Before I had time to delve into my introspective thoughts, a soft melody floated from everywhere at once. I couldn’t make out the words or even the language that it was in, but Spot just ignored it in favor of the feast in front of him. Nothing good could follow that almost-Gaelic music, so I threw myself into draining as much power as I could from Fugly’s body. I walked into this fight with full power and that epic blast cost me most of what I had in me and in Gungnir. Svalinn was still pretty much good to go, and from what I could tell at a glance, it wasn’t draining power from the corpse but actually eating, as if the piecemeal soul of Rath that I put in there was hungry.

As pulses of crimson energy in time with the dying heart of the beast washed into me, purified by my spear and armor and stored in the crystal batteries, I checked again for a ley line. Being so used to having unending power may actually be the death of me some day, but my hope was that it wasn’t this particular day. With every bite Spot took, I saw in the magical spectrum the vast quantities of power that were being added to his own, replacing what the witch stole from him in her initial attack against me. The pressure of available energy being funneled suddenly lost its power, slowing to a trickle. The damn singing had gotten a bit louder and as I turned my head to see the landscape of my probably temporary victory, two man sized portals opened up.

The first portal was a sort of off-white, like freshly shined pearl or super organic milk, streams of light burning their way through,and the second portal was purple smoke mixed with black thorns that cut their way into our reality. At the same time, two visitors stepped out and landed on the dirt.

“She’s not here, hehehehe, does this mean I’m free?”

“Silence filth. If you ever shut up you’d feel that the Mistress isn’t far. And we don’t get to play unless we obey her first.”

The one who spoke first, a pitch-black woman with glowing purple tattoos and too many spikes to be nice to snuggle, sulked at her partner before taking a good look around.

“Maalik, I don’t see her but maybe I can play with them first?”

Her glowing yellow eyes honed in on me as she drew two whips from off her belt and cracked them. At the ends of the whips were cobra heads, literal heads of cobras with fangs that dripped poison. In her eyes, all I could see were visions of agonizing torture, dripping poison that burned like acid while being suffocated by the sinister fog that wreathed her body. Before I could completely engage my mind sorcery, the brightly glowing man with golden wings and two blazing swords stood between me and the she-devil. What could only be described as an angel stood with his back towards me.

“I may not be guarding Eden anymore with Uriel since the Fall, but I’ll be damned thrice over before I let you take another mortal. Your whips don't need another face, Enera.”

“Fine,” she pouted, “Let’s find Mistress and then have some fun.”

Not that I wasn’t glad for the heavenly intervention, but something about this angel seemed, less, way less than the last one I met. Gav’riel seemed to be the personification of a compressed holy nuke, while this guy was his baby brother who just learned how to play with matches. And her, freaky smoke and whip bitch over there, she was an F5 hurricane of acid rain that I did not want to tangle with, ever. Redoubling my efforts to take in as much power as possible, I compacted a mental letter of commands that was going to go to Spot in just a minute. My best bet would be to get the fuck outta here. Both of these supernatural creatures were way above my weight class. Maybe, just maybe, they couldn’t mess with me just like Gav’riel, but the fact that they showed up right after I buried their Mistress means that something great is not on the way.

Sensing that I had gotten all that I was going to get energy-wise from Fugly, I used a bit of my flesh sorcery to banish the gore covering me and then dove into the ground like a fish. Going down deep into the earth where I stashed the giant black sleeper pods, I inspected each one. [Tango, tango, fucking Tango, which one is fucking TANGO?! Got it!]

Pushing the entire thing up to the surface with my earth sorcery, I deposited it next where Spot was still wolfing down what he could. Checking my magical senses, I could feel the angel and the demon rooting around in the dirt to get to the witch, so I shaped Gungnir into a spear and blasted the hinges off both sides of the longhouse sized pod. “Spot, get those tops off!” I ordered, taking a couple steps back. Reluctantly stopping his gorging, my faithful dog got a good grip on the top parts and ripped them clean off.

“Too fat, that’s a chick, whoa, didn’t know catgirls were actually a thing, uhm, lizard man, let’s take this helmet off here, dude with two heads, nope, and that’s definitely too weird.” My constant diatribe was the only thing keeping my anticipation and anxiety from driving me insane. The one side of the pod didn’t have my brother in either the top or bottom layer. Most were some kind of mutated or ‘enhanced’ human, and some were just plain aliens.

Rounding the corner, the first face I saw was my brother’s. Brown eyes, his face a little larger than I was used to, proportionally speaking, and that dopey expression on his unconscious face. Other than meeting the standard height and weight for a Centauri, it didn’t look like he had any other kinds of genetic changes. Carefully cutting him out of the harness, his body fell forward knocking me to the ground. “Fucking fat ass! Wake up bro!” I yelled, pushing him off of me and onto his back. No response.

Ignoring everything, I put my hands on his head and dove into his mind. Steel, all I found in there was steel. Every thought, every feeling except for the unconscious was held in perfect stasis, but it was some kind of mental metal that kept him unconscious. Even I couldn’t tell if it was literal or figurative steel in there. My earth sorcery kept telling me that it wasn’t metal in there keeping him this way and my mind sorcery kept telling me that it wasn’t his mind. Then, my mana sorcery pointed my senses to a grouping of flowing silver needles that were in line with the nerves in his neck.

Fearing that my touch would burn his nerves out like Casparai’s, I withdrew from my examination. As far as I could tell he was ok but, this didn’t have the feel of something voluntary, it stank of someone taking advantage of naivety. My little brother was a total nerd just like me, and would have jumped at any kind of opportunity the enterprising Centauri put in front of him. What nerd could resist gaining magic or centuries of life or even the chance to travel space like it was a damn highway? I wouldn’t have missed that chance for the world. But what stopped the Centauri from having hooks in their travel package, nothing. But hooks I could deal with. What I couldn’t deal with were the two beings behind me who had already brought up the platinum coffin of their master.

“Oh my, did you find what you were looking for?” Enera’s smoky voice sent all the wrong kinds of shivers down my spine.

“I believe he has my pet, and if he had but asked, I might have even let him have it. That was however, before he killed my favorite one.”

Turning around, the silvery prison was upright in the dirt thirty feet from me, demon on one side and angel on the other. Now that they were a bit closer, I could see a thin golden tattoo on Enera’s neck just over where a jugular would be, if demons had jugulars. A matching one but in purple was on Maalik. Through the eye holes of the prison that also functioned as air holes, I could see the witch’s eyeball staring straight at me.

“How’d you?”

“Use magic while inside this? Hmmm?” she laughed, “Easy. Not all magic requires power. Some require knowledge, others require simple talent. What’s your name, young sorcerer. Beast tamers don’t have that kind of power offhand.”

“How’d you know I said beast tamer to the Centauri?” I shot back, trying to keep the upper hand.

“Because they’re mine. I bought them. How else do you think the great leader of the Alpha Centauri regime keeps back the hordes of undead that constantly assault the fringes of their empire?”

“Huh?”

“They don’t pay us in gold dear, they pay us in lives. Earth is not the first harvested world for the Centauri and it won’t be the last.”

My mind was scrambling. Reeanth told me that the Amazons were the footsoldiers of the Hags, what I’m assuming the witches are, which means that’s probably who this lady is. So what in the world are they doing with Centauri soldiers?

“Now please let me out. Wytchfire will do the trick but it’s certainly hell on one’s complexion.”

Wytchfire, the stuff that cleansed Terra, the former paradise mirror Earth from long ago?

“Hold on lady,” I interrupted, gripping Gungnir tight and fully activating Svalinn, wide bladed teardrop shields forming on my forearms. “First off, you ain’t going nowhere. Those two limp-winged dicks can’t touch me and you know it. Second off, this is my brother, and he is going with me. So I can either have Spot eat you now and shit you out later, or I can take my brother and we all leave in peace. Whatcha say?”

Forcibly using my mental sorcery to keep me calm and my flesh sorcery to keep my face from giving any tells, I pulled on all of the power in and near me and pushed it into my epic weapons. This was a total fucking bluff. I had nothing that could do a thing to either a demon or an angel, probably. Svalinn hasn’t been fully tested yet, having pieces of a dragon’s soul in it that probably could eat many different varieties of creatures, and Gungnir was just badass all around. But what hurts an angel other than another angel? What hurts a demon other than another angel, a demon, or a fucking priest? All of which, I’m fresh out of.

One part of me wished Reeanth and Johnny would hurry their fat asses up, but even then they wouldn’t get here in time dragging that bear behind them. The other part of me contemplated the uselessness of that venture. In front of me was a literal angel. Angels were heavenly shock troopers from what I remembered from church. They made people blind, rained fire on cities, killed thousands in a night with a silent blade, and that was only half the problem. Who knows what demons can do? My only saving grace was lingering deductions from what Gav’riel said and did near me, and holy shit I hoped I was right.

Carefully flexing my will, I caused the dirt underneath the platinum prison to swallow it up again. Damn I love that tactic, so freakin useful. Pulling out the knob of wood that I took off Yggdrasil, I threw it into one of the torn out sections of the witch’s beast while mentally ordering Spot to back off his feast. Making sure that her minions went right back to cursing and digging her I out, I made sure to get scarce. Dragging my brother over to it, I flooded the magical backup plan with mana carefully, right at the maximum flow that Yggdrasil piece could handle. As that was going on, I took out the razor thorny vine caltrop seeds out and planted them all around and linked them all together. True to form, the vine seeds planted and the thorns speared into the corpse, absorbing it directly and converting it into energy. Taking a hold of that process, I forced most of the energy being broken down into myself where I hold it and feed it into the Yggdrasil that, WASN’T GROWING. The stupid thing just kept drinking down the energy like pouring water down a drain.

“Come on,” I muttered, using nature sorcery to communicate what I wanted the knob of living wood. “Connect you damn thing, you’re the same thing.” I was working off of half-assumptions and hunches here, but if this bit of wood was a part of Yggdrasil, and the World Tree is always connected to every part of itself at all times, then this piece of wood when activated should give me access to all of the mana powering my under-tree hideout. The big generator worked there still, and maybe I’d get a less than perfectly efficient flow, but this means that I could plant the knob and have access to all the power I needed! Not to say that this would help me in my specific situation as I didn’t count on fighting Higher and Lower beings, but it was a proof of concept. Also, it might let me escape in a last ditch effort to travel back home to where my seat of power truly was.

Wait, I had people coming this way. Not today, but in two or three days, my own group of idiots would stumble over here into a camp of Centauri soldiers and an unhappy witch. Fuck. Doing this the nice way might not be the answer for once. Scorched earth tactic time. Leaving the whole mess of plants right where they were, I cut my palm and leaked some blood on the World Tree bud, binding it to myself. Taking a second to see where I was mana-wise, I pulled all of the mana it didn’t need to survive and pushed it into Gungnir and Svalinn. The lynchpin here was the damn witch. Ordering Spot to guard Andy, I dove back into the earth. Watching an Angel and a Demon cooperate to dig out an alien witch is not something you see that often.

[If she dies, do you both go free?] I asked, sending my thoughts to the angel. I figured I’d get a better response from him.

With a grunt that I translated as a ‘yes’, he kept digging. Flexing my magic again, I forced her coffin to sink another hundred yards.

[Dig a little slower dude,] I thought at him, [Trying to help us both out.]

[If I go free, Enera does too, and the Host have a duty to bind those who seek to interfere with Choice.] he sent back. [I failed at the Gate with her, and was bound to her in my Failure.]

[The witch or the demon?]

[The witch you imbecilic monkey! You think I’d let even a Fallen such as myself be bound to a demon willingly?! I was under Uriel’s command in guarding Eden, so my duties were transferred to guarding the gates of Hell after Eden fell, and when Enera escaped from her duties there, I was cast to the witch.]

[So if I get rid of the witch, you’ll take care of Enera?]

[I will remove her from this dimension yes, but she will always hate you, and chase you if given the chance.]

[Done.]

Grabbing the coffin with my earth sorcery, I forced it down as deep as I could handle it. With the pressure of mother earth all around me, the agony was sharp, but my sorcery never felt more alive. Slowly forcing a fist closed, my magic mirroring my intent, I couldn’t even hear her screams.