David looked at Rhea and yelled. "Level?"
"Fifty-seven!" she yelled back.
He hesitated. Had he seen it wrong? He could have sworn it said level fifty? What was going on with him?
The hesitation lasted half a second. The herd thundered closer, hooves cracking against stone, a hundred bodies moving as one. The knight sat motionless before the spire, watching them come. Watching the immense number of monsters come. It didn't move. Didn't prepare. It did nothing but watch with a strange calm.
David immediately calmed himself and did the math. Fifty-seven on paper meant it couldn't probably kill them all. But it was a demon, a knight. Not a mere creature. Even the hobs were martial masters. How much more would a demon be? What tricks would it have? Skills? Demonology? Sigils? What if it could cheat like David? Or had an unfair edge like the Soul-Eater? That meant it could probably kill a lot of stagfiends. Either it would cull the stagfiends' numbers and die, or eviscerate them all with ease. For what he had planned, David hoped for the former. If the demon didn't die, things would get very annoying and very inconvenient. But a voice in the back of his head told him that the demon, riding a giant steed, might just live through what came next.
"Slow the pace," he said. "We head for the knight."
The group adjusted stride. Feet hit the stone basin at a measured clip, no longer a dead sprint. They would approach with control, not panic. Save something for what came after.
As they closed the final distance, David got his first clear look at the steed. A giant demon lizard with twisted horns curving back from its skull. Its skin looked like actual stone, rough and craggy, plates overlapping like armor. The creature stood motionless, matching its rider's unnatural stillness. The system tag flickered at the edge of his vision.
[Gargoyle, Lvl 40]
Stagfiends were catching up. They flanked, pushing in from the sides, testing the edges of Fenrir's veil. Riders lunged with smoky spears, the points grazing close. One broke through completely, a stagfiend and the rider-shaped thing fused to its back suddenly visible inside their perimeter. Cinder pivoted mid-stride without losing speed. Her greatsword swung in a wide arc, catching the creature across the chest. As the blade connected, the rider split open like a Venus flytrap, revealing a molten center lined with jagged edges, grasping toward her arm. The force of the blow sent it tumbling into the dirt anyway, the mouth snapping shut as it rolled, its spear clattering across stone.
Rhea's head snapped toward him. "David, they're inside the veil!"
"Trust me," he said. "Stay right behind me at all times. No matter what."
She kept running, waiting.
"We're going to the bone place," he said.
Rhea's eyes widened. Then they set in understanding. She nodded once, sharply, and moved right behind him, a shadow sticking to his back as they ran in the universe deadliest relay race.
Expecting the demon knight not to be able to see them was asking for trouble. Level fifty-seven, a demon, a sentinel variant with a name like Alastiel The Eternal Harvest. Even if it couldn't see through Fenrir's veil, he didn't want to risk the wolf getting close. Fenrir was too valuable, too central to everything they did and would do. Could do. The invisibility from Absolute Mirage was their best asset right now, and he needed it for maybe two or three more seconds. Just enough to close the distance. But Fenrir couldn't die for those seconds.
If the wolf broke off now, flanked wide, the demon's attention would stay on the main group. On David. On the five bodies running straight at it with a hundred monsters behind them. Fenrir would either be retreating, moving away from the threat, or simply not perceived at all, a shadow outside the demon's focus. The math was simple. The demon would prioritize the immediate threat, the ones charging its position, over something pulling back. David was offering himself as the target. Keeping Fenrir alive meant keeping the invisibility up for those last few seconds. Preserving a valuable asset. Keeping the invisibility up meant they wouldn’t immediately die.
He reached through the tether.
As they reached the knight, David saw it in detail. Gothic armor, dark plate packed with so much demonic energy it blazed in his oracle vision like a second sun. The swords in its hands were filled with formations of energy more complex than anything he'd seen to date. Layers upon layers, interlocking patterns that made their weaponry look like stick figures. A large knight in full dark plate, its helm crowned with two thick horns reaching for the sky. Full black plate armor. Two long swords, one in each arm, each as large as Rhea. The blades glowed a sickly green, dense energy rolling off them in visible waves.
David and his cohort stood directly in front of it. The herd—no, the horde—was at their backs and flanks, a wall of bodies and spears and smoke and teeth. They were pinned between a hundred monsters and a level fifty-seven demon knight.
The high Level demon, the knight, finally reacted to their presence. Despite the invisibility, despite Fenrir's Absolute Mirage still clinging to them, it knew. It knew they were there. The gargoyle steed stepped forward, stone-like skin grinding against itself, and from its saddle on the creature's nape, the demon knight swung one of its dual swords. An immense attack delivered as if swatting flies.
How it knew they were there, David didn't know. But it only seemed to realize at close range.
No matter. David had already opened a door-sized portal in his magic field. David, Rhea, the warlock, and Cinder raced through the portal in front of the knight just as its swing passed through the space where they should have been.
Behind them, through the still-open portal, David and Rhea saw, felt, and heard what happened next. The swing that missed them didn't miss the horde. The sword connected with the front line of stagfiends, and gore sprayed through the portal in an arc, black blood and chunks of viscera shooting out onto the bone ground at their feet. More followed—severed limbs, a split torso, half a rider's face still frozen in its death snarl. The sounds that came through were a wall of noise. Roaring. Screaming. The wet impact of blade on flesh repeated over and over. The sickening crunch of bone. The thunder of hooves suddenly chaotic, directionless. A titanic clash erupted on the other side of the doorway.
Through the portal, they saw a war unfolding. A hundred creatures against the Level 57 demon knight, Alastiel.
Through the portal, they watched.
The first wave of stagfiends hit the demon knight like a tide against a cliff. They broke. The gargoyle steed moved beneath him, claws tearing through the front rank. Bodies flew in pieces. The demon knight's swords moved in a rhythm that looked almost casual—a swing here, a cut there—but every motion sent green energy blades scything through the horde. The blades passed through the first rank and kept going, taking down creatures behind them. Limbs separated from bodies in clean arcs. Torsos split. Heads rolled.
The massive stagfiend leader with smoke trailing from its eyes hung back. Its fused rider raised one of its twin spears and hurled it. The spear of dark smoky magic caught the demon knight in the shoulder. The black plate held, but a scuff mark appeared, a shallow gouge in the enchanted surface. The rider's other spear flew a second later, slamming into the demon knight's side. Another scuff. The gargoyle twisted beneath him, taking hits meant for its rider, stone hide cracking.
Stolen novel; please report.
The dual wielding demon knight in full enchanted black plate landed on its feet after the gargoyle went down.
That was worse. On foot, the demon knight moved like water, like wind. The twin swords became a blur—masterful dual wielding that left no openings. One blade would block, the other would strike. Both would cut at once. They moved like extensions of those clawed gauntlets. Green energy trailed every swing, carving channels through the horde. Stagfiends died in twos and threes with every motion. The demon knight's full black plate turned their spears aside like straw. Clawed gauntlets reached out, grabbed a rider by the face, and crushed. Nothing got close.
The stagfiend leader hurled another spear. It caught the demon knight in the chest. A scuff. A dent. A crack. Another throw, another hit. The demon knight's armor showed dozens of small impacts from the level 47 heretic buck's accurate throws. But with every stagfiend that fell, the scuffs began to fade. The armor repaired itself. Each kill healed a wound.
The demon knight's swords released another wave of green energy. It swept through a packed cluster, and a dozen bodies dropped in pieces. The scuffs faded further. The demon knight kept cutting, a one-creature army against a hundred.
Then the transformation started. Both of them. The demon and the armor.
Horns pushed through the helm, longer, more twisted, curving higher. The armor shifted—plates rearranged, thickened, grew spikes along the joints. Thicker, longer claws extended from the gauntlets, punching through where the fingers should have been, becoming part of the metal. The backplate split and folded as wings unfurled, black and leathery, their edges tipped with sickly green. The armor rippled, reforming around the demon knight's changing body, becoming one with it. Body and plate fused into something new.
The fear aura rolled off the demon knight in waves. David felt it even through the portal, a pressure in his chest that made breathing harder. It pressed against his Calm Mind skill, testing its edges. The stagfiends closest to the demon knight froze for a fatal second. That was all he needed.
Wounds appeared on the demon knight's transformed form—gashes from the heretic buck's spears, cracks from impacts. They sealed as he fought. Regeneration. The body and armor together, healing as one with every kill. The stagfiend leader hurled spear after spear, each one landing, each one leaving a mark, and with every demon kill, those marks vanished.
For a second, they all held their breath. The insane level of power and prowess on display was something beyond what David had seen. This was an apex predator. A living weapon. The demon knight, Alastiel The Eternal Harvest, and the name made sense now.
David glanced beside him where Cinder watched. Felt silence where there was usually orchestra. Even her constant bloodthirst seemed to briefly still. For once, even his demon was impressed.
"I'm gonna hold the door open," David said. "Spread out. We need to outlast the things on the other side."
They turned and spread out, and beheld The Bone Place.
A hellish realm spread out like an endless sea of bone, dunes of pale ridges and jagged spines crunching underfoot while bone creatures crawled, stalked, and galloped across the landscape on two legs, four legs, or swarms of thin clattering limbs that never stopped moving. Towers of rib-like pillars jutted from the ground, trenches filled with shifting piles of skull-shaped shells, and in the distance whole mountains moved—slow behemoths of layered bone plates and tusk forests grinding forward, their steps shaking the horizon as smaller bone horrors scattered around them, predators made of jointed armor, needle teeth, hollow eye sockets glowing with heat, the air dry and sharp with dust while the land itself shifted like a living graveyard ocean that never rested.
The one thing meditation had actually helped with was his concentration. Not the peace of mind stuff, not finding inner calm—that hadn't done anything. But the focus, the ability to hold a single thought without his brain skittering off to forty other places? That improved. And that improvement translated directly into his portal magic.
He had leveled it. He could hold portals open for longer now, and larger. Door sized. Big enough for a person to step through without crouching. He'd even figured out the frequency to one specific place, a location he and Rhea had started calling 'The Bone Place' because neither of them wanted to give it a real name.
It was a nightmare. Far worse than the forest. But from their observations—and they'd done a lot of observing—it had a pattern. The mountain-sized bone behemoths that moved like slow disasters across the horizon drew the worst of it. The swarms of bone horrors surrounded them, fed on whatever got too close. Stay away from those, and you could survive. For a time.
So long as you didn't mind constant attacks from things made of femurs and ribcages that moved on too many legs.
They had tested it. Tossed in a few test subjects. Werebeasts, flying imps, stagfiends, even a warlock they'd caught. Watched from the safety of the other side. The creatures would land, look around, and for a few minutes, nothing happened. Then something noticed them. Then more things noticed. The tests never lasted long. The creatures they threw in fought endless waves, losing battles of attrition every time.
Him and Rhea had discussed using it as an emergency escape. A last resort. Not a permanent migration—it was far worse than the forest, and from what they could tell, nowhere near the mountain that led to the next floor—but a way to survive the unsurvivable. A Hail Mary of ‘let's not die’.
Rhea looked around at the endless bone and let out a breath. "I honestly thought we'd never have to do this. Hoped."
"Yeah? Well, every plan you make for when things go to shit goes to shit." He glanced at the portal. "Still better than being on the other side of that."
Through the doorway, the sounds of slaughter continued—the demon knight's green blades, the stagfiend leader's spears, bodies hitting stone. He didn't look back. The doorway was human-sized. Everything fighting back there was too big to fit through. That didn't mean they were safe from errant spears or shockwaves, but it was something.
The old, ambitious warlock was already seated on a pile of broken ribs, exhausted, trying to recover energy. David looked at it. Hey. Who told you to sit? We're not safe, you know. He didn't say anything. Let it rest.
He reached through the tether. Fenrir was on the other side, at the edge of the melee, hidden in the tree line. Injured. But alive.
David scanned the horizon. No behemoths near his portal. The swarm of bone horrors wasn't close. They had landed in a quiet pocket. For once, something went right. This should buy them time. A chance to breathe, regroup, figure out—
Cinder swung her greatsword and smashed a bone creature to pieces.
David stared at the scattered remains. So much for buying time. "We've been spotted," he said. "Get ready."
He knew that eventually, the bones would reform. That was how this place got you. You could kill the bone things—smash them, scatter the pieces—but over time, they'd fuse. They'd resurrect as something new. Stronger. A few level twos would become a level five, then a level seven, then ten. Until suddenly the levels weren't something you could kill anymore. The bone place was infinitely worse than the forest, and in all honesty? David had originally planned to use it for other things. A prison for enemies too useful to kill outright. A thrall-factory of sorts. Maybe enthrall one of its native creatures, see what an evolving bone horror could do. But that was if they made it through.
Now, they just had to outlast the war on the other side.
Soon, bone creatures started attacking. Levels three through seven, the smaller ones, the ones that skittered and crawled and galloped on too many legs. More came with every kill, drawn by the sound of combat like sharks to blood.
They were busy with their own fight—David, Rhea, the warlock, Cinder swinging and shooting and cursing anything made of bone that got close. But between swings, between dodges, David caught glimpses through the portal.
The demon knight was still a badass. It had transformed further, shifting from armored knight into something massive, dragon-like, a full demon form that spewed fire and explosive heat across what remained of the stagfiend horde. The ground on the other side cratered with every blast. But David noticed the scuffs on its armor had grown. Some patches hadn't healed. Parts of its armor were cracked or completely missing, revealing black blood beneath. Smoke trailed from various wounds.
The stagfiends were down to a third of what they'd started with. The giant smoke-wielding buck was missing an arm now, the stump trailing dark vapor, but it still fought. Its rider was almost cut in half—just a torso and one arm remaining, wielding a spear of pure smoke. David knew that wasn't the real body. Just its mouth. The feeding part. It still fought.
The demon knight was injured too. Its armor faltered. Smoke trailed from a dozen places—a curse of some kind. It probably didn't have enough bodies left to repair itself. The fight could go either way.
Between swings of his cursed spear, between blasts of flaming bolts at approaching bone horrors, David thought a mental blessing to stupid meditation. Because thanks to that constant practice, he could apply the principles now—fight, keep the portal open, track two battles at once. It shouldn't have been possible. It was barely possible. But it was happening.
"How much longer?" Rhea yelled, slamming a javelin through a level seven skull.
Cinder stepped in front of David, greatsword clearing a arc of space. David checked the fight through Fenrir's eyes on the other side.
Finally. It was coming to a close.
All the stagfiends were dead. Just two creatures left. The badly injured, one-armed level forty-seven heretic variant buck, smoke still trailing from its eyes, and its rider—just a torso and an arm now, still clutching that spear of pure black smoke, still fused to the large stag’s back. The demon knight was slower now, back in its humanoid form, armor in pieces, smoke trailing from everywhere, black blood pooling at its feet. It couldn't heal anymore. Numbers had worn it down.
Both creatures were on their last legs.
David reached through the tether. Fenrir, still at the tree line, injured but alive.
He turned to Rhea. "It's time. Let's go. One of them's about to die."
She looked at him, waiting, a constellation of jagged bones floating around her.
"We need to make sure it's both."