Chapter 8

The fourth socketed ring was something of a mystery in how it could be used by us. It was directed toward a Hero that used a bow because it made arrows specifically explosive. Well, none of us could use that ring, so we sold it to John, who already had a customer in mind for it. He gave us $6,250 for it and expected to get something like $15,000 for it when he coupled it with a moderate size ruby which he already had in stock.

John made us a bulk offer of $9,000 for the rest of the gems, and we took his offer with gratitude because that made it easy to divide the money in half. I had already swapped away my share of the money to Ed and Bill in exchange for the large ruby I wanted to install onto my Demon Bane.

Okay, that was enough for now—it was past time for our supper. We went together and each ordered the largest grilled steak in the restaurant. I had my usual baked potato with sour cream with it, and we all had what amounted to German chocolate cake and ice cream for desert. This had been such a profitable day that we all felt that a celebration was in order.

Next, we adjourned to Jake’s Tavern for a couple of beers before going to bed. Bill and I went to our customary piles of straw at the livery stable, but Ed went to his former home to say goodbye to the remainder of his family. He spent the night there and avoided his father, but took everything he owned with him in his fanny pack the next morning. He put the fanny pack into his locker at the hiring hall for safe keeping. He planned to pick up another fanny pack from a demon out in the field upon our return to Eastmont.

The three of us were transported there by Pete, and we set out to get rid of as many of the invaders as we could manage on this day. I was wearing my antipoison ring, so I was going to be the one who went after any succubi with green hair, or, for that matter, any other poison dealing demon that we met.

As it turned out, it took only about a block of travel before I had a chance to test that ring. We met three goat men, and all of them had stabbing spears, but they also had the ability to throw flasks of poison at us. Bill and Ed hung back as I ran to engage the goat men. The first one went down with a surprised look on his face. He had hit me dead center on the chest with a flask of poison, and I should have dropped immediately while uttering a scream of pain. The fact that I didn’t do that made it ridiculously easy to touch him with Demon Bane and drop his electrocuted body to the street.

The other two goat men were too dumb to run away, but they were smart enough to try to stab me simultaneously with their spears. Again, all I had to do was to touch the two goat men to electrocute them, and the way was open to us to proceed. We did remove their fanny packs before the three goat men had time to vaporize, so that was what we gained from the short contest.

The next obstacle we met was a pack of skeletons. There were about 20 of them, and they were all carrying swords imbued with fire spells. This was the kind of fight that we were made for, and our fire protection made it impossible for their magic to do us any harm. We swept through the skeletons at a comfortable walking speed, killing every one that we met. Ed and I were chopping heads of, but Bill was crushing chests with his knuckle dusters. I have no idea which one of us might have killed the most skeletons; maybe it was a dead heat.

Anyway, in only about six minutes, we accumulated 23 fanny packs. Ed now had a pack that he had taken from the poison wielding goat men, so we were not overburdened with our loot. We did pick up all of those swords imbued with the magic spell of fire, since we figured to get at least $25-30 for each one back in Truth.

This got us to the first cross street in the business district, and the place was teeming with demons and monsters. The first attack from these enemies was by one of those huge buffalo-like beasts. It was I who drew his ire because I happened to be the one in front of our group, so I was the first human to infringe on what he considered to be his territory. That was fine with me because I wanted to see what Demon Bane could do against such a massive beast.

I was also curious about what kind of defense my diamond ring could give me against the charge of the huge monster. I had already been bounced around enough to know that I would not be hurt by being hit by the monster’s charge, so I just stood still and let the creature run into me with the hard plate of bone across his head between his horns.

Well, I will admit that the 30-foot running start that the monster had did bang me a lot harder than I expected, as far as the monster was concerned, he had run into the proverbial immovable object. He dropped dead at my feet with a crushed skull! I was rocked a little bit by the impact, but I never moved an inch away from where I had been standing. Okay, that was a valuable lesson for me and for my friends: neither one of them had the kind of physical protection that I had. Either one would undoubtedly have been crushed by the impact, and even Bill who had been awarded the amulet would have been killed because the amulet could never have cured him of being crushed before he died from a ruptured heart. Oh, well, nothing is perfect, and Bill would have to take that sort of thing into account when he fought something that strong.

Another of the same kind of monster had observed what had just happened and decided to test his luck against me. Okay, I knew what would happen if he ran into me, so I wanted to test my Demon Bane against this creature. This time, I jumped aside so that he missed me in his charge. The beast skidded to a halt and ripped up some of the cobble stones paving the street before he finally came to a stop.

Having proved that I could move quickly enough to jump aside, my next test was with a touch by Demon Bane. The creature charged at me again, and this time quite an audience of demons had gathered to see what might happen. None of them were worried that I might win the contest.

The beast flashed past me as I jumped aside again, but this time, I stuck out Demon Bane so that the creature would bump against it as it ran by me. Well, I am not completely sure of what happened exactly, but there was an arc of lightning when the beast passed me, and it fell to the street quite dead. I think that Demon Bane may have anticipated the contact and arced before the beast actually touched my weapon, and that was the arc that I saw. Naturally, I did not really care. The beast was dead, and that was the effect that I was looking for, so I was happy with the result.

There was a roar of disapproval from the audience, and they charged at me. It was fortunate that the beast had torn up more cobblestones during its fall as it died because the resulting massive body, the ditch it left when it skidded to a halt, and the scattered cobblestones made a nice breastwork for me to fight behind. The way things worked out, the enemy could attack me from only one side, and that made my defense very easy. All I had to do was to stick out Demon Bane and let the demons and monsters run into it. The lightning arc jumping from my weapon soon killed so many of them that they simply could not get to me.

Meanwhile, Bill and Ed were having a ball killing the enemy from the rear when they pressed against each other as they tried to reach me. The result was over 100 dead demons and monsters in sort of a ridge between me and my friends. Man, let me tell you, all three of us had to work fast to salvage the fanny packs from the dead demons, and we were not able to get them all.

That was when we made an interesting discovery. We had not noticed before because of the debris that we had not bothered to dig through. We had not realized that the fanny pack vanished when the monsters did, but any metallic object that had been inside the fanny pack was simply dropped to the street. That meant that all we really had to do was to look through the ashes that were left after the destruction of the demons’ bodies in order to find what was inside the multitude of fanny packs. Of course, if we wanted to salvage a fanny pack itself, we had to grab it before the creature vaporized.

As a result, when a wind came up and blew the residual dust away, we had an easy time of picking up the money, the rings, and other metallic stuff that fell from the destroyed fanny packs. Let me tell you, that made it a whole lot easier to loot the demons’ bodies. Dammit, why didn’t we notice that sooner!?

It turned out in this melee, we managed to eliminate ever demon and monster that was at the center of the business district. We also found a storage area where the demons had stacked boxed of supplies. Among these boxes, we managed to find several crates of grenades. That was a joyful find, and Bill and Ed each took a carrying harness holding six grenades.

That was a great opportunity to teach Ed how to handle a grenade, and he and Bill threw several grenades against various targets so that they could learn the characteristics of the grenade as a weapon against massed enemy. It did not seem to us that we had to worry about using a grenade on one or two demons or monsters if they were no larger than the average man, but they would be a great help against massed enemy or giants. We were not out to prove that we could kill the enemy, everybody already knew that Heroes could do that. We were there to “fumigate” an area and get rid of the invaders before they killed any more humans or animals or destroyed any more property. Killing the enemy just for show was not in our repertoire.

Most of the grenades we found were of the explosive type, but there were a couple of crates of flasks containing poison. Since I had the added protection against poison, I was the one to inherit the flasks. Neither Bill nor Ed wanted anything to do with them. Those flasks could be too dangerous to the user if they got broken during a fight.

Supposedly, if a person used a weapon in a crowd of mixed humans and demons or monsters, only the bad guys would be killed or injured. We knew that from the experience reported by the users of arrows, javelins, death rays, or anything launched by a Hero, but all of that experience was dependent on the weapon having been of human manufacture. We had no idea what would happen if a grenade taken from a demon and used by a human would work the same way. We would just be very careful until we had definitive proof of that. That was the tactic that I was working under, and my friends wholeheartedly approved of that.

It turned out that we found 12 full crates of grenades and 2 full crates of flasks of poison. We stocked up on grenades from the open crate, and I pulled a carrying harness from a crate of poison for my own use. We loaded the rest of the crates onto wagons which we used to move the loot to a transporter platform. The crates were moved to the platform, and we jumped back to the hiring hall. Pete found a place for us to store these crates where they were unlikely to be found while we waited for a ruling from Pete’s friend on the allowed weapons committee.