In a few minutes we reached the edge of the forest of the ice trees. We could see the ice castle of Luna the moon succubus clearly now. It was built entirely of ice and had a very jagged look. The ground between us and the castle was quite bare.

But just as we took a few steps forward, when suddenly from the very ground itself sprung a monster—

An ice demon of sorts. It had a humanoid appearance but it was four times Danor’s size, who himself was a giant and the demon had red eyes and great canines. Its body consisted entirely of ice, very much like the trees of the forest.

Even as we were taking in our situation when yet another demon appeared. This was followed by yet another. Within a minute at least twenty more demons had appeared.

The demon closest to us raised its arms and brought them down onto us. Lana, Danor and I leapt in different direction to protect ourselves. The result was that I landed in front of another ice demon who grabbed me with his giant hand and took me off the ground.

He squeezed me hard. In a bid to save myself I hit one of the demon’s fingers with my sword—as if that would work. The demon simply took away my sword with his other hand and threw it away. Just then, Lana came flying at top speed. She hit the ice demon on the head with such brute force that the ice demon’s head separated from its neck and went flying and hit another ice demon.

The body of the ice demon went limp and it tumbled down, the fingers of its hands still wrapped around me. Luckily, the ice demon fell on its back so that I was spared from being crushed to death under its immense weight.

I was somehow able to remove the fat ice fingers of the ice demon from over myself, and I stumbled onto the snow. Lana was still hovering overhead. In the distance, one of the ice demons had caught Danor. Lana was about to fly towards him to help him when another ice demon leapt to the air and grabbed her and brought her down.

Lana began to box the hand of the ice demon, but I could see that she was running out of steam as her punches seemed to be low in energy. Still she was able to break herself free from the grasps of the ice demon. There were still so many of the demons that there was no way we could win over them. Lana might be able to deal with one or two more ice demons, but soon she would be depleted of energy and she would need to recharge. I was quite useless against the ice demons. All I had were my tamer powers and they wouldn’t come quite in handy against the ice demons. The thousands of succubi and demons over whom I exercised power where hundreds of thousands of kilometres away on earth.

Wait, I still had my blast spell!

I had used it so many days ago that I had almost forgotten that I still had it.

Danor let out a cry. The ice demon had its arms wrapped around him and was trying to crush him to death.

I pointed my hands at the demon and cried,

“Blast!”

Immediately the blast of air hit the ice demon, so that it was thrown backwards. Danor was able to get away from the ice demon even as the demon slowly recovered from the effects of the spell.

And then came the cry.

Or ‘cries’ to be precise.

They came from the forest of the ice trees. The ice demons were also confused and for a few moments the three of us were no longer their centre of attention.

After a second, we saw who were crying out. And no, the cries were not ones of sorrow. But they were battle cries.

Green beings began to jump out of the forest of the ice trees. At first I struggled to comprehend what they actually were, and it took me a moment to realise that the green beings were actually… plants?

Well, they had leaves for hair and their bodies seemed very like the stems of trees. But they also possessed eyes and were quite humanoid in appearance. The soles of their feet also seemed to possess roots.

These tree men and women threw themselves at the ice demons. They however, totally ignored us. The ice demons were stronger than the tree creatures, however, the tree creatures had the upper hand because of their sheer numbers. Amidst the chaos, Lana and Danor somehow made their way to me and then the three of us watched with awe as the battle raged between the tree people and the ice demons.

The tree people carried swords. However, the swords did not always work well against the ice demons since sometimes the swords would get lodged in the thick bodies of the ice demons and it was hard to pull out the swords, while other swords shattered at the sheer impact. However, the tree people had other tricks up their sleeves. Their fingers could elongate and shrink as per their wish. Several of the tree men would throw their elongated fingers on an ice demon and wrap the demon completely in their fingers, such that the ice demon could be rendered motionless and then one of the tree men could decapitate the head of the ice demon with a sword.

For what seemed like a good while, the battle went on. I reckoned the reason behind the tree men not attacking us was that they had seen us being attacked by the ice demons. Since they themselves were enemies of the ice demons, they had thought that they needn’t do anything to us.