Announcement

As the image above declares, Book 1 of this story, titled Grease and Gambits, is now available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited! Give it a read -- or, if you've already read it (which you probably have...since you're here, after all), tell your friends and neighbors!

The four tags from the Printchy Chambels auction were uncovered by a demonic demivirus thousands of times larger than its non-demi counterparts. With craggy wireframe hands, it triumphantly held the cluster of wooden tags above its diamond head, singing in twelve voices.

The infiltrators had taken what they wanted to take. Yet they weren’t leaving.

The virus left to deliver the goods, skittering through a shifting, destroying mass of demons. It was a motley crowd of demijellies and demiviruses, engorged quadrupedal fetuses from the lower lobes of Illthink, gem gnomes, cyclopic cliones, and others still uncategorized. All alike could have come from the depths of an ocean or a dream.

They stayed because there was still so much destruction to wreak—and looting and pilfering besides.

Overburdened with too many bodies, the stairway to the second floor collapsed, to raucous cheers. Demons improvised detours to the second floor, and under the force of so many climbing claws and slimy appendages, wood and pillars and iron bars creaked and gave way.

For all the vases and decorative plates they lifted over their heads or lugged under arms, though, there were surprisingly few living spoils...

Felicity screamed and hammered a demijellyfish’s back (which was just more tentacles) with pathetic fists. Getting carried over the shoulder bag-of-potatoes style has a way of making people flustered, so it took a moment before she shaped her arms into masses of cutting blade-shaped bark.

The soft tentacles should’ve been punctured and shredded. Instead they hardened on contact, taking the damage as surface cracks. The jellyfish laughed and kept walking.

The imp stopped, squinted at her palm, and morphed the center of it into a point only as long as a nail. “How about this...”

Felicity wriggled to the side—as much as she could, in the jelly’s grip—and smacked the nail into the back of their head, under the cap. The head hardened. The nail did hardly any damage...until it extended, driving itself further and then, before the enemy could realize what was happening, through.

A tiny spear broke through their forehead, loosing a pinprick of hellsmoke. That pinprick became a burst. Staggering forward with a gasp, the jelly let Felicity tuck and roll to the floor.

“Ha ha!” she said, allowing herself a fist-pump before scurrying away. Immediately she was scooped up by a different jellyfish who’d seen her last trick and, determined not to fall for it, had already crystallized their entire body. “Aw.”

This kidnapper stomped through the ever-shifting, rampaging crowd and thought up a new destination: their home in Styx. As their sights shifted, their steps grew heavier, more deliberate...no, actually they were just getting slower, until the demijellyfish came to a complete, confused halt.

Numb, moving against their will, the demon’s arm-tentacles fell slack to their side, the crystal clanging against their body. Felicity fell and scampered a second time. A glance backward told her that this time she was saved by silvery soul threads coiled around the jelly’s limbs.

A few steps later and she’d found Darling, her six arms and thirty fingers extended. Threads unspooled from every possible joint: knuckles, elbows, even the space between her head and neck. But while many were pulled taut, just as many had been cut.

Behind Darling, back-to-back with her, was Dodd. She held a dagger in one hand and her increasingly damaged, increasingly sad dented chakram in the other. Both were ablaze with controlled flames.

For the moment, they’d driven foes off! Felicity took it all in. “Between your soul control, your flames, and my living-weapon-ness,” she said, a hint of wonder in her voice, “we’ll...we’ll probably still not be able to make it! I mean, we’re imps and a menial. They’re not much better, but there’s like a thousand of them!”

“W-we can do something,” said Dodd, but she was wincing. She knew Felicity was right.

“And we were waiting on Agi,” Darling admitted.

Agi wouldn’t be much stronger either—the best he could do was escape, taking a few people and possessions out with him. It looked to Felicity like he’d saved nothing but his own hide, though.

A face full of diamond sent Dodd sprawling and knocked her weapons to the floor. A virus had come near, snarling, swinging its head like a blinding mace. Broken soul thread trailed behind.

Darling whirled around, eyes wide, raising a hand high to strangle the virus with a new one. She was buffeted by an energy blast in her side that split her clean in two, disintegrating even the webbing.

Felicity yelped and hit the dirt. Nothing to do now but attain fetal position and hope her new captives were generous.

Shadows and heavy feet passed over her. Something crushed her arm and moved on. Maybe she’d get trampled soon, die, and her soul gem remains would get kicked into a corner. Her mind went wild with useless thoughts.

W-wait—

Another shadow passed, followed by a moment of odd calm.

She peeked out from between her fingers.

Just inches above her, Agi gritted his teeth as he struggled to overpower a gnome sword against sword. He pushed against twin stone blades with the Hellrazor, which pulsed with hissing black energy. At the sight of him, her heart grew more hopeful than she cared to admit.

Dodd and Darling—had they made it to the protection of his shadow?

And Nyx—that beam of light sent up through the crowd—was it them, had he brought them back? Still had a chance, then, didn’t they?