Chapter 614: Another Testing
His hand found the joint where the wing met the body and applied the specific directional force that joints were not designed to accommodate, the force coming from his understanding of the anatomy rather than from simple strength. The joint did not want to go the direction he was sending it.
He sent it that direction.
Kraaa!
The crack was distinct.
The demon made a sound that communicated the quality of what had just happened with more precision than words would have.
Damien moved to the right wing.
The demon twisted, trying to bring what leverage it still had to bear on stopping what was happening. Luton adjusted its grip to account for the twist.
The right wing went the same way as the left.
The demon’s attempts at movement were now significantly more limited than they had been two minutes ago. Damien stepped around to its front and looked at it.
The demon looked back.
There was something in the demon’s eyes that went beyond fear. Not incomprehension, not the reactive terror of a creature responding to immediate threat. Something more specific. The specific quality of something that had been doing this long enough to understand when a situation was past the point of recovery and was arriving at that understanding right now, in this moment, with this particular person standing in front of it.
Damien crouched to its level.
He looked at the demon the way he looked at interesting problems.
The demon shuddered.
The shudder was not from the wing joints. Those were already concluded, the damage done, the demon’s system having processed those losses and moved on to the assessment of the current situation. The shudder was from the looking. From whatever the demon’s perception made of what was looking at it.
Damien reached down.
His hands found the demon’s front left limb and he broke it with the same methodical, interested quality he had applied to the wings. The demon’s sound this time was different from the first, lower, the body having already processed one level of this and updating its response for the accumulation.
The front right followed.
The rear limbs were less immediately necessary to disable given that Luton had the legs covered, but he did them anyway. The rear left and then the rear right, each one producing its contribution to the demon’s current understanding of the situation.
He sat back on his heels.
Looked at the demon.
The demon was alive. Completely alive, its core untouched, its vital systems running at full capacity. The only things that had changed in the last few minutes were the specific mechanical functions that would have allowed it to go anywhere that wasn’t the specific spot on the forest floor Luton had deposited it on.
The demon was not going anywhere.
Damien looked at it for a moment longer, the anticipation that the smile had been expressing having reached the specific place where anticipation turned into the action it had been waiting to become.
He looked at Luton.
"The jar," he said.
Not the Stormhorn’s blood. He did not specify, but specification was not required. Luton understood which jar. Had understood which jar since the moment Damien had asked it to separate the two at storage, had been carrying both of them in the Universal Space with the particular attentiveness of a summon that understood when something was going to be needed.
Luton reached inward.
The Universal Space produced the jar from within it, the sealed container rising through Luton’s surface and presenting itself in the air where Damien could reach it.
Dark liquid.
The not-quite-right darkness of Null Blood through glass, the color that absorbed light at its edges and made the contents look slightly less certain about what color they were.
The demon looked at the jar.
Then at Damien.
Damien smiled again.
The same smile.
The demon shuddered as it understood.
It wouldn’t be going anywhere after this encounter.
That had been the point of the limbs and the wings, and the point had been well established. It lay on the forest floor with Luton maintaining a light hold around its midsection, not the full enclosing grip of capture but enough to communicate that movement of the kind the demon might prefer was not currently an option.
The demon had stopped struggling.
Not from acceptance. From the specific exhaustion of struggling against something that gives nothing back, the reserves spent against Luton’s hold having produced no result except the spending. It was conserving now, which was the rational response to its situation.
Damien crouched beside it.
He had the jar in his hand. The Null Blood, sealed, the dark liquid inside it carrying the faint visual quality that he had started to associate with its specific nature, the uncertain-color darkness that absorbed light in a way ordinary blood did not.
He looked at the demon.
At the cuts the limb-breaking had produced, some of them shallow, some of them the kind that came from fractures expressing themselves outward through the surrounding tissue. Open. Real. Entry points without the need to create them.
He opened the jar.
The application was careful. He was not generous with it, not at the start. The purpose of starting small was to observe the progression at the small end, to watch what the Null Blood did when it entered the demon’s system in a limited quantity and see how that process looked from outside before he increased the variable.
Three drops.
He placed them on the shallowest of the cuts, the one with the cleanest opening and the most accessible tissue beneath it. Then he sat back and watched.
The effect was not immediate.
That was the first piece of information. The contact-evaporation of the Stormhorn blood tests had been rapid. This was different, the Null Blood working through a living system rather than reacting with another essence-bearing substance.
It had to enter. Had to be absorbed. Had to find its way into the demon’s circulation in whatever form circulation took in a Grade Four demon’s body.
The demon’s skin around the entry point changed quality first.
Subtle. The darkening that came from the Null Blood itself spreading beneath the surface, the discoloration of tissue that was being introduced to something incompatible with it. The spread was slow, moving outward from the entry point in increments that he could track without difficulty.
Then the shaking started.
Not violent. The small, barely-there tremor of a body responding to something in its system that it did not know how to address. The demon’s visible surface carrying the vibration in the way that essence-level disruption expressed itself physically, the macro symptom of a micro-level fight happening inside the tissue.
Damien watched it.
He waited until the three-drop application had been running long enough to show him the progression pattern. The spread. The tremor quality. The rate at which the Null Blood was moving through the demon’s system relative to the demon’s own essence attempting to compensate for what was entering it.
The compensation was happening.
The demon’s essence was not passive about the intrusion. He could feel the output of it, the specific character of a system working hard to address something working against it. The Null Blood was fighting the demon’s essence and the demon’s essence was fighting back and the fighting itself was the cost, the expenditure of the demon’s reserves toward a problem that was not being solved by the expenditure.
Interesting.
He increased the drops.
Ten this time. Distributed across the other cuts, not all in one location, the spread of entry points giving the Null Blood multiple channels into the system simultaneously.
The tremor increased.
Not dramatically, not with the sudden shift of a threshold being crossed, but measurably. The demon’s body registering the increased introduction with a proportional increase in the response, the essence compensation running faster and producing more heat than it had been producing a moment ago.
Damien could feel the demon’s essence output changing.
Not through any direct connection. Through the ambient field, the way a practitioner with sufficiently developed sensitivity read the essence activity of things in their proximity. The demon’s output had been at a stable level since it stopped struggling. Now it was climbing, the compensation effort drawing on reserves that were being spent without being replenished.
He watched the level.
It climbed for a while as the demon’s system threw everything available at the problem. Then it peaked.
However, just moments after its peak, something different started happening. It began to drop.
The drop was the confirmation he had been watching for. The Null Blood working through the demon’s internal system had reached the point where the compensation effort was costing more than the demon’s rate of recovery could replace, the reserves decreasing despite the effort rather than holding steady. The Null Blood was winning the internal fight.
It was not very swift because of the quantity administered but slowly, it was working its way into its victim and damaging it from the inside.