Walking through the portal was like walking through soup. Unlike the gelatin that had transported Samantha and me to the garden, this substance was thinner, slimier, and allowed me to breathe relatively fine. And then it fell away, leaving Gregor, Burin, and I standing in darkness.
Okay. I’m being dramatic. But going from being surrounded by light, to finding yourself standing in an ashen covered hellhole was more than a little jarring. I had to squint just to see three feet in front of me. I barely kept a sneeze in as I glanced around. I wasn’t too surprised to see that the portal leading back to Samantha and the “ship” had blipped out of existence. It had dropped us off amidst the three fresh corpses she’d made out of those fleeing demons.
Vials were scattered across the ashy ground. I knelt and picked up the two nearest to my left foot. I tossed one over to Gregor. Or at least, where I assumed he was standing. To my eyes, he was little more than a blurry green shadow. Even if my aim was a bit off, the fighter still managed to catch the vial just fine.
“I believe she wanted us to drink these,” he said.
“She wants us to do a lot of things,” I replied grumpily.
Burin seemed to be having an easier time seeing than us. Maybe he’d activated his dragon eyes or whatever. Either way, he tugged a satchel out from under one of the corpses and rummaged inside. He came up with more vials, along with a folded sheet of paper. He unfolded it and started reading. “Akellod, I hear the boss has you working on some kind of potions for that stupid mortal. I don’t care if he is a dragon, I can’t fathom why she would be doing as he wishes. Still, take really good notes on your work, and see if you can make these transformations permanent. Just think of what we could do with those. Can you imagine, you and me at the head of an entire army of humans who we’ve dominated and turned into balors? We could carve out our own nice little dominion. Then I’ll,” Burin hesitated here, making a sound of discomfort before continuing, “I’ll, uh, bend the boss over and show that bitch her place. Stick with me, and I’ll make sure you get your turn on her. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about what it’d be like to break her and her daughters. Jokaxal.”
“That’s a lot to process,” I mused, holding the vial up close to my eyes. Its glass surface was marked with tiny sigils that I couldn’t read. “Typhon wanted these made. To turn innocent people into demons against their wills…”
Damnit, Ty, the ghost of the young man I’d once been, the dragon’s friend, thought. You were gonna unify the world. But in the end, you weren’t any better than that bitch Kestrel…Or me.
Gregor interrupted my train of thought by yanking the cork out of his vial with a loud pop. He sniffed it. Burin didn’t bother doing even that much. Down the hatch it went. He made noises of pain as his flesh bubbled, stretched, and darkened, absorbing everything except his axe into his new giant, demonic form. Dark flames rippled across it and the batlike wings growing out of his shoulder blades. His eyes burned with that same hellish “light” as he used them to scan the world we’d walked into.
“How does it feel?” I asked.
“It’s Burin,” Gregor chuckled. “Probably just tickled.”
“I’m starting to feel like a million gold,” the demon finally answered with the dwarf’s usual silly voice. “Heavy.”
On that note, Gregor and I looked at one another, shrugged, and drank from our vials. No, it didn’t tickle. It was as painful as it’d looked. That and disorienting. Feeling my body melt away only to reform into a monster? Not fun. By the end of it I was on one knee, breathing heavily, with an uglier, slimier body than the one I’d been born with. The only saving grace was that, like Burin’s axe, it felt like most of my equipment and weapons had been unaffected by the transformation. And now, thanks to my new eyes, I was able to properly see.
Y’know, as someone who enjoys killing people for a living, I’d made peace with the fact that I was likely going to Hell after I died. Which Hell in particular? Not sure. Whichever one wanted me, I guess. But the demon planet very much fit your run-of-the-mill, unimaginative, raining-ash-and-brimstone Hell-Hell. The only thing of immediate note was a building-maybe more like a small castle-directly in front of us flanked on both sides by a spooky, scary forest.
“I’ve got more arms,” I heard Gregor shout. I turned. He’d turned into a winged demon like Burin, only smaller and not on fire. Oh, and he now also had four arms instead of just two.
“Damn,” I said. “You’re ugly.”
“Yes. But you’re ugly and gooey.”
He wasn’t wrong. Acid covered my body. Every drop made the ground sizzle. Again, mercifully, my gear was unaffected by my acid sweat. I drew the gun that Samantha had given me. As I did so, Burin and Gregor took to the air with their wings. “Oh,” the latter said, amused. “I don’t think Terry has wings, Burin.”
I scowled at him. “I just knew that was gonna come up. Come on, Ugly and Uglier. Let’s get this over with.”
The jerks kept close as I jogged towards our obvious destination. We entered into an inner courtyard. The ground gave way for smooth marble and onyx, with the building itself colored red, black, and gold. Torches on the walls illuminated the castle’s interior.
The sound of battle reached our ears way before we entered the courtyard though. Burin drew his axe, I readied my gun, and Gregor…flexed his arms with anticipation or something. I recognized the sound of gunfire, but it was different than what I was used to. Instead of the crash of bullets, the sounds were…lighter. Instead of bang, bang, bang, it was more pew, pew, pew!
I glanced over at Burin. Now that our bodies weren’t magically tethered, I didn’t have to worry about wandering too far and being teleported back to him. So I snuck off when both he and Gregor weren’t looking, heading towards the ruckus.
The sight I stumbled into was…interesting to say the least. Spherical automations seemingly made of yellowed bones were shooting red energy balls at the ten-feet tall statue of a haughty-looking woman with a crown of curved horns, carrying a whip. Several corpses were strewn about the courtyard, steam emanating from the holes they’d been riddled with. I stuck to the shadows, watching. It didn’t take too long for me to spot movement behind the statue.
A female demon with the lower half of a pale snake was hiding behind it. She was seriously injured, with steam trickling from her wounds. Neither she nor the automatons had noticed me yet. If we were sneaky about it, maybe we could pass on through with all of them none the wiser-
Burin appeared in the room. He flew past the automatons, evading their fire, and landed behind Snake Lady.
“Hello!”
She jerked away, pressing herself against the statue. When he didn’t attack her, she exhaled shakily and asked him, “Did the Mistress send you?”
He cocked his head, frowning.
“Who’s the Mistress?”
I rolled my eyes. I bolted from the shadows, ducked and rolled, and popped back up between them. Though I kept low so as to take advantage of the cover the statue was providing in case I had to start shooting back at the approaching machines.
“Nocticula, fool,” I snapped at him, using the tone of a high-ranking officer reprimanding his subordinate. Persephone and I had set aside an afternoon in the hut to talk to Emily about the demon bitch in question. The information she’d given, plus everything I’d gotten from both Lyriana and the magic mirror, made it easy for me to be able to put two and two together. Samanatha had sent us to break into Nocticula’s house. Though, if the automatons were anything to go by, we hadn’t been the first to come up with the idea.
My personal hatred for the demon queen aside, I kept my tone light, even amused, as I told Snake Lady at Burin’s expense, “He’s taken so many axes to the face, it’s a miracle he can function at all. Forgive his lapse in memory.”
She shook her head. “The facility has fallen. I no longer care for what goes on here. But the Mistress’ daughter sent me here. To retrieve her own daughter! If you agree to help me with that, you can take whatever you want. I don’t care.”
“Okay!” Burin exclaimed. “Thank you!”
His overt friendliness made her tilt her head, but she remained all business as she called over the shots being fired, “You need to be careful with these hellwalkers. They’re using infernal energy, and they can do a lot of damage.”
“So can we,” Gregor shouted, flying over. He latched upside down onto the back of the statue and looked down at me, like a man-sized bat. “We’re here for weapons. If I get you one of these ‘hellwalkers’, you think you can work it?”
I nodded hungrily.
“You had me at ‘weapon’.”
Speaking of the devils, the hellwalkers were closing in, now close enough to tear decent chunks out of the Nocticula statue. Lizard Lady flinched. Her wounds seemed to be closing on their own, but not quick enough for her to be useful in a fight, probably. Unfortunately for her, if she was expecting one of us to be her new bodyguard, she was sorely mistaken. If she died, she died.
Gregor and I moved in unison towards the hellwalker leading the pack. It maybe wasn’t the most optimal move, but hey, it wasn’t every day that I had nasty demon powers. I took my hand off my gun and flung it forward. Acid slammed across the black glass covering the hellwalker’s cockpit. It sizzled but didn’t eat all of the way through. If it had, that would’ve been a bonus. But my real goal had been to make someone else’s job easier.
Gregor flew over me and atop the sizzling automaton. He drove all four clawed hands into the glass panel, yanked it off, and flung it to the side. This gave me my first look at the pilot. She was an emaciated husk of a female. Or really, of a female demon. Tubes were jammed into her, connecting her to the hellwalker. Maybe it was using her to power itself?
To protect her, the hellwalker shuddered and then sprouted two clawed arms on either side. They swung in towards Gregor. Unfazed, he knocked them aside. But that left him open to shots from two other hellwalkers. They took chunks out of his side and back, making him roar with pain.
Another two hellwalkers fired, one at me and the other at a charging Burin. He managed to dodge out of the way, but I wasn’t so lucky. Pain shot up my spine as I had a piece of my right arm burned off. I managed to push through the pain and rolled forward, taking cover behind the hellwalker Gregor was keeping busy.
“Okay,” I snarled. “No more, Mr. Nice Demon.”
I waited for a pause in their blasts before popping back up and returning fire with my gun. But I used one of my special bullets, the sort I use to control my little bots. They were designed to infect the mindless, preferably machines. The bullet struck the nearest hellwalker’s side and then there was a yank on my psyche. Unlike with my toy soldiers, this machine already had a master. I was now in a psychic tug-of-war with its pilot for control.
While that was going on, Burin swung his axe at his own attacker. Impressively, the pilot managed to maneuver the hellwalker away, avoiding the attack. Gregor’s foe wasn’t so lucky. Before the automaton could attack again, he drove all four of his clawed hands up into the pilot’s chest and stomach. He yanked her out of the hellwalker, and ripped her apart, severing her connections to the tubes. He tossed aside the fleshy mess that had once been her body and pumped four bloody fists in the air in triumph.
“I got one!” he called down to me.
I was too busy waging war in my head to respond. The pilot took away enough control to make the hellwalker shoot at me again. It clipped my shoulder, knocking me down to one knee. I managed to retain the connection despite the pain. If anything, the pain helped.
Not dead yet, I snarled back at the pilot. Did it twice. Not a fan.
I focused on the pain. Used it to strip control away from her, completely talking over the hellwalker. No. The Terry-Walker. I extended my mind into it, gaining a vague idea of its capabilities. Claws for slashing and grabbing. Guns for shooting. Simple enough. I’d need more time to figure out the finer details, but that’d come after.
I forced myself back up onto my feet and focused my attention onto the hellwalker attacking Burin. In near unison, the Terry-Walker shuddered and turned to face it.
Shoot, I commanded in my mind. The automaton did as it was told and began blasting at the enemy hellwalker. As it did that, I nodded at Gregor and climbed into Terry-Walker2. Grinning with a mouth full of fangs, he leapt away and landed on one of the last hellwalkers. He kicked in the glass plating, nearly breaking it in half. He then pulled it free, revealing the pilot inside, and went to work.
Very, very bloody work.
Burin swung and this time managed to strike his foe with his axe. Glass and bone fragments filled the air. The hellwalker pushed through the hit and Terry-Walker’s shots and clamped its claws around his shoulders, driving them into his flesh. Burin took a step back, dragging it along. The automaton suddenly began pulsing, each pulse coming quicker than the last.
The dwarf frowned before suddenly raising his free hand and channeling magic into it. He released it with a violent blast.
Not at the hellwalker attacking him, but at the one who’d been heading towards Snake Lady. The blast of magic shattered it, saving her. But that still left Burin seconds away from going boom.
Rolling my eyes, I fired at the hellwalker grappling him. I shot at the ligaments connecting the arms to the main body, making them drop and let him go. Instead of taking the hint, he stayed put.
I can only do so much.
I ducked down low, taking cover inside Terry-Walker2.
Pulse…
…Pulse…
BOOM!!!
The automaton erupted, becoming a sphere of black-red fire that consumed Burin. The blast rattled, making my teeth rattle, but it didn’t reach me. Before it could eat Snake Lady, Gregor jumped, grabbed her, and flew for safety. Seconds passed in silence before I sat up and looked over.
There was a perfectly circular crater with a smoking Burin at its center. He looked back and forth. It was hard to tell because of his new demon face, but his expression was more that of confusion than hurt.
I slumped back inside the cockpit and near immediately winced in pain. It wasn’t comfy. A lot of metal and bones and leftover tubes. But as I looked around, I mused to myself, I can work with this.