“Lemma!” Iason shouted,
charging into my field of view as he attacked the demon on its wounded side. It
tried to swing at him with its severed hand, which he dodged easily and then
stabbed up, slashing a gaping wound in the creature’s chest.
I blinked. My finger was pointed
right at the girl, I was about to..! Hastily I shifted targets, just in time as
a bolt of lightning flowed through the channel I’d created, striking the demon
right in the chest wound. It screamed in hate and agony, then exploded in a
puff of green flame and was gone.
“I’ll kill you!” screamed
the girl and charged us. I hit her with a gust of wind that knocked her flat on
her back.
“Calm your tits,” I told
her. I walked over and looked down at her, hands on my hips. “Do you
realize what just happened?”
“Yes!” she yelled,
slamming her fist down in the mud. “You killed Sonneillon!”
“Banished,” corrected
Iason, putting his sword away as he walked up to us. “You can’t kill a
demon.”
He was mostly right. A demon’s body
is a construct made of mostly magic, with just enough matter to hold it
together. All that happens if you destroy it is that the demon goes back to
wherever it came from and stays there until someone calls it back into the
world and gives it what it needs to make a new body. Even Iason’s sword
just disrupted the magic that held the body together–the demon’s true self is
pure mu, void, soulstuff, whatever you want to call it, and can’t be
destroyed under normal circumstances.
Of course there are always abnormal
circumstances. There were ways to truly kill a demon. Well, one way. A
way which, thanks to a certain book we recovered from a vampire nest, I now had
access to. I tried not to think about it.
“Killed, banished,
whatever!” snapped the girl. “It took me weeks to get together
everything I needed to summon him, and now I have to start from scratch! You’ve
ruined everything!”
“Saved everything, more
like,” I countered. “That was a wrath demon, wasn’t it?”
“Well…” she admitted.
“Yeah, I thought so. And you
were angry enough to order it to kill. It had its hooks in you! Do you have any
idea how much damage an out of control wrath demon that powerful could
do?”
“It wouldn’t have got
out of control if you hadn’t interfered! I was doing fine keeping my cool while
it attacked me, it would’ve given in if you hadn’t gotten in the way!”
Oh, so that’s why she was fighting
it–demonstrating dominance so it would obey her! That made sense, sort of.
“Young lady,” Iason said
sternly, “demons always get out of control eventually. They’re not
to be played with!”
“Hmph,” said the girl,
sitting up. “I think I know my demons. I know better than to fall for a
wrath demon’s taunts, unlike some people!”
To be continued…
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