Chapter 10

We next ran into a mass of the flying creatures that looked like overgrown wasps. For simplicity, we just called them wasps. They had a large stinger at their rear ends, and we were careful to avoid being poked with that thing. We were reasonably sure that the stinger could not penetrate our armor, but we were not about to take a chance that we didn’t have to, so we avoided the stinger as much as possible. None of us were ever stung by it, but we could not be sure if a wasp had ever gotten close enough to do that, so we were as careful as we could be.

These were the creatures that released the flying things that exploded when they got close enough to us; that was usually a contact-triggered event. No matter how we tried to destroy these flying things, there was no way we could do anything with any of our magical defenses. We could destroy one by swatting it with Demon Bane, but the resulting explosion was scary. What if it damaged our Demon Banes? We had no way to repair the weapon while we were in the field, so we did our best to avoid that kind of contact. That left us with our only defense as dodging. That worked pretty well most of the time, but sometimes it simply couldn’t be done.

Those wasps were very agile, so it was quite difficult to swat them with the Demon Banes. They persisted in bedeviling us whenever we were in their area. Luckily, they did not tend to follow us as we moved from place to place. Temporarily, we just conceded victory to the wasps and tried to avoid them as much as possible.

The other flying demon that was so much trouble was the gnats. Again, we did not know a better word for them, but they were like very small biting gnats. They did not seem to be large enough to be much of a danger because of the protection imparted to us by our armor and my diamond ring. However, they were a definite distraction that could become a problem. The problem was that they were so small that we had nothing that we could fight conventionally with. Sure, I could kill them with the poison, but I didn’t want to waste a limited resource. Usually we resorted to flailing around with our Demon Banes until we managed a lucky hit or until we escaped them. Either way, they were a pain or a nuisance, depending on the situation.

We were in a copse of trees that were not part of a full forest, and were on the lookout for any sort of demon or monster. Suddenly, there was a roar, or maybe it could better be described as a loud snort. Off to our left was one of those huge buffalo-like creatures. Well, at the moment I happened to be the one who was walking on the left side of our trio, and that made me the obvious target. This was when I had what must have been a blast of idiocy.

The creature charged at me, and I just stood there waiting for him. I knew from previous experience that it could not injure me if it did manage to run into me, so I had an experiment that I wanted to run. The creature lowered its head and ran toward me as if to hook me with its right side horn. Okay, that was great for my experiment.

I merely leaned aside enough when the beast got to me so that it missed my body with its horn, but I was holding my right arm crooked in a certain way so that I could hook that right horn as the beast ran past me. Yes, I had temporarily set my Demon Bane aside so that I could run the experiment. As the beast blasted past me, I hooked the horn under my elbow and held my arm as rigidly in place as I could.

As before, the creature was not able to move me from where I stood, and I firmly held the horn. The extra strength from the ring made that possible. The beast’s head was snapped around and its neck was broken immediately. The beast must have died immediately because it began to fall right away. I released my hold on the horn, and the buffalo skidded a few feet before it stopped moving. I turned to face my friends and grinned.

They both stared at me as if I were some sort of circus performer who had just done an impossible trick. That lasted only a moment before they began to cheer and applaud. Shortly thereafter, we all three began to laugh. I figured that I should be allowed occasionally to show off and have some fun, and I had set myself up as a comic-relief to relax us all. We had been very tense as we took our first steps onto level #5, and I was looking for some way to break that tension. It looked like I had done so.

Ed said, “Dammit, Jim, do not ever do something like that again without warning me. I damned near shit in my pants when that beast reached you. I expected to see nothing but a bloody smear on the ground after it ran over you.” We all laughed at that statement, and Bill echoed the thought. I agreed to warn them the next time I tried something like that, but I might slip again. Who knows?

There was nothing to loot from the buffalo-like creature, and we marched away, still looking for more demons or monsters.

We had gone about a mile and were beginning to wonder if we had already seen all that level #5 had to offer. That stray thought did not last long because we encountered one of those huge statue-like giants marching toward us. The damned thing must have been 20 or more feet tall. Bill said, “Let me try for this one. I want a good test for my new Demon Bane. You two cover for me if I get into trouble, please. We agreed, and Bill marched off a few yards alone to face the monster. He planned to use only his Demon Bane against it in order to see just how much he could expect from it.

The giant seemed to ignore Bill until he was quite close. At that point it swung its hand toward Bill as if to brush an ant aside. Bill had no trouble ducking the swing because the giant had to go through a bit of preparation to have the arm ready to move when it was called upon. That warned Bill of what to expect, and we all concluded that this was going to be an easy monster to defeat if it had to go through all of that before it could perform an attack, even one as simple as what it had just done.

While the giant was recovering its balance from the attempted blow, Bill ran up and stabbed it in the leg with the blade of its Demon Bane. There was little resistance to the entry or continued motion of the blade, but the giant seemed not to notice what Bill had done. Well, it was obvious to Bill how frustrating that was. In what I assumed was a fit of pique, Bill drew back his Demon Bane and hit the giant in the leg at about its knee as hard as he could swing the weapon.

Ah, now the giant showed some reaction to the weapon. A huge section of its leg was converted to sand and dust, and the rest of the leg broke off at the point of impact. This caused the giant to tumble to the ground, and that impact was enough to break it up into its component material. In other words, the giant was converted into a pile of common dirt!

We laughed as Bill turned to us and bowed. He was congratulated on showing us how to defeat such a monster, and he was pleased at that. Oh, well, now it was off to the next demon or monster. There was no question that the giant had been a dangerous foe, but Bill had used his brain and defeated the monster with ease. He deserved our congratulations.

Shortly thereafter, we met another giant, but it was a living creature. At first, we thought that it was simply another one of the giants made of dirt, but we soon saw our error. This monster looked so much like the statue that we were confused at first, but we could see that this was a living demon as it got closer. It could have been the model for the sand giant, but that giant had been about three feet taller than this enemy. In any case, it was impossible for any of us to reach its head, it was so far off the ground.

“Okay, Ed, this is your monster to lay low.” That was Bill’s comment, and Ed took him at face value. He held his Demon Bane in both hands and approached the giant. Ed was tall enough to land a blow on the giant’s hip, but that seemed to do little damage. His Demon Bane arced a lightning bolt as Ed struck the giant, but that was not enough to bring it down. Ed took a couple more swats at the giant with no more effect than the first, except that he did cut the giant’s clothes with his blade. That told Ed that the giant was reachable with the right attack, but he was damned tough.

Obviously, a conventional attack was useless against this giant, and Ed was having to move around quite a lot to escape being hit by one of the giant’s arms or fists. That was when Ed had a brainstorm!

Ed ran up close to the giant and took advantage of the increased speed and agility of his movements. He got close to one of the giants feet and smashed as hard as he could with his Demon Bane club down on the giant’s toes. The giant was wearing boots, but they were not enough protection against this kind of attack.

The giant let out a scream of pain and jumped back out of Ed’s reach. That made no real difference to Ed. He ran around the fallen giant and jammed the end of his Demon Bane into the giant’s ear opening. It was obvious that the giant did not have much protection here because Demon Bane traveled into the giant’s ear almost its full length, and that meant that the giant’s brain was reached by the blade. Ed twisted and otherwise moved his Demon Bane around as much as he could manage, and he must have made one or more fatal cuts to the brain that he was attacking.

The giant did not die as fast as had the one that Bill fought, but the giant died anyway. Ed did show some signs of the effort that he had put out against the giant, but he was still in excellent shape when he returned to us after cleaning off his Demon Bane shaft by wiping it on the giant’s clothes. He too was congratulated on his kill, and now we three had performed well against some of level #5’s most powerful creatures.

This demon had a fanny pack, the first one we had seen in a while, so we waited until it was available. We had to wait until the giant had vaporized because it was too big for us to roll off its fanny pack which was under the demon’s body. However, once the demon vaporized, it was easy to get to what the fanny pack had dropped.

This time, we found a set of chest armor that was covered with steel. It was a great find if it had the same protective magic as did the leather armor of the kind we all wore. Ed had earned it, so it was allotted to him if it was worth his effort. Ed put it into his fanny pack for later evaluation.