Chapter 167 - A Simple Plan

ANNOUNCEMENT: Just in case anyone's missed it, I wanted to make sure that everyone's aware that the first 53 chapters are going to be coming down on the 13th.  I'm doing this in preparation for the first book's release on Nov. 29 (for both Audible and Kindle).

“So, just bash them with your club, huh?” asked Abby, smirking at Zeke. Everyone was sitting around the table, which had become their de facto conference room. “Why am I not surprised?”

He shrugged. “I kind of am who I am,” he admitted. “If you’re waiting on me to become a brilliant strategist, I think you’re going to be waiting for a long, long time. I’m a straightforward kind of person, and the way I see it, the best way to get through that army is to hit them hard and fast and hope we get through before we can be overwhelmed.”

Tucker asked, “What about that big rune formation?”

Zeke glanced in his direction, all but grimacing when he saw the demon soul sitting in its jar on the table. “What’s our little friend say about it? What is it?” he asked.

“The outer ring is there to form a connection with the mortal realm,” said the collection of black-and-purple mist. “Now that it has, it does nothing. The true gate will be much smaller, and it will almost certainly be in the center of that shadow city.”

“Shadow city?” asked Abby.

“A reflection of your world,” it explained. “It bleeds through and reinforces the connection, both a side effect and an enhancement.”

“So, it’s not real?” was Zeke’s question. During their observation of the demon army, he had seen that the walls were solid enough. The gates were open, but only a trickle of demons entered the black city. “And why aren’t they all rushing toward the portal?”

“You truly are an infant,” the warlock’s soul complained. “Every demon down there has at least a modicum of power. The moment they enter that city, it throws the energy into imbalance. The connection can handle a trickle, but if that trickle becomes a river, the entire thing will destabilize.”

Zeke took a moment to think. After a few seconds, he asked, “So, is it just me, or does my plan actually seem kind of perfect? If we smash our way through, they can’t follow, or the reflection will collapse and take the portal with it. Which they obviously don’t want.”

“Uh…yeah,” said Abby with a sigh. “Seems that way.”

“Why do you sound so disappointed?” he asked.

“I don’t want to encourage your behavior,” she said with another smile. “Next thing, you’ll start leaping at bad guys again.”

“And screaming,” added Talia, her first contribution to the conversation. While it was good to see her participating, as opposed to simply standing in the corner like a statue, Zeke didn’t like that her first contribution was to poke fun at him.

“Right. Can’t forget the screaming,” Abby agreed.

Zeke let out a deep breath. “It’s a war cry,” he muttered, half to himself, but loud enough that everyone else could hear him. “Lots of people do it.”

Abby patted him on the arm, saying, “It’s alright. You scream like an insane caveman if you want. We support you either way.”

“I don’t know what’s happening right now,” Carlos said, obviously missing the long-standing and running joke of making fun of Zeke’s battle tactics. Or lack thereof.

“Zeke is kind of hopeless when it comes to making plans,” supplied Tucker.

“Or doing anything except ‘smash it with a club,’” Abby added. “At least when it comes to fighting. But that’s why we love him.”

Zeke wanted to argue, but he knew that, even though they were obviously exaggerating, his friends were kind of right. It wasn’t so much that he was incapable of planning. Rather, he always found that charging in and physically dominating anything in his way was preferable to any elaborate scheme. Sure, if he had an army at his disposal, things might be a little different. He wasn’t a tactical genius, but he could at least grasp many of the concepts involved. However, when it was just him and his friends, it was usually better to just tackle things head-on.

Or maybe he was just trying to justify his own ineptitude as a tactician. But in his defense, he’d never set out to be one. Nor had he laid claim to the title. Instead, leadership had been thrust upon him, and he was just doing the best he could with his limited talents.

“So, what can we expect when we get to the portal?” Zeke asked, hoping to change the subject.

“It will be similar to what you saw in the cavern,” the soul stated. “More impressive, though.”

“In what way?” asked Zeke.

“There will be redundancies,” the former warlock answered. “I only saw the plans, so I can not be certain, but…it will be impossible to destabilize it without destroying both sides.”

Abby took that opportunity to interject, “And I suppose that if we mess with whatever’s going on here, we won’t be able to go through the portal, right? You’re saying we’re going to have to choose between going home and keeping the world from being overrun by demons, aren’t you?”

If a floating cloud of black-and-purple mist could smile, the warlock’s detached soul would have done just that. Instead, it had to settle for a bit of evil mirth infecting its voice as it said, “That does seem to be the case.”

“Well, screw that,” Tucker said. “I can always rig up a timer and blow the whole city to kingdom come. In fact, I like this plan. Let’s blow everything up.”

“That’s your answer to everything,” Zeke said.

“If it ain’t broke…”

Zeke shook his head and stood. As he started to pace, he had to admit that Tucker’s plan was probably the best option. Was it foolproof? No. Was there a good chance that something would go wrong? Almost certainly. But Zeke didn’t really know how better to accomplish their goals of both escaping Mal’araxis and destroying the portals. As he paced, the others continued to discuss their options, but no one offered any better suggestions.

Of course, Talia suggested that she could stay behind while everyone else escaped. So long as Zeke explained to her how to destroy the rune formation that anchored the portal, she could probably destabilize it enough to ruin its viability. However, that would also mean that she would be stranded in a realm whose very atmosphere was toxic. The purifier’s gems were great at keeping the toxicity at bay, but they wouldn’t last forever. Ramul had said as much. In effect, if Talia – or anyone else – stayed behind, they’d be sentencing themselves to death.

Anyone but Zeke, that was.

He alone could survive the demon realm; in fact, he’d been doing just that for weeks without much issue. The only reason he’d been injured as much as he had was because he’d been pushing himself through exhaustion in order to find a way for his friends to survive. Without that hanging over his head, he didn’t expect that surviving in Mal’araxis would prove inordinately difficult. In fact, there was a part of him that expected it would be beneficial to his development. Nothing sharpened a man’s power like a constant struggle to survive; his time in the troll caves had taught him that much, and nothing since escaping that hell had made him rethink the idea.

But taking that option would mean being separated from his friends. It would mean having to be alone again – something that he would avoid at nearly any cost. Zeke wasn’t so proud that he couldn’t admit that the notion of spending days, weeks, or even months alone terrified him. In the troll caves, he’d devolved into little more than a wild beast. He’d grown stronger, and he’d eventually recovered his humanity – mostly – but he couldn’t guarantee he’d be so lucky if he had to confront the solitude once again.

Not alone, came Pudge’s thought.

Zeke glanced in the infernal bear’s direction and couldn’t stop a small smile from turning up the corners of his mouth. Indeed, he would never be alone again. Pudge wouldn’t leave his side for anything. However, it was a bittersweet thought, given that he didn’t want to subject his companion to a life in the demon realm any more than he wanted to live one himself.

Even so, he would do it if the situation called for such a sacrifice. Otherwise, he would never be able to live with himself.

“How long will it take you to brew the appropriate potions?” Zeke asked, interrupting a conversation that had devolved into meaninglessness.

Tucker shrugged, “A few days, at most. But I’ve been thinking. Why not make something special for that army, too?”

“Like what?” Zeke asked.

“Okay, so – you know how I’ve been working on something to help us survive, right?” he said, referring to his efforts to create a potion that would counteract the demon realm’s toxic atmosphere. “Well, I started taking little pieces of our friend here, and I might have found a way to…well…it’s hard to explain, actually.”

“Try.”

“Fine,” the alchemist said. “Alright – so, demons. They’re kind of like…I don’t know…they’re not fully real. Or not in the way we are. It’s one of the reasons we can’t survive in this realm.”

“Totally not following,” said Abby.

“Yeah, it’s complicated,” he said. “And I don’t really understand it all that well. The basics are that their bodies are not really tied to their souls. It’s like the souls are the real demons, and the bodies are just…their vehicles. Does that make any kind of sense?”

“Not really.”

“No.”

“You lost me.”

Abby, Zeke, and Carlos all spoke up at once, and even Pudge seemed confused. Of course, expecting a bear to understand something like that was probably an exercise in futility.

“Yeah – doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, either,” Tucker said. “But all of my tests tell me that if you attack a demon’s soul, you can cause a lot more damage than if you damage their bodies. That’s why Locky here is so weak. Passing back through the portal as it was collapsing destroyed his body. The backlash weakened him.”

“That is an oversimplification,” claimed the soul. “I am not meant for this plane, and entering it further –”

“Locky?” asked Abby with a raise of her eyebrow.

“Won’t tell me his name, and inspection doesn’t work on him. I had to call him something,” Tucker stated. “My point is that I think I can make a grenade that will sever the connection between the souls and their bodies, which are basically pure corruption, by the way, so it shouldn’t be that hard. That’s how I figured it out. I can destroy that corruption pretty easily. It wasn’t enough to make it safe for more than a minute or two, but –”

“It is not corruption,” said the demon soul from its jar. “It is the combined suffering of millions of souls, and it is –”

“Shut up, or I’ll start ripping pieces off of you again,” threatened Tucker. The soul went silent. Tucker turned to Zeke, saying, “If you give me a few days, I can put together a hundred grenades that will weaken or maybe even kill a good portion of that army out there. There’s no way for us to kill them all, but we can put a good dent in their numbers. That’ll make it easier for us to get through.”

“Wouldn’t that just…I don’t know…make them all come at us?” Zeke asked. “I mean, we start blowing them up, and they’re definitely going to react. Our goal is to get through the army as quickly as possible so we can destabilize the portal.”

“That’s the thing – I can rig them up with a timer,” he said. “Well, it’s not really a timer so much as a delayed chemical reaction that eventually explodes, but…well, for our purposes, it’s a timer.”

“And you think this will make our job easier?”

“It almost has to,” Tucker stated. “It won’t make it harder, though.  I can guarantee that much.”

After that, they all agreed to incorporate Tucker’s timed bombs into the rudimentary plan. Even with their addition, Zeke couldn’t help but wonder if everything was just too simple. But try as he might, he either didn’t have enough information or the means to alter the plan in any significant way. Or perhaps it was just a lack of creativity. Either way, he was forced to accept that it wasn’t going to get any better. So, once everyone was satisfied with their roles, everyone went about their preparation.

It would be a few days before Tucker could finish brewing enough potions to enact the plan, so Zeke took that time to train with Talia. She was the only person who could reasonably keep up with him, after all. And even she was having more and more trouble as the days went by. After getting a couple of new achievements as well as two levels – which he reasoned was for killing the warlock, which Zeke had discovered was a high enough level that it was a native of a higher plane – the gap in power had only grown. Now, even when Talia was going all-out, she was only marginally faster than him.

After a couple of hours’ worth of sparring, Talia backed away, saying, “Your techniques are changing. Why?”

He relaxed, letting his mace’s head fall to the floor. “I’m not satisfied with the way my path was going,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming, but I’m really not suited to sitting behind a shield. I’m better when I’m attacking.”

That wasn’t necessarily true. Or at least, it didn’t capture the nuances of Zeke’s developing technique. He didn’t always attack; in fact, he spent a good bit of time defending. However, instead of meeting every blow with a shield, he used his mace to block or redirect incoming attacks. What he couldn’t block, he tried to dodge, and when that failed, he accepted getting hit, intending to rely on his durable body, incredible vitality, and his skills to see him through to the other side. It was a far more inclusive technique that, instead of relying on his strength and endurance to bolster his defenses, he used every tool in his toolkit – even his newfound pain resistance. Without that, the collective mental strain of dealing with dozens of wounds would distract and force him into a far more aggressive style. It would work in a pinch, and he intended to use that when he needed to, but it wasn’t sustainable. He was going for steady and implacable, controlled and indomitable.

Was his new technique perfect? No. Not at all. He had a long way to go before he even began to approach a level he considered competence. However, as he adjusted, he could prop himself up with sheer stats. Then, when he finally mastered it, he would be unstoppable. Or that was what he envisioned.

So it went for three days. Sometimes, Abby, Pudge, and Carlos joined their sparring sessions, but usually, it was just him and Talia. For her part, Talia’s fighting style bounded between two extremes. On the one end, she utilized the measured strikes of a lifetime practitioner of martial arts – which she was; from a very young age, she had been trained by Silas Martel, and her technique showed that she had taken her lessons to heart. However, on the other end of the spectrum was something far more feral. She moved like a predator, graceful and as brutal as any beast. Zeke wasn’t certain which extreme was more difficult to deal with, and he suspected that when she brought everything under her control, and learned to switch between them at will, she would become an even deadlier opponent.

As for Abby, she diligently worked on her archery, shooting thousands of arrows each day. The only limiter was her mana; each conjured arrow had a small cost, but when the number of times she used the skill was counted in the hundreds each hour, that cost tended to add up. In addition, she worked on her [Earthen Bonds] skill as she learned to manipulate the earth in a variety of ways. Usually, it still manifested as a series of earthen hands, but she also managed to turn the ground into a quicksand-like substance. As a restraint, it wasn’t much more effective than the grasping hands, but it represented an increased level of control that boded well for the future of the skill.

Carlos participated in the odd sparring session, but Zeke could tell that the man was holding back a significant portion of his power. Whether it was because he didn’t trust Zeke and the others or if he was simply afraid to let loose because he might hurt someone was a mystery. However, it did give Zeke the opportunity to practice against another ranged specialist, and his skills differed enough from Abby’s that it was invaluable. In the back of his mind, Zeke also hoped that it would help Carlos to feel more at ease around the group – something he recognized was probably too much to ask.

Finally, Pudge usually just left the tower to hunt the demonic monsters. At Zeke’s insistence, he didn’t stray so far that Zeke couldn’t respond if the infernal bear found trouble he couldn’t handle. Zeke’s worry seemed ill-placed, though, because Pudge quickly established himself as the region’s apex predator. Surely, there were monsters that could challenge him, but for whatever reason, they stayed away.

At last, Tucker emerged from his lab. He was clearly exhausted, with heavy bags beneath his eyes. He even looked somehow less solid than ever before. Pointedly, the jar that had held the warlock’s soul was missing. It wasn’t that surprising, given that Tucker had confided in Zeke that he would have to use the bits of the warlock’s soul to properly anchor the grenades’ destructive power.

“One-hundred demon-killing grenades,” Tucker said, walking into the room they’d designated as a training hall, if only because it had high ceilings and plenty of room. “As ordered.”

“Any trouble?” asked Zeke.

Tucker shook his head. “Locky didn’t even complain,” he said. “I think he welcomed the release of death.”

Zeke nodded, though he didn’t say anything. He knew now that every single demon had once been human, its soul tortured and twisted until it lost every ounce of humanity. Instead, that was replaced by anger, sadism, and, though Zeke hated using such black-and-white terms, pure evil. He felt confident that none of them were redeemable, though that might’ve just been an attempt to placate his own conscience. Whatever the case, it didn’t matter. For now, they were enemies, and they were in Zeke’s way.

“Get some rest,” he said, reaching out to grip Tucker’s shoulder. “We’ll hit them as soon as you’re ready.”