Christina Schmidt looked like her mother, which was good. I was her paternal uncle and I looked like what I was; a blunt instrument used to exert large amounts of force with precision to accomplish whatever ends deemed necessary. In the army this was well defined and poorly rewarded. In civilian life it was poorly defined and richly rewarded. I looked like I was twenty years older than my fifty, and that I probably killed three people before breakfast. This was untrue. I was lying in a hospital bed with tubes running stuff both in and out of me. My last meal was about three weeks ago, and my next one would be in Valhalla, assuming I couldn’t just sneak past and quietly take a dirt nap in the grave. Christina looked like the sort of girl that should be surrounded by a herd of happy cows as she sang on a mountain top in some Disney movie, or like she should be crashing the blue line in her quest to make the Canadian Women’s World Junior Hockey Team. She didn’t make it, but she made the camp and still got listed as an alternate.

“You are looking better Uncle Jack.” Christina said as she accepted the cards I dealt.

I smiled. “See, the ability to lie with a smile on your face. You would have made an excellent officer.” I looked over the crib board at her and frowned. She was a Schmidt, and we never give a sucker an even break. I was in danger of not just losing, but being skunked.

Christina shuddered. “No thank you. I am looking at a full ride Hockey Scholarship from Princeton which will get me through my public policy degree. I am willing to sell my body to get my education, like you did, but I would rather do it on the ice than on some battlefield. Rather than getting a degree and ending up on the same battlefield as an officer, I want to be the one drafting the proposals that become the policies so that we don’t have to send anyone to those battlefields.” She fanned her cards, moved a few, tossed two she didn’t like into my crib, then eyed me cheerfully over the top of her cards.

I fought back the tears. I pissed away my own life, ruined three marriages, two of which were my fault and the other one……..the other one I broke my bad habits and we found we didn’t have a lot left in common after that. I had been there, done that, got the T shirt and had little to show for it save the leukemia that was killing me now. Technically I had beaten the leukemia, but before it died out, it left friends in my liver and pancreas. The pancreas will get the honour of ushering my ass out the door in another few weeks. I never had kids, I was not honestly a very good son and probably a terrible brother, but I didn’t suck as hard at being “Uncle Jack”. As a result, Christina took time out of every day before and after class to visit me. She had no idea that after she leaves I collapse and can’t even speak for the half day until she returns. We are both lying to each other that everything is Okay, and it is all that is keeping me alive.

She is quietly amazing. Smarter than anyone in our family has any right to be. Strong and about as inexhaustible as any Schmidt in history, somehow she got the beauty, social skills, and unholy networking ability of her Martel mother. From the age of five, she has been in charge of any group she was in for more than 30 seconds and had everyone in it fast friends no matter what they might have wanted going in. It was a kind of magic as far from my own skills at turning human beings into recyclables, and training others to do the same as I could imagine. I had a hard time imagining that someone like her could exist in a world that permitted men like me. Then again, this world was eating me from the inside, so maybe cancer was the correction for that error.

I focused on my hand, two sixes, two eights. I get a seven I won’t get skunked. It’s her first count, but I might not get my ass kicked. Hell even an ace gives me a dozen. I would be fine. I only needed ten.

She cut.

The Jack of Hearts stared back at me. Christine smiled. “Lucky Uncle Jack, its you!”

The one eyed idiot shoving a sword through his head looked back at me. Yup. That is me.

She had two queens, a king and a five, so I never got to count. She skunked me. I was glad the game was fast, and though I grumbled about it, my pride was pleased she was playing to win even though I was on my death’s bed. No mercy. You don’t sit at the table unless you come to play, and you don’t play except to win. Gods but I loved her. She packed up to leave, and before she went, she quietly put a small stone with three interlocking triangles on my hospital bed. She had broken into my apartment and stolen it off my altar. Good girl. She didn’t meet my eyes, just whispered before she left. “Victory Father be with you.”

I couldn’t see her eyes through the tears in mine. I didn’t think it was the Victory Father I would be seeing. I was dying in bed, no chance of Valhalla. I was still going to be feeding his raven’s pretty soon, but Odin wouldn’t be calling me home. That was fine, after a lifetime of battle spending eternity resting in the earth knowing my blood lived on in someone like Christina is better than an eternity drinking and fighting in Odin’s hall of heroes. I did that already. The pay sucked, conditions sucked, we didn’t solve anything, and everyone I know is pretty much already dead. It’s just, I was good at it, and shit at everything else.

I fell asleep before she got down three floors to the lobby, let alone across campus to class.

****In the Jade Palace of Xiang, and the Grave of the Ten Thousand Stalwart

Grand Master Bo, Order of the Celestial Dragon looked over the summoning circle. He had his Masters lay in the circle per his design, and he had checked the design himself, verified the star positions would be in the proper alignment. He even went so far as to taste the ink the Adepts had crafted to make sure it was pure enough to channel the Chi required to power this circle. War with the demons was coming. The cultivators of the Hundred Peaks spent too much time in dream, too much time in secluded cultivation, in pursuit of true immortality and admittance to the Celestial Palace. While the best of the cultivators of the ancient times turned their eyes beyond, the demons were rising in the world. On every front, the militant orders were in decline. The peaceful orders prospered, but the wall of the orders militant grew thinner and thinner as the sword cultivators died by the hundreds, and were replaced by the dozen.

Musicians, artists, alchemists, poets he had in abundance, for their path to the peak was one of time and resources, but those that strode the path of the sword no longer just faced each other, and the poor mortals who lacked the power of chi, they faced the rising tide of demons. He had only the wisdom of the Celestial Dragon to offer hope. To summon heroes from another world, to summon children from the realms without cultivation, children whose bodies had no limits to the power they could contain, bloodlines that never had to face the burnout that happened when infants with unlimited potential unconsciously drew upon chi and burned their immature bodies like screaming candles. Summon them as pubescent teens, new come into their full potential, yet strangers to the path of cultivation.

The Imperial Princess strode to the edge of the circle. Grand Master Bo bowed to her, although he ranked higher, she was here as the representative of the Son of Heaven, the living link to the Jade Throne and the Celestial Dragon guardians.

Three times she rang her bell, and as the third tone faded, Grand Master Bo exhaled and breathed his Chi into the great circle. Behind him a ten Spiritual Masters, a hundred Masters, and a thousand Acolytes wove their chi into the circle, and the call went forth. In the Celestial Palace, Longzhie Master of the Celestial Bureaucracy raised his golden head, itself longer than ten spears, he judged the purity of the call, and added his own roar to it. The force of the greatest spiritual sending of the last thousand years joined the roar of the great Celestial Dragon, himself the final intermediary between the immortal ascendent humans and the gods themselves, and lanced that call like a spear through the veil between worlds. Like a fisherman’s spear to seek prey so removed from the world of the fisherman they do not even dream it exists until the spear finds them. Not to summon a single soul to become a hero, but a hundred.

From them forge not a single hero, but a hundred!

A hundred young sword cultivators showered with every resource of the Jade Palace and the Imperial Family, granted the guidance and secret teachings of the finest Spiritual Masters of the Order of the Celestial Dragon, they would sweep the demons from the face of this earth. The Celestial Order would be restored. The Mortal World would return to the meaningless thing that it was meant to be, a distraction, where lesser humans did nothing but produce food for lower ranked cultivators that still needed it, comely women and boys for those cultivators that still held earthly desires, and of course bred the tens of thousands of their kind required to produce a single worthy potential servant.

Demon Sui stroked his horns as he stared into the dark pool in the sunken Grave of the Ten Thousand Stalwart.

They were summoning a hundred would be heroes to stop the rising tide of demons. So far above the mortal worlds, the strongest of them had not stepped upon the earth in a hundred years, the closest they came was soaring the sky’s above standing upon their swords, never looking down to see the huddled humanity grovelling in the mud beneath their feet. They cared only for the heavens, for the purity of spirit. He laughed. Demons too loved spirit, if not purity.

Everything the cultivators purged gave life to the demons, the passions, the lusts, the fears, the rage. As the celestials soared higher, the miasma of the demons tainted the earth more and more, and fewer and fewer of the immortals cared to lower themselves to protect the human mortals from which the immortals sprang. The demons would take the mortal world, ending the mortal race, leaving the great heaven spanning tree of the immortals rootless and dead without any of the god like immortals caring enough to stop them. They would summon a hundred heroes? It took years to produce a sword cultivator, decades to produce a Spiritual Warrior. It took hours to corrupt a pure vessel, to embody fully a demon in a human body full of potential power but without even the protection of baptism.

Let them summon their hundred heroes. He would take a tenth. Ten souls. Ten souls he would trap, and ten demons of ancient power and greed he would place in them. Before the hundred heroes could be trained, he would set his ten demons to slaughter them. The age of the immortals was ending, the time of the demons was now.

He could do nothing now. Demon Sui dared not show himself before Longzhie, Master of the Celestial Bureaucracy, that dragon would not dirty a claw to rend him. A simple thought of that greatest immortal would destroy him. However, when the call returned, it would not be driven by the roar of the Celestial Dragon, but simply the will of human cultivators, human spiritual masters whose mastery of the spirit was unmatched, but whose memory of mortal flesh was all but forgotten. These humans from a world without chi would be flesh creatures, their soul so weak and unformed that it was less than a single drop of blood in a wine jar, and demons were masters of manipulating both blood and wine jars. The ten strongest souls he would grab, for those were the ones burning bright enough to see as individual lights inside the lightning bolt, and he would bind them, bind them and fill them with the ten hungriest demons he had. The fools had done all the work, they had torn a great wound into heaven, a wound his kind could never make, but they could infect it. They could, and they did. Through that infection must pass the summoned, and the ten strongest would not pass that infection alone.

In a quiet amphitheater, a professor was busy showing the curves of population median age, median income, and voting results for the last hundred years, indicating how rarely the voting record coincided with the best interests of the groups involved, and highlighting the periods of greatest actions against self interest for study to find which polarizing issues had been used to get voters to voluntarily choose the least advantageous option. Tsien Tsang frowned and looked at his long time best friend and eternal post breakup lover Christina and muttered.

"I can't believe people vote against their best interests more often than not. How can that be the default"

Christina snorted. "It's like you never met people Tsien. It is like my Uncle Jack says, the only thing that sells better than sex is hate. If you told people that eating poodle shit gave you the right to burn homosexuals, the homeless, or gay people then you could retire on the proceeds of selling bags of random dog crap for a hundred dollars a piece, with free bottle of gas and lighter thrown in. No one would even care if it was really poodle crap, because all they really care about is the justification to do what they want and feel morally upright about it."

Tsien looked at her in amazement. She was the sweetest girl he had ever known, but there was something in her that was indescribably old at the same time. There was no innocence in her, simply an acceptance of the world as it was, a determination to see the beauty in it while at the same time an awareness of its ugly truths that sometimes scared him a little.

Long term they would never be a couple, but whenever one of them broke up with someone, they always came back to each other for a reset. No matter where they went in life, he knew they would never orbit far from each other. It drove both their parents mad. One set because they thought they should obviously marry, the other because they were sure he would never marry because no woman could ever get past Christina to become a prospective bride. Somehow, neither one of them cared. They explored the world together, and ran back to each other whenever they found something either new enough to want to share, or traumatic enough to require processing.

They were both taken by surprise when a glowing white circle filled with something very similar to archiach Cantonese ideograms formed under the sloping sides of the amphitheater and one hundred of the one hundred and eighty five students began to shine in the same light as if under an unseen spotlight.

Inside their minds they heard the voice of an old man, sounding like thunder, like the ultimate voice of wisdom and authority. His words rang not just in their minds, but in their souls.

"Children of the Mortal Realm hear me. By the authority of the Jade Emperor and in accordance with the will of the Celestial Dragon Longzhie ,Master of the Celestial Bureaucracy, you are summoned to the world of Xiao and your destiny as heroes. Humanity is under siege by a rising tide of demons, soon the powerless mortals of Xiao will be nothing more than fodder for the demons that rise from the corruption and taint of humanity. We call the hundred of you of highest potential to our world, where the gifts you do not know you have may be awakened. Answer our call, and become the heroes of humanity."

Christina looked at Tsien and he shone like a star in the night, brighter than all the others of the hundred who had been called. His was a pure soul, a strong soul, a hero's soul. He trusted because he could be trusted. She reached out and took his hand, she knew he could not refuse the call. They would take him, they would use him, and he would become a tool for hypocrites who called for a hundred children to send to the battlefield to do the bleeding, dying, and killing they would not lower themselves to do. They would use him, and when they were done, they would destroy him, because he was too pure to be allowed to become powerful enough to demand they live up to whatever moral code they wrap their lies inside. She reached out and took his hand. She would have to go with him. She would have to protect him. He would never see the poison in the cup, the knife sharpened for his back. He would believe, and without her, he would die for it.

Tsien looked at Christina, and she shone like a star in the darkness, brighter than all the others in the room. Hers was a caring soul, an ancient soul, a wise soul. She stepped into danger knowing it was there because only by facing it could she steal the bits of life worth living for. She would take the challenge, knowing it was likely to kill her, because the others would never see the dangers around them, and without her they would surely fall. She would go, knowing she would not survive, because without her no one would survive. He would go. Every step she took into danger, he would stride before her. Whatever danger would fall upon her, must fall upon him first. He would have to protect her, because as long as one of the others was in danger, she would be there in front to guide them.

Jack writhed in pain, half way between worlds. His body had been dying for a while, and he didn't know why he fought to hold on. Pain and shitting into a diaper? Tubes putting liquids into him, tubes taking liquids out of him. He fed the pain to his rage, but that made him dangerous to the people around him. He had been strong, three hundred pounds of bearlike fury now starved down to two hundred pounds of hollow bones and sunken eyes, too weak and clumsy to do more than lash out like a petulant child, but with a man's will to keep from doing so. So far. He meditated. He was Odin's man, and while he had little of the wisdom the old man taught, what he had, he owned. He mediated on the World Tree Yggdrasil, the tree that Odin rode between the worlds. Rooted in Hel, and reaching to every world, from that tree Odin hung himself, sacrificed himself to himself to learn the runes of power. As a young soldier he had taken that same initiation, hung from the tree, and stabbed by the spear. Not run through like Odin because he was a young idiot not an actual god, but he had stood his watch by the tree, naked to the truths of himself. He returned to the tree now, he felt the noose around his neck, and he felt more at one with the tree than ever.

Yggdrasil the world tree was rooted in Hel, and below it was Nidhogg, the world eating dragon and her brood. They ate at the roots of the tree every day, and every day the tree was renewed by the Norns with the waters of the Well of Wyrd, the waters of fate. He was like Yggdrasil in that Nidhogg's brood gnawed at him, the cancer was through him now like the roots of the tree were though every land of the dead, but the Norns did not waste their waters of renewal on him. He was dragon food, and the meal was nearing its end. He hung on the tree, and they dragons gnawed at him. He was only silent because the noose took his screams and strangled them in his throat. Why he hung on, he didn't know. There was no Valhalla waiting for him, no heroes hall. Only oblivion. His battles were done, there was nothing left for him to fight for in this world. He only wanted it to end.

The old man was inside him. The Hanged One, the Gallows Lord, lord of the tree. His laughter was the sound of ravens watching a dying man crawl as his guts unravelled behind him, it was the rasp of a whetstone over a knife edge, it was the sound of brass sliding over steel as a round slid hungrily into the firing chamber.

"Ready to go boy? Ready to stop fighting? No worries Jack, you can have your peace. Others will take up the struggle. Others will face the fire, the fang, the steel. Others will face the lies and half truths, carry the sins of slaughter, the mistakes, the loss of being not good enough, not fast enough, or the bitter truth that none of that matters when wyrd weaves the one beside you dies today. You can rest Jack, your fight is over."

Odin was his god, but he lied with truth, and hid truth in lies. He was the master manipulator, the wordsmith. He was the master of strategy and deception. He was the master of magic, and the father of treachery. He was Victory Father, and every dirty thing required to make that happen was his. He was rage and courage, loyalty and discipline, he was wisdom and inspiration both. Knowing this was a trick and a trap, Jack forced his spirit to open its eyes one last time and he opened himself to the call even now shaking the world.

"Children of the Mortal Realm hear me. By the authority of the Jade Emperor and in accordance with the will of the Celestial Dragon Longzhie ,Master of the Celestial Bureaucracy, you are summoned to the world of Xiao and your destiny as heroes. Humanity is under siege by a rising tide of demons, soon the powerless mortals of Xiao will be nothing more than fodder for the demons that rise from the corruption and taint of humanity. We call the hundred of you of highest potential to our world, where the gifts you do not know you have may be awakened. Answer our call, and become the heroes of humanity."

The call rang with the authority of the old men who sat in quiet well appointed offices and decided the fates of nations, sending generations of the young and disposable off to turn human flesh into suffering and shit, blood and misery so that some rich and powerful people could carve a little more of the world for themselves. A call he had answered again and again because turning human beings into component parts was his best life skill, and after you got good enough at that you were not safe around anyone else. He looked and two young ones rose ahead of the other hundred.

Two rose like twin suns trapped in orbit about each other, shining like stars compared to the weak candle flames of the rest. One he knew. Christina. His Christina. She had chosen not to follow his path, but to seek a path that meant that maybe no one else had to get fed into the slaughter to settle the affairs of those old men in the rich and safe offices. Now she was being called away to another world to die in someone elses service for a people not even her own.

"NO!" Jack roared, reaching out the twin stars rising even now to the sky.

Odin's voice whispered inside him. "You are not strong enough, you are tied to your flesh, and too weak to answer. What will you offer, what will you sacrifice to save her."

"My life." I screamed.

Odin whispered his voice in my ear, I could feel his breath.

"That's a few minutes at best, so not much of a gift." He mused. "You gave me the good bits already."

"My soul!" I screamed.

"Not enough. I own that already." He said, now he was in front of me, between me and Christina.

"A river of blood and souls for your aid!" I screamed, uncaring. This was Christina. I would not count the cost.

"Ah you precious idiot. Bargained well and done." The Old Man whispered, the vaknut in my chest burning like a brand and my strength flowed into my body.

I pulled against the tree like I was pushing on air with my feet and I felt the noose tightening on my throat, felt it strangling me. Not enough, not fast enough, Christina and her friend Tsien were rising too fast. I gave myself to the rage and lunged with all I had. My neck broke with a snap and I tore free of my body, I clawed at Odin's form before me in my madness. I was awash in frenzy and need, my soul naked and already fading, I ripped into his spirit and tore bits of it to ram in my throat like a starving man. Feeling power flow into my fading spirit like connecting to a living lightning bolt I soared to the heavens like an eagle. In my claws I took two souls that circled each other like twin suns, two souls too pure for this world, and too good to sacrifice to another, and I cast them to earth with a scream.

The summons caught at my wings and tore them off. As a human, I surrendered myself to the summoning, a dying man fading from existence, a fragment of a soul not whole enough to stay alive because not all of me came from my corpse, but a fragment of the Hanged One stolen and eaten as I fled kept me at least half alive. More than one soul, less than two souls, I took the place of the two I had freed in the summoning and the imbalance weakened the working.

Was it my interference, was it Odin's plan, was it the demon's work? Who can say, but the imbalance caused the spell to waver and weaken, and the net cast by the demons to catch the strongest ten and bind them with demons caught me first.

I felt a demon sliding into me, tearing at me, tearing into the power of my soul where the energy of this new world caused my soul to burn with an energy it could not contain. In that moment of weakness I should have been defenseless, yet inside me was the fragment of the God of the Slain, the Lord of the Mound, the Hanged One. As the demon entered me, I felt the noose that connected me to him in ritual sacrifice reach out and snare this demon and pull it deep inside where he hid. The guttering flame that was my fading life firmed enough for the consuming hunger to fill me. I was not a body and soul as the other summons. I was a soul and a half, I was half formed, a naked howling hunger that could not be filled. Without a body, what could I be in this world but a hungry ghost?

In that hunger I lashed out at a second demon as it passed, and as I had done with the fragment of Odin before the tree I ate it. Again and again I grabbed at the demons who sought to steal the strongest of the Hundred Heroes as they came into their power, and ate them. As I ate the demons, the energy in my body changed, and I became a dark star in the shining column of light, a black hole that ate the corrupting shadows that sought to hunt within the light. I was darker than they, hungrier than they, and I had spent my entire professional life perfecting the art of being just a little better at killing than whoever was sent against me.

From them I forged flesh of demon spirit, god spirit, whatever fragments of my own spirit my howling rage could hold together and the strange energy of this world. It flowed into me like liquid fire, until I had flesh enough to wrap the bones forged of demon to block it from me. When I formed a throat it was screaming as the energy of life that was too much for my new flesh to contain threatened to shred the souls I was trying to bind to my flesh. I had not walked the paths of magic in my life because the magic taught by our ancient faith was not something I believed in. What bits of it I knew I learned to control the bits of my body and brain that injuries and wounds had taken from me. I knew the magics of hearth and home because I tried to use them to connect to my family when my own nature was ill suited. I learned the magics of meditation and soul travel to deal with my rage, and to deal with my dead. I turned my back in scorn at the practices of seidr and galdor, at the magics of spirit and rune. That was witch stuff, woman stuff. Fantasy bullshit.

Now I burned in magic, the force of the world drawn into my spirit. I had spirits inside me, half devoured demons who raged inside me, wanting to eat me as I had eaten them. I had a god laughing inside me as he slowly devoured the demon he had taken, and unwilling to share the knowledge of how. Odin had sacrificed for his knowledge, and he was the god of those who chose to walk the path of the fool, the path of the hero, the path of discovery. He was a raven, ever seeking shiny new things, or the corpse of a failure for his next meal. He didn't care which. Either I would lead him to shiny new things, or become the corpse for his next meal. If he preferred the first, he would settle for the second.

There was a net that closed about me, a net of foulness and corruption. It whispered to me, every hatred, every fear, every doubt, every lust I should be ashamed of, every dark act I had ever committed, that was a depressingly long list, every time I had failed those that depended on me, another depressingly long take, it threatened me with ten thousand horrors, and promised me as many dark delights. Had I been young, innocent, or not struggling with every fiber of my being against the sensation of being burned with external fire from the spiritual energy of this world trying to ignite my flesh, and trying to hold back the nine demon souls I had consumed from trying to return the favour, then I might have been either intimidated or concerned.

Mostly, I was busy. I was good at multitasking. I was an old soldier and we do compartmentalizing. Immediate survival got all of my bandwidth and things like what that will cost, what it all means, the fate of the world, all get shoved in little boxes to be dealt with later (or kept buried under enough sex and booze to put off for a while). I was wrapped in a body that felt like me as I remembered myself as a young adult. That was so different from how I actually was as a young adult that a good therapist could write a publishable paper on the gap. That was less important than the fact that this body was alive, not dying of cancer, and I had written in it all the reflexes and training of a lifetime soldier. I was never that good when I was that young and flexible. I was never that young and flexible when I was that good. Of course, almost none of my skills were applicable here, and there was the small issue of nine demons worth of energy, a god half digesting his own demon, and the scraps of my own soul being trapped in this hairy and over muscled new me.

Also, there was the other demon.

Above me stood a demon out of nightmare. Horned and scaled, burning red eyes blazed with all the hunger and malice in the world. He was large, easily a dozen feet tall if he stood, but he hunched low like a bent old man intent on selling you genuine Gucci bags for only ten dollars. I felt the cold iron of chains on my hands and feet and a cold table beneath me. There were nine other tables arrayed around me, with no one on them.

The demon had his eyes closed and the dark energies that had pulled me from the pure light of the summoning ran like threads back to his fingers. He spoke in a voice that sounded like every bad idea I had ever had with the smugness of my CO about to send us off on a plan based on Headquarters ignoring every bit of scouting we did, again.

"I am Demon Sui, and although the Jade Emperor has chosen you to be his heroes and pawns, I have taken and bound you to my demons so you can be my slaves, and deliver this world to the darkness. In time, you will feast on the rest of the Hundred Heroes and lead my forces to tear down the sects and their spiritual masters, so that no more immortals will ever walk this earth, and all humanity will meet its fate as fodder to demon kind. First you will feast on the hundred peasants I have penned for you, until your hunger is sated, and I can begin training you how to grow in power."

Demon Sui then opened his eyes, and his carefully rehearsed villain monologue went off track.

"Wait, where are the other nine of you?"

I was still in full rage mode and I threw my strength against the cold iron of my chains without thought to my bones or flesh. One by one the chains failed; the right arm, then left, right leg then left shattered.

I looked up at Demon Sui as the bones in my arms and legs had broken as I shattered the chains, but the unnatural vitality of the demons caused them to spend their own essence healing me. They were not as good at pain as I was, and while they wanted to kill me, they were not willing to hurt to get there. I was old. I had done pain, broken pretty much everything. It wasn't really that big a deal anymore. I was too weak right now to fight off a determined panda bear, but damned if I would give this loser the satisfaction of knowing I just broke my own limbs getting free.

I held out an arm whose wrist was visibly rotating as the bones reformed and pointed at him.

"I ate them all, and you are next."

Demon Sui was a true immortal demon. He was slowly winning the war to conquer the mortal world because he was a coward. Faced with any fight he had any chance of losing, he fled. He could always win another day. The enemies he could destroy he would. The enemies who were too strong would cast their eyes to the heavens and progress beyond worldly concerns, leaving him free to continue taking it over.

He didn't understand what was going on, how he had failed, or how powerful the mortal before him was, so he did what he always did when facing something of unknown strength. He fled.

I screamed for a while while six weeks or so of healing happened in about six minutes. My arms and legs restored to more or less working order, I stood up, naked, and looked at a cage with a hundred terrified looking vaguely Asian people in what looked like peasant farm clothes.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked

All of the backed to the back wall except one fat woman in her late middle years. She looked at me and then began to chant softly and look at me again as her eyes began to focus on something beyond what I could see. She looked shocked, but grunted with a strange unmusical "Huh"

"You are being devoured by demons. When they get free, they will consume us, and eventually the whole of the mortal world. Yet, there is something inside you that is also eating demons. What are you?" She asked in the sort of tone a grandmother would use to ask a muck coloured grandchild what on earth they had rolled in to find that particular smell.

I grinned back at her. "Not half the witch you are, but if you will help me out, almost certainly not going to kill and eat you all." She eyed me with deep suspicion. I could feel the demons trying to eat me, and eating away at my strength. I could feel the energy in this world, but I couldn't reach it. I was losing ground every second, and Odin was sitting in the back of my mind chewing on bits of his demon happily and growing stronger content to let me either figure it out on my own or die trying. I had one idea, and when the old woman heard it, she would trust me even less.

In the Chamber of Summoning, Grand Master Bo looked upon the 98 summoned heroes and looked confused.

"Where are the other two? I felt the summons take them. Then something else forced its way in. Where are the other two the strongest two. These are the ones who should be first among you, the strongest among you. Tell me the names of those who were called with you and are not here now!"

Grand Master Bo placed his will upon them like a vice, sifting through their memories. While these young people burned with a power of Chi that this world had never seen, he knew them to be the weaker of the hundred summoned. The first two blazed already like small stars, and would certainly be hundred generation genius cultivators, peak masters, true ascendant souls. These others had master class potential to be sure, some may even be dozen generation geniuses, but nothing like those two shining stars he had seen and almost grasped. Those two could shatter the rising tide of demons and turn the whole of the world to the will of the Jade Throne, if properly nurtured and guided.

He would have their names from their fellow classmates. Given their names and the feel of their spirits, nowhere in this whole world could they hide from him!

In a classroom on earth, police had finished questioning them and released them at last. Tsien and Christina were holding hands as they walked towards the parking lot and his car that would take them both to their homes.

"Who was that, the one who pushed us out?" Tsien asked.

"That was my Uncle Jack. He always said he would look out for me, I just figured him dying of cancer would be more of a problem." Christina said, her voice thick with emotion.

Tsien smiled. "Ah, well I guess he had to play hero one last time. I am glad he saved you. I was worried if you went you wouldn't make it back."

Christina laughed bitterly, and squeezed his hand hard. "He is not kind of hero. He was a soldier. I am glad he saved you. You would have tried to be a hero, and those get used up or killed, and the ones who get killed at least die clean."

Tsien searched for something to say. "I am sorry for your loss." He offered.

Christina pulled him in for a quick hug. "Feel sorry for them. They have no idea what they are in for."