NOVEL NEXT Book 5, Chapter 11
"I'll deal with the Hellknight," I said, as I opened the passenger side door, calling up my dragon wings with a burst of Sorcery. "Everyone else, deal with the demon army, and protect the grove."
"I'm coming with you," Volex insisted.
"As you wish." I leapt out into open air, and spread my wings, feeling them snap fully open as they caught the rising plumes of smoke from the forest fire below. Behind me, Volex retreated into her reliquary- I wished I'd just given her the damn thing when it was ready and swapped her soul out, but no, I had to be special about it- and Faith took the van in for a landing as everyone geared up for combat.
"YOU!" Karthrynax yelled as she spotted me. "I will have my revenge on you, monster!"
"You killed me too," I said, my sword- the one Uncle Frederick had given me all those years ago- teleporting into my hands just in time to deflect her own- she had, clearly, gotten a new one, after I'd taken her previous sword and given it to Summer.
"You killed my husband!" Karthrynax spat. "My King! Oh, you monstrous little knife-ear, your reckoning has come!"
"How'd you get back onto the mortal plane, anyhow?" I asked. "Doesn't an unbound Succubus return to Hell after the destruction of her body? What did you do to your summoner?"
"I told her that yes, I would like revenge on the elf who killed my husband!" Karthrynax said. "Has it ever occurred to you that your behavior has consequences, little Ironheart? Or will you have to learn it at the hands of the numerous unrelated people who you've wronged just this year alone?"
A foreign twinge of Occult magic told me to back the hell off, and I did so eagerly, flapping my wings powerfully to throw me back a good fifty feet. Right as I got out of range, an entire goddamn Black Dragon screamed past me, hitting Karthrynax with a powerful swat of its front paw and sending her sailing off into the distance.
Uncle Frederick then banked into a sharp hairpin turn, as raw, crackling lightning welled up in his maw, spilling out between his saber-like teeth, and then unleashed a burst of lightning on the army of demons below him, breaking their formation and driving them, panicked, into the waiting arms of the Wood Elves and the rest of the Bad Chicks- Faith wasn't the only person down there wearing elven full plate, but she was the only one of them with a motorcycle and a machine gun rather than...
...oh, those are unicorns.
Focus, Catherine. You can ask to meet the unicorns after you've saved the Wood Elves from certain death.
I sped off after Karthrynax, beating my wings hard, hoping to hold our confrontation away from the grove, so that she couldn't support the army below her. A Succubus was a powerful Occult spellcaster, and that could, clearly, turn a disorganized rabble of traumatized morons into an effective fighting force, but only if they had that Occult working being actively maintained in close proximity by a powerful spellcaster; if Karthrynax had been attacking a human settlement, then the effect could last longer, but unfortunately for her, Wood Elves produced Occult savants even more prolifically than High Elves produced Arcane archmages, and the grove's Elders would probably be ripping that effect apart as we spoke.
Unless, of course, this battle was metaphysically about me, in which case they'd only manage to hold the line and trade space for time while I went off to duel Karthrynax, but, again, Wood Elves valued Occult magic, and even a Succubus simply should not have the kind of mojo that'd let her-
REVENGE.
I faltered in midair as Karthrynax's nascent Mantle exerted its pressure upon me.
That'd be enough to overpower a whole grove of Wood Elves, yeah. I hate being right.
Karthrynax, the Demon Prince of Revenge, came at me with bared fangs, a wickedly sharp saber in her hand. Her desire was written all over her face, to rip my heart from my chest and spread my blood for miles in every direction, to make a trophy of me as I'd made a trophy of Paimon... and, in the process, to complete her apotheosis, to become the Demon King of Revenge, ready to finish the work of her lost master, the work of conquering the mortal plane and drinking every last drop of life it had in its veins.
There were... hrm. I mean, I did not plan to let her kill me, because even if death was recoverable, it was still a deeply painful and unpleasant failure state. But here? Death was not a recoverable failure state. Death would mean birthing a Demon King, a Living God, who was already on the mortal plane, ready to start the next round of Dark Crusades.
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Killing Paimon was a fluke; I'd caught him at his most vulnerable, stopped him from recovering, and ganged up on him with a Druid and a Paladin. Karthrynax was on top of her game, and I was fighting her alone.
"Not alone," Volex whispered to me, as steel rang against steel, as Karthrynax pressed me with her sword. "I'm here for you. Always, to the bitter end, and beyond."
I grit my teeth, and 'stepped' through Karthrynax's guard to slug her in her exposed belly with an Arcane Force Bolt charged in my fist. She made a little noise of pain as she flew back a few feet, bent over a few degrees as she tried to recover, and I pressed the advantage.
"What do I do?" I asked Volex, wincing as steel bit into the dragonscale of my wing's "forearm," for lack of a better word, before I managed to force Karthrynax back onto the back... foot? Wing?
"Go on the attack," Volex said. "Verbally, not just physically. Thwart her narrative, and you'll be left with just a skilled knight as your opponent."
"'Just' a skilled knight, you say," I complained, but... still, I listened to her. What was the point of keeping a skilled Occultist like her around if I wasn't going to listen to her advice? You know, aside from the fact that she's a close friend of mine who I love very dearly.
"So I killed your husband," I began, ducking under a wild slash of Karthrynax's sword. "Cry me a fucking river."
"You insolent-!" Karthrynax yelled.
"Oh boo hoo, I engaged in military violence against enemy combatants who are in a state of declared war with the entire mortal plane, and killed your cultists and master in order to protect the innocent and rescue my kidnapped friend from being sacrificed on an altar," I continued. "Tenpenny wants to avenge her husband, who died by my hand purely because I got to him first, and who attempted to sacrifice me on an altar? Fuck the both of you, fuck your stupid persecution complexes, and fuck your stupid wings!"
"You-"
A temporal rift opened, spitting out a Catherine Ironheart from a few seconds in the future, who grabbed Karthrynax by the base of her wings, planted her boots between the Prince's shoulderblades, and ripped the poor little Hellknight's wings right off, sending her falling to the ground, while that Catherine followed her down to continue the fight. For my part, I zipped forward, whipping around, and opened a tiny temporal rift to complete the tiny time loop I'd just witnessed.
"Fuck your narrative," I continued, slamming my shoulder into her chest and bearing her to the ground faster than gravity could alone, with a mighty flap of my wings, and putting a Hellknight-shaped crater into the forest floor. "You think this is revenge? You think you've earned revenge? You think I'm the one who wronged you? Well, guess what, dipshit! None of that actually matters! You're dealing with a High Elf, not a Wood Elf. I'm not just an Occultist, I'm a Wizard. Maybe you can argue with my interpretation of the situation. I'd like to see you argue with a lightning bolt."
Up above, the sky had already clouded over; the potent magics of the grove's Elders working to bring enough rain to douse the fires before anything more could be burned. Conveniently for me, those clouds were dense and dark. A thunderhead was forming. All it took for me to channel its might towards my own purposes was a simple laser spell- ultraviolet, starting on Karthrynax's body and going straight up towards the thunderhead, ionizing the air along the way into oh-so-conductive plasma.
I backpedaled with my wings, putting distance between myself and the Hellknight, who groaned as she pushed herself upright from the center of the crater, and throwing up an Arcane shield against explosions and radiation, just in time for the time-delayed radiation spell to activate.
The shield held, and I could watch a Hellknight get struck by true, Wrath Of Nature lightning without blinding myself in the process. The blast of thunder was more of an shockwave than a loud noise at this distance; my shield had to be a full orb around me to keep me from rupturing organs in the blast, or else the shockwave would just go around the shield.
As it stood, the flash was reduced to a pretty light show, the shockwave reduced to an annoyingly loud bang, and I watched as Karthrynax's hellforged armor heated up to a bright glow, the metal softening and warping, even melting in some places where it was especially thin.
I grinned. For as much as I'd been focusing on my other magics, my Divine spellcasting, my Occultism, my Sorcery... I was still a Bachelor of Wizardry, trained by one of history's greatest archmages, and it was so fucking gratifying to see that actually matter again, for more reasons than making pocket dimensions and magic guns. To witness firsthand the difference between fighting an Occultist and fighting an Arcanist. Any jackass can argue with a Bard's narrative. Good luck outsmarting a fucking lightning bolt.
I let my shield drop, once the lightshow was over, and then... frowned.
"God dammit," I muttered, as Karthrynax staggered to her feet, shuffling off the melted and twisted bits of her armor, before drawing her sword from the earth where it'd been buried halfway up the blade. "I guess if it was that easy to kill a demigod, they wouldn't be scarier than a battlemage, would they?" She was steaming and smoking- any sweat and grime on her skin had been flash-boiled by the lightning, and it appeared that her hair was partially on fire.
"I," Karthrynax snarled, as her wings regrew in a sickeningly crunchy spray of black ichor, "am sick of your bullshit, elf. Your blood will be sweeter than any wine I've had, and your skull will decorate my throne until the end of time."
I sighed, and wove all my dragon's form spells together as I cast them. I wasn't quite a half-dragon at this point, but that was enough to cover me in scales like steel, and give me teeth and claws sharper than any knife I've ever held, along with a thick, long tail, and an extra half foot of height and a hundred pounds of muscle.
"Come," I growled, embers spilling from my toothy maw, "and fucking take it."