The primary thing that the professors of the Magisterium were able to give us was a set of bedrooms where we could nap for a few hours. It was 9 o'clock at night when we arrived at the Magisterium and a long day filled with mortal combat before that; all of us were tired. More importantly, Skill prices and usages reset at midnight, so when they came to wake us up we had gotten our daily Attunement and were able to buy things cheaply again. I immediately clicked on that Rare node.

You do not have the 46,656 Attunement necessary to unlock this Rare Skill.

Harumph. Okay, how about that Advanced node that I wasn't able to unlock yesterday? I had 5,467 Attunement, that should be enough. Right? It was a very big number.

You do not have the 7,776 Attunement necessary to unlock this Advanced Skill.

Pah. Fine, I would save up. These demons were worth a lot and there were plenty of them running around. 'Attunement cookies', Eugene had called them yesterday. When I asked him why he called them that he laughed and said "Because you can't stop after just one."

"Sleep okay?" Marcus asked, giving me an ear scritch.

I leaned in, forcing him to brace himself and scritch harder. "Yup." A yawn snuck up on me. "Still waking up, though."

"Well, best get to that," he said with a smile. "We need to head out soon."

"You're coming with me?"

"Of course. I'm not sure how much good we'll be against the hazdahem, but we can help with the smaller stuff. One of the professors here gave me an unlock for Force Spike and I had enough to buy it, so I'll have some range."

"We need to get Eugene to give us the unlock on Rapid Restoration," Estelle noted.

"Oh, I can do that," I said, feeling guilty. I'd done it for Eugene but hadn't been able to afford it for the other two, and then we all got separated. "Hang on, let me just buy it back and—"

She put a hand on my neck and I stopped talking.

"Thanks," she said. "But not now. You should keep your Attunement handy. You've got a lot of strong nodes in your section, right?"

"Yeah?"

She nodded. "Good. You build up until you can afford some of those. We'll get Rapid Restoration eventually, and thank you for it. Right now it makes more sense to get you the more impressive stuff as opposed to have you jack up your prices by unlocking for us."

My heart got all fuzzy-warm and I snoot-bumped her in gratitude. "Thank you."

She laughed. "Hey, don't be too impressed. I'm expecting you to be keeping my butt unchewed. It just makes sense to power you up. In fact, as soon as I have enough I'm going to give you Weapon of Peace. It'll make your paw swipes not do any damage but they'll have massive knockback. Good way to get an enemy out of the fight temporarily. I'm going to try to talk the others into giving you some of their Skills. Spirits know that we'll be earning enough on this mission to buy some things back."

I opened my mouth to say something, I'm not entirely sure what, but was interrupted.

"Good oh-dear-gods-it's-barely morning," Corporal Belker said, coming into the map room while rubbing the sleep from his eyes. "The others will be here in just a second. How are you guys doing?"

"Pretty well," Marcus said. "I talked to Baratos about whether they had anything to help us find the target but he said no, we need to talk to Deimos."

One of the students bustled up to us with a pair of normal-sized mugs hanging off each of the fingers on his left hand. In his right hand he carried a carafe the size of a plum. "Coffee?" he asked.

"Thanks," Estelle said, taking one of the mugs. The student filled it from the carafe, served Estelle and Corporal Belker likewise, and then bustled off in response to a bellowed demand from one of the professors clustered around the map table.

Eugene came through the door and spotted us. "Hey," he said, wandering over. "You guys ready?"

"The others will be here in a minute," Corporal Belker said. Estelle and Marcus sipped at their coffee without replying.

"Tell them to snap it, eh?" Marcus said. "I've got three Advanced nodes on my Skillweb and I'm hoping to get them unlocked today."

"Speaking of that," Estelle said, "we should figure out what unlocks to give Athos. He's got mana for days and he's our primary combatant. I'm going to give him Weapon of Peace as soon as I can afford to."

Marcus's eyebrows went up and he nodded. "That's a good—"

Deimos came in, stretching and yawning. "God, I hate short sleep," he said. "Ooh, coffee!" He hurried off to where the student and his teeny carafe were busily dispensing hot beverage to the professors.

"That smells really good," I remarked, eyeing Estelle's mug significantly. The scent was amazing, rich and deep like a hollow in the forest loam where a rabbit had died.

"You wouldn't like it," she said, taking a sip.

"Are you sure? I might."

She shrugged with a knowing smile and extended the mug to me. "Careful, it's hot."

Excited, I lapped up a tongueful and immediately gagged.

"How can you drink that?!" I demanded, the words only clear because Murray was kind enough not to mangle them the way I would have since I was in the middle of trying to spit my tongue out of my mouth. "It tastes like asphalt with skunk-butt skidmarks!"

The humans, uncaring traitors all, laughed at my misery.

"It's an acquired taste," Marcus said, patting me on the neck.

I whimpered. "Why would you want to acquire a taste for something so utterly disgusting?" Oh Family, I couldn't get rid of it. Enhanced Senses came with some major downsides. If only it had been a little bit hotter it might have burned my tongue enough that I wouldn't be able to taste it. I started frantically licking my nose and snoot in the hope that I could get enough hair and maybe even boogers to drown out the grossness.

Eugene rejoined us, a mug in his hand, and looked from the laughing humans to me and my desperate nose-licking.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

o-o-o-o

It took another two hours for us to get on our way, mostly because that's how long it took for Deimos to wake up, get showered, and make the various magical preparations necessary to let us track down demons. The professors were not able to help us, since apparently sympathetic magic dealt only with relations between things that had at one point been part of a whole. Deimos's magic was the exact opposite; it was, as he put it 'the art of interactions between multiple reifications of a conceptual entity based on the number of axes of accordance as expressed by...' I put it down to "how similar things are" and called it a day.

His preparations were a bit gruesome; he wrenched the balor's fangs out of its head with a pair of pliers and put them in a palm-sized net of fine threads. He held it up in front of himself and mumbled over it for forty minutes, periodically waving his arms and occasionally putting it on the ground to draw chalk marks around it. The rest of us watched, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. Finally it was ready and our not-so-little hunting party set out.

On our side: Six guardsmen, Annette, Master Hethok, Aerith, Eugene, Marcus, Estelle, and me. The guardsmen had almost no Skills, their weapons would be useless if Annette wasn't able to empower them, Estelle had a limited number of arrows, and there was only so much mana among us.

On the other side: A small army of demons wielding extradimensional magic and incredible physical force.

It wasn't even close to a fair fight, but it wasn't my fault that the bad guys didn't bring enough monsters.

Estelle and Marcus had seemed dubious about Deimos's talisman, but it worked well. We found and dispatched four balor within five blocks of the Magisterium. Our group was large enough and strong enough that I wasn't getting all that much Attunement for each of them, but it was better than nothing. At Eugene's suggestion I didn't use any of my Skills, choosing instead to conserve the limited uses of each.

Three blocks over, we lucked into a group of four balor led by a malazaheen. Aerith walled the malazaheen in with three glowing walls stacked together in a pyramid while Estelle shot one of the balor in the face and the guardsmen stabbed them with tridents that, thanks to Annette's blessing, went through their scales like a knife through uncooked steak. Once they were all dead, Aerith dropped one of the walls from his pyramid and Master Hethok torched the demon before it could move. Attunement dropped into all of our General Funds.

"They're going to figure out to avoid us at some point," Estelle said, her head snapping up towards a suspicious movement on the roof of the building to our left. I had already noticed it and dismissed it as nothing more than an upset pigeon, but I said nothing.

"Nah," Eugene said. "They like the fire too much."

It was true. It was dark out and we were traveling by the treacle light of Melos's power that clung to Annette and, to a greater degree, the flames that Master Hethok wrapped around himself like a comfy bathrobe. The balor seemed fascinated by this; the moment they saw us they would charge forward, usually aiming for Master Hethok. The malazaheen had been smarter, taking its time to scope things out before moving to the attack and getting trapped by Aerith's walls.

"Why are they so fascinated by the fire, Murray?" I asked.

"It's homey, boss. Dis place sucks. Too cold, too dahk. No clients ta look aftah and the squishies here break if ya try anyt'ing wid 'em. A little fiyah is a little bit ah home, yeah?"

"Makes sense," Estelle said, smiling. She nudged Marcus. "Remember the pigeon coop?"

He laughed. "Ugh, don't remind me."

"What about a pigeon coop?" Aerith demanded, grumpy at being left out of the joke.

"It's nothing," Marcus said. "Growing up, we lived in an abandoned pigeon coop for a couple months. At first it was gross but after a while we started liking it."

"Why would you—"

With a shriek, a malazaheen leapt out of a third-floor window and landed on Annette. Its scythes stabbed into her chest, slamming her to the ground so hard that the cobbles cracked and chips of stone sprayed out fast enough to cut at my ankles.

The golden aura around Annette bent inwards at the impact, pooling up beneath the scythe tips until finally it popped like a soap bubble. It slowed the attack enough that the scythes pricked her in the shoulders but only barely drew blood before Master Hethok slapped the demon in the ankles with their tail. The demon dropped on its back and we descended on it with a flurry of stabs, thrusts, and a paw smash that shattered its pelvis and lower right shoulder, eliciting a steamwhistle gasp. We hurried to pin it down and Sergeant Carpenter raised his trident for the killing blow.

"Hold up," Eugene said. "Murray, can these things talk?"

"Yeah, but dey ain't real communicative."

"I can talk, fleshbag."

"Okay, I flap corrected. Dey usually ain't real communicative."

"We're looking for your boss," Eugene said. "The hazdahem. Where is it?"

The creature laughed, the sound filled with wormy writhing. "Little soul wrapped in a bag of meat, why do you seek your death?"

I had shattered the lower right shoulder and was standing on the scythe of the upper right arm, pinning it to the ground. Marcus had laid his spear across the malazaheen's left two arms and frozen it in place with his Spatial Lock power, immobilizing those arms. His knife was stabbed into the crumpled wreckage of the shoulder I had ruined, cutting the muscles and tendons so that the limb hung limp. When it asked its question, he twisted the knife and got another of those steamwhistle cries.

"Ooh, yes," the malazaheen laughed. "So like home, except no subtlety. The entrapment, this is a good start. Feelings of confinement a good foundation make. The pain...clumsy. Obvious. To be expected from flicker-life of a fleshbag."

I shouldered the humans out of the way so that I could smash the malazaheen's upper right shoulder to muck with my paw, removing the need for me to stand on it. I stepped forward, placing one paw and about half my weight on the demon's chest, leaning close so I could growl right in its face, my nose barely out of reach of its eyeworms. Its teeth were foul, in desperate need of a good brushing, the spaces between jammed with half-rotted meat the source of which I tried not to think about.

"I've been told that my teeth are spiritual weapons," I said. "I think that means they can kill you permanently. Right?" I breathed out, letting the warm wetness of my breath wash over it. Hopefully I smelled as awful to it as it did to me. Just thinking about the stench, about the filthy things this monster had undoubtedly done...I could barely keep myself from biting through its face.

The beast went still.

"What are you?" it asked, cocking its head in curiosity. "Not flesh around soul...you are flesh and soul. How—"

"We're the ones asking the questions," Sergeant Carpenter interrupted. "Now, where is the hazdahem?"

The demon laughed. "To battle my Strike Leader wish you, tiny soul? The most luck. The place of the upwelling fish, therein he waits. Go. Not alone of his rank. Of the 517th I am, but elements of the 1131st and 719th here also are, each with their Strike Leader. Not kill you my Leader shall. Strip your skin from your flesh and defile—

I bit its face off and stomped through its chest.

"Damnit, Athos," Eugene said with a sigh. "Not so quick on the thrust there." He shook his head. "Anyone know what this 'place of the upswelling fish' is?"

"Yes," Aerith said. "It's probably the Academy of Biomancy. The light fish circulate through a fountain on the square outside their front gate."

Estelle raised an eyebrow. "'The light fish'?"

"Sure. What, you haven't—" He paused. "Right, I forgot. You're a weed, you'll have never been to the decent parts of the city."

Her face didn't change but for one moment she became very still.

"Excuse me," I said to Aerith. "That sounded rude. I don't like it when people are rude to my friends."

He met my eyes for only a moment before looking away; it might have had something to do with the steady flow of demonic ichor dripping from my jaws. "Right. Most of the city has street lighting of some kind or another. About three miles from here, up on Scarf Knob, the lights are in the form of a loop of transparent piping elevated above the streets. The water is full of plankton and fish that have been biomantically engineered to glow. The loop starts and ends in front of the Academy, in a pair of vertical pipes. The pipe comes in from the east and goes down into a service area underground where it gets cleaned and fed, then it fountains up on the west side and goes out into the loop. It's a public square with several main boulevards coming into it, so an easy place to set up a command post."

"Cool," Sergeant Carpenter said. "Sounds like we know where to go hunting."

o-o-o-o

"This is not the kind of hunting I had in mind," Sergeant Carpenter whispered.

We were split up, pairs and trios huddled in the wreckage of ruined buildings on both sides of the street while demons traipsed to and fro at unpredictable intervals.

We stood near the top of Scarf Knob, until now one of the wealthiest districts in the city. The streets had been freshly paved, the buildings had once been nicer than anywhere else we had been, and we had passed two separate disaster shelters on the way in. Both of them had been cracked open and I could smell dead humans inside. I wanted to go in and check for survivors but my teammates insisted that we keep moving.

The shelters were not unusual in their destruction. Half of the buildings around us were poorly-balanced stacks of rubble, parts of one or two walls standing but the rest lying in chunks. The buildings that were still standing were heavily damaged, usually in the form of massive holes kicked through black- or gold- or red crystal walls a foot thick. Bodies and chunks of bodies were everywhere, along with more of the revolting human sculpture. We found another group of people posed on iron rods, followed by a heap of bodies that had been carefully eviscerated in order to extract enough human intestine to form a spiderweb across the street with a man, a woman, and a child dangling from the center. Murals had been painted on walls in shades of red, grey, brown, and black that had been made by careful admixtures of blood, brain, and feces.

We had little time to study the desecration and no time to clean it up. The enemy had been in greater force the closer we got, lending credence to the idea that we would find a hazdahem on the square at the very top of the Knob. Unfortunately, the makeup of the enemy had started to change.

Balors were in plenty, but still manageable as long as we were careful to husband our resources. The first and third groups, the guardsmen and I feinted and snapped in order to herd the balor into one tightly-packed group so that Master Hethok could ash them all with one narrow blast, thereby conserving his strength. The second and fourth group, the fighters dealt with while the mages stood back and Annette did nothing except empower the humans' weapons. After each fight, Annette and Aerith performed some minor healing on those of us who had been dinged up, although I declined since I could manage it myself with Enhanced Rapid Recovery.

The first time I used the Skill was an unpleasant surprise. I was down three hundred hit points and almost as much mana; it restored all of that but I only received Attunement for the healing it actually did, not for the full amount I had expected. After that I resolved to wait until I was hurt enough to be able to get proper use out of it; in the meantime, me not accepting healing left more for the squishy humans.

Still, the accumulating scrapes and stabs and bites sure weren't comfortable.

The fifth enemy patrol was different, and the reason we were hiding. Murray had been scouting ahead (much to his disgruntlement) and he rejoined us as fast as his wings would flap, making frantic gestures with both arms to say that we should be quiet and get to cover. We obeyed, splitting up to dive into whichever rubble pile was closest and waiting for the bad guys to tromp by.

They were human...mostly. There were nine of them, they all carried guns, and none of them had skin. The first had long green worms writhing across her body. The rest had a net of shiny silver threads woven into their flesh from top to bottom, as well as parts entirely covered in the stuff. For some it was only a small part—left arm, both legs, part of their skull—but for most of them the replacements were nigh-ubiquitous. On their heads, every one of them wore a circlet of barbed vines pressed tight into their skulls so that rivulets of blood ran in steady flows down their faces.

"Shit," Corporal Belker murmured from my right. "They're Patched."

I looked over at him, head cocked in question.

"The metal," he whispered. "It's—"

Murray frantically waved for silence and the corporal obeyed.

The modified humans paused in front of our hideout, looked at one another...and then one of them tossed us a casual salute and the whole group kept moving. It was enough to send a chill down my spine.

We waited until after they had turned the corner out of sight, then waited another minute before Sergeant Carpenter stood up and waved for everyone to gather up.

"They were Patched," Corporal Belker explained to me once we were all inside a semi-ruined building that still had two walls standing and would mostly keep us out of sight. "From one of the high-tech Realms. The weapons? Those are called..." He paused, frowning as he tried to remember.

"Guns," I said. "Submachine guns, I think? I used to see those things all the time on Dad's noisybox shows. The woman with the worms had a weird-looking one that I didn't recognize. I'm not sure it was a regular gun."

Corporal Belker nodded. "Guns, sure. Anyway, all that metal in their bodies? Some kind of weaponized technology, probably makes them stronger and faster. This Realm won't support it and the stuff will stop working in a few weeks or months, but for now there's no telling what they can do."

"Dey ain't Patched," Murray said. "Dey're levies. Clients from one ah da Upper Pits dat have been given da chance to leave dere hospitality suite in exchange fah doin' some support woik fah one of da Legions. Da skin removal and dah control crowns was us, but da metal and some ah dah uddah stuff was original parts from when dey came ta us. Da guns woulda been traded for. Whatevah powahs all da modifications gave 'em, dat's why dey was chosen." He smiled. "Guess da choice wasn't too good, since dey knew we was heah but dey just fucked off."

I digested that for a moment.

"I think I'm ready to kill all of these demons," I said.

The rest of the team nodded grimly.

Deimos held up his little mesh bag of demon teeth. "There's a huge amount of primary accord in the air right now, on multiple consangual—"

"Speak normal," Private Smith growled.

"...Right. Sorry." He paused, thinking. "As best I can tell, there are a lot of balors in this area, along with some other demons that are not balor, but they're all spread out. There's something similar but more..." He grimaced, face scrunching up as he tried to figure out the words. Finally he gave up and shrugged. "There's something that might be the hazdahem two blocks that way." He pointed northeast.

"Murray, wait here," I said, turning and loping off before anyone could object. Sergeant Carpenter hissed for me to stop but I decided that temporary deafness wasn't only for fetching frisbees.

I loped up two blocks to the north and peeked around the corner. There were piles of rubble and dead bodies up and down the block, with half a dozen balor standing around watching one of their number slowly pull a child's corpse apart. At the other end of the block the street opened up into a large public square. A pair of balor hurried across my field of view, one going left to right and the other right to left. I waited to see if anything else would happen, and a few seconds later there was a basso profundo howl so loud it hurt my ears. The demon that had crossed from left to right was thrown back across my sightline without touching the ground.

Yup, I was in the right spot.

I checked my character sheet, just to see if there was anything useful I could buy. I was up to 8,155 Attunement, which was enough to unlock that Advanced Skill. I hesitated, wondering if I wanted to go for that or keep piling it up to get the Rare, since that one would get a lot more expensive if I had already unlocked something today. In the end I decided to wait.

With the decision made, I took a deep breath, braced myself, and moved.

Rounding the corner was the slowest part. Once my nose was pointed in the right direction I launched myself forward, blowing past the balors before they could react and continuing to speed up. I stretched out low to the ground, pushing the speed until the wind of my passage made my eyes water and my ears stream out behind me.

I got to the end of the block and cornered as hard as I could, feet scrabbling on the roughened crystal paving stones as I struggled to redirect my enormous mass.

The square was large, easily the size of a football field, with edges defined by towering buildings in every style. The one I had blown past on my way in looked like a gingerbread house, the walls overlapping scales of robin egg blue and a swooping roofline. Beside it was a six-story box of frosted glass, and beyond that a miniature castle carved from a single emerald with a blackened and smashed-open ivory door that rotated around an axis instead of swinging.

All of that was peripheral impressions as I turned, my main attention on the demon and his throne.

The throne was raised up on a three-step dais made of carefully-stacked human bodies supporting platforms of bone. The demon was seated, but would probably be thirty feet tall when he stood up. He looked like the traditional pictures of the Devil from the movies: A muscular human male with red skin covered in tiny scales, deeply sunken eyes, impractically enormous horns that swooped out of his temples and angled forward in sharp points, hooves the size of manhole covers, and fingernails that stuck out into claws. The claws and fangs were black like soot and the stench of brimstone rolled off of him, reaching all the way to where I had entered the square a hundred feet away. A leather harness held a steel plate on his chest and he wore a kilt that looked like steel but moved like fabric. A sword bigger than me leaned against the arm of the throne.

There were two malazaheen flanking him, their lower scythes curved in front of them and the upper ones raised and ready to strike. A balor knelt in front of the dais, head bowed and speaking in a language I didn't understand as it made report to its commander.

The hazdahem's head jerked up as he saw me coming. The malazaheen reacted immediately, leaping off the dais and splitting up to the left and right as they raced towards me in that disorienting zig-zag fashion. Their scythes clashed together in a tickertack of promise. The hazdahem rose from his throne and stepped forward to the edge of the dias.

I waited until the malazaheen were almost on me and then used a quick burst of Mystic Acceleration to zip between them before they could respond. The extra speed carried me the last distance to the base of the dias, where the balor's head was only just starting to rise and turn to see what was happening. I stepped on it in passing and used it as a platform to launch myself at the hazdahem.

The monster's arm moved so fast I could barely see it, backhanding me out of the air and sending me flying.

I hit the ground with a yelp and rolled back to my feet.

"And what might you be, little thing?" the beast asked. The malazaheen hissed and started towards me but their master absently waved them back. They spread out to the sides, scythes tickertacking angrily.

"You are not a fleshsack like those who dwell in this place," the hazdahem mused. His sniffed, his nose flaring. "You have a taint of the Glowing Ones but you are not one of them...very strange."

I growled.

He laughed, deep and loud. "Ah, a protector. Are you angry at how we dealt with your city?"

I said nothing and started stalking forward and to the side, spiraling closer and forcing him to turn to face me. I wanted the malazaheen and their boss all in front of me so that I could keep track of them.

The hazdahem's nose wrinkled again, pulling in so much air that his chest puffed out. "Hmmm...is that a whiff of orichalculm I smell on you, little thing? What might you know about that?"

I growled again and stepped forward.

"Remove his legs," the monster said, waving idly to his flunkies.

The malazaheen charged.