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Chapter 121: Loud Worms
🕑 Added 2023-10-28 15:12:36 +0000 UTCEven though the destruction of an entire demon town was probably enough to worry the demon forces, the humans decided to do a bit more damage on the demon side of the border on their way out. At first, the three Ra’Zorians assumed Matt would be on board, then noticed he lagged a little behind in every fight, as if he was a bit reluctant to kill.
“I mean, I could have sworn you were going to kill me with that shovel before I evacuated.” Derek was, for better or worse, the second-most talkative member of the team behind Brennan, who didn’t sweat the small stuff enough to consider Matt’s reluctance a problem yet. “And you just nuked a whole city. I don’t get it.”
“Listen, I’m fresh in from another planet. And the demons seem like dicks, yes, but the whole ‘murdering everyone I see’ thing is pretty new to me. And for what it’s worth, I don’t know who is on the right side of this whole war. I’m here to get stronger.”
“And you nuked the town on accident. No way you could pull that off if you were actually trying,” Lucy chortled.
Matt continued to talk, “And I nuked that town on accident. I was trying to do sabotage, not genocide. For all I know, a bunch of kids went up in that explosion.”
Artemis, who had been studiously pretending to stay out of it, glanced over. “You really don’t know much about them, do you?”
“Demons? No. They seem murderous, and pretty corrupt.”
“That’s right, but you probably deserve the quick primer. Demons aren’t born, they spawn. Fully adult, with baseline skills that they improve from there. Every so many square miles of demon-controlled land generates one every so often. There are formulas for it.”
“That… that honestly makes no sense.”
“Our understanding is that it’s a function of the demon lord’s powers, something like how a nation’s leader’s skills work, only stronger.”
“Oh, shit, Matt. You get what she’s saying, right?” Lucy chimed in.
He did. “You’re saying that it’s like a leader spreading the benefits from his estate, and that’s what makes the demon lord powerful? He’s an evil administrator?”
Brennan laughed. “That, and the fact that he’s almost entirely immune to both magical and physical attacks. And that he apparently has now grown to a point where he can make suitcase nukes. But jokes aside, his territory really is the worst part. He doesn’t get involved in the war directly very often. His personal combat powers just make sure we can’t stop him.”
“Be that as it may,” Artemis said, in what Matt was fast learning was her get-back-on-topic voice, “The demons don’t care about much, They are built literally for a purpose, and that purpose is killing humans and expanding the demon lord’s land.”
“They seem pretty fleshed out, personality-wise, for mindless destruction automatons.”
“We think that’s because sentient beings just fight better, or because of limitations in exactly what the demon lord can make. But we’ve talked to them. We’ve tortured them, even. And they have no positive interests. They self-promote, they try to grow personal wealth, they cheat, and they lie. They don’t love, they don’t marry, they don’t have kids. Full stop.”
Matt couldn’t confirm everything she said was absolutely true, but it at least wasn’t inconsistent with what he’d seen from the demons so far. There was so much grift inside the only colony he’d been in that the only two conversations he had that weren’t about buying food involved bribes, and that 100% of the conversations he’d overheard somehow involved killing or eating people.
“And on the other side? Seems like you spend a lot of time killing demons yourselves, not that I can really judge.”
Derek spoke up. “So, the big downside with our side is the church.”
“Derek!” Artemis yelled immediately. “The church is good, Derek. They organize humanity against the demons.”
Derek didn’t let up. “That’s only kind of true. Listen, Matt, you know in anime? Where there’s a church, and they do all kinds of good stuff, and then you check beneath the surface, and they’re just totally fucked up in every way?”
Matt nodded.
“So this is like that. They control everything. It’s not, like, obvious that they do anything terrible with that power, but you can’t shake the feeling that they are always about to. Brennan will back me up.”
“No, he won’t,” Artemis said. “Because Brennan, unlike you, is sane.”
“Actually, it is sort of creepy. It’s like, there’s sort of a pope, they don’t call him that, but he’s like clearly controlling his emotions all the time to seem calm, and I’m pretty sure he tells the king what to do. It’s iffy.” Derek shrugged.
“And I should feel okay about this?” Matt asked.
Derek piped up again. “It’s that thing where you meet a kid, and he’s super creepy, but he’s not actually doing anything wrong, it’s just a vibe thing.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s like, you might want to punch the creepy out of him, but he’s probably not doing it on purpose. So your choices are either waiting until he actually does something, or being a bully. It’s like that.”
Artemis looked incredibly disturbed. “I had no idea you guys felt this way about the church. As far as I’m concerned, they are normal.”
Derek shook his head. “That’s because you grew up with it. Trust me, it’s not a normal situation. It might not be evil, but it’s definitely not normal. Anyway. Matt, none of this is actually the point. The point is that if you were on the human side of things, the Church is the worst part. But the soup alone balances all that out.”
Matt’s ears perked up. “Soup? What kind?”
—
By the time they reached the border, Derek had made exactly zero progress in explaining the whole soup thing.
“So it’s not, like, a specialty soup.”
“No, it’s every soup. Every single Ra’Zorian, for reasons they either can’t explain or do a really good job of hiding, is really good at making soup. Like, better than the best person on Earth would be. Even if they can’t otherwise cook.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It doesn’t. It’s just true. When we get back, I’ll show you. It’s like if Superman’s power was soup making, and he founded his own planet. It’s freaky and weird, but it’s the best part of this place.”
Using the slight camouflage of his cloak, Matt had dug out a trench for them to hide in, and they looked out at what Brennan and Artemis considered to be the border.
“I thought the point of this route was that we’d face the least resistance.” Matt was honestly confused. For miles on either side, there was nothing. But right in front of them was a giant tower, one that could see unencumbered at the land around. Crossing here seemed oddly intentional in a way he didn’t understand.
“There are other places we could pass without fighting, but they have other detection measures that we can’t bypass. These towers let them know when anybody crosses the border. It’s part of their function. When that happens, they call in help which happens to be a whole demon army. We want to cross safely, but also undetected. That means taking out this tower and making a gap in the net, so to speak.” Artemis said all of this without ever taking her eyes off the tower as she peeked over the mound of dirt Matt had piled up in front of the trench. She had been observing and feeding information back
“Won’t they just signal for help if we attack?”
“That’s part of the problem, yes. They likely only have one individual or device capable of doing that, though, and if we can take it out without being noticed, we can clean up whatever demons are here and slip through. Brennan, any luck with that?”
Brennan shook his head. “Not if what you say is true and there are dozens of demons in that tower. It doesn’t take that long to send a message, none of us can breach straight through solid stone, and even a handful of them could stop us long enough to get a signal out to others. It’s a hard problem.”
“Well, damn. I had hoped we could make this a little easier. But if we have to go loud, we have to go loud.” Artemis took her bow, bent it, and set the string. “Let’s do this.”
While the others gathered their gear, Matt stamped on the earth in the trench. His digging skill was so good that he rarely had to worry about the consistency of soil anymore, but he had the inklings of an idea cooking, and it mattered now. He was pleased to find that the soil was only loose for a few inches near the top of the ground. Under that, it was hard-packed, dry, and perfect for what he had in mind.
“Oh, I get it.” Lucy had been watching him, and he turned around to see a big grin on her face. “Yes, let’s do that.”
“Hey guys?” Matt said, smiling, “I think I have a less precise way to handle this that might work fine.”
—
“The tower is shaking.”
The bulk of the first-floor demons glared at the speaker. For the most part, towers were guarded by DEX-heavy classes, like scouts and defensive archers. Somehow, that rule had decided that this tower was an exception. Bears were a VIT heavy subspecies of demon, and this particular bulwark-classed example had somehow wormed himself into a tower job where he wasn’t helpful in the least.
Worse, he was stupid. That was a matter of luck, not stats, but there was no denying the bear was dumb. He seemed to have no idea that the rest of the animals resented him, much less why. It had taken them weeks to get him to understand latrine discipline, and he was hopeless at cooking. He spent most days sitting around useless, completely oblivious to the fact that all the others hated him. Except today, it seemed. Today, he wouldn’t shut up.
“No, it isn’t. There is no wind. Even if there was, the tower is made out of stone. It’s not moving.” The tower captain would have liked to ignore the bear, but part of his job was maintaining morale among the troops.
“It’s shaking. I can feel it.”
“No, you can't!” The captain shouted. The demons under his command were particularly touchy lately, given that they had all missed out on what promised to be a major killing-and-looting event in human territory and had instead pulled guard duty. If he didn’t want a full murder on his hands, he needed to get the bear to shut up before he found him dead the next morning with a slit throat. “You can’t feel the tower shaking. The worms are not ‘really loud today’. You are imagining things. You are going to stop talking, you will stop talking now, and you'll remain completely silent under any and all circumstances for the rest of the day. This is an order. Do you understand?”
“But…” The bear-demon looked up at the captain dully, so infuriatingly slow that he got a backhand across his snout for his efforts. The captain was not nearly so large as the bear, but he was a much, much higher level. He reached down, grasped the bear by the hide around his neck, and lifted him clear off the ground.
“No. No ‘But’ and no more talking.” He drew his sword and held it dangerously close to the bear's neck. “You will be quiet. You are not going to speak. Do you understand? It’s a yes or no question.”
Somewhere in the bear’s pancake-batter intellect, the idea that he was actually in some sort of danger clicked into place. He closed his mouth, narrowly avoiding letting another objection slip out.
“Yes,” he said, meekly.
The captain let him down, and the bear demon retreated to a table in the corner, where he sat quietly, apparently trying to look as small as possible. With the show over, the other demons on the first floor went about their business again, but smiling now. None of them were exactly friends, but they would come together for certain purposes, and jeering at a peer was definitely one. The captain had done his job and had done it well. Even he was satisfied with his own performance.
Comments
Jake Holland
Nice casual admittance of torture there. Being against an "acceptable target" doesn't make that cool, yknow?
Lyncher98
Can't wait for the next chapter.
