The power of the perception manipulation that the Bloodcrowned King used was fundamental. How could you hope to strike back against an enemy that interfered with the information your brain received from the source? Not only was it impossible to strike the beast and whatever else it chose to protect, but those perception alterations became our physical reality too.

  The city was warping and bending like fabric in the wind. It turned over on itself, pushing building against building and allowing us to see far beyond the horizon, across the hills and towards the rural outlying areas. Even on the ground level there were hundreds of other such discrepancies. Doorways became tiny and impassable, or huge and unreachable. That which was human sized a moment before would grow or shrink to frustrate our efforts.

  “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  Samantha and I expanded our focuses and closed our eyes to block out the disorientating view of the city shifting around us. What we needed to conceptualize was abstract in nature, and that was where our powers were the most dangerous. We were cutting away the chaff that the demon was summoning and manipulating us with.

  I reached out using my invisible hands and wiped the board clean. Samantha quickly found herself following in my wake, tethering the remaining pieces back together and putting things back to the way they should be. The gears ground to a halt, and the damage was being rewound.

  The King didn’t like our meddling. As soon as we found ourselves on solid footing again, I overheard the flapping of wings and the scratching of claws. I snapped my eyes open and turned on the demon with my hands outstretched, deploying my shield before it could attack us.

  “Why do you struggle? This is folly. There is nothing worth preserving in this realm.”

  “You demons need human emotion to live.”

  “You are nothing more than a single flickering candle, amongst millions. Your death shall not affect the balance between our worlds. That mortal form will wither away into dust, your soul cast into the sunless sea, and your memory will fade from the collective.”

  “So why are you struggling too? You came here to obtain that crystal from Landon for a reason! To save yourself, or to get revenge on the gods – I care not for your reasons, but I do object to your manner of acting above it all. Your motives are no more complex than ours. Your act to perpetuate your existence, like all living things.”

  “To live as a mortal is merely the first step on a long road. It would be a mercy to untether from those rotting husks early and see the truth of the world for what it is.”

  Being forced to live in that hellscape, fighting for survival in a different way was not appealing to my ears. I could tell from the way it spoke that it considered those battles the sole reason for its existence. To claw and bite, and to weather your life down to a fine edge that could be used to win any fight.

  What kind of life was that? Did this demon grow tired of being able to see something more in existence? No music or voices, or smells or sights or tastes. There was nothing superior about that kind of existence. It preened and boasted and tried to threaten us – but at the end of the day it was a damned fool. No wise person wanted to live a life of nothing but conflict.

  “Life is a load of shit, but it’s a hell of a lot better than whatever you’re proposing.”

  Samantha looked around us and awed at the changes our magic had made to the environment. Pieces of the world had been cut free from their bondage and removed in rigid shapes. Several square segments of the surrounding buildings had been excised from the rest of the structure and left floating in the air, offering a cross-section of what hid inside. I could see the living room of some hapless resident behind the horned crest of the King, split into a small corner and separated from the building it occupied.

  There were hundreds of these displaced pieces. They were sections of the road and dirt below, or rooms and sections from buildings that surrounded the market, or even pieces of the sky that were out of place. Some of the clouds were cut harshly at a strange angle, a clear indication that the entire fabric of the world was ours to play with as we pleased. I was happy to see that there was nobody inside of those cross-sections, in fact there wasn’t a single other soul in this city aside from us.

  That was a mystery I couldn’t find answers to. The Bloodcrowned King wasn’t exactly interested in talking about anything more than our reasons for resisting its will. A very prideful creature considering that it was begging for scraps from someone like Sloan.

  It was something to be thankful for though. Having to dance around the million plus residents of the cities whilst managing this was too big an ask for us. We had no experience with this magic, and it would be easy for us to overreach and harm them by accident. For the time being we had some solid ground to stand on and a new type of impasse for the King to worry about. We could undo whatever manipulation he caused to our surroundings.

  It wanted us to get stuck in here, helpless and disoriented. We weren’t entirely free from its powers though. I could still feel the pull of vertigo trying to meddle with my depth perception. Attacking it was going to be difficult. With my knife drawn and the battle lines drawn anew, it was time to see if we could match up to the big talk.

  The ‘conceptual’ power of nihility extended to many domains. In that instant I decided to erase the gap that existed between me and the demon. I flew through the air at an impossible speed – so quickly that it was not something any being could hope to react to. The physical space between us disappeared, and with some deft manipulation I could propel myself in a form of teleportation.

  It looked at me, floating overhead with my weapon held aloft and ready to split its body in two. With a flap of its wings it fled backwards, barely managing to avoid my downward slash. The nihility-empowered edge continued past the tip of the blade and sliced through the nearest building, cutting clean through it; brick, tile, wood and foundation all.

  “They made a mistake by empowering you.”

  “If you could fight as well as you talk, then this would be over already!”

  I teleported after it rapidly in succession, closing the distance over and over again whilst it attempted to fly away and evade my attacks. I considered attempting to delete it completely as a nuclear option, but it was impossible to do without the ability to aim accurately. It was the one effective counter to a power that could delete anything from existence.

  It grabbed a nearby fragment of the street and threw it at me. I batted it aside using my dagger by splitting it down the middle, only to find another following up from behind. I teleported through and swung at the demon again, only to find that it was ascending higher into the air. Gravity took a hold of me and I fell back down onto solid ground. Samantha extended a pillar of earth from the floor to catch me.

  “I can barely keep up with you! You’re flying all over the damn place!”

  “But it’s still not fast enough. I need to land a killing blow on it or we’ll be stuck here while the city goes down in flames!”

  Frustration bloomed in my chest. Any other kind of foe would have been caught out by that first attack and destroyed then and there, but Sloan had summoned a being from another, harsh dimension which had the ability to float through the air and keep me from eviscerating the matter it resided within. It didn’t need air or even a physical body. I had to strike it directly and completely.

  I went at it again. The demon tightened its grip over my ability to perceive, twisting the physical world we recreated and causing my next attack to go astray, destroying yet another building in the process. My stomach was revolting at the harsh treatment, and my vision blurred from the extreme speeds I was traveling at without a moment’s rest.

  Even if I saturated a huge area with my magic there was no guarantee that it would sit there and let me hit it. Beyond that it would cost a significant amount of energy to do so, and if there was more trouble on the horizon then I would be left without my most effective weapon.

  “Let me help!” Samantha yelled.

  That was when it decided to strike. It swung out at me, clipping one of my legs with an arm and sending me tumbling through the air and into the nearest window. I crashed through onto a wooden floor and rolled for two meters, which just-so-happened to be the edge of the building segment floating in the air. Instinct drove me to grab the edge of the cube and hold on for dear life.

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  That hurt.

  It was worse than getting shot. It was closer to being human-sized than before, but that didn’t mean it lacked power in those physical characteristics. It had astutely located a moment of vulnerability during our duel and swatted me halfway across the city when the opportunity arose.

  The Horr crashed through the wall and landed in front of me. Before it could deliver the finishing blow, Samantha appeared from behind and cast a spell of her own. The tendons and bones in its left arm froze in a raised position, unable to be lowered to strike me. It roared and twisted around to try and kill her instead, but she was already leaping away, bringing forth another piece of floating earth to break her fall and make her escape.

  “Insolence!”

  That was its first mistake. I clambered back onto the platform using all of my strength and swung again. This time the blade met its mark, slashing through both arms on the left side and cutting them loose. The King staggered away and used the remaining arms to hold itself steady on the other side. The entire section wobbled from the weight of its immense body.

  When I fought the hound on the train, it was obvious that normal attacks had little effect on these semi-undead creatures. Nihility could slice right through them. They puppeteered physical bodies to interact with our world. They couldn’t regenerate that dead tissue once it was severed. That wound would last for the rest of its time in our dimension.

  I wish it hit it in the head and ended this madness. It took every bit of my concentration not to miss completely, gluing my eyes to the tip of my laser-like blade and keeping them locked to it during the arc of my swing. Even that was difficult. The chance of hitting it in the head the first time around was next to none. I squared up again and locked my feet into a firm position.

  “Come and get me - you ugly sack of shit!”

  The train station in the middle of the city was being overrun by thousands of desperate people. It had started almost a week ago when the fighting in the streets became more vicious. The bystanders in their homes could see the writing on the wall. The pressure was building, and soon it would explode into a full-scale civil war in the most densely populated area in the country.

  But this was even more dire than before.

  Marco Fisichella stood atop the stairs and looked down into the main atrium, from where he could see all five platforms which were completely swamped with people pushing and shoving, trying to get the last open spots on each train as they left the city and fled into the countryside.

  He was sleeping with his bags when the commotion started. The daylight coming in through the glass roof atop the building had turned a malicious shade of crimson red, normally a portent of bad weather according to the superstitious fishermen. Initially writing it off as a trick of the light, Marco soon overheard some of the conversations from the recent arrivals who were stuck in the same position.

  “It’s madness out there! There’s a great bloody demon killing everyone it sees!”

  Marco tipped the brim of his hat upwards and approached the pair of strangers to hear their discussion more clearly. It was difficult to decipher beneath the shouting and whistling coming from the platforms.

  “Really? No wonder this place is a madhouse. Every single person with the cash for a ticket is trying to catch the last train out of here. There’s no way we can fight through all of them!”

  He’d seen his fair share of fistfights breaking out between the rowdy passengers. He had a bad feeling about this. If he couldn’t catch the train out of town, then there was no reason to be in a hotspot with so many other people and the police keeping order. The risk of getting caught was too high.

  “I’ve heard rumours that there’s even more of them out there! I don’t know why the police haven’t barricaded those bloody doors yet.”

  “Because they want to let as many people in here as possible. They’ll get a proper talking to if they lock them out and get ‘em killed.”

  “Does it matter? Letting those things break in here and slaughter everyone is just as bad!”

  It didn’t matter. Marco could tell that this building was a total death trap no matter what they decided to do. Too many entrances and exits to keep an eye on, and plenty of obstacles and other people to get tripped up by while trying to flee. He had no faith that they could stop any type of monster, assuming they weren’t full of shit. Marco had seen the news about the cult’s summoning ritual at the fort – but he was always sceptical of what he read in the papers. They were very sophisticated in manipulating public opinion, and sensationalism was the method of the day.

  What a goddess damned joke this was.

  Marco shook his head and headed back to his suitcase, picking it up and wandering back towards the entrance. Being around so many strangers was making the hair on the back of his neck stand up. This station was the first place any bad bastard looking for trouble would visit. The huge crowd would attract a lot of attention. He had a good intuition for that type of thing.

  Unfortunately for him, his decision to leave the station came a few minutes too late. The crowd on the platforms roared in fear as the crack of gunfire rumbled into the building from outside. Marco gripped his luggage tight and hurried down the steps, onto the street where the fighting was unfolding.

  “What the hell...”

  His eyes were drawn invariably to the swirling maelstrom of red energy that was shooting upwards into the clouds. It didn’t look like that when he was awake earlier. More gunfire forced him to look down the avenue, where a group of soldiers were attempting to fight off a blood-soaked hound with a gaping maw of a thousand teeth.

  The profane beast was unlike any he’d ever seen. Their gunfire appeared to be mostly ineffective, only chipping away worthless flesh and striking solid bone. There were dead bodies strewn around the checkpoint, of both the soldiers and the demons now assailing the city.

  One of the unlucky men couldn’t put his foe down fast enough. The beast leapt through the air and came down on top of him, surely knocking him unconscious from the impact, before ripping into his chest and neck using its savage claws. The rest of the soldiers rounded the monster while it was distracted, focusing their fire on its skull-like head and beating it until a weak spot finally gave way.

  The beast wailed, with blood flying in every direction, before it finally died under their combined assault. Marco almost twisted around and socked the man behind him, feeling a firm hand gripping his shoulder and trying to pull him away.

  “It’s not safe here, sir!”

  “It’s not any safer inside. Have you seen how many people are crammed into there?”

  It was a young police officer, trying to maintain some kind of order amongst the chaos unfolding in the city.

  “I wouldn’t recommend leaving, even if the building is occupied.”

  “What’s the point? I’m not gonna’ be able to catch a train. They’re not coming back to this mayhem willingly.”

  It was absurd to be having this type of argument at the same time as a wave of demons attacking the nearby military checkpoints. Marco turned on the smaller man and scowled, hoping that he would take the hint and go bother someone who cared about what the police thought.

  Looking over his shoulder and down the other end of the road revealed a worrying sight barrelling straight towards them. Another dog-like beast was charging with murderous intent, and Marco didn’t have his gun free from his luggage. He dropped his suitcase to the ground and wrapped his arm around the officer’s neck, unholstering his pistol and keeping him in place while using his shoulder as a bipod for his aim.

  There was no time to worry about the consequences. He understood that it was life or death for them both. He used every bit of his nerve and skill to target the beast’s weakest spot. There was a fleshy mass protruding from its chest, warped from the flesh of another dead human and worn like morbid garb.

  He pulled the trigger and hoped to all that was holy that he hit the mark.

  The bullets flew through the air and ripped into the canine demon. The police officer flinched at the deafening sound of his own pistol being fired so close to his ear hole. The beast staggered and made the following shots even harder when combined with its incredible speed.

  Marco was no amateur though. He held back on the rest of the magazine and unleashed a second volley when the first failed to stop it dead. The next two shots finished the job, tearing apart the makeshift physical body and causing it to slump over on the paving stones.

  There was a moment of peace. Marco stepped away and regarded the deceased creature with a wary look.

  “What in the Goddess’ good name is that horrible thing?”

  The officer twisted around and stared at it.

  “Who knows? They’re all over the place now. That was a mighty fine shot you just made. Are you former army? Police?”

  Marco flipped the pistol in his palm and handed it back. The officer ejected the mostly empty magazine and replaced it with his backup. He couldn’t rely on this low-power firearm to cut through the armoured demons in a tough situation. He and the other police had been told to help evacuate civilians and keep order so that the army could take care of them.

  “No. I’m a hobbyist. It’s not unlike shooting a clay pigeon.”

  “I’m mighty thankful for it.”

  Marco opened his trunk and rifled through his belongings, emerging with his own pistol. He slid it into the pocket of his coat along with some extra ammunition.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me for bringing this out in public.”

  The officer tapped the side of his nose; “I didn’t see anything. Be careful around everyone else, there’s a curfew, no weapons allowed in civilian hands.”

  They had bigger problems to worry about than the rebels now. Marco was willing to take the risk. A few other bystanders were emerging from the doors, having also given up on getting a spot on the last trains out of town. A good hiding place was as good as it was going to get. Marco was well-versed in hiding, but that was usually from the police, not a bloodthirsty pack of demon dogs...

  The situation went from bad to worse, several more of them skidding around the corner and making their presence known. The onlookers screamed in fear and scattered inside and out. Marco grabbed his trunk and made a break for it, running across the street and scampering up a fire escape on one of the nearby buildings. Every day he thanked the government for tightening up those safety regulations after several devastating urban fires.

  The dog was biting at his heels. He climbed up the ladder in the nick of time, avoiding the crushing jaws coming down around his left leg. He did not stick around to gloat. He was already up the steps and close to the roof before the beast could figure out how the ladder worked. It eventually got bored and left in search of easier prey.

  Marco was not happy with what we saw. Smoke rose across the cityscape, and there were bodies contorted into scarecrows by savage red spikes all over the place. It was complete bedlam. The military had lost control of the situation and now it was spreading unrestrained. He leaned on the edge of the railing and sighed.

  “I bet that meddler is in the middle of this,” he murmured.

  They needed a miracle. Perhaps Maria Walston-Carter was the one to deliver it.