Chapter 13

Pete had said that it was important for us to clear this town of demons and monsters, but he did not tell us why. I’ll bet it was because he did not know, but he had orders from his upper echelon, so there was no way for us to argue with him. Of course, we didn’t care why we had to clear this town, we were there to do a job, and we were going to do the best we could. We were afraid if we ever did fail to do our best, we would be demoted, and that would be damned hard on the egos, much less on anything else.

We entered the town by following the road from the main road that ran between the town and the forest. This must have been a very peaceful area, judging form the fact that there was no guard shack or any other such structure at the edge of town. Had this been a socially unsettled area, there would have been some place for guards and a warning system to let the town know that trouble was on the way.

The invasion by the Hell-spawn must have been a great surprise with no way for the townsfolk to prepare themselves for battle. My guess was that it was simply a slaughter of the humans as the bad guys waltzed into town with weapons blazing.

Well, we were copying that tactic to some extent because we did not tell the invaders that we were coming with revenge as one of our main desires. Let the demons and monsters find out the hard way just how devastating a human attack could be! We were ready to fight the moment we stepped onto one of the paved streets of the town. We had our Demon Banes poised for battle, even though we expected most of the real fighting to be done by my amulet.

The first thing we saw that was out of place was a bunch of the demon dogs lolling around in the shade waiting to be told what to do. They must have been well trained because the dogs were lying quietly with no fence or leashes to control them. Did that mean that the demon dogs were more intelligent than the dogs humans were used to? It really made no difference, but I was curious, and I doubted that I would ever get an answer to that question.

My amulet reacted at the first movement by the dogs. They got to their feet and began to growl. At that first sound, the amulet began casting lightning bolts, and these were very powerful because we were so close to the dogs. This time the lightning behaved in a way we did not expect. There were more than 30 dogs facing us, but only six bolts of lightning were cast. The bolts jumped from one dog to the next, and every dog was hit by lightning, but most of it was lightning that jumped from dog to dog.

The bolts moved so fast that it looked to us like there were chains of bolts linking the dogs, and we could not see when a bolt completed its work of killing one dog and jumped to the next dog. The bolts all seemed to be launched at the same time, and only one cast was necessary. We had to agree that this was the most efficient killing attack that any of us had ever seen. Certainly, it was more effective than the machine guns that I had seen ever were in combat, even against charging “human waves.”

The dogs were wiped out in only a few seconds, and the growling that they had done that activated the amulet was the only offensive action that they took. There was no time for anything else. If that was the way the amulet was going to operate most, if not all, of the time, we were not going to be doing much of the fighting ourselves.

Our only bad thought about this demolishing of the dog pack was that there were no fanny packs for us to loot. Oh, well, surely there would be ample opportunity for looting when we met the rest of the demon horde. It would be greatly to our advantage if we were able to find more amulets or rings that functioned even closely to my amulet, even though we did not expect to find anything that came close that amulet. There were no legends that supported the idea of more than one amulet and no mention of any sort of ring with that sort of capability. Oh, well, as I said before, if wishes were horses, etc.

There was a rumor about pants that a Hero could wear that put out a thin fog of poison whenever enemies approached, though the poison was not nearly as strong or quick acting as that contained in the flasks as used by the succubi. Even that sort of defense would be helpful when a Hero was attacked by many demons at the same time.

It seemed to me that if a Hero had such pants and a ring that gave some protection against poison, then he would have a strong protection against attack by a close enemy, such as one using a sword or knife. Similar rings could be used by people in close proximity to the Hero to give them protection. I wonder if a good wizard could work out something like that? I was going to ask Wizard Merkle her opinion. Her knowledge of medical magic should give her a head start on answering those questions. If she could do it, I would be happy to pay her for that kind of defense.

We continued our walk through the town and finally hit something that we could relate to; namely, we found a pack of goat men who were carrying stabbing spears. This confused my amulet for only a moment, but as soon as one of the goat men saw us, he raised his spear and bleated at us in a loud voice. That triggered the offensive reaction of the amulet, and a full set of lightning bolts were released. Meanwhile, the goat men who were quick to react to the signal from the alert one managed to charge at us.

Those who charged actually fared no better than the ones who were slower to react. The charging goat men were the first ones hit by the lightning bolts and were electrocuted immediately. However, the slower goat men did not escape the bolts because they chained to the remaining goat men much as had the bolts gone after the demon dogs. It was a beautiful display of “fireworks” as the bolts jumped from goat man to goat man.

In places, there were as many as five goat men caught in a chain of lightning, and the last one hit was just as dead as the first one. A later count of the piles of gold and other metallic items left by the vaporized fanny packs gave us a count of 53 goat men in that group. There were so many goat men that it took us nearly half an hour to collect all of the items left behind by them, and we had not stopped to count the gold as we picked it up. What we did find was enough gold to come close to filling our main fanny pack. It sure looked like this was going to be a profitable day among days!

We had hardly picked up all of the dropped goodies when we were hit by swarms of those damned gnats. Fortunately for us, the amulet had no trouble in knowing where to aim a bolt. All nine swarms of the gnats were eliminated in seconds. Man, what a relief that was! Dammit, the main problem with dead gnats was that they had not been carrying fanny packs. Oh, well...

We were currently at the very edge of the town, so we ran out of demons and monsters. We made a right turn and walked along that edge of town. Our idea was to box in the invaders and catch them where they did not expect us. At first, the plan was successful, but the demons finally caught on to what we were doing and were waiting for us by the time we made our second right turn. However, in that walk we did run into collections of small demons on two occasions, and had piles of loot from nearly 90 more fanny packs to load from. By this time, we were already running out of fanny packs and were going to have to collect more of them from our next encounter with the appropriate demons.

Following the second right turn, we came upon two of the buffalo-like monsters. They both charged us at the same time, and I momentarily wondered if the amulet could cope with that danger. Well, it could. Two bolts hit each of the charging monsters, and they were fried by the lightning after taking only a few steps. We got no prizes from the two creatures, but we all three heaved a sigh of relief at what the amulet had done for us.

Oh, my God, our next encounter was nearly our last. We were ambushed by succubi with green hair. I was the only one with adequate protection against the poison being used by the succubi, so I sent Bill and Ed running to escape while I stood my ground and accepted the flasks of poison thrown at me by the succubi. The amulet shot out its bolts of lightning at the succubi as expected, but I did not expect what else happened. The amulet fired lightning at the flasks of poison directed at me and destroyed them while they were still intact in the air.

There was a lot of green smoke around, but the small quantity that did reach me was counteracted by my ring of poison resistance. That was my same diamond ring that had been protecting me from so much other harm, but it was able to block the small amount of poison that would otherwise have reached me. Of course, I would have been dead if only one of those flasks of poison had gotten close to me before it was shattered. That was another occasion when I owed a huge load of thanks to the Wizard who had made the amulet. I wished that I could remember his name.

Bill and Ed had been watching the fun from a distance and came rushing toward me as soon as the last succubus was killed. I shouted at them to halt until I could be sure that the last of the poison had dissipated. They did not need any convincing, so they were preserved. Bills amulet might have saved him by curing him of the effects of the gas, but Ed had no such protection, so he was the one I was really worried about.

The moment I could, I rushed to the dead succubi and grabbed three fanny packs before the succubi had time to vaporize. That was enough, in combination with the fanny packs we already had to hold all of the gold dropped by the succubi up to that time, but we were about to run out of space.

That called for an experiment since we had to send somebody back to Truth to empty the fanny packs before we went any farther. Ed seemed like the one to do that because I had the maximum protection afforded by an amulet, and Bill had the curative amulet. We went to the transport platform we had arrived on, and I sent Ed back to the hiring hall.

Pete was surprised to see him, but a quick explanation from Ed fixed that. He emptied the loot from all six fanny packs into his locker and had Pete return him to us. He was gone only about 20 minutes and said that he had spent more time talking to Pete than he had expected. We resumed our march through the town and tripped over what the demons found so attractive about it.

In our march away from the transporter platform we spotted a number of crates that bore the marks of belonging to the demons. They were neatly stacked as if they were awaiting shipment somewhere. We were consumed by curiosity, so we opened one of the crates and found some gems that none of us recognized. Okay, what made these gems so valuable to the demons that they would collect them for what we presumed was shipment back to Hell?