One never truly appreciates how vast the world really is. Not until they spent four weeks on horseback, and noticed how the terrain barely changed. Once, early in my career, I traveled for nine months without seeing a single other human being.
Having grown up in a city, it was surreal.
Excerpt from The Beasts of the Dungeon.
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Marcus grunted in annoyance when yet another so-called spatial mage threw up, all but feeling Elly's grin. She bumped his shoulder a moment later, tone gleeful. "Hey. Hey Marcus. Hey."
"Yes, Elly?"
"Another one of the mages threw up."
He sighed a deep, long sigh. She seemed to delight in it. "I saw."
"So the Empire is shit and we're the best, eh? If these are their so-called experts, I mean."
"They're just more sensitive," Marcus replied, glancing at her. "And you were glaring at trees an hour ago. Are rapid and unpredictable mood swings something I'm going to have to watch out for?"
She pouted at him. "Don't be mean. I was hangry."
"Thank the Silent Gods I carried snacks. Someone could have died."
His dry tone set off another round of pouting, which really was a far too adorable expression. But he had to hold strong, or she'd be employing it every moment of every day.
Marcus stepped to the side and turned back to their war party, who seemed to have finally collected themselves. Xathar stomped in impatience next to him, glaring at Elly's horse, but he paid the demon little mind.
Of much more interest was everyone else. His own Royal Guards, mages and more were mounted on mundane horses, and though their stamina was improved thanks to the trio of healers they had, they grew tired.
Vistus' mages, on the other hand, were riding summoned creatures to the last. Quadrupedal stone elementals, flightless birds, skittish lizards and more. It was a sight to see, though he'd since gotten used to it.
Despite the variety, all of them proved fast and persistent, while the horses they'd brought were very much mortal. Still, him being able to teleport the group sped up their progress, and by quite a bit at that.
A river was just a river, and he wasn't really needed there. But hordes of Hounds still swarmed around them, even this far from the Dungeon, and Calamities proved frequent.
Vistus had already killed three, and watching the man fight had been an experience. Mostly because it was fresh on his mind, and even though the man had declined his offer of moving him there and back, Marcus had taken a peek.
It had been a big bastard, that one. Vaguely similar to the first one he and Elly had ever fought, though not made of stone. And Vistus had just kind of looked at it, then promptly made it rain explosives. Marcus wasn't sure what that stuff had been, but the Calamity hadn't enjoyed it. Not in the slightest.
And speaking of the man, there he was. Marcus waved and the Archmage turned their way, joining them after a minute. His companions, the fire elemental and his apprentice, didn't.
"Marcus," Vistus greeted. The man seemed tired but in good spirits, which was leagues better than Marcus' own experience with the things. "Elenoir. I noticed you looking. What do you think?"
Elly snorted. "I think you're being wasted by babysitting us."
"Quite a few people would agree," the man replied mildly. "But the Empress does not, and nor do I. Which is not a reflection on your skills, of course. But the Empire has lost promising Archmages before, and for all my might, I am replaceable."
Marcus grunted. "Which implies that I'm not. I agree in theory, but Elly and I killed four of them combined, two of which while alone. That's not even including the fact that one was a Horde Calamity. We can take care of ourselves, or more accurately, can help you take care of everyone."
"I have been meaning to ask about that," Vistus said, turning to look at the vast forest stretching out before them. Marcus had to agree that it was a spectacular sight, made somewhat less so by the flying Hounds nesting in its tallest trees. "There's a good reason Horde Calamities are so feared, and not because of their personal might. I am right in assuming that you snuck inside the city, teleported towards it, then killed it as quickly as possible?"
Elly shifted in her saddle. "It didn't go as smoothly as that, but essentially."
"Fighting Calamities is never smooth," the man dismissed. "No, the problem is getting to them. Which applies to regular Calamities too, if to a lesser extent. Not even I fight them alone, since even should I succeed, it will quite possibly have taken all my might to do so. And Hounds might fear them, but they get over that frightfully quickly once it is dead."
Marcus sighed. "And I don't have that problem. We don't have that problem, we being anyone who travels with me. But teleportation isn't that hard, at least not in small groups. I'm sure the Empire can find a few talented enough to shepherd Archmages around, no?"
"If they existed, I'd have them." Vistus shrugged. "You're new to your power, pushing its boundaries. It's natural that what seems easy to you, should be possible for others. Everyone thinks like that, to an extent. But just like there are no transmutation mages capable of filling entire warehouses with food, there are no spatial mages capable of teleportation. Not like you are, at least."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that there are some select few who have figured it out, and can teleport a whole four times before their reserves run empty. While traveling alone, mind you. Higher magics are classified like they are for a reason."
Marcus didn't sigh, because he had been doing that too much already, and half turned towards an approaching Royal Guard. Nothing but a message. He glanced at their breastplate, again, and resisted the urge to ask them to take it off. Again.
That offhanded comment had gotten him mocked for nearly an hour, last time, but he hadn't been involved in that particular project. With the army in quarters at River Reach, the enchanters under Gretched had taken the liberty of rushing out a project. His guards had benefited.
It wasn't absurd, the magic mainly focused on impact redistribution alongside minor temperature control, but it made them harder to kill. And when distributed over dozens of fighters, the unit showed a noticeable improvement in performance.
Or so their captain had promised, anyway. Helios' nephew had seemed somewhat stressed trying to keep up with both him and Elly, reinventing the Royal Guard over and over as the danger to them changed, but honestly Marcus was pleased with the man.
Yonas worked diligently, without complaint and mostly in the background. Even Vess had seen little to complain about, which was rare enough. And speaking of Vess, the succubus was slipping more and more into the background herself. He suspected that she liked being an invisible spymistress.
…wait, what's that?
"Elly, what's that?"
He pointed, and she followed his finger. The following silence was anything but reassuring, and even Vistus shifted his stance. She finally answered, tone hesitant. "I think it's a portal? There's quite a lot of trees in the way."
"I'm the only one capable of making portals," he countered, glancing at Vistus. "Right?"
The man didn't reply immediately, and Marcus felt Vistus' senses stretch out. He'd been working on that himself, recently. Magical sensitivity, that was. Vistus grunted. "It's a demonically aligned summoning portal. A long-term one, from what I can feel. It's pretty far away."
"There shouldn't be anyone here, right? Let alone a mage capable of something like that?"
"Correct. I recommend investigating."
Marcus was about to agree when he felt a brief spike of demonic energy. A very familiar spike of energy, back from when he'd been inside of the School of Life.
Silent Gods, that felt like a lifetime ago.
But no, it wasn't just familiar. Any shapeshifter was familiar to him, be that one he knew or not. The mining town might have been the shortest of the loops, but it had left an impression. Had made him come to more than one realization, realizations that might very well have shaped the person he was now.
"You have got to be fucking kidding me."
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"You have got to be fucking kidding me."
Elly snapped around to look at Marcus, because while he didn't curse much, he even more rarely sounded angry. Annoyed, upset, irritated and impatient, yes, but so very rarely angry.
Then his lips actually curled into a snarl, and he was gone. She shared a surprised look with Vistus, because randomly running off was even more rare than him getting angry.
"Fuck," she muttered, dismounting and checking her weapons in one smooth motion. Sword, check. Bow, quiver, knife and armor, check. Two day rations, check. Good enough. "I'm going after him. Can you keep up?"
Vistus shook his head. "No. Maybe with you, if we're on a flat plane of ground, but most certainly not with Marcus. I'll follow with the rest of the party."
She nodded, her mild dislike of the man set aside. Whatever else, she believed that he was invested in keeping Marcus alive.
Elly pulled, and her body flooded with Life. She might have been slightly faster if she infused her horse with it, but not in that forest, and while she hadn't seen Marcus reappear, it didn't take a genius to figure out he was going to the portal.
The why wasn't as obvious, but anything that actually made him that angry was worthy of being stabbed. And then erased from existence, if possible.
Trees soon filled her view, but by the time navigation became a problem, she could feel Marcus' magic with her senses. He'd stopped, that much was clear, but while she was half decent at feeling out his usual spells, whatever he was doing now was a mystery.
The summoning portal hadn't been close, and though it was visible from where she'd been standing before, it was thoroughly hidden now. But she was much, much more familiar with Marcus' magic than that from some random mage, and in the end it only took her ten minutes to find the place.
Ten minutes against Marcus'... what? Thirty seconds? Damn but teleportation was cheating.
Elly slowed and stepped into the clearing, glancing at the scene. Marcus was fine, and seemingly tearing open a hole in reality while glancing at the still-active summoning portal, but four bodies were on the floor.
All had been decapitated, and so cleanly that it could have been done with nothing but a spatial arc, and from the scent in the air, there had been at least a few dozen demons. Mostly Brutes, Felids and a trace of something she couldn't quite identify.
She sighed, trying for humor. "Alright, that was rude. Mind telling me—"
The tear Marcus was working on flashed with power, and he stepped through with so much as turning to her. It was separate from the summoning portal, which winked out of existence a moment later, and Elly cursed again.
She would bet her left hand that was going straight to the Hells. Life energy should allow her to go there, and in fact Marcus had done some testing with Vess to ensure that it could, but this was rather different than a simulated environment.
Fuck.
Elly stepped up to the portal, pressing her hand against it. Annoyingly, nothing happened. That annoyance turned to a spark of fear when she realized Marcus was in one of the Hells, alone and without backup. He was a good fighter, a very good fighter, but she didn't know what could be on the other side. Neither could he have.
It took almost a minute and a half to figure out she had to press a drop of blood to the thing. Seconds could, and often did, decide a fight, so that was ninety chances that Marcus could be dead. That her Marcus—
Her mind was violently pulled away from its train of through by the teleportation, which was far more turbulent than usual. And then, after one moment had pushed the limits of infinity, a new landscape stretched before her.
The sky was purple and filled with lightning, the ground was blood and the trees were ivory. Elly gasped for air and found it bitter, which she academically understood to be a byproduct of Life filtering it for human use, but everything was wrong.
Stone screamed in mute horror, the wind whispered tales of a thousand battlefields, and direction was meaningless. North was down and down was sideways, the moon leering down in glee above it all. Gravity politely asked her to kneel, and light itself drew knives made of liquid nightmares.
Elly pulled on more Life, infusing her flesh as far as it would go, and some distant part of her mind started the clock. The countdown before her very body broke down under the stress. The rest of her was far too busy being relieved, because things snapped back to a state of normality.
The ground, for example, was made of blood not because that seemed like a fun alternative to grass, but because Marcus was slaughtering a small army of demons.
"You think I have time for this?" a distant voice thundered. The sound rolled over the battlefield, and it took her a long, startled moment to realize it belonged to Marcus. He sounded incensed. "Do you think we were just going to go back to playing hide and seek?!"
Elly tracked the sound, needing to take a moment to adjust, but she had time. The area around the portal was filled with nothing but the corpses of demons. Dead, mutilated demons. She realized she hadn't actually seen much of those before, because anytime they died, they returned to the Hells.
But here they weren't immortal. Here they were home, and there was nowhere for their souls to flee to.
She grinned, her expression freezing in place when she finally did find Marcus. He was screaming at a shape of liquid flesh, which was trying very hard to run away, and apparently he didn't notice the giant demon approaching from behind.
Elly rushed towards them, bow already drawn, but too little, too late. The demon stabbed him with a flaming sword—a Demon Prince, shit—which seemed to burn magic itself. Marcus screamed, half in pain and half in sheer rage, before teleporting both himself and the shapeshifter away.
The Demon Prince pulled their weapon back, snorting like a bull. The tip was coated red.
Her Life enhanced, magically augmented arrow slammed into the thing's head a moment later. More details clicked into place as it did, like the fact that this was clearly an invasion force and that the shapeshifter Marcus was ranting against was very most likely the same one that had stalked him in the School of Life, but that was irrelevant for now. Even the fact that Marcus was using more defensive matrices than usual, probably to deal with the hostile environment, was set aside.
That creature had stabbed Marcus. It was going to die. Violently.
The arrow hadn't done too much, breaking through whatever that helmet was made out of but failing to kill the demon, and Elly put her bow away. Picking it off from range would be the smart play, but there were still other demons around. And for all that they could actually die now, they weren't cowards.
Marcus was killing them by the hundreds, alternating between raging monologues and almost dreadful silence, but she ignored it. And resolved herself to never push him this far. Ever.
Damn but he could be terrifying.
"Who do you think you are?!" Marcus demanded, still so very far away. Elly focused on closing the distance to the Demon Prince, dodging hordes of Brutes and Imps along the way. And Okisth, and Bats, and another dozen species. It was a mess. "Answer me, you slithering coward. Did you think I would not come here? Did you think I cared for your age?"
Elly slowly unsheathed her sword, a bellow from the Prince seeing its army retreat. The thing wanted a fair fight, it would seem. That was fine with her.
The Prince was big. She'd known that already, both from her reading and from seeing it from afar. But the books all talked about vicious fighters. They talked about incredible strength combined with lightning fast reflexes, and how their minds were so complex they bordered on the genius.
She wasn't sure why the books had been lying, but she vaulted over its first swing easily enough. Her own blade cut through its foot, crimson blood mixing with her sword's green hue, and though the wound closed quickly, the Prince bellowed in pain.
Elly dismantled the creature. It took time, it took effort, but this wasn't a Calamity. Its flesh wasn't up to the task of resisting her blade, especially not with how much Life she cycled through the thing, and its so-called genius mind couldn't seem to figure out how to catch her.
At which point the other demons moved to flank her, because apparently honor didn't matter once the thing was actually losing, but Marcus appeared between them. Spatial arcs cut through thousands, reaping entire battalions at a time.
He didn't use his new sixth-tier spell, because defense wasn't optional in the Hells, but he didn't need to. Her husband appeared, killed, vanished, and repeated that process. Over and over and over.
And while he was wiping out an army, she was cutting apart the Prince. The demon healed every wound she made, but that was alright. Its regeneration was slowing, its strength bleeding away, and it didn't seem to enjoy Life energy in the slightest.
Any hope of turning the situation around vanished when Vistus arrived through the portal, who immediately sealed it off inside a stone dome. Elly didn't pay the man any mind, ducking low and slicing at the Prince's hand.
Unlike before, it was a hair too slow to dodge. Her blade cut through half its wrist before stopping, but that was enough. Elly kicked the weapon, using it to jump up higher, and it clattered to the floor. Her sword was sheathed and her bow in hand before she reached the apex of her flight, her second arrow taking the Prince in the eye.
Again it didn't manage to penetrate the skull, but whatever that helmet was made out of, it couldn't stop her entirely. The Prince screamed when its eye was destroyed, and she managed to force down the hand coming to pluck out her arrow.
With the arrow still in place, and her blade resuming its butcher's work, the Prince couldn't take it out. And being blinded in one eye was more of a disadvantage than most people assumed, even for demons.
Then Vistus arrived, and a cord of metal wrapped around its throat. Elly half turned to the Archmage while the Prince's head was sawed off, eyes narrowing. "It's rude to interrupt."
"It's stupid to be here," the man countered. Elly blinked. That was a lot blunter than usual. "Go fetch Marcus. We're leaving."
She bristled at the order, but her concern for Marcus won out over her dislike for the man. She found him standing over a pile of flesh, blinking at her arrival. "Elly. Hi."
"Hey," she replied gently, half reaching out a hand before letting it drop. "You doing alright?"
He looked at the wound in his side, shrugging. "Mostly. Sorry for running off like that."
"It's alright," Elly soothed. It wasn't, but she could forgive far worse than rage. When not aimed at her, anyway. "Vistus says that we should leave."
Marcus shook his head, glancing at where the man was removing the Prince. Literally, at that, its corpse fusing with the ground. "Shit. Yeah, we should. The Prince will have a King, who might or might not be upset at the death of their officer. Ready?"
She nodded, and a moment later she was standing next to Vistus again. The man didn't say anything for a long moment, seemingly inspecting the ground. He finally nodded.
"Good enough." The man turned towards Marcus, which made Elly tense. His tone was forcefully level. "I won't scold you, because that is beneath us all, but this was stupid. One Prince and their forces is nothing compared to what a true invasion might— No. We'll talk outside."
Vistus turned and moved towards the portal, something which Marcus cut short by teleporting them there. The stone barrier melted away, and seconds later Elly was breathing normal air again. It was sweet in a way she'd never appreciated before, especially once the portal winked out of existence, but her relief was short lived.
Marcus was tense, which the Royal Guards picked up on, and that in turn made Vistus' people wary. The man grunted when she moved to speak, cutting her off. "Not here. Come."
Elly narrowed her eyes, but Marcus teleported them into the air before anything could come of it. They were standing where he'd lost his mind moments later, and her husband turned to his fellow Archmage with a frown.
"I appreciate your annoyance at the situation," he began, folding his arms. "And I will accept that it was my fault. Don't cut Elly off like that again."
Vistus took a visible moment to calm himself, making chairs rise from the dirt, and he suddenly seemed so very tired. Tired and old. "I'm sorry. The Hells are dangerous at the best of times, doubly so while unprepared. Humanity can't afford for you to die, Marcus."
"Horzo has as equal a chance to change the war as I do," he countered, wincing as he sat. A trickle of blood ran down onto the chair, which stopped a moment later. "Damn that hurts. I won't argue my point. I recognized the shapeshifter from the School of Life, which as it turns out only half remembers me, and it triggered old trauma. The kind I thought to have mastered."
The other Archmage sighed. "Yeah. Risking the chance of you taking this as approval, that issue did have to be dealt with. One successful probe would lead to a dozen more, and if the King thinks we're weak, they will come with a proper army. But we've shown not to be, so they can't afford to risk it. Whoever that Prince answered to will lose interest in us humans soon enough. They always do."
"How did we even stumble onto them? We're in the middle of nowhere."
"Maybe the Sect of Wisdrog foresaw this, and planned our path accordingly." Vistus shrugged, his tone turning dry. "It usually takes a bit more effort to break into the Hells, I will say. Either way, the Sect doesn't tend to explain themselves much."
Marcus hissed and pressed a hand to his side, grunting in annoyance. Elly suppressed a wince, glancing at Vistus. "Can't you just seal up the wound?"
"I'm only a middling healer," the man replied, moving towards Marcus anyway. "The body is too complex, and more importantly too alive, for transmutation to be much help. Hold still."
Elly watched them fight the wound, which seemed to want to burn, and suppressed a grimace. That had been almost fun, for a little while, but getting stuck in the Hells sounded horrific. For all that Life protected her, her body wouldn't be able to keep up. And once she ran out, death would follow rather swiftly.
She eased herself off the energy that was running through her veins, a wave of exhaustion rolling over her, and she reclined further into her shockingly comfortable chair.
Dealing with a demonic invasion on top of the Dungeon Break would be unpleasant, and just when she decided that a small nap sounded lovely, a flock of flying Hounds screeched in the near distance.
It never ended. She was finally starting to appreciate that. No matter how many Hounds they killed, how many Calamities they slaughtered, there would always be more. It was a war where one side cared nothing for attrition or losses, and the other was barely hanging on.
Endless, exhausting war.
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