He gulped. Spinning up some blackstone spikes and walls, and cracking a cave like plastic, had been a weird, difficult, and had left him hungry. Hell, he was still hungry, and he’d eaten twice since the incident. Humans could go months without eating, but not him. If Mia had created that tornado, she was probably starving.
“David’s sister did that?” Lasca asked. “Strong! David do hellfire, too?”
He looked back at the crowd. “That’s… Is that hellfire?”
“Hard to tell from here,” Jes said. “Hellfire kinda looks like fire, until you get close and you see the amber in it. The lava.”
Hellfire was, as far as the runes in his mind could figure, some sort of destructive force created by essence and resonance ripping into each other and creating a cycle, almost like a fission reaction. The runes showed him it was Hell’s form of annihilation, as if it embodied it, represented it. As if it was existentially important, and the runes showed it side by side with the flowing waters of Heaven.
Water for healing, and fire for destruction. It was very… traditional.
“You want to go back?” Caera asked. “Maybe see if there’s a way across the canyon?”
“Nah. You know that’ll never work. Huge waste of time, we might not find a way across, we might never catch up to her, and even if we did us just being near each other causes problems. No, let’s just… keep going.” He turned, checked back to see if the insane display was real and not his imagination, and continued on the journey.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~Day 51~~
They walked. They walked. They walked some more. His feet were iron by this point, but the demons weren’t so lucky. Daoka felt fine enough to walk on her own again, and Caera was thankful to be free of the extra weight, but demons were strong and she hadn’t really been weighed down. No, it was just the distance that was the problem, kilometers upon kilometers, miles upon miles.
They went slow, but there was no avoiding how worn down they were all getting. Even Acelina, Laria, and Latia grew tired, their hooves unable to withstand the rock and stone for so long.
“I’m telling you,” David said, falling back a bit so he could chat with the two little gremlas, “you should get horseshoes.”
“Do not be ridiculous,” Acelina said, walking in the back.
“It might help?”
Latia whined up at him and tugged on his arm.
“Carry me.”
“Uh, aren’t you the demon? Super strong? You should be carrying me.”
“Latia is tiny!” After a few more whines, she threw herself at his back.
He almost toppled, but sure enough, Latia was a tiny thing, and once she was on his back, it wasn’t much trouble to hold her thighs. He’d held her horizontally and fucked her like a toy just a week ago, that’s how light she was. They’d all had sex a few times since then, but never with the same energy since everyone was exhausted all the time.
The little devil critter flapped her wings a few times, snuggled to his back, and buried her chin over his shoulder. Okay, yeap, still light, but she had chunks of meera metal for armor, and his ego quickly proved his downfall as he tried to walk the next kilometer. Her armor was probably as heavy as all of her.
“You’re killing him,” Caera said, one very painful half hour later.
“David is strong!”
“David is a small human man who can barely lift a pebble.”
He winced, but the sweat beading down his forehead didn’t lie.
“Fiiiine.” Latia hopped off and immediately began whining again. Literally, whining noises, like a dog or annoyed cat, and it wasn’t long before the other little critters mirrored her. Four little ladies teetered side to side as they walked, knocking shoulders, unable to stay upright.
“You four,” Acelina said with a hiss, “weigh almost nothing. I weigh more than ten of you. Stop complaining.”
“Butt too big,” Lasca said.
“Thighs too big,” Laara said.
“Boobs too big,” Laria said, which made David laugh. The little gremla was a busty creature.
With a heavy snort, Acelina stomped forward, and the four Las scattered, chirping and clicking and squealing. She didn’t chase them, satisfied, and hit David in the back with one of her long wings.
“Annoying as the little creatures are, they have a point. It would be easier to run than to walk this distance.”
“Really?” David asked.
“No, but regardless, if this trek does not end sometime soon, we may have to stop for several days.”
“Agreed,” Caera said. “I know you wanna just go go go, David, but if this keeps up, we’ll break.”
He raised an eyebrow down at the tiger prowling beside him.
“Really?”
She laughed. “No, but it’s definitely harder on us than you. We might need a few days to sit and hunt.”
Daoka clicked and gestured around at the mountains.
“Right,” Jes said. “Demons want to hunt! We want to sneak around, track down some souls, and eat them. And then laze about doing nothing for hours. Days.”
Demons were predators, and the more he learned about them, the more they seemed like classic surface big cat predators. They didn’t go on journeys. They set up a territory, marked it, patrolled it, hunted in it, and didn’t get along with potential competitors.
“We need a car,” he said, looking down as he went into think mode. “We’re almost at the Grave Valley, right? Then we cross the Scar, the Red Pits, and the Navameere Fields. We’re crossing over half of Hell.”
All the demons, save Acelina, groaned.
“Don’t remind us,” Jes said. “We agreed to help ’cause we’d prefer the world didn’t end, you know? Doesn’t mean we have to like the trip.”
“Maybe… Maybe we can recruit some hellbeasts? You said demons sometimes ride goorts, right?”
“I did,” Caera said. “But it’d have to be a damn big goort to handle me or Acelina. And you can’t tame a wild goort, not easily. You have to raise it from an egg, and even then they can be dangerous.”
Jes came up beside him. “I wonder how the rider tamed that dragon. I’ve never seen a hellbeast like that, so it has to be rare. Probably something from Angel’s Spine. Think you can tame that?”
“I don’t know how to tame a hellbeast! What makes you think I can?”
“The rider. You both got some crazy auras. So… maybe you can, too?”
“They’re not the same,” Caera said. “The rider’s aura isn’t like a demon’s, or David’s.”
Mysteries on top of mysteries.
“I mean, find me a hellbeast and I’ll try?” David said. “I think–”
The group grew silent as they crested a hill, and the Grave Valley lay before them.