Chapter 12

John swapped the gems for me, and I threw in the small ruby as a tip. “Now, you need to talk to Ed.”

Ed said, “I would like to increase the size of the gem in my amulet. What have you got that I can afford?”

“Hmm, let me see your amulet, and I can give you a better answer.” Ed handed John the amulet, and John looked closely at the gem in the socket. I have an emerald that I can let you have for the same price as I quoted Jim for his new gem.”

“I do not know, John. Is the emerald also a Marquis cut, or is it less than that?”

“No, Ed, the emerald I have is square cut and not quite as large as a Marquis.”

They immediately dropped into bargaining mode, and they finally settled on a price that Ed was willing to pay. Ed swapped the gems and returned the emerald to Ed along with the upgraded amulet. Ed dropped the amulet over his head and put the emerald in his fanny pack.

“Well, Bill, do you have something that you want done to your amulet?”

“No, John, it seems to be quite satisfactory as it is. It has already repaired my broken arm, and it did such a good job that I would never have known that it happened if I had not been there when it was broken.” He grinned at that, and the rest of us winced.

I dug out the miscellaneous stuff that we had, and John bought the lot for $900. After the way he had dropped the prices of the two stones for our amulets, we decided to take his first number and call it square. Everybody was happy, and we left for Jake’s Tavern. My amulet drew a lot of comment, especially with the way it was glowing with its aura, but we were smart enough not to mention Ed’s amulet. That might have excited the avarice of more than one man, and we didn’t want a fight in Truth, much less in Jake’s Tavern.

We considered Jake a friend, and we didn’t want to cause him any more trouble than he usually had.

On the way to the livery stable, I asked Bill, “When do we close on the house?”

“Tomorrow after we get off from work. That will take about half an hour, and then we can go sleep in our own beds. Ellet already knows about the closing, and she will meet us with Alon at the house right after we close.”

The next day, it was back to level #5. Pete was concerned about that town we had found, so he wanted us to see if there were anything there that would be of special interest to the demons. We landed on the transporter platform that we had left the town from the previous day. Oh, my God, there were 10 succubi there, and all of them had green hair.

We were in trouble if we had been ordinary apprentice Heroes. As it was, the moment one of the succubi raised her arm to throw a poison flask at us, my amulet let out with a bolt of lightning that I didn’t think would be possible to come from a piece of metal of that size. Right behind that bolt were nine more just like it, and the succubi were all blasted to cinders before we could fully appreciate the danger that we faced.

Man, was I glad that I had bargained for that Marquis ruby. I didn’t know of anything else that could have saved us, but here we were, all hale and hearty. Well, we were breathing hard! It must have taken a minute for us to regain our equilibrium, but we left the platform to see what Ed’s amulet had done for us.

There was nothing there but some fighting knives and 10 piles of gold and other goodies. That blast of lightning into each of the succubi had vaporized them before the magic had done the same thing. I’ll bet that the vaporization normally is a part of returning the demon’s body to Hell, but I was sure that the succubi had all ceased to exist before that could happen to them. Hooray for the wizard who had made this amulet. I have forgotten his name, but I will never forget what he did!

We each had a single spare fanny pack with us. We had thought that would be enough to hold the extra gold we found, but we had fooled ourselves on that. We barely had any room in any of the fanny packs after we picked up the gold that we found dropped by the succubi. We were simply stunned by just how rich we were at that moment.

Hell, if we had wanted to quit right then, a share of the gold would have carried us the rest of our lives. Nevertheless, none of us gave any real thought of retiring. No, we were having too much fun killing those damned demons and monsters.

Okay, so much for our temporary celebration. We were on level #5 on serious business, and we needed to get back to our regular jobs before some demon spotted us and eliminated us from Isbardia. We set out to find the wall around the town and to follow it to circumnavigate the town. Dammit, I didn’t even know the name of the place, and I was in grave danger of never leaving it if a demon or monster caught me in a momentary state of inattention.

We arbitrarily decided to return to the gate that we had used to enter the town yesterday, and go clockwise from there. Why not? We knew nothing about the town except that it was a trading center taken over by the minions of the Devil. With that for a blank slate to work on, we headed for the gate.

We had hardly traveled a block on the paved street when we met our next challenge. This time, it was more of the wasps. The difficulty was that there were six of them, and they swooped about faster than we could follow. Dammit, those blasted yellow birds started flying at us as launched by the wasps and we were totally confused about what to do.

Suddenly, Ed shouted, “LIE ON THE PAVEMENT! IT LOOKS LIKE THEY CANNOT FLY THAT LOW WITHOUT HITTING THE GROUND WITH THEIR FLAPPING WINGS!” That was what we did, and the little birds all hit the ground and exploded. I was lying on my chest and covering up my amulet, but I rolled over and let it “see” the wasps attacking us. That was all it took. The amulet started shooting lightning bolts at the wasps. It didn’t hit many of the wasps at each shot, but the wasps didn’t seem to know what to do to fight this new danger and were freezing in the air trying to decide what to do.

That was all the amulet needed to see. The wasps just hanging there in the air made perfect targets, and the wasps were eliminated in short order. Whew, that seemed like a close one, though the explosions of themselves were no that much of a danger as long as we had our fire proof leather armor to cover us. The real danger was the possibility of being stabbed by the wasp’s stinger, though our armor could probably prevent that. However, none of us was willing to be the test subject in that experiment. Bill’s amulet could probably cure the wound, but nobody wanted to go through the pain of waiting for the cure to work. Our plan of the moment was simply to avoid the wasps as much as possible.

It turned out that the transporter platform we had been using was fairly close to the city wall, so it did not take long for us to reach it.

Well, it was approaching noon, so we decided to eat lunch before resuming our trek along the inside of the wall. We pulled out our lunch, and, as usual, it was steak. We ate, cleaned up, and resumed our march. We had only gone about 100 yards when we were attacked by more skeletons. These were armed with bows and exploding arrows. Thank God that we had my amulet that shot lightning bolts.

That Marquis ruby had really invigorated the magic of the amulet. Lightning spit out and wiped out the skeletons in only a very few minutes, two or three at the most. Based on the bows we counted, there had to be at least 40 skeletons in the mob that attacked us, but the amulet was totally effective in wiping them out.

This must have been another new bunch pressed recently into service. I say that because we had filled only one fanny pack with gold coins, and found only one ring among the debris left by the vaporized skeletons. On top of that, the ring did not have a socket. More disappointment to hang upon our frustration.

Hey, an interesting point suddenly occurred to me; namely, so far, there had been no need for us to fight. All of the demons that had been successfully destroyed had been victims of the lightning bolts from my amulet. Was that as significant as my subconscious seemed to think?

Well, the one time we had tried to fight conventionally, we had been abject failures in our efforts. Was that a further indication that my subconscious was on to something? The lightning bolts from my amulet were the prefect application of the idea of a “death ray.” Was there a Hero with that kind of power?

I asked my friends that question, and Bill commented, “I have heard that Wizards have abilities to shoot out rays like your amulet does. I do not know how powerful they have to be to be able to do that. If you really are interested, Pete can answer your question. Why do you ask?”

“I have had an idea running around in the back of my mind about that, and I cannot seem to shake it loose. I will let you know if I come up with more on the idea.”

“Okay, but do not forget why we are here.”

We all laughed at that comment, and we continued along the wall. It was not long before we came to another gate through the wall, and there were a lot of crates stacked near there. The crates had the look of something that the demons would make, so I guessed that they were additional weapons, and that included more grenades and poison flasks.

I couldn’t read the demon language, so I had no idea what the label might say, but I was always looking for more grenades and flasks of poison. My curiosity and avarice got the better of me, so I looked for something to use to pry open the lid of a crate. The lid was nailed shut, so there was no way I was going to open the crate with just my fingers.

Well, I was holding my Demon Bane in my right hand, so I figured that it was worth while to try to pry open a crate with the blade. I slipped that under the edge of the lid and threw my weight on the other end. Much more easily than I expected, the lid popped open and there lay before me a whole case of the very desirable flasks of poison.

Dammit, this was too good an opportunity to miss, so I asked my friends to help me find a wagon and load the crates on it. My plan was to pull and push the wagon along the paved street until I reached the transporter platform. We started immediately to look for a suitable wagon. There were 14 crates stacked by the street, so it was well worth the effort to swipe that many from the demons. Not only was that a great supply for me, but stealing it deprived the demons of some of their ammunition. What more could we ask for?