David watched Rhea hover three feet above the dirt and tried to decide whether to be impressed or start planning how to catch her.

  Three javelins held her up. She gripped one in each hand. The third floated near her hip, aligned parallel to the ground. All three hovered in the air with her, suspended by her pull.

  One javelin drifted half an inch off alignment. Her body dipped slightly. The other two compensated. She corrected and leveled again.

  Sweat tracked down her temple. She blinked it away.

  Then she accelerated forward in controlled bursts. The javelins maintained their spacing around her center of mass. A three-point suspension moving through open air. Repeat. Fast enough that she crossed distance without ever committing her weight to the ground.

  It looked dangerous.

  He kept his hands loose at his sides. If she dropped, he needed to decide in half a second whether to grab fabric or limb. He decided he’d grab fabric first, then an arm if he had to, and only touch a spear if there was no other option. He stepped closer without making a thing of it.

  “What’s the plan if one of those slips out of position?” he asked. “Or if you get hit.”

  She adjusted her wrist and rose another inch.

  “I’m pulling my clothes too,” she said. “They’re under the same force. The javelins take most of it so I can move fast without shredding my jacket or injuring myself.”

  A javelin shifted slightly. She corrected without losing height.

  “If I get hit or lose them, the pull is still there,” she said. “I won’t just fall.”

  She moved again, faster this time. She shot forward, stopped hard, changed direction midair without touching ground.

  David watched her and said nothing.

  His mind ran ahead anyway.

  That changes things.

  High ground without needing a wall. In a tight space she could ride the ceiling line and stab down into eye sockets. In open space she could cross ten feet without ever being seen.

  “Height changes everything. If you’re above them, you decide where it lands. You can drop a spear straight into the back of a neck. Or drive it down through the top of the shoulder when the armor parts as they move.”

  She glanced at him, looking vaguely pleased. “That’s the idea.”

  “Overhead reach too,” he said. “Most of them swing flat. You’d be above that.”

  She smirked softly, clearly, she had thought of that too.

  If something struck her, she still had the pull through her clothes. The spears made her fast. The pull kept her suspended. The javelins carried the load so her body did not have to. Losing one did not send her crashing. Losing all three still left her held.

  From above, she moved along a plane they did not guard.

  That made her range more valuable—harder to corner. Rhea had become more dangerous in a way she had not been ten minutes ago.

  My own personal human attack helicopter, amazing.

  David kept his face neutral and watched her test the balance again, already thinking about where he would position himself while she moved overhead.

  As they moved, David put time into his skills, because time spent practicing kept him alive.

  He formed jagged spears of demonic fire and threw them until the motion felt automatic. He forced the fire to stay tight instead of flaring wild, pressing it thinner along the edge so it burned through instead of splashing across the surface. Then he threaded death through it. Fire alone punched through and blew out the back. Fire with death lingered. The spears hit, burst with searing heat, and left a brief weakening rot in the wound before a creature’s endurance shoved the damage closed again. The decay faded fast. Fast still counted. A second of weakness could turn into a kill if he timed it right.

  He worked the thrall tether next, extending it and flexing it while paying attention to what came back through the link. Through the bond he followed how Cinder manipulated its energy and how the hob carried out its martial techniques step by step, taking in the sequence as it happened. David adjusted what he sent down the tether, varying pressure, flow, and intent, using the response to understand how the connection behaved under strain as he worked to level the skill further.

  He could see the stat screens of what he created. Cinder was there. Fenrir was there. The hob, and most importantly, Corbin, wasn’t. That irritated him enough to run the comparison again instead of brushing it off. The things he made had their souls tied directly to his will from the moment they existed. Corbin did not. That difference likely explained it. Another option sat in the back of his mind. His thrall skill might still be too low level. Either way, he did not enjoy blind spots.

  He practiced portal magic after that. He opened larger portals and held them steady long enough for something to step through. Whatever crossed the threshold died quickly. He tried pushing Cinder’s selective reinforcement outward, wrapping it around incoming bodies to keep them from breaking apart after death. Intact corpses had uses. Dust did not.

  They travelled and they fought, David without rest, Rhea only stoping to eat or recover mana.

  During the journey, David and Rhea’s teamwork improved fast and kept improving. They stopped interfering with each other and started moving with intent. David broke into the enemy lines in a versatile storm, and Rhea covered him, dropping threats before they could reach him. Cinder drove straight through resistance and forced breaks in the line. The hob controlled space at David’s flank and cut down anything that tried to circle. Rhea struck joints and exposed lines before they could close on him. He read the flow and redirected it. Rhea punished errors immediately. Fights ended faster, and they kept moving.

  They moved east through the forest, keeping a steady pace. David spoke without looking at her, his eyes on every shadow.

  “You’ve got time before either skill hits ten. When the perk shows up, pick anything that lets you touch mana directly. Or gives you tighter control. I don’t care how it’s worded. If it smells like access, take it.”

  Rhea glanced ahead. “You think both can do that?”

  “Maybe. Distant Gaze already uses mana to boost your vision. It’s slightly more likely to evolve into seeing energy in the world. Telekinetic Tug could shift toward manipulation instead of raw force. Either path works.”

  He considered the limits in silence. He doubted she would ever see souls, thrall tethers, or the internal structure of things the way he could. That depth came from an aspect, not a skill. Still, if she kept leveling, external mana perception remained possible.

  “Push both to ten,” he said. “When the perk appears, choose interaction. It could open fringe skills tied to your main ones.”

  What he did not say was that he also wanted proof. If mana-based circulation existed, something parallel to his own demonic empowerment, it would increase her survivability. Her sight and javelins had already proven invaluable during their journey east.

  They'd been walking for forty-seven minutes. David knew because he'd started counting after the last imp died and the pattern started feeling wrong.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "There's fewer," Rhea said.

  He nodded. The scouting parties used to hit every twelve, fifteen minutes. Then twenty. The last one came through almost an hour ago. Nothing since.

  The ground was changing too. More rock breaking through the soil, jagged gray slabs wedged between tree roots. The foliage thinned in patches, replaced by loose stone and hard-packed dirt that didn't hold prints well.

  "I've only seen higher levels," Rhea said. "Lowest was an eight. Everything else double digits."

  David had noticed. The smaller stagfiends with their jittery, panicked movements were gone. The ones he saw now were broader through the chest, antlers thicker, moving at speeds that left afterimages if you blinked wrong. The werebeasts had scaled up too. Same crude swords, same patchwork armor, but the muscle under the fur was denser, the shoulders broader. They didn't scavenge. They hunted.

  The imps had wings now.

  He spotted one through a break in the redwoods. Maybe sixty feet up, perched on a branch thicker than his torso. Bat-like wings folded against its back, wide and leathery, draped like heavy curtains. The upper body had changed to support them. More muscle across the shoulders and pectorals, a thicker neck. When it launched off the branch the wings caught air immediately and it banked hard between trunks, gone in two seconds.

  "They didn't have those before," David said.

  "No."

  Smaller creatures still moved through the underbrush. Forest critters. Squirrel-sized but faster, much faster, blurring from one tree base to another. A few heartbeats of visibility then nothing. Everything that stayed still here probably got eaten.

  "This is weird," Rhea said.

  David considered the word. Weird was imprecise. What it was: the low-level chaff had been filtered out. The slow things, the weak things, the things that couldn't compete. What remained moved at speeds that registered as visual noise until they decided to stop.

  "Only the fast stuff survives," he said. "That's the selection pressure here. Not strength, not durability. Speed. Reaction time. Acceleration."

  Rhea followed his gaze to the redwood canopy. "Then whatever's at the top."

  He didn't answer. She wasn't asking.

  The werebeasts he'd clocked were faster than the stagfiends in short bursts but the stagfiends had endurance and numbers. Herds of forty at least, sometimes larger. He'd watched a pack of werebeasts try to isolate one from the edge and the herd just turned and trampled the whole hunting party. Didn't matter how sharp your sword was when hundreds of pounds of antler and muscle hit you at full gallop.

  But the werebeasts led by warlocks. Those groups were different. They moved with purpose, not hunger. They flanked. They set traps. They used the terrain.

  "They're the only ones that thrive here," David said. "Groups with casters."

  Rhea's gaze swept the treeline. "Because they adapt."

  "Because they cheat."

  She didn't correct him.

  They moved through the brush, invisible, silent. Rhea ten feet to his left. David kept his breathing shallow.

  Something ahead. Not sound. Vibration. The ground transmitted it through his boots, a low frequency rhythm. Impacts. Many of them. Fast.

  He held up a fist. Rhea stopped.

  They crouched beneath the foliage, pressed low against the exposed roots of a redwood. David parted the leaves with two fingers.

  Herd of stagfiends, maybe fifty of them, moving so fast their bodies blurred at the edges. Their chitin spears angled forward, rows of natural lances. They didn't slow for terrain. They accelerated through it.

  Smaller pack of werebeasts trying to hold a flank. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Dense muscle under patchy scale armor, crude swords swinging in wide arcs, claws and teeth filling the gaps when the blades missed. Bigger than the ones he'd seen before. Meaner.

  Above them, floating, an old werebeast in dark robes.

  David's breath caught. Even from this distance, a hundred yards through tangled brush and redwood trunks, he felt it. Pressure. Like standing too close to a furnace with the door cracked open. The thing radiated demonic energy in waves, dense and concentrated. A bonfire. A bonfire wearing a warlock's shape.

  It looked like the others but thinner. Frailer. Aged in a way that had nothing to do with years. The frame underneath the robes was almost gaunt, the fur patchy at the joints. None of that mattered. What mattered was what filled it.

  A werebeast went down. Clutching its throat, chitin spear through the windpipe. Dead before it hit the ground.

  The warlock moved. Pointed. Something that looked like fiery malevolent ghost-like spirits streamed from its fingers into the fresh corpse. The body jerked. Its eyes ignited orange. It stood up, possessed, and rejoined the fight.

  Rhea's jaw tightened.

  Another gesture. Dark malevolent ghost-like spirits, curses, lanced into the stagfiend herd. The front rank staggered. One misstepped at full speed and its legs folded, sending it crashing through the undergrowth in a spray of dirt and broken chitin. Two more behind it went down in the pileup.

  David watched the warlock float above the chaos, repositioning, surveying.

  David waited until the warlock drifted to the far side of the engagement.

  "You see that?"

  Rhea didn't look at him. Her eyes stayed locked on the field, Distant Gaze active.

  "The black curse spirit thing. It looked like a stun. Or maybe a disruption effect."

  Another gesture from the warlock. Dark purple lightning, thicker than his arm, lanced into the stagfiend herd. The lightning caused the struck stagfiend to go into a rage and attack its own herd. It rammed its chitin spears into the stagfiend next to it, twisted, tore free. Then another. Then another. The herd fractured. Some tried to flee. Others turned on the raged creature. Stagfiends killing stagfiends.

  The warlock floated higher.

  Stagfiends turned. Dozens of chitin spears angled up, tracked the robed figure. The riders on their backs, fused to the flesh, unfolded. Sharp molten maws gaped open, heat distortion rippling from the cavities. They launched their spears. The sound was like hailstones on sheet metal, rapid and overlapping. Tens of spears. Then tens more.

  A dark shield erupted around the warlock. The spears hit, shattered, deflected. The shield cracked under the barrage, hairline fractures spiderwebbing across its surface. A few spears punched through. One glanced off the warlock's shoulder. Another lodged in the fabric of its robe.

  David saw it chuckle. Saw it wave a hand.

  Tentacles pushed up through the soil beneath the stagfiend herd. Pale slick lengths, tapered at the ends, each as thick as a man's thigh. They moved with wet sounds, pulling themselves out of the earth. Some of the tentacles had eyes set into the flesh at irregular intervals, too many, blinking out of sync. Others had small arms growing from the sides, human-proportioned but too long, fingers grasping at air. At the tapered ends, mouths opened. Circular, ringed with multiple rows of small pointed teeth, wet and glistening. They coiled around stagfiend legs first, then torsos, then the fused riders. The mouths bit down. The small arms grabbed at chitin plates, pulled, tore. The herd thrashed. Riders stabbed chitin spears into the pale lengths. The wounds leaked clear fluid. The tentacles tightened. One stagfiend's rider unfolded its maw and bit down on a tentacle, the molten edges searing the flesh. The tentacle's mouth bit back. More coiled over the rider's maw, forced it shut. Small arms found the rider's face.

  The werebeasts moved in.

  They targeted the trapped stagfiends one by one, crude swords finding the gaps between chitin plates, claws opening throats. The possessed corpses fought alongside them, silent, relentless, their eyes burning orange.

  Thirty seconds. Maybe less.

  The surviving werebeasts regrouped. Of the original fifteen, maybe eight were still standing. Six living—two wounded—plus four possessed corpses, still burning, still mobile.

  They left ten stagfiends alive and bound.

  David watched the warlock settle onto the outcropping. The pack below was slowing down. Wounds getting bound. Possessed corpses staring at nothing.

  "We should hit them," he said. "Now."

  Rhea didn't turn. "Based on what."

  "Numbers are down. Six standing. Two wounded. Four possessed corpses that fight like puppets with half the strings cut."

  "They just killed fifty stagfiends."

  "They had help." David nodded toward the warlock. "That thing did the heavy lifting. The werebeasts mopped up. Now they're standing around catching their breath."

  Rhea was quiet.

  "You saw the shield," David said. "Cracked on first contact. A few more spears and it would've failed. That's not a defense stack. That's a panic button."

  Rhea shifted her weight. Her fingers moved along the javelin shaft.

  "Curses. Lightning. Tentacles. You saw that and you still want to engage."

  Engage. That wasn’t civilian speech. David knew she’d been a nurse, but he hadn’t ruled out the military background. Her dad, maybe.

  "The curses are spirits. My spear kills spirits.” He was ninety percent sure it did. That was good enough. “I can intercept."

  "You haven't tested that on curses."

  "You don't know that."

  "I don't like this," Rhea said.

  David waited. He knew what was coming.

  She trusted him. It was that direct. She trusted him because he was competent. He saw things clearly. When everything went wrong he kept moving forward instead of freezing. He'd saved people, if by coincidence—a side effect of getting what he wanted. He’d even saved her.

  She trusted him implicitly.

  "But you think it works. So." She shifted her grip on a single javelin she held as others floated. "Okay."

  David nodded. "Okay."

  He looked past her at the field. The warlock still hadn't moved.

  "You shouldn't fly into visibility. Hang back and kite. Take it by surprise."

  Rhea waited.

  "Hang back and harass them. Keep the warlock and its pack occupied. The hob will take out the remaining ten bodies."

  He didn't mention Fenrir. Rhea didn't know about Fenrir.

  "Me and Cinder take the warlock."

  They moved.

  David activated his energy affinity. He circulated demonic energy to his eyes, then death energy into his eyes, then his aspect into his eyes. His eyes turned pitch black with a silver sheen.

  He saw everything. More than he'd ever seen before. Life, death, and every energy in between.

  He identified the elevated warlock. The fulcrum.

  David and his group slowly approached the warlock and its group using the trees and foliage as cover, circling.

  Once they were in range, David and his thralls charged at the warlock.

  Up close, the warlock's demonic energy was immense. It had what looked like ghosts, or spirits, circling it in orbit. David saw its demonic energy forming a sigil in the air. The energy converged. Reality warped around the demonic sigil and another spirit erupted from it, manifested, and orbited the warlock.

  David almost paused. He was immensely intrigued. Was that magic? Real, structured, methodical demonic magic?

  "Jackpot," he muttered, as he launched himself toward the creature.