“Those dance shoes look really cute.” Fufi bobbed her long neck at different angles to look at Alex’s new footwear from different angles. 

Alex wabbled her shoe-covered feet. “Yeah, it is nice to finally upgrade to something other than wooden sandals.”

“You don’t consider your bird talons and upgrade in footwear?  We matched for a few days.” Fufi pouted.

“How did we match?  You have webbed feet for swimming.  I had raptor claws for abducting people.” Alex crossed her arms.

“Meru!” Merumeru offered tea to the pair.

Alex and Fufi both took their stone tea glasses in turn and became quiet.  The tea was good and made the petty arguing seem silly.

“I suppose we have to start heading back now.  I don’t really want to linger around this temple any longer. It is like visiting a haunted house,” Alex said.

“Yeah, but we can’t fly back.  We’ll have to descend the mountains the hard way.  It will take many times longer than it did to get here.” Fufi lowered her beak.  She didn’t like slow travel much as evidenced by the tone in her voice.

“We can just head southeast and with the sled bits we made on the carriage it should be quick at least when we are going down hill.  It won’t be as quick as flying but hopefully if we can find a decent route it’ll be better than walking.” Alex sipped some tea and looked outside to see the sun still low in the sky.  “We’ve got all day ahead of us for travel so let's get going.”

The trio of girls packed up and headed out.  They gave the carriage’s key a good wind and pulled the lever to get the back wheels moving.  The driving experience was not great.  It couldn’t be helped though because they had no ice to test it on before going out.  The carriage moved okay on flat land but breaking on ice was impossible.  They slipped down the glacier and almost crashed a few times.  

Fufi took to the skies and scouted out a path that they could make it through without disaster.  She flapped around and shouted out instructions.

Alex followed them and they made some slow but steady pace away from the temple for the first day. They made decent time traveling.  Cutting back and forth to find not too steep ground netted them a pair of mountains behind them.  Fufi guessed they had traveled around 30 miles before the sun started to set.

The next day started similarly but when Fufi flew her scouting route she came back in a hurry. “Alex, Merumeru, there is an ice demon out there.  It was shooting ice spears at me!”

“Oh no, I thought we were far away from it.  Hurry back, I'll get the dolls.” Alex pulled out Lily, Rose and Edelweiss and took up a guarding position on top of the carriage. 

—Ice Demon Frosto’s POV—

Frosto hunted intruders in the frozen waste.  While he wasn’t the master of his sect, he held the honored position as a direct disciple of the master.  The sect of frost demons were always looked down on in demon society.  Demons that cultivated frost were seen as the opposite of what a demon should be.  However, there was a benefit to being a frost cultivator. They were mostly left alone.

Frosto didn’t start as a frost demon.  He had evolved from a first tier imp to a regular demon during the war almost a century ago.  The war had some extreme ups and downs.  The demons were able to walk right into the kingdoms softened up by the demon queen’s agents.  They faced little organized resistance at first.  Then the hero came and all of the free world rallied to his banner.  Things went terrible.  Many demons died to the hero and his allies.  But just as things looked grim for the demon army, the hero retired.  Then the forces lead by the demon queen were able to destroy or subdue all the remaining human civilization.

That is when the trouble started.  Her vengeance sated, the demon queen took less and less of an active role in her demonic minions.  Without an active leader or a shared enemy the demons’ conflict turned inward.  Betray, intrigue and dominance became the rules of demonic society.  Recent history has been plagued by demon on demon violence.  Places to cultivate easily became less and less common.  

Like all of the second tier demons who went to train on the peaks with the master, Frosto became an ice demon to escape a knife in the back even if it meant seeming shameful to the more traditional cultivators.  

This mountain range had much ice for them to consume with their cultivation techniques.  However, there was one stubborn blot in it which refused to be removed: the purity temple. They had tried to assault it many times but could not breach their defenses.  Nowadays, no one ever leaves the temple.  The only traffic that came were harpies drawn to it like some kind of siren’s song.  Frosto and the rest of the ice sect expected the humans to die out decades ago.  After all, their weak human bodies and this planet's system had proved inferior to the might of the demonic cultivators.  However, the ones that stood guard were not pushovers. The humans all looked more and more similar over the years.  It was odd.  There were never harpies defending the temple.  Regardless, without stronger demons they were at a stalemate with the temple.  The master’s pride would not let him seek aid from rival sects.  Not that it would help.  A fire demon couldn’t be expected to survive in this land of ice.

When an ice acolite returned from his rounds saying that he had spotted tracks of some strange beast heading away from the temple and followed until he saw it, Frosto was sent to kill it.  The lesser demon followed until he spotted the white furry beast and a pink bird flying around the area.  The bird was likely scouting for the large beast.  So the master’s third tier demon disciple should be enough to slay whatever creature the temple had let loose.  It could have been an envoy sent by the clergy to seek aid. Not that there was any aid to be found in human lands, but mounting that beast’s head on a pike in view of the temple would be a great way to bait the priests out of their fortifications. 

Frosto came across the bird flying about and shot ice spikes up into the air trying to impale it.

None of them hit.  The pink bird didn’t fly low enough for him to have an easy shot and didn’t fly in a straight line enough for him to lead a shot and have it hit.  The ice demon followed and harried the bird until he chased it back to the white furry beast.

Frosto saw a pair of people by the large beast.  One of them was obviously a priestess from the temple.  On his scouting missions he’d caught sight of the pair that regularly stood guard over the gate and she was the female of the pair that he always saw there.  Oddly, she held three dolls in her arms. The other creature Frosto saw appeared to be a small human-shaped slime wearing a red shirt, blue overalls and a red hat.

Arrogantly the blue-skinned demon shouted, “I am frost disciple of the frost sect. Surrender now or face the might of a third tier demon practitioner.” 

The priestly woman looked at the pink bird and said, “Are all demons this arrogant?”

The bird nodded, “Pretty much.  But be careful Alex, third tier demons are no joke.”

Incensed at being ignored, Frosto summoned a gale of ice shards and flung them at the group.

The pink bird flew above it.

The slime hopped behind the large animal.

The priestess simply said, “Let's dance” and started spinning and flipping around.  She avoided every shard of ice, moving at incredible speed.

Frosto gaped at the inhuman speed. “I see that you are a worthy foe.  Feel honored for now I will not hold back!”

The priestess held up a hand. “Can you give me one second?  I like to play music while I dance.”

Frosto just blinked in disbelief and looked around, seeing no band.

The priestess took a rectangle block out of her skirt and pressed it. “Do nothing till you hear from me, that’s a nice one.”   Then the block started emitting a sound that had some piano, bass and a rather jazzy tune.

“I certainly will not do anything just because you demand it.”  Frosto summoned ice lances from the glacier they were standing on.

The priestess simply danced around them like this was some kind of game.

“You certainly are a lively dance partner.” The priestess grabbed a pillar of ice and spun around it like it was a pole.

Incensed, Frosto summoned a whirlwind of ice shards that blotted out the area scouring everything.  The ice was so thick that he couldn’t even see.  There was no way anyone could dodge that.

“Ugh, you tore up the firs on my carriage.  No more playing nice.” The priestess stepped out of the whirlwind unscathed.  Not even her clothing was damaged.

“Impossible!” Frosto’s eyes went wide.  

The three dolls spun into action.  One shot arrows at him with alarming speed.  Another one charged at him with a rotating rock on a pole.  A third one, pitched on top of the carriage sprayed water at him.

Frosto raised a hand and channeled his ice cultivation.  The water froze before it could blast him back and became a barrier that blocked the attacks of the two other dolls. “Fool, you would use water on an ice cultivator?!”

They went back and forth, Frosto could not land a single hit on the priestess but he could blast the dolls.  They took some damage from area attacks.

The thick sheet of ice he summoned could be destroyed but they took time.  The doll with the stone on a stick drilled through them but he just made more.

It looked like this would go on forever but the dolls were eventually damaged beyond repair.  The song playing on the phone ended and there was a few second of odd silence.  

The two stared at each other awkwardly.

And that is when the doom music started.

Alex’s phone thundered a horrible tune of some distorted metal.  

Frosto had never heard anything like it.  It was kinda cool to his demon sense of music.

The priestess just altered her dance into something more primal, going with the flow.  A panel shot off the carriage and clanked onto the ice.

A small plush stood there with one clothy foot extended.

“Hero?!” The pink bird cried.

The hero pointed a mitt-like hand at the demon.  Then the stuffed doll extended a thumb and pointed it at the ground.

Frosto might have found it intimidating except for the fact that it was a child’s toy.

The dolls button eyes glowed red and the next thing Frosto knew it was grasping his face.  The two-foot cotton-stuffed figure gave him a suplex by holding his head and bending over backward.

Frosto crashed to the ground and felt ribs crack.  As a third tier demon though he could regenerate them quickly.   They snapped back into place while he glared at that little cotton terror.

Frosto formed long talons of ice and launched a flurry of blows at the tiny creature of fabric and stuffing.

None of the blows landed.

The doll suddenly started glowing with a golden fire.  He shot into the ice demon’s gut with a poof of a pillow hitting someone.  The doll launched into the air, carrying the demon with him.  He put Frosto’s head between his cloth legs.  As they gained altitude the doll and demon pair spun like a top with the demon’s head facing the ground.  

The last thing Frosto saw was one of his own ice spikes fastly approaching his head.

The hero doll finished the pile driver, absolutely obliterating the demon’s head into one of the ice spike.

The song ended with, “Rip and tear until it is done.”

Seeing the fight was over, Alex stopped the music.  “Well, that just happened.”

Everyone regarded the hero doll with renewed respect.