High Inquisitor Patrus was patient.

He’d spent several hours waiting, watching the apartment that the children had pointed out to him as the one where the ‘spider lady’ had disappeared into, with no result.

There was no back door he could have missed. He’d checked.

There was a limit to even Mitla’s own patience, however. Eventually, after more than two hours of watching and waiting with no result, he was forced to admit that even if the children had not sent him on a wild goose chase, without evidence to the contrary, he could no longer justify any further time wasted on this endeavor.

Perhaps he’d task one of the witless, layabout scum filling this city to watch the apartment for the promise of a few coin, despite how undependable they were.

He’d been halfway down the street, on his way to leave, disgusted at the time wasted, when a demon walked right past him and, to his surprise, headed directly for the door he’d been keeping an eagle eye on.

A demon was an odd visitor to any house, certainly, even in this most despicable of sinful cities, but it was not what he had been waiting for. Demons themselves were relatively common in this forsaken city, and while its presence meant the inhabitants of the house were certainly damned by association, this was not the particular blasphemy that he was trying to put to the sword.

It was, however, enough to renew his focus in watching the apartment. An excuse to continue his vigil. The evil, malicious spider had consorted with demons before, after all. Would it be such a stretch to believe that she was up to her old tricks again?

And, praise be to Mitla, his patience was finally rewarded!

Only one demon had entered, but two demons left the dwelling; one, the one that he’d seen arrive not too long before, but the other… the other he recognized. It was the demon that had been traveling with the spider before. The big, muscular one.

Excitement fluttered in his heart. Combined with the report from the children, her presence was simply too much of a coincidence. It was almost certain that the spider was either currently present in the home, or, at the very least, had been there earlier.

His fingers flexed around the hilt of the sword he carried on his hip. He had to restrain the excitement building in his chest. After weeks of searching, he had finally found a lead. Something to point him towards his quarry. All he had to do now was gently, gently pull on this thread and not let her go to ground again.

When they set off down the street, he briefly considered following them, but in the end decided against it. As much as they deserved divine eradication, this city had more blasphemies than a leper had sores and his mission was more important than cleansing a few random demons from the world.

No, he had a mission. A mission from Mitla Himself. This was where he was meant to be, he just knew it. It felt right.

He briefly considered breaking into the house to look for her directly, but quickly discarded that notion. Even with the demon gone, if she was still there, which he could not be certain of, he had no idea what he would be walking into.

If he had still had the full power of Mitla behind him, he would not have hesitated for a moment, but he found himself uniquely vulnerable and exposed, with naught but the most basic of Mitla’s blessings at his fingertips. He had no idea how many more slaves and lackeys she had protecting her and he couldn’t risk letting her slip through his fingers again.

Besides, there was no reason to rush. He had the element of surprise, all the patience in the world.

Patience was one of the virtues taught by Mitla, and he, High Inquisitor Patrus, was nothing if not patient. Most of the time. And so he remained. Vigilant. Watching from the shadows like a hawk, observant for even the smallest sign of someone entering or leaving.

Not long after, the demons returned. They were chatting and bickering amongst themselves, no doubt planning vile atrocities of some kind, though Patrus was not close enough to overhear the details.

Not that it mattered. Odds were their planned victims would be among the inhabitants of this forsaken city anyway and therefore none of his concern.

What drew his attention was not the demons, however, but their shadow. A young man in a dark hood had followed them. He kept his distance, doing his best to stay out of their sight, but he was plainly visible from Patrus’s vantage point. His antics only made him stand out more as he wove between the crowds in a clear attempt to remain hidden from the two demons.

For a moment, Patrus thought that another would join his vigil right then and there, observing the comings and goings of the demon-house, but it was not to be. After the demons went back inside, the young man stayed only long enough to confirm which door they’d entered before scurrying off, back up the street from whence he’d come.

For some time, nothing further happened. The house remained still and quiet, the curtains drawn. Then the young man returned and it became clear that he’d merely gone to fetch his friends. Dressed in similar dark hoods, the five of them carried strange pipe-like devices engraved with faintly glowing symbols over their shoulders.

Stopping across the road from the demon house, they conferred for a moment, pointing and whispering among themselves. Then, as a unit, they all trooped into the building directly opposite the house.

After carefully adjusting his position so that he would have a better view, Patrus could see that the hooded figures had set up on the top floor, the third one, their strange pipes clearly visible sticking out one of the windows and pointed directly at the spider’s lair.

Were they also after the spider? Were they assassins? Spies? Potential allies? Or were they hidden guardians, watching over the spider’s lair on her behalf?

Patrus had no way to know. No way except to wait, watch and see what happened.

When time passed with nothing further happening, Patrus realized that they too were waiting, just like him. But for what?

And then the door opened and a screaming, flailing, cursing demon came flying out.

“No! Wait! I can walk! I’ll go!” Ixxy protested as Gora dragged her to the door by the back of her shirt and shorts. She still had the tronic clasped tightly in her left hand.

“Shut up and be glad you’re getting off light,” Gora grumbled as she elbowed her front door open.

Then she tossed Ixxy through, sending her sailing, screaming, through the air, right into the middle of the street. There, she bounced painfully off the smooth stone surface of the road before rolling to a stop.

Right in front of a pair of very large horses.

With hooves the size of dinner plates right above her, Ixxy did the only reasonable thing: she screamed and curled herself into the smallest ball she could.

The horses, despite likely being large enough to trample her without even noticing it, reacted like any peaceful herbivores would when they suddenly discover something new and noisy under their feet.

They freaked out.

In an attempt to avoid the strange, loud, red thing that was suddenly right in front of them, one horse reared up in an attempt to arrest his forward movement… only for the momentum of the heavy cart behind to shove him, toppling him forward anyway and snapping his harness in the process.

He hit the ground with a loud crash, close enough that Ixxy felt the ground shake, and very nearly crushing her.

The other horse, showing either more intelligence or less, depending on your point of view, swerved to the side instead, dragging the cart out of its lane — it’s large wheels just narrowly missing running over Ixxy’s legs — right into oncoming traffic.

A smaller cart coming from the opposite direction and perhaps moving a little too fast for safety — there’s always one — suddenly found itself with nowhere to go in the narrow street and unable to stop in time. Its horse, with no other options and acting on instinct, attempted to jump the obstacle that had suddenly appeared in its path. It went about as well as you would expect a horse tied to a cart trying to jump would go.

Horse and cart, too heavy to really get any appreciable airtime, landed almost on top of the first cart, just barely missing the driver. The combined momentum of the two carts plus horse now piled on top kept them going, tumbling across the road, scattering cargo everywhere and slamming into a third cart that had been parked on the side of the road.

And that was it. By this point, traffic in the road had either stopped or slowed to a crawl as everyone sought to avoid the three-cart pile-up that had suddenly left most of the road completely unnavigable. What space there was still remaining was covered in boxes, barrels and other assorted cargo.

After a moment of stunned silence, all of the noise came rushing back.

One of the drivers, the one from the speeding cart, had been thrown clear and was wailing about a broken arm. Then there were the horses, all neighing and screaming loudly in terror and shock, though they seemed to be fine. One was one his back in the rear of one of the carts, but from the way his legs were kicking helplessly in the air, he seemed uninjured, if momentarily stuck. The rest seemed perfectly fine, just frightened.

Thankfully, they were big, tough animals, despite their skittish temperament. Apart from a few scratches and the broken arm, miraculously, there had been no serious injury.

A red, horned head warily poked out from among the mess. Somehow, Ixxy seemed to have escaped injury as well.

“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

Gora shut her front door before turning to face Samual, who was standing right behind her. Outside, a shouting match was starting to erupt as everyone sought to blame everyone else.

She shrugged at him. “Maybe.”

Then the front door that she’d just closed exploded.

There was no warning. One moment, she was facing Samual, mouth open to say something pithy, and the next Gora was thrown back like a ragdoll by a blast wave of sickly, blue flame, crashing through her furniture and coming to rest in a pile of splinters and chunks of mage-rock.

For a few moments she could do nothing but lie there, completely shell-shocked. But very quickly, her instincts kicked in and her brain managed to focus on one thought.

Someone had attacked her house.

And she had a suspicion who.

She felt like one, giant bruise and her ears were ringing, but nothing seemed broken. She had scrapes and scratches and more than a few mild burns, but that was nothing that her regeneration wouldn’t sort out in short order. She’d taken worse hits in the Nightmare before.

The question was, how had Samual fared. He’d been standing right behind her. She vaguely remembered crashing into him as she went flying.

Bits of dust and masonry cascaded off her back as she slowly climbed to her feet, coughing and hacking all the way. She looked around, blinking, taking in the mess that her ground floor room had become. A thick cloud of dust and smoke blocked visibility, but she could still see that most of her furniture had been been reduced to kindling.

Fuck. And they’d been expensive too, having had to be special-made to be sturdy enough to accomodate her frame.

Glancing towards the front of the apartment Gora could just about make out the hole that used to be her front door through the thick dust in the air. A part of the surrounding wall had also been blown inwards.

She should have snapped the little demon bitch’s neck before tossing her out.

She found Samual not far from where she’d found herself, also half-covered in dust and pieces of furniture. For a moment he looked dead, until Gora noticed the clench in his jaw.

“Hey, you alive?” she asked as she nudged him with the tip of her boot in a voice that was perhaps a little too loud, her ears still ringing a bit.

“Yes,” he replied stiffly. “Armor. Healing now.”

That wasn’t good. Even if his mail had taken the edge off, Samual didn’t have Gora’s ridiculous toughness. He was, at the end of the day, simply human, and comparatively fragile. Even if he could heal thanks to his god, he was going to need a moment to recover.

And at any moment, the crazy demon bitch could toss a second blast through the hole in front of the apartment.

“No time,” Gora growled, crouching down next to him. “I need you to get Rita and my cousin safe.”

To Samual’s credit, he didn’t waste any time with questions. His eyes flicked open and met Gora’s for just a moment before he nodded and rolled over, teeth gritted with pain as he fought to his feet.

Good man. He’d quickly grasped the situation and realized why huddling inside was a fool’s game. The dust that had been kicked up by the blast was obscuring them for now, but it would quickly dissipate, and then they’d be sitting ducks for any follow-up attacks.

No, the only sensible plan was to go out and deal with the problem.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What I do best,” Gora growled, grabbing a large chunk of masonry in one of her massive paws. “I’m going to go hurt someone.”

The street in front of her house was a mess. It had started as a multi-cart pile-up, but with the attack and the explosion and the fire, it had gone rapidly downhill from there.

The surrounding horses, already skittish and nervous after the initial pile-up, had fully panicked at the noise of the explosion and decided to run. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been anywhere to run to.

Blocked in front by carts and cargo strewn across the road and behind by other carts that had also stopped to avoid joining the pile-up, there was simply nowhere to go. Nevertheless, in their panic, they tried anyway, aiming for any gaps that they could either fit through or jump over, completely ignoring the physics of whether the carts they were tied to could follow.

The result was complete and utter chaos. Screaming, terrified horses, yelling drivers trying to control their animals and the heavy crunches as carts impacted each other, the cramped space of the road was rapidly filling up with wrecks as harnesses and tethers snapped, leaving stranded and toppled carts and wagons in their wake.

Somewhere along the line, something had caught fire as well and several of the broken carts were burning merrily with bright red flames. The result was an already chaotic situation turned into something that looked like a cross between a battlefield and the aftermath of a wizard duel. It was going to be an ungodly mess to clean up.

All that she took in at a glance, because the subject of all her attention and fury was standing in the middle of the road, unhurt and surrounded by the carnage, staring back at Gora with wide eyes.

Ixxy. The little demon slut.

“You!” Gora roared, muscles tensing to either dive behind a nearby cart if the demon threw more magic at her or simply charge in and cut her down if she did not.

But her next words caught Gora just a little off-guard.

“Look out!”

Gora didn’t even have time to properly parse the look of panic and concern on Ixxy’s face before there was a crack and something struck her. It felt like being punched in the chest from somewhere above. Hard. Harder than anyone had ever punched her before without sending her flying.

Except, when Gora looked down, she didn’t see a bruise. In her chest, just above her right breast, there was a hole, the size of small coin, already leaking blood.

Some kind of magic had punched a hole clean through her.

“Rita! Rita, where are you?” Samual’s voice.

Rita coughed, raising her hand so he could find her in the cloying dust, not quite in a state to shout back.

Her throat felt raw, the dust in the air making her choke and sputter.

The explosion hadn’t been anywhere near her, but just the fright, the sudden shock of the blast, had been enough to bowl her over and making her hit her head against the edge of the stairs on the way down. Not enough to draw blood, but now her head hurt on top of feeling completely drained by the events of the last few hours.

“Rita… are you okay?” Samual asked as he kneeled next to her.

“I’m okay… I think… just bruised,” she muttered between coughing fits.

“Nothing seems broken,” he said softly, gently yet professionally prodding her ribs and arms until Rita batted his hands away.

She hadn’t had time to put her silk chest wrap back on, having scrambled to just get her shirt over her head to cover her modesty before charging downstairs, and things were a little looser than she was strictly comfortable with.

“I’m fine, just bruised,” she said, wincing as she struggled to sit up with her weird anatomy. “What happened?”

“Some kind of attack. We need to get upstairs.”

“Upstairs? Why?” Rita asked as she let Samual drag her to her feet.

“Because there’s a hole where the front door used to be and once the dust settles, we won’t have any cover,” he whispered. “And breathing all this dust can’t be good for you, either. Now come on, Timothy already headed up.”

Upstairs, they found the young mage cowering behind Gora’s bed, peering out at them with wide eyes. His hair was covered in dust, and Rita suspected hers probably were little better.

“What’s going on?” he asked in a panicked voice.

“Attacked,” Samual stated simply, motioning for Rita to get away from the window while he himself took up a position next to it, peeking through a gap in the curtains. “Shit.”

“What?” Rita hissed, ignoring his instructions and squeezing herself in next to the window on the other side.

“Rita!” Samual hissed, but she ignored him. She needed to know what was going on.

But what she saw through the window filled her with dread.

The entire street in front of the apartment was a mess of scattered boxes and overturned carts, some of them on fire. Gora was crouched behind one that was miraculously not burning, bleeding from numerous spots.

On the other side of the street, partially surrounded by burning wreckage, stood Ixxy.

Was this all her doing? Had she unleashed some crazy demonic magics in a fit of rage after being denied Rita’s soul?

But hadn’t they paid her?

Just then, Gora tried to dart out from behind the cart to the cover of another one nearby. She got barely halfway before a bright, blue ball of energy struck it and the entire thing exploded, blowing Gora off her feet and forcing her to scramble back behind the cover of the first cart.

It was only as the roar of the explosion died down that Rita began hearing the staccato of cracks as things struck the cart she was hiding behind, chipping off chunks of wood and splinters.

If Rita didn’t know any better, she would have thought somebody was shooting at Gora, and it wasn’t Ixxy. The demoness was still standing in the same place, seemingly frozen in place as the world around her burned, neck craned as she stared up at at the building across the road from Gora’s apartment.

Following Ixxy’s line of sight, Rita found the true culprits.

Nestled in one of the upper story windows, a group of people clad in dark clothes pointed sticks of some kind down towards where Gora was huddled. One of the sticks sparked, and the telltale crack echoed through the air as a piece of the cart was blasted off.

So it wasn’t guns that were making that noise at all, but rather some kind of magical staves or something that worked like guns. Not that that was much of a consolation.

One of the dark figures didn’t have a thin stick, however. Rita had only brief glimpse at what appeared to be a big, thick pipe that had been resting on the windowsill, glowing sickly blue with what she assumed were arcane symbols, before it was drawn back inside.

Right, so magical stick-guns and and bloody arcane bazookas!

“Rita, dammit, listen to me!” Samual snarled, grabbing Rita by the arm and forcibly dragging her away from the window and down on the ground.

Rita couldn’t help but notice that if whatever that pipe bazooka was was turned on them, their little window and curtain certainly wasn’t going to provide a hell of a lot of protection.

“Samual, we have to do something!” she hissed at him, struggling to keep her voice down as if that would somehow make the difference in whether they were noticed over the loud magical firefight happening right outside.

“I am doing something. I am waiting for my injuries to heal while keeping you and the nerd safe so Gora can deal with this mess without worrying about having to protect the two of you.”

At this, Rita grabbed Samual’s arm, nails digging painfully into the links of his armour.

“Samual,” she said seriously, “if somebody doesn’t do something, Gora is going to die!”

Ixxy couldn’t believe it.

The Cambion was going to die!

Gora was pinned down behind her cart, her last spot of nearby cover blown to smithereens. Once whatever device they were using to throw out these balls of blue fire recharged again, they were going to turn it on her and that would be the end.

Gora would be reduced to chunks of vaguely demon-flavoured flesh.

And there was nothing Ixxy could do about it!

She watched helplessly as the thick, rune-inscribed pipe pushed through the window for the third time, carefully taking aim at Gora’s cover.

Her hands and jaw clenched in frustration. The little green square that had been her payment and her salvation dug into her palm. Her own magic was shackled by the Grand Contract, chained down and restricted for the so-called ‘safety’ of all of the mortals she had to brush shoulders with every day.

Now she couldn’t even use it to save just one.

She could just walk away. They’d paid her. Their business was done. They owed each other nothing. Heck, if they accidentally killed Timmy-boy, that just got her off the hook for her part of what remained of their contract, which was technically a win despite her kind of looking forward to it.

The sigils around the tip of the pipe began glowing a familiar sickly blue, signifying the spell had began to take shape.

There was nothing Ixxy had to do.

There was nothing Ixxy could do.

Except…

Her feet kicked off the blackened rock of the street hard enough to leave divots, her muscles already tuned up all the way again. She leapt, kicked off the side of a burning cart, dove through a flames of a crackling pile of what had once been sacks of grain and landed on the cart Gora was huddled behind right as one of the smaller weapons fired with loud crack.

A concentrated blast of magic punched a hole right through her chest.

A faint spark of pain exploded inside her, despite her already having killed her sense of pain, as the backlash from the magic sent sharp spikes of feedback up her connection to her real self.

Fuck! That had gone right through her boob!

Nevertheless, despite the pain, a faint smile creased her lips.

They’d hit her. With magic.

Inside, she felt the chains slide over her magic like silk over skin, leaving it free and exposed. For only the second time since she’d foot in this place, it felt like she could truly breathe.

She raised her hands, stretching them out towards the attackers. Just in time to intercept the bright, glowing blue sphere of incinerating fire that was racing right at her.

It exploded in a roar of blue fire right in front of her outstretched fingers. But instead of turning the cart she was standing on into cinders and herself into chunky giblets, the force of the explosion washed up against and around a shimmering blue barrier that had sprung up right in front of it, gouging a chunk out of the road in front of the cart and sending another, smaller wagon skidding away.

As the noise of the explosion died down, there was another crack and the barrier shimmered, intercepting another, smaller blast. Then another. Soon, there was a near constant stream of cracks and impacts, signifying the attackers hadn’t stopped firing simply because their big shot had been intercepted.

Luckily, they weren’t getting through. For now.

“The fuck… you think… you’re doing?” Gora wheezed from somewhere below and Ixxy glanced back to see the Cambion peering over the edge of the cart.

She looked bad. She’d been hit several times by the smaller, faster weapons and dark red blood was flowing freely from a number of wounds in her chest and shoulders.

“What does it look like? Saving your stupid ass,” Ixxy snarled back. “Now do something! I can’t hold another blast like that!”

Gora stared up at her suspiciously for just a moment longer. Then she limped out from behind the cart, up to the edge of the shield, and hefted the piece of masonry she was still holding onto.

“What are you doing?” Ixxy hissed over the noise of the cracks and sizzles against her shield.

“Getting myself some space to work,” Gora growled and with a grunt and flick of her arm, she sent a fist-sized chunk of masonry hurtling towards where the thick pipe had just vanished back into the darkness behind the window.

It struck just below the window itself, burrowing an ugly, jagged hole through the stone that left cracks spreading through the wall.

A scream of pain came from inside, signifying the hit.

“Er… good shot,” Ixxy said. “But I think you need to hit them with something bigger.”

Gora merely grunted as she she walked back up to the cart Ixxy was balanced on. Her limp was already less pronounced.

“Get off,” she growled simply.

She was about to snap that this hardly time to be getting possessive about her place to hide when her eyes widened as the Cambion spread her arms and took a firm hold of the chassis of the cart.

Hurriedly, she hopped off, doing her best to keep shielding the Cambion with her barrier.

Gora grunted and strained, her muscles bulging as she slowly began dragging the heavy wooden cart in a circle around her.

At first, it just slowly rolled across the ground as she pushed, but slowly, the wooden vehicle began to pick up speed. Soon, it was moving as fast as any horse had ever pulled it as it spun. Still Gora strained, and still the cart kept picking up speed, while Ixxy did her best to cover them both with her conjured barrier, which kept popping and crackling as it kept being struck by a near constant barrage of hits.

Faster and faster it spun. First the speed of a gallop, then a run, then a dead sprint and still it kept accelerating, until, eventually, the cart’s wheels left the ground. By this point, Gora was spinning like a top, the massive cart flying through the air, anchored to the ground solely by her bulging arms and legs.

Then, with a roar of triumph, she let go.

Suddenly unleashed, Ixxy watched in awe as the massive cart tumbled through the air, straight towards the window of the apartment their tormentors were using.

The window on the third floor.

Like the world’s biggest hammer toss, the heavy cart sailed gracefully through the air before smashing into the side of the building with an almighty crash, shattering every window as the entire side of the building cracked under the force of the impact. This was quickly followed by another loud crash as whatever remained of the cart dropped back onto the road, scattering what pieces of it remained everywhere.

If they’d gotten very lucky, that strike had taken out all of their attackers, but Ixxy doubted it. The hit hadn’t been clean, unfortunately having impacted just a hair to the left of the open window, and it would have been easy enough for them to duck behind cover before the cart arrived.

Still an amazing accomplishment by Gora, considering the general aerodynamic qualities of wooden wagons.

“Wow,” Ixxy said in the sudden silence once the last pieces of the cart came to rest. “That was honestly kinda impressive. But when I said ‘bigger’, I meant this.”

Luckily, what the rather over-sized projectile from Gora had done was momentarily drive the hooded hooligans away from the window, which was all Ixxy needed.

The barrier she’d been holding, no longer sparking with intercepted magical attacks, collapsed as she drew her hand back, and the energy that had infused it streamed back towards her, forming a brightly glowing blue bead in her palm, the size of a marble.

Without hesitation, she whipped her arm around, sending the glowing marble streaking straight towards the newly shattered window.

As it spun through air, throwing off glowing blue rings behind it, it sang. A high pitched whine that built higher and louder as it spun faster and faster, it’s own internal energies powering a micro-ritual in a fantastically complex magical reaction that even the archmages of this world would be hard pressed to duplicate.

A dark, hooded face appeared in the shattered window, revealing that at least one had indeed survived Gora’s cart-based onslaught, just in time to catch glowing, blue demonic magic right in the forehead.

Headshot!

And then, with a deafening blast, it exploded.

Despite being less than half the size of the glowing balls of fire that had been fired down at Gora and Ixxy, this explosion blew out the entire front of the apartment as all the previously cracked walls finally gave way, scattering a shower of bricks and rubble across the street, and sening thick plumes of dust and rubble out the other windows on the floor.

Oops. Perhaps Ixxy had put in a little too much ‘oomph’ into it. There had probably been a little collateral damage in that one.

All at once, the runes in her head slammed down hard, shutting down her magic near instantly and driving the breath from her lungs.

“Hmph. Show off,” Gora rumbled, eyes fixed on the damage and not noticing Ixxy doubled over. “I’m going to go check if anyone survived,” she said, before rushing towards a ground floor door half-choked by fallen rubble.

Ixxy could barely wheeze an affirmative, the backlash of the uncontrolled magic she did hitting her hard. Yes. She’d definitely gone a little overboard. And the runes weren’t happy. She could have, and probably did, injure an innocent bystander or two, either caught in the blast in a neighbouring apartment on the top floor or brained by a flying brick down on the street.

Well, sucked to be them. What was done was done, and she regretted nothing. Collateral damage was a fact of life and no amount of punishment after the fact was going to undo it. As if realizing that, the runes in her head eased off, and suddenly Ixxy could suck in a shuddering breath of dust-choked air.

Which was when a long, hard blade of steel punched through her stomach from behind.

For a moment, Ixxy could only stare at it in confusion. With her pain senses turned off, she didn’t feel a thing besides the impact, but half a meter of solid steel was hard to miss.

“For Mitla,” a voice behind her softly spoke, and the entire blade lit up with a bright, red fire.

Ixxy couldn’t hold back a scream of pain as the holy fire ignited her body from the inside.