Chapter 6

This kill was actually very easy, which I must admit was something of a surprise. The creature was wearing a sort of harness that held five more of the grenades, and I pulled one out of the harness to take a quick look at it. It looked like all other grenades I had seen lately, and it looked like an offensive grenade since there was no covering over the body of the grenade to break into shrapnel when it was used. The arming device was a sort of wire hoop that could be pulled out, and that would arm the fuse.

I had no idea of the delay time on the fuse, so I figured that if I used it, I had better figure that the grenade fuse had no more than a five-second delay. It was simply a case of pull out the wire hoop and get rid of the grenade before it went off in my hand. The whole thing looked like a good deal to me, so I put the grenade back in it carrying pocket and slipped on the carrying harness. I figured that I might as well make use of the grenades if they were good enough for the demons to use.

It turned out that I was very close to an intersection with another street. That meant ambush territory to me, so I looked around the corner of the building without exposing any more of my body than I could help. Oh, my God, there were at least 20 of the goat men just waiting for me to step around the corner. Okay, this was a good place to make a good test of the grenades.

I set Demon Bane down where I could get to it easily and quickly and pulled a grenade from its traveling pocket. I stepped around the corner, pulled the hoop that I figured must be the activator for the fuse, tossed the grenade into the gang of goat men and jumped back to the protection from the building before anybody on the other side could react to what I had done.

Hardly had I picked up Demon Bane when I heard the explosion of the grenade. I took a quick look around the corner of the building and saw that the grenade had played hell with the goat men. At least five were down on the street; I figured that any of those five who were not dead were still out of the coming battle. I yelled to Bill to join me for a fight and went back around the corner to start killing demons and monsters.

Bill showed up in seconds and was ready to fight. As before, he was ready with his two knuckle dusters, and both of us waded in on the partially stunned goat men who were still standing as if they were waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Well, we fought like mad men, and soon were standing among a bunch of dead goat men. “BILL, KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR ME WHILE I AM BUSY.” Bill acknowledged my request, and I began to use the blade portion of Demon Bane to cut the fanny packs away from the dead goat men.

I had hardly finished that task before some of them began to vaporize. During that time, I was also looking around for more of the grenades. That first attempt had been so successful that I wanted more of the grenades to use against other groups of enemies.

Ah, there it was. I spotted a dead demon like the one that had used the grenade on me, and liberated its grenade harness before that demon vaporized. We had another pause in the excitement, so I showed Bill what I had learned about using the grenades. He didn’t want them because they weren’t traditional for Monks. That attitude caught me by surprise, but I did not argue with him. Instead, I just pulled the carrying harness over my head and arranged it so that I could carry two harnesses at one time. I figured that I could have a lot of fun with 11 grenades.

I did not plan to use the grenades against one or two opponents, but would save them for a collection of demons or monsters that were worth expending a grenade. Also, I was going to keep an eye out for extra grenades that I could appropriate. I was going to take them back with me to Truth and store them in my locker if Pete would put up with that. I was going to keep on using the grenades until I ran out or until I was told that I had to quit using them because they were not traditional. In that case, I would start calling myself a Grenadier and go out freelancing. I could now use the transporter without Pete’s help, so I could avoid the hiring hall if I had to.

We had a good view of quite a bit of the business district from where we were, so I suggested that we do a quick walkthrough to see what else we could stir up. This was a good area for the kind of fighting that Monks were best with, so Bill was quick to agree. Again we moved to opposite sides of the street and started looking for trouble.

We had only gone about half a block before we encountered one of those giant demons with the two morning stars. Bill wanted the honor this time, so I agreed to act as his covering force while he took care of that demon. He had heard me mention the problem with my encounter when I was caught between the two morning stars. I hoped that he would keep that in mind. I might find it difficult to get him to a Wizard physician in time if he did get caught between the two weapons.

Bill ran up to the demon and punched him in the lower belly once with each hand. Bill might as well have been punching a foam mattress for all of the good those punches did him. The spikes on his knuckle dusters did mark the demon’s belly to show plainly where he had made his hits, but there was no more effect than just producing a lot of blood. It was obvious that Bill was going to have to attack some other part of the giant’s anatomy before he was going to make much headway. I was prepared to help Bill, but I was waiting for him to ask for it.

I did yell, “BILL, GO AFTER HIS KNEES!” I was not sure what good that would do, but it would tell us how much protection all of that fat was going to offer. Bill did follow my advice and attack the demon’s knees. It took an amazing number of blows with the knuckle dusters to break the knee joints, but the creature did finally fall to the street. Okay, that now made it hard for the demon to use its arms to take a swing at Bill with those two morning stars, but Bill still had to come up with a way to make the kill.

Well, the giant was so fat and so large that it had considerable difficulty in moving about. Bill took advantage of that factor and pounded on the giant’s head with as much force as he could muster. The knuckle dusters finally did break the giant’s skull and kill him, but Bill was exhausted by the time he finished.

Bill badly needed some time to rest after all of that exertion, so I suggested, though it was early, that we go ahead and eat lunch. I figured that the grilled steak would do wonders for Bill’s morale, even if it did not do much else for him. He agreed, so I opened my fanny pack and took out the two meals that the restaurant had prepared for us. Bill appreciated the steak, and demolished it in what may well be record time. He also ate the potato substitute, but with less gusto. Okay, I kind of expected that.

We cleaned up after our meal, but Bill needed a bit more time to rest. We used that time to look through the demon’s fanny pack. There was one hell of a foul odor when we opened the fanny pack! What in the hell had the demon been carrying in there? In the interest of speed, we dumped the contents of the fanny pack onto the ground and found what looked like decomposed meat, but it was really difficult to identify what it smelled like.

We found nothing of interest from the fanny pack and regretted having opened it. We just scraped together the contents of the fanny pack and burned them and the pack itself. We could not think of any other way to kill the odor!

That was enough fiddling around for Bill to recover, so we resumed our search through Eastmont. We had gone less than a block with each of us covering the opposite sides of the street. Oh, joy! There were some more of the demon dogs. They spotted us at about the same time we saw them, and seven of them charged us. Fortunately we were still in the area with the doorways recessed into the small alcoves. I wonder who the genius was who thought of that style of architecture? Whoever he was, God praise his soul! They were the perfect place from which to fight many types of demons and monsters.

The demon dogs were an excellent case in point. Most of the time, the alcove was too narrow to allow more than one of the demon dogs to approach and attack. The dogs were too damned big to fit more than one at a time between the walls of the alcove. From our point of view, that was an enormous advantage!

Bill and I followed his previous practice of striking the creature’s backbone just behind the head with his knuckle dusters and me stabbing them in the back with the lightning juiced sword point on Demon Bane. Bill killed three of the dogs and I killed four of them. At this point in our day, that just provided us with what amounted to very nearly a rest time now that we knew what to do.

Our only complaint at this point was that we were not picking up as many of the fanny packs as we wanted to. We might have to move on just to make a decent profit from this excursion. Where were the demons with the full fanny packs?

Okay, I got the answer to that in the next block. We were faced with about 12 skeletons using the lightning enhanced swords and clubs. Bill had commented on how well I was able to handle an enemy with Demon Bane, so I asked him if he wanted to give the weapon a try. He gave the matter some thought and agreed that it would be fun to see why I was doing so well. I loaned him Demon Bane and I went back to my magic sword until I could win another club from a skeleton.

The skeleton mob split up into two groups and one went for Bill and the other came for me. Bill was using my technique with Demon Bane against the skeletons, and he was knocking them permanently out of the fight as easily as I did. Meanwhile, I had to work a bit harder with the sword in my right hand and my minimal knuckle duster in my left. Of course, I still had the buckler mounted on my left forearm.

I came up with a technique that would have been very dangerous if I had been wearing conventional armor, but what I had, especially with that ring, gave me all of the protection that I needed. My sword was curved slightly and had only one cutting edge, so I was using it as a kind of hook to pull a skeleton into knuckle duster ranger. Once it was there, I could usually knock its head off with only one strike with my left hand.

A hit from the electrified sword or club was of no value because of the excellent protection that I was enjoying from the diamond ring, the armor, and the buckler in that order. I was untouchable from the point of view of the skeletons, but the reverse was a long way from the case for me.

Okay, we won this battle with our usual ease, and took the time to confiscate the fanny packs of the 13 skeletons we turned out facing. Both of us were certainly cocky at the end of this battle, and Bill said that he wanted a Demon Bane for his own use. Killing demons and monsters with that weapon was a lot like a training exercise because it was such an effective weapon for the enemy that we had seen so far. Bill picked up a club and a sword from the clutter around him so that he could have a blacksmith make a Demon Bane for him when we got back to Truth.