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Chapter 47: Slim To None


47

“I know your kind,” Jo-Mel says, rising painfully, slowly to her feet.

Turning towards her, the beast looks closely and is surprised on this delightfully unexpected day yet again.

“As you should, little wildling,” she purrs. “I feasted on the flesh of your kind out beyond the soft places, in the dark lands.”

“Then you know that we hunted you all down and drove you out.”

“Well, that would depend on your perspective, I guess,” the beast chides. “As you can see, I wasn't hunted down. I wasn't driven out.”

“But I do remember the temerity, the audacity of you unfinished people,” she continues. “Your harassments were ceaseless.

“Perhaps I should pay you back in kind for the sum total of those offenses?”

Jo-Mel saw that Monique was held fast and struggled against her bindings to no avail. The beast's black threading was nothing like the invisible, gossamer web that Pickle-Me-Jack had spun around her.

Monique struggled to summon her blade, to draw forth her armoring. She struggled to repeat the reflexive motions that had first sheathed her in flame, put a steel dagger in her hand, but her thoughts fell apart. The black threads were tough, like thick, steel cords, but they also scrambled her senses. The more she fought against them, the tighter they wound themselves around her, body and mind.

Monique felt her chest crack from the pressure and it grew harder to draw breath, her lungs restricted along with her tenuous thoughts.

Jo-Mel kept TruthSeeker sheathed. She knew that to challenge this demon straight on would result in nothing but a quick death for them both. Her only chance was to keep it engaged until Monique managed to gather herself. Perhaps then, if nothing else, she could find a way for them to survive long enough to retreat.

Jo-Mel knew to be afraid. She knew of the Majora Shitani. These were apex predators, feared even amongst the lesser demons, whom they would just as soon prey and feast upon. It had taken many lives and the intercession of the Incata's most powerful adepts to drive them back down beneath the Eternal planes.

Some had escaped upward, into the light of the Dual Realms, though. They skittered about throughout the underpinnings of reality, hiding amongst the unseen places, often within the hearts and minds of unsuspecting women and men.

Their kind were typically regarded by most, however, as nothing more than myth, a frightening fairy tale. Jo-Mel knew better. She could feel the depth of malevolence within this beast before her. That she had not sensed it earlier, could not grasp the immensity of its sinister energies, must have meant that it slept.

These Great Beasts, harried and pursued long ago, had learned to go into hiding, their psychic emanations tamped down while they burrowed down into underlying dimensional structures.

Jo-Mel's people, the greatest of hunters, had long ago led the Incata's Mage Warriors to the lairs of these hibernating beasts as they sought safe haven within the Wilds. They were more vulnerable, capable of being dispatched in this sleep state, though much more difficult to locate.

This is how the beast had gone unnoticed here, Jo-Mel surmised.

Her unit, Askauri's command battalion, was formed to handle threats such as this, their sanctioned expeditions over into the Earth realm were often in response to the detection of such beasts' awakening. If they didn't act fast, strike before it had been allowed to arise fully into its form, they would struggle mightily, and typically with more than a few casualties, to contain the threat.

But Jo-Mel had never felt anything like this. This was a Majora Shitani on steroids.

And she was but one person.

Monique, she reckoned, wouldn't be much help against the beast. Lost to her rage, she was currently bound, her flames contained. She was less of an asset anyway, as dangerously out of control and disconnected to the source of her strength as she was.

So no, this wasn't about a fight. This was about surviving.

And as the Great Beast turned its attentions upon her, Jo-Mel knew that survival was nothing but a slim possibility at best

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