Chapter 617: Using Luton Oddly
Damien had been very clear with himself, since the swamp decision, about not wanting to spend energy on things that could be avoided.
He looked at the grass.
At the movement beneath it.
He looked up.
And gave the command. "Summon Aquila."
The portal opened in the air above the grass line, the blue light of it appearing in the early evening sky above the plain’s edge, and before Aquila had even begun to emerge through it, before the griffin’s form had materialized on the other side of the fold.
The portal finished opening.
Aquila came through it with the clean, committed descent of something that had been summoned into a specific purpose and had read the purpose before it arrived — the terrain below, the grass wall, the plain beyond it, and the person waiting at the grass’s edge on the back of a large wolf.
It landed on Fenrir’s back beside Damien, which was not a conventional landing surface but was available and Aquila had long since stopped being particular about conventional.
Damien was already moving.
He mounted Aquila from Fenrir’s back, the transition smooth, and sent the mental commands through his bonds in quick succession.
Fenrir, dismissed.
Cerbe, dismissed.
The wolf and the hellhound dissolved into their respective portals without ceremony, the portals closing behind them, the forest’s edge suddenly quieter and noticeably cooler without Cerbe’s ambient heat.
Luton remained on his head.
Aquila launched.
The ascent was immediate and steep, the griffin’s wings driving hard against the air beneath them, carrying them upward above the grass line with the specific urgency of a takeoff rather than a climb. Below, the grass of the plain’s border was exactly as it had been — dense, still at the surface, the movement beneath it continuing in the pattern that had been its character since he first felt it.
He looked down from Aquila’s back.
The plain was visible now from above, the elevation giving him the first proper look at it. Wide. The expanse of open ground stretching outward in every direction from the grass border’s inner edge, the strange rocks the record had described scattered across it at irregular intervals, some of them the size of his fist and some of them taller than he was, none of them arranged in any pattern that suggested intent.
Natural. Or old enough to look natural.
And somewhere in that expanse, the seventh altar.
He scanned for it from altitude, the read of the altar’s essence character having become something he could conduct passively after six activations. The seventh was there — he could feel the faint resonance of it from above, the carved demonic script carrying its specific signature even in a dormant state.
He was calculating the approach line when the grass moved differently.
Not the subtle movement of things navigating the cover. The fierce, sudden movement of things that had made a decision.
The grasses along the border’s inner edge erupted.
Not in one place. In several simultaneously, the specific pattern of a group that had coordinated its launch rather than responding individually. The figures that came out of the grass were not what he had expected — not the compact ground creatures that dense cover typically housed. They were larger than that, larger than dense cover creatures had any business being, their bodies long and supple with the proportion of something built for speed rather than bulk.
Large.
The squirrel comparison was accurate in the general shape of things — the body, the prominent limbs, the tail that served as a balance and navigation instrument. But these had the scale that the comparison’s usual subject did not, the size of something that had been living in an ecosystem rich enough with essence to develop well beyond the template.
And from each side, the webbing.
Stretched between flank and forelimb joint on both sides, the membrane of it catching the air as each creature launched from its position in the grass, the spread of the webbing converting the launch into something that was not exactly flight and was not exactly a leap but was the specific, sustained glide of something that had developed a way to use air without being a flying creature.
They rose.
Not to Aquila’s altitude. The glide had a ceiling that true flight did not have, the membrane giving them distance and direction but not the climbing ability that wings provided. They spread out across the plain’s airspace at the level their launch had carried them to and then they held that level as the glide flattened into a directed drift toward him and Aquila.
He counted.
Eleven. Twelve. More still coming from the grass.
He had not wanted a confrontation.
He had specifically, explicitly, consciously decided at the swamp and then again at the grass border that confrontation was not what the remainder of this journey was for, that the seventh altar was the destination and everything between him and it was ideally something he arrived past without engaging.
He looked at the creatures gliding toward him and Aquila.
He looked at the plain beneath him and the altar somewhere in it and the distance between his current position and it.
He exhaled sharply through his nose.
Not a sigh. Something shorter and harder, the specific breath of someone who had decided on a course of action and then been informed by the world that the decision was not available.
He looked at Luton.
The slime was on his head where it always was, the compressed, traveling-form presence that had been his constant companion through the forest. He reached up and brought it down to his hand.
Luton in his palm, looking up at him with the quality it had when it was waiting for whatever came next.
An idea had been forming since the grass moved.
Not a battle plan in the formal sense. Something more immediate than that, the specific creative response to an aerial situation that most of his combat experience had been ground-based and Luton’s most effective applications had been ground-based and the combination of a griffin that could evade and a slime that could not fly independently was something he had not previously had to develop solutions for.
He had one now.
He looked at Luton.
"Extend a piece of yourself to my wrist," he said. "Thin. Like a cord. Attached."
Luton processed the instruction.
The slime extended a thin portion of itself from its main body, the filament of it reaching from Luton’s surface to his wrist where it attached with the particular adhesion that Luton’s surface could produce when it chose to, the contact point small but secure.
A cord.
Luton still sat in his palm, connected to him by the thin extension.
"Now," Damien said, "shrink. As small as you can get while staying solid. And harden."
The slime complied.
The compression was visible in his palm, Luton reducing from the size that comfortably occupied it to something smaller, and then smaller again, the process accompanied by the change in surface quality that hardening produced. Not the soft, yielding surface of Luton at rest or the absorbing surface of Luton in combat. Something different.
Dense.
The surface catching the light differently, the texture of it shifting from the faintly luminescent, almost liquid quality of the slime’s natural state to something that looked considerably less like a living creature and considerably more like a polished stone with the specific properties of a very unusual material.
He closed his fingers around it.
Felt the weight distribution.
Good.
The first of the gliding creatures had covered most of the distance between its launch point and Aquila’s position. The griffin was reading the approach and maintaining altitude with the specific awareness of something that was being approached from multiple angles and was tracking all of them.
"Evade," Damien said. "Keep them from reaching me but don’t engage directly."
Aquila adjusted its flight, the wings changing angle, the griffin shifting sideways and upward in the particular way of something that understood its role as mobile platform rather than combatant in this specific engagement.
The first creature adjusted its glide to follow.
Damien threw Luton.
Not gently. Not with the measured release of something thrown at a target from a position of stability. He threw it with the full rotation of his shoulder and arm, the motion of someone who had been swinging things their whole life and had found the specific combination of body mechanics and intent that produced a throw that covered distance fast.
Luton left his hand.
The cord extended behind it.
The hardened surface caught the air in the specific way of something dense being thrown fast rather than something aerodynamic, the trajectory not a curve but a line, direct and committed.
It hit the first creature in the center of its body.
The sound was wrong.
Squelch!
Not wrong in the sense of unexpected. Wrong in the sense of the specific, total, extremely final quality of a hardened slime traveling at speed colliding with a creature that had not been designed to receive that impact.