he crashed into a nearby wall hard enough to knock the breath clean out of him. Dust burst around his shoulders, and his skull rang. For a second, he tasted blood and old plaster, so he wheezed as he tried to scramble onto his feet. Tough bastard.

So that first demon just wasn't prepared to eat my fist? No time to think. The demon had already chased him to the wall, raising its club to smash his head in, so he rolled over, dodged the smash, and glared up at the demon. Sharp. He needed something sharp. He pressed his gauntlet's fingers together to make a knife-like hand, then launched an uppercut as he got up on one knee, ripping a thin five-mana earth spike from the ground before him.

The spike shot up, punching through the underside of the demon's jaw and out the top of its skull. The demon froze with its club still raised before dropping, shimmering blood leaking from its head. Orland threw himself back onto his feet, gasping for breath, and tried to shake the shaking out of his right arm. No good, though. The impact still rang through his bones. He'd probably need to use his bloodreturn flask to make a healing potion, but he could only do that after the fight.

"Alright," he muttered, licking blood off his lips.

"Blunt force won't work, but sharp things will." While the other four elkkin demons advanced towards him slowly, he thrust his gauntlet and yanked out four more clumps of earth around him, trying to shave them all into five-mana spikes at once—but that was where the problem came in. He had to visualize every step: rip out a clump of earth, keep it hovering, compress it, shave it down, sharpen the point, and then repeat that three more times.

He made his first spike quickly enough, but when he had to focus on hovering it while shaving the second spike, sweat slipped down his temple. Then both spikes started wobbling unevenly as he focused on shaving the third spike. The demons had enough of watching him work. Two more demons charged him from opposite corners of the street before he could finish his fourth spike. Shit! Just throw them as they are! He jerked his gauntlet forward, throwing two spikes at the left one and one spike at the right one.

His spikes flew quickly enough, but the left demon batted them aside with their clubs, shattering them out of the air. The right demon just jerked its body aside and ran past the spike, club raised high enough to cave his chest in. Orland poured mana into his sylph shoes and jumped. His first burst of wind launched him above the swinging club. The second burst carried him over the demons' heads and up onto a low, slanted roof.

He landed hard on the tiles, one knee almost buckling, then turned with a growl and ripped a dozen one-mana earth tiles free with his gauntlet. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"What about this?" he shouted. He stabbed his gauntlet forward, and the tiles whipped down in a rapid spray at the demons' heads. Tile after tile cracked against their antlers, brows, throats, shoulders—and they definitely sounded like they were hitting hard enough that even Rusalka's armored townsguard would drop—but the elkkin demons only braced, glaring up at him as the tiles shattered across their lead-patched bodies and thick skulls. One of them shook its head as his barrage ended, evidently irritated.

Oh, come on. Not a single one hit their eyes of somethi— The other two demons had circled around the back of the house and smashed their clubs into the base, causing the whole building to lurch. The back wall folded in, and the tiles under Orland's feet tilted hard enough that he lost his balance instantly. Huh? He jumped as the roof collapsed under him, kicked off a falling beam with one burst from his sylph shoes, then hit the street in a rough roll that scraped his shoulder and hip.

His clothes began stitching themselves back together almost immediately, but his bones didn't share the trick. He pushed himself onto one knee, breath sawing in and out, trying to think. Could he make the ground swallow them? Maybe. But trying to do so might take more mana than he could spare. Could he cut their ankles? Maybe if they stood still like idiots, but they didn't seem like dumb brutes. Could he use their own clubs against him? Not unless bones counted as earth, which he doubted.

What were earthly materials in the first place, anyways? But now all four demons rushed him at the same time, and for one, awful moment, time seemed to stretch just enough for him to understand his situation properly. The first demon he'd killed had died because it hadn't seen him coming. The second had died because he'd found a gap in its lead-armored fur and got lucky. These four demons charged at him with their chin tucked so he couldn't possibly repeat his tricks, which meant he just had to suck it up for now.

He gritted his teeth and clenched his gauntlet, ready to rip up a ten-mana earth wall even if it emptied his chest and made Kazimir call him a fool for three days straight. Better a living fool than a dead Hero with expensive shoes. If he could just protect himself for a little while, he could think up a new way to— THOOM. A war horn blasted from afar, making the elkkin demons flinch and halt. Orland looked off to the side as well, his gauntlet still ready to pull up a wall.

On a distant roof a few streets over, a silhouette stood in shadow against the dimming sky. They were large, broad, and cloaked from head to toe, and for a second, Orland saw the glint of armor reflecting back at him. Then the figure jumped, arcing across what must be two streets in a single leap, and smashed into the ground before the two demons on Orland's left. The newcomer rose slowly. She was a lady. A very large lady.

She was taller than any man he'd ever seen, broad with muscle under heavy iron armor seemingly assembled around her entire body in overlapping plates. A cape with metal grid-like patterns trailed from her pauldrons. Her skin was dark and deeply tanned where he could see it above her neck, but while a thick black braid ran down her back like a tail—longer than any hair had a right to be in a fight—her face was covered by a dark veil strapped around her forehead, hiding her expression. She was no townsguard.

Nor a miner. Nor a soldier.

"... Who the hell?" he muttered aloud. The giant lady only looked at him briefly as she straightened, ending up twice his height. Then she turned her attention to the demons surrounding him, and she let a low growl from behind her veil." Kalani, sobaks!" she shouted. The nearest elkkin demon twitched an eye, then swung its bone club straight at her head. She didn't dodge. Instead, she raised her left arm, and her scale-layered bracer flashed bright blue as the club slammed into it.

She herself held firm, barely even budging from the impact. Orland raised a brow. So did the demon. But before the demon could draw its club back, she reached behind her and swung a giant warhammer—layered with the same black scales—back into the demon's head. The scales on the hammerhead flashed a fleeting ripple of bright red on impact, and the energy detonated the demon's head.

Bones, horns, and lead-patched fur exploded everywhere with a single swing, and the demon dropped so hard the other three took an unconscious step back. For Orland's part, he'd taken one step away from her as well. … Huh. But then the remaining three demons regrouped at once. Whatever instincts they had decided she was the much bigger threat—and a threat they couldn't run from—so they all ignored Orland entirely and charged her together, clubs and mouths opened in silver-eyed rage.

The lady planted one foot forward and stomped, cracking the street hard enough that the demons stumbled. One lost its footing. Another lurched sideways. The last was semi-prepared for it. The third demon alone reached her first, but its swing came too wide, too unbalanced, so the lady shot a giant hand out and grabbed its head with the speed of a darting hummingbird, crushing its skull before its swing could even finish. The other two finally reached her, careful not to get in her grabbing range.

They swung their clubs at her while shouting in demon tongue, each attack surging at speeds Orland could barely follow—and the lady blocked attack after attack with her armor, her scales flashing blue wherever she intercepted their attack. Her stance was solid, her footwork steady, and when the openings presented themselves, she swung her warhammer twice in quick succession: once upwards in a diagonal cross, the second straight down in a log-chopping motion.

Both swings flashed red as they went out, detonating the first demon's torso and smashing the second demon's head into its neck. More demons came roaring from the town square further behind Orland. Seven, eight, nine of them… there seemed no end to them. But while Orland backed off to the side of the street, not wanting to get caught up in the fighting, the lady merely whipped her head at the new arrivals and pointed her warhammer at them.

"Sharsana!" she roared.

"Feast!" Then the ground beside her burst open, and a hound-sized beast tore out of the soil. It had a mole's wide digging claws, a drake's plated snout, and hundreds of little spikes running along its back. Its armored eyelids blinked open to reveal flesh-hungry crimson eyes, and before Orland knew it, it launched itself at the charging demons to rip into their legs.

The demons all staggered and stumbled, but the little mole-beast was much faster than it looked as well, their swings only grazing its scales as it darted between their legs. Another wave of eight demons rushed in from behind the lady, on the opposite side of the street, but they were so focused on the lady and the rampaging mole-beast that they didn't notice Kazimir stepping out of a side alley, twirling his frostfire chainblade.

"Not even speech-capable demons, eh?" the man muttered.

"Just low-grade fodder to distract and disorient. That's all you are." And with a single whip of his chainblade, he decapitated all eight demons, spattering shimmering blood across the street and onto the lady's cape. She hadn't noticed the demons or him coming in from behind her, for that matter, so she whirled and seemingly gave him a glare as he reeled his chainblade back into its sword form—but neither of them noticed a third wave of demons coming in from another side alley. Orland did.

He reached his gauntlet out, visualised grabbing the entire mouth of the alley, and ripped a twenty-mana spike straight up to impale the three demons through the stomach. Just like that, the demons still pouring out of the mine entrance in the town square faltered. Between the mole-beast, the lady, Kazimir, Orland, and the scattering of wounded soldiers around the town, they seemed to recognize bad odds when they saw it. One by one, they turned tail and fled back into the mine.

Neither Kazimir nor the lady stopped them from running, though the mole-beast did have its fun tearing through the last of the demons before it looked around at its master, blinking as if asking for permission to pursue." Nyet, Sharsana," she said, shaking her head.

"Let them flee. They shall carry tales of our wrath in trembling tongues." As the lead storm continued churning around the outskirts of the town, forming a shimmering wall, the wounded soldiers around the square finally began to stand and breathe again. Of course, they were all looking at the three new arrivals who'd come in out of nowhere, but for Orland and Kazimir's part, they were both staring at the armored lady.

While the little mole-beast thing curled affectionately around her legs—snorting and pawing at the ground while its plated tail thumped lazily against the cobbles—the lady ignored everyone else staring at her and stared back at Orland instead. Orland tensed. He still couldn't see a single trace of her face beneath the dark veil strapped around her head, but he could feel her staring at him specifically. Not at Kazimir, and not at the soldiers. Him. Why?

"... W-Who are you people?" a man said from behind Orland. He turned to see it was the wounded soldier he'd saved earlier with the earth fist, now having pushed himself upright and limping along a wall.

"That mask… and that gauntlet… might you be—" The giant lady cut the man off by planting her warhammer into the ground with a heavy thunk. Once the man was frightened into submission, she crossed her arms over her chest, making her look even bigger—as if she weren't already towering at least a head over every grown man in the square.

"My name," she declared proudly, "is Miriyela Doch Kamenrody Kamengradskaya, the Sixth Princess of Kamengrad, Dwarven Daughter of Stone-Crown Blood, and one of the six prophesied companions of the Fifth Hero." Then she suddenly dropped onto one knee before Orland, reaching towards her belt and pulling out a broken silver crown. One side of the crown was shattered inwards, as though something enormous had crushed it long ago.

"Fifth Hero, He Who Wields the Star-Element Gauntlet," she announced.

"By blood of fallen kiln, and by duty entrusted upon my royal lineage, I humbly request your hand in marriage." She lowered her head then, lifting the broken crown towards him with both hands.

"You must become the King of Kamengrad." Orland blinked. He looked at her crown. Then at Kazimir. Then at the soldiers. Then he looked back at the lady, putting on as confident a smile as he could muster.

"I think you got the wrong guy," he lied.