Lillene

Enjoy!

The Lesser Demon of Wrath was incredibly cute, far cuter than the Lesser Demon of Sorrow. Serenity was pretty confident that other people wouldn’t think so, but there was something about how tiny and aggressive it was that made it positively endearing.

As he watched, it tried to headbutt its way through the bars of its cage. It wasn’t making any progress, but it kept trying. Serenity tried to suppress his grin, but it kept returning whenever the adorable ball of aggression smacked into the cage. 

The cage itself was clearly custom-made, with half-inch-wide bars welded to a two-foot-wide circular base. The bars were bent together near the top and welded to a much smaller open circle, one that looked wide enough for the Lesser Demon of Wrath to fit through without much extra space. Serenity couldn’t imagine how they got it in there unless they somehow got it to move in itself.

Actually, that was probably the answer. It wasn’t that hard to get a Wrath Demon to do something, especially a Lesser Wrath Demon. All you had to do was give it something to attack and it would.

A flat bar was stuck through the open circle and secured from the inside; that looked deliberate, so that if the cage somehow fell over, the Wrath Demon wouldn’t be able to push its way out. It also seemed to provide a deliberate handhold to move the cage, since the Wrath Demon couldn’t get up that high as long as the cage was more or less upright.

“When we first brought it in, it tried to eat the cage,” Russ admitted. “We’ve had to move it a couple times. This one seems to be holding, though. Any idea what it is? It looks almost like a hellhound but it’s not quite canine enough for that.”

“It’s a Lesser Demon of Wrath. Yes, like the Lesser Demon of Sorrow. This is a much smaller one, obviously; you said something about the summoning being interrupted?” Serenity knew that demons came in a wide range of sizes, but he’d never actually seen one this small before. It was about the size of a real badger kit, well under the size of the Lesser Demons of Wrath Serenity encountered on Asihanya. If there was such a thing as a Least Demon of Wrath, Serenity would have assumed that was what this was, but it was identical to a Lesser Demon of Wrath in everything except size. It probably had to grow before anything else could happen. 

It was a monster, but the monster core Serenity could faintly sense was absolutely tiny, suited to its small size. That size was probably why the cage was able to hold it.

“That’s what the report said. I think Red called the people who were there; she’ll have the details. Are you ready to see the remains from the summoning rituals?” Russ tapped the table the cage sat on. The noise attracted the attention of the Lesser Demon of Wrath; it charged the bars. Russ snatched his hand off the table as the impact from the Wrath Demon made the cage rock in place.

Serenity chuckled. The little demon was so cute when it did that! “What do you think will happen to the little guy here?”

Russ gave Serenity a look he couldn’t read. Serenity didn’t pay too much attention to it; the Wrath Demon had his attention. 

“Now that we know what it is? It’ll be retained as long as it’s useful as evidence, then it’ll be killed.”  Russ sighed. “You’re going to want to give it to the dungeon, aren’t you? Do you think it’s going to put in a demon floor?”

Serenity shook his head. “Two demons isn’t enough for that. It’s still worth collecting for her, though. The little guy is adorable!”

“I will never understand why people think murder-balls are cute.” Russ shook his head. “Still, I think I can get it released to you in the next few days as long as you agree to take care of it and make sure to keep it available in case it’s necessary. Brown will be happy he doesn’t have to take care of it anymore.”

“Sounds good,” Serenity agreed. “It should be pretty easy to take care of. I’ll have to think of a better way to keep it confined, though. It must be bored.”

Russ snorted. “I’m amazed it hasn’t given itself a concussion. We tried putting some towels in there as padding, but it just tore them up. The same thing happened when we tried adding padding. Really, the only thing that works at all is the cover; I wouldn’t have thought to try that but Quincy thought it might quiet down when it was dark.”

“Like a bird?” Serenity was surprised by that; he’d seen Wrath Demons active in all sorts of light levels. When he thought about it, though, those were generally variants; he couldn’t think of any time he’d seen Lesser Wrath Demons active in the dark. Perhaps it was an evolution or even a group of evolutions? 

He couldn’t be certain. He was more familiar with the later variants, after all; basic Lesser Wrath Demons stopped appearing in dungeons past roughly Tier Five or Six. They just weren’t very strong. Dungeons that low tended to be really straightforward, too; it was entirely possible that he’d never been in a completely dark dungeon until he was above that Tier himself.

“Yeah, like a bird. She has a couple of parakeets; I think that’s where she got the idea. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work all the time; it really won’t sleep more than ten or twelve hours at a time.” Russ shook his head. “That’s probably to be expected. It sleeps at night, it doesn’t live in the dark.”

Russ tapped the table again, then walked over to the bookcase full of boxes while the Lesser Demon of Wrath threw itself against the cage bars. “Do you want to start the ones that fully triggered or the one that was broken early?”

Serenity tore his attention away from the playing demon. “Uh. One of the fully triggered ones. But we’d better move this guy off the table or he’s going to keep grabbing my attention.”

Russ snorted at that, but picked the cage up and moved it next to the bookcase, then tossed a threadbare towel over the top. “About one time in four, the monster manages to get ahold of whatever we cover the cage with. Towels seem to work pretty well; even if it tears the towel up, it’s quiet and seems about as happy as it can be. I think it likes destroying things.”

That didn’t seem unlikely for a Demon of Wrath.

Russ pulled a box off the shelf and set it on the table, then opened it. Strangely, it held a shredded box. “This is what we recovered after the first one, the one that was sent to -” Russ stopped.

“Sent where?” Serenity hadn’t noticed before, but all Russ had said about the first incident was that it targeted one of the homes that was on the list they’d gotten from the man who tried to cheat people out of their homes with suggestion magic and that it was found when it was reported as a suspicious package. That didn’t seem strange until Russ tried not to say where it was found.

Russ shook his head. “Sent to one of the houses on the list. I have the recording from inside the bomb truck…”

The next two hours were filled with looking over the evidence left behind from the three summonings that actually happened. The remains from the two that completed were nearly identical. 

Serenity couldn’t rebuild the spellform from them, but the residue easily made it obvious that the summons wasn’t reaching out to the Origin. Instead, there was a distinct hint of space affinity or something like it. Distance affinity, perhaps? Serenity wasn’t certain. It wasn’t exactly the same as his spacetime affinity, even without the temporal aspect, but it was close. It wasn’t enough to figure out exactly where it was reaching out to. 

The third one, the one that ended up with the tiny Wrath Demon in the cage, was even more helpful because it was far more intact. From it, Serenity was able to figure out that the pottery was actually consumed by the spell itself to create the connection. It still wasn’t entirely clear where the connection went, but it was enough to solidify Serenity’s opinion that this was reaching somewhere and pulling things in, not creating them. 

From what Serenity knew of summoning, that was unusual. If you wanted to call something in, you had to be able to reach exactly what you wanted; that was why most summoners were actually making temporary facsimiles of what they summoned instead of teleporting in the real thing. It was easier, much cheaper (usually) and far more likely to actually get you what you wanted.

Admittedly, Serenity wasn’t a summoner. If the summoning classes he’d taken so long ago were like the death magic classes, they’d left enough out that the truth of the matter might be completely different from the little he remembered. 

Unfortunately, none of the three boxes had what he really wanted: a way to find the summoner. Whatever signature they’d once had was gone, wiped out and overwritten with a demonic smell that matched the Wrath Demon in the cage or something similar enough that they had to be the ones that were killed. Since Serenity knew the Lesser Wrath Demon wasn’t the mind behind it all, it didn’t help.

“Where are the ones that didn’t get triggered?” Serenity knew there should be more than three; there were five addresses on the list Russ gave him. “For that matter, where’s the one that went to Rissa’s house?”

Her house was on the list, after all. Serenity knew Russ and Phoebe were taking care of it, since Rissa had decided against selling it, but he hadn’t been back in a while. They’d basically moved out before Rissa joined Serenity in A’Atla and he hadn’t seen a reason to move back. They’d been mostly out of Rissa’s house for a while even before that, but she made sure to finish the move.

Russ pointed silently at one of the torn apart boxes. Serenity thought it was the “first one,” which explained why Russ hadn’t wanted to say where the box went. At least Serenity knew it hadn’t harmed anyone, unlike the second box; that was the important thing.

Russ kept his eyes on Serenity. After a moment, he seemed to relax a little; was he expecting Serenity to get upset or something? “The unopened ones are being kept in the damaged bomb truck. It’s not the best place for them, since we know the monsters, demons, can go through the walls. No one wanted to keep them in here, though, where they could get accidentally opened. No one’s getting into the back of the bomb truck who isn’t supposed to, so they seem safer there.”

The bomb truck was at the central maintenance site for the city’s vehicles, waiting on parts. It’d been there since the day after the fight and would likely be there for several more months. On the way there, Russ had the radio on, tuned to a local news station. “...plant monsters that look like giant thorns. Our very own Michael Willowby is on the scene. Michael, what do you see?”

“Truthfully, not much. There’s a monster about twice as tall as I am. I guess you could call it a giant thorn, if thorns come in neon pink. It seems to be almost completely resistant to gunfire, so we’re waiting for UERT…”

Lillene

What a young badger is called varies by location; around here, they’re called kits. Elsewhere, they might be called cubs. I don’t know why the difference exists, but kit is the term Serenity would know.