Lillene

Enjoy!

Misty watched in awe as the light expanded from two points to a pair of blobs, one stretching taller and the other wider. The light faded as it stretched, but it gave Misty and Nat time to point their flashlights at the two forming demons. Misty couldn’t really see by Nat’s flashlight, but that was fine; she could point her own flashlight at each demon. It gave enough light to see by.

The demon on the left, where Nat set down the piece of paper for the demon Misty picked out, was the tall one. She knew from the picture that it was going to be disappointing. Resolve demons apparently looked like people, only covered in fur. There was also something funny about the shoulders, they seemed to stick up and to the sides for some reason, but she wasn’t able to make out more than that. The picture didn’t show horns or even ears on the top of its head; it was really pretty boring, just a person covered in gray fur.

The demon forming in front of her looked a lot more interesting. Yes, it basically still looked like a person, but it was a really odd looking person. First of all, it was short, probably under four feet tall. It didn’t look like a child at all, though; it was wide and muscular. Any child that big would have looked fat, but the Resolve Demon didn’t look fat at all. Instead, it looked a lot like a really buff wrestler who just happened to also be really short and covered in fur.

Second, the fur wasn’t the plain gray shown in the picture. It was mostly a pale gray, but there were splotches of color spread across the demon’s body. Above the demon’s waist, they were generally short lines; below that, they curved and even swirled in places. Some were closer to dots than lines, but those were generally inside a swirl on the demon’s lower half. It seemed like a hunter’s camouflage to Misty, even though it didn’t look at all like the camo pattern. It did seem to make the demon a bit harder to see at night even though his coat was light enough he should have been easy to make out.

The last part of the Resolve Demon that took shape was also the least human. Its shoulders weren’t strange; instead, it had something that looked like another set of shoulders attached to a pair of arms coming out of its back. If it had had feathers, Misty imagined it would look something like a bird’s wing, but it didn’t even have the skin of a bat’s wings. Instead, emerging from the back where wings could have been was a second pair of arms. They were shaped strangely, but they were definitely arms. They even ended in a pair of hands that looked normal and human, though like the rest of the demon’s body they were covered in gray fur.

Weirdly, it was when she recognized the things on the ends of the demon’s second pair of upper limbs that Misty started feeling creeped out by the demon. It was just wrong. 

As she watched, the Resolve Demon stretched slowly. Since her demon was still stuck in its summoning cage, Mostly could take the time to get a good look at Nat’s demon. She still didn’t know what her friend wanted to call on. Nat’s demon was short and almost round. For a long moment, it looked so much like a beachball with legs that Misty wanted to poke it, maybe even toss it back and forth with Nat.

It took some time to make out the details: those weren’t legs. They didn’t have any joints. Worse, the “beachball” was a bunch of long tendrils curled up. Misty thought they might be curled around something, but she couldn’t make out what it was. What she could see was that every now and then one of them would shift away from the ball, usually, up, then flick out towards the edges of its magical cage like a whip. 

Sometimes it even hit the magical barriers, which made it very obvious that they were there. Each time, a slight glow appeared where the beachball demon hit it. Misty could see that each time it smashed a tentacle against the barrier, it seemed to hurt the beachball demon; it winced and something dripped from the end of the tentacle that hit the barrier. The pain didn’t slow the demon down; it kept slowly testing the barrier.

Misty turned the light back to her own demon. After the beachball demon, it seemed positively wholesome and reassuring. Sure, she’d have to get used to a pair or wing-arms, but other than that it was just like a fuzzy teddy bear, wasn’t it? It was a dangerous, muscular fuzzy teddy bear, but as long as it wasn’t dangerous to her that was exactly what she wanted.

On the far side of the circle, Nat started chanting again. Misty wasn’t sure why, but she looked down at the papers she held. She’d read the part she was supposed to read, but maybe there was more?

Misty checked both sides of both pieces of paper. There wasn’t anything she’d missed. She couldn’t decide if she was supposed to repeat the chant now or not; it didn’t say that she needed to do anything more than what she’d already done, but Nat was. On the other hand, Nat did most of the spell; she’d chanted both before and after Misty did. This was probably more of the same.

“Almost too late.” A soft voice from behind Misty made her swing around and wave her flashlight into the darkness. It took her a moment to find the man hurrying towards the two of them. She might have missed him if her light hadn’t shone brightly when it hit his long, slightly curved, silver horns.

Wait, horns? Was that another demon? Why was there another demon here?

Serenity hurried towards the park on his flyer. When he reached the park, he slowed down for a moment and searched for a route that led over to where the picture was taken; which he didn’t actually have to follow a path on the flyer, it was possible that if he didn’t, he’d run into an unexpected obstacle. Despite the fact that Kansas was supposed to be flat, the landscape around him wasn’t flat; it wasn’t mountainous, but it was rough enough that he’d seen a three-foot dropoff on one side of the road on the way from the closest portal. 

His flyer could go over that, it was designed for really rough terrain, but climbing up that high through the air was slow. It was actually faster to rise if you were moving forward; that was a limitation built into the spell’s design. Serenity completely understood why; whoever made it had optimized it for what it did the most, which meant that it was horribly inefficient and slow when it was just climbing. It was a reasonable tradeoff and probably meant that he arrived a lot faster than he would have if it hadn’t been optimized for forward movement. 

When Serenity was finally able to make out the spell in the distance, he stopped distracting himself with thoughts of the flyer. He was nervous; he really wanted this situation to give him the last of the information he needed to hunt down the demon lord that attacked A’Atla, the demon lord who was probably behind the curse on Rissa and her family. The demon lord had been behind entirely too many of the issues plaguing Earth already; Serenity wanted to make sure that would stop.

The spell lit up the park to Serenity’s magesight. He could even hear chanting, though the chanting wasn’t accompanied by mana movement; it wasn’t part of a spell. As he got close enough, he could see that the spell was still in place; there were two demons inside it and two young girls standing just outside the circle. The circle was active; that was definitely good news. 

Serenity didn’t recognize the illuminated demon. It looked a lot like his Arcane Asura shape, except that it was hornless, more muscular, far shorter, covered in fur like the wiry fur of a Wrath demon, and the wings were distorted into a second pair of arms. It was probably a rare variant, perhaps one of the demon types that didn’t like to fight despite its shape. There were so many different types of demons; he could only come up with the proper names for a fraction of them without looking them up, and those were generally the common ones.

“Almost too late,” he muttered. It would have been better if he’d arrived before the demons did. At least he was here before the spell’s protective barrier fell.

Serenity got a glimpse of the second demon as the girl holding the flashlight swung it around to see him. It looked like a ball held up by a couple of tentacles, with a smaller tendril slapping the air. Serenity really hoped he’d seen it wrong, because the first thing that came to mind for that shape was an assassination demon.

That wasn’t its real name, of course, but everyone called it an assassination or killer demon. Other demons killed, of course, but assassination demons were experts at getting past their targets’ defenses. There were even rumors that older assassination demons could slip right past shields. 

Serenity probably wouldn’t have recognized it if the Final Reaper hadn’t been targeted by them repeatedly. He could confirm that some assassination demons could slip past some shields, but he’d never had one get past his personal shield, only the ones protecting the area. Serenity suspected that was a matter of tuning; his personal shields were specifically set against all sorts of dangers, but the area shields were dumber. The assassination demon could also spend the time it needed to get past area shields, while the Final Reaper would have noticed if something studied his personal shield and tried to get past it.

Serenity dug in his pocket and pulled out a mini flashlight. It was a better choice than a spell now that he was back on Earth. He could have produced the same effect from his magitech, but he hadn’t settled where he wanted it with Aide yet. Everywhere he thought of had some issues, so for now a flashlight he could put down was the best choice.

The chanting came from the other side of the circle. It seemed to speed up as Serenity focused the light on the ball-like demon. He watched it test the barrier it was inside and sighed internally; it almost certainly was an assassination demon. He’d kill it first. They were slippery and annoying to fight, but if he killed it before it had a chance to spread itself out he might even get it in a single hit. He pulled his Crystal Hilt off his belt; a manablade was a good choice against an assassination demon. His ax was also a good choice, but he was carrying the manablade at the moment.

“Are-ka!” the voice on the other side of the circle shouted, then picked up a candle and lit something on fire. A piece of paper, maybe? 

She tossed the flaming sheet of paper into the circle. The moment it crossed the barrier, Serenity saw the magic dissipate into formless mana. The spell was gone.

“Freeze!” Serenity shouted, aiming mostly at the assassination demon. He wasn’t certain it would do anything, but at the least it wouldn’t hurt.

Moments later, he still wasn’t sure if he’d actually controlled the assassination demon or if he’d just startled it. It paused for a moment and seemed to turn towards him, but it wasn’t fast enough to escape Serenity’s manablade as he dove off the flyer and across the canceled spell. The manablade sliced through one of the upper whip-like tendrils, then cleaved through the center of the assassination demon’s ball. 

It fell to the ground in two pieces. 

Well, two halves, anyway; with as many tendrils as were wrapped around the ball that formed its central body, there were almost certainly more than just two pieces. Serenity was only sort of grateful that he’d fought them before; it meant that he knew exactly where to hit to kill the thing quickly, but it also meant that he definitely knew just how annoying they were to fight if they weren’t killed quickly.

Lillene

For some reason, even though a lot of demons are humanoid, those demons are not the most common summons. It’s almost like humanoids are better with tools, which makes them more difficult to create since you also have to make the tools.