Chapter 613: Owing The Turf
The forest seemed to have calmed around Damien even more.
The kind of ambient tension that had characterized the forest during the period of demonic occupation, the specific quality of a living place that was also being used as a base of operations by something that did not belong in it, was gone. And indeed, they were gone. The demons he’d slain days ago.
What remained was the forest’s own noise, the noise of a place that had been doing what it did for centuries and was simply continuing to do it.
Damien rode through it without urgency as though he now owned the place. As though this was his turf.
He did. He now owned the turf.
Fenrir set its own pace, the long, ground-covering walk it used when there was no reason for speed, the wolf moving between the trees with the practiced ease of something that had spent weeks in this terrain and had long since stopped treating the navigation as something that required effort.
Cerbe walked to the left.
The hellhound had been running hotter than usual in the last hour, the ambient heat distortion around its body wider than it typically maintained during ordinary travel. Damien had not told it to reduce the output and Cerbe had not reduced it, the same implicit understanding that had been present between them since the forest had run out of things that posed serious threats and Cerbe had found no particular reason to conserve what it produced when conservation was not required.
It was simply warm.
The forest accepted it without visible resentment.
Aquila was to the right, moving through the forest in the slightly awkward ground-travel style that had not improved despite the extended time in the forest’s terrain and had also not gotten worse. The griffin maintained its position with something that communicated consistent mild dissatisfaction with any environment it could not easily be above. Damien had developed a certain appreciation for the consistency.
The hunting had been Aquila’s best part of the morning.
The first mana beast had appeared from the undergrowth not long after they had resumed travel from the previous night’s camp, a Grade Four creature that had been working through the forest in a direction that had put it directly across Fenrir’s path. Damien had not moved to engage it. He had simply looked at Aquila.
Aquila had dropped on it from above before the mana beast had registered the angle of the threat.
Clean. Immediate.
The core had gone to Aquila afterward. Damien had extracted it and held it out without comment and Aquila had received it with the specific undignified enthusiasm it brought to that particular activity, the elegant aerial predator becoming briefly something that prioritized its interest in cores over the presentation it maintained at all other times.
Two more had followed across the morning’s travel.
The second had been a Grade Five that Cerbe had noticed before anyone else did, the hellhound’s left head orienting toward a section of undergrowth that looked empty until Cerbe’s attention was on it and then did not look empty anymore. Damien had directed Aquila with a gesture and Aquila had gone to it with the same decisive efficiency, the brief engagement ending with a Grade Five core being added to Aquila’s growing intake.
The third had been the most interesting. A Grade Three, lower end of the grade, occupying a clearing that the path took them through. It had seen them coming. Had assessed what was coming. Had made the sensible decision to leave the clearing before they arrived.
Had not made that decision quickly enough.
Aquila was significantly faster than a lower Grade Three mana beast over open ground.
The core from that one had produced a visible response in Aquila — a settling quality, something in the griffin’s presence that had a slightly different density than it had carried at the start of the morning’s travel. Not a grade change, nothing that significant. But something building. The accumulation of Grade Three and above core essence being processed through the weeks of feeding Damien had been providing to his summons.
Good.
He wanted all of them building.
Luton was on his head, which was where Luton was unless there was a reason for it to be somewhere else. The slime had not contributed to the morning’s hunting beyond its usual passive awareness of the surrounding territory, which was the ambient monitoring of a creature that never fully stopped paying attention to what was around it.
The two jars in its Universal Space were there.
He had not retrieved them since he stored them. Had thought about them at intervals, the specific thinking of someone who has a plan and is waiting for the right variable to complete the plan. The variable had not yet appeared.
It appeared mid-afternoon.
He felt it before Fenrir did, which was unusual enough that he registered the reversal. A presence, medium grade, moving through the forest in a direction that was going to intersect with theirs at some point in the next few minutes. The essence signature of it had the characteristic he had learned to identify, the partial obscuring quality that sat over a Null Demon’s presence like a slight static over a clear signal.
Another one.
He felt something shift in his chest.
Not urgency. Not wariness. Something closer to anticipation that had a smile attached to it.
Fenrir’s ears moved toward the approaching presence.
Damien said nothing to any of his summons. He simply waited, reading the approach, tracking the direction and pace of the demon’s movement through the ambient essence field. It was not coming directly at them. It was moving through the forest without apparent awareness that what it was approaching was worth changing direction for.
It became aware.
The demon’s movement changed when the awareness arrived, the specific change of a creature that had been going somewhere and had received information suggesting that somewhere was in the same general direction as something its instincts had opinions about.
It stopped moving forward.
Then it moved sideways.
Damien let it move sideways for a few seconds.
Then Fenrir changed direction, the wolf’s heading adjusting without instruction, cutting across the demon’s new vector with the particular purpose of something that had been doing this long enough to understand what direction changes from fleeing things meant and how to respond to them.
The demon changed direction again.
Faster this time.
The awareness had upgraded from something worth adjusting for to something worth moving away from quickly, and the demon’s pace increased to match the upgraded assessment.
Damien smiled.
It was not a smile he used often. Not the slight, controlled expression that he produced in response to interesting information or small satisfactions. This was wider. It had something in it that was not performance, not controlled, just present — the specific quality of someone who was about to do something they were genuinely looking forward to.
Cerbe’s middle head turned toward him.
Read the smile.
The flames along Cerbe’s fur brightened slightly, responding to something in Damien’s aura that the expression was expressing outwardly.
The demon, from fifty meters away through the trees, had not seen the smile.
But it felt something.
Whatever a demon felt when it was being looked at by something that was looking at it the way Damien was looking at it. The directional sense that living things developed for predatory attention, the specific register of being in someone’s category of things they intended to have. The demon’s pace increased again, beyond the level of moving away from something efficiently, crossing into the level of moving away from something with rising alarm.
Too late.
Luton left Damien’s head.
The slime moved through the air in the arc that Damien had directed it through with the slight forward tilt of his head, the compact, dense form of it traveling the distance between Damien’s position and the demon’s path faster than the demon’s current pace could adjust to.
The demon saw it coming.
Made the calculation that what was coming was small and therefore manageable.
Luton arrived.
The demon discovered the problem with that calculation in the specific, total, immediate way that things discovered problems with calculations about Luton. The slime expanded around it with the surging, engulfing motion of its combat extension, wrapping the demon’s legs before the demon had completed the step it had been in the middle of.
The demon went down.
Not all the way. Luton held it at the partial fall, the demon’s upper body still upright while its legs were entirely within the slime’s grip. The wings on its back opened, the instinctive attempt to generate the lift that would pull it free of a ground-level restraint.
Damien was already off Fenrir.
He reached the demon’s position as the wings were still extending, the movement the wings were making on behalf of escape serving also as the movement that presented them at full extension and therefore at their most accessible.
He took the left wing first.
However, he did not use a weapon.