Paladin 4: Chapter 9 (Patreon)

The young woman’s attempts to get out from underneath Callum proved entirely futile. He had been bigger than her when he was just a holy adept, and now that he was a paladin, he had four times the young woman’s weight, not even counting the heavy plate armor he was wearing. She soon realized this and stopped struggling so she could reach for the hunting knife strapped to her thigh.

“I’m terribly sorry, miss!” Callum hastily scrambled to his knees, which let the young woman draw her knife and lunge at his face with it.

“You won’t take me alive! I’ll never reveal the location of our village to you!” The young woman yelled.

Callum caught her wrist easily, but she dropped the knife and caught it with her other hand.

“Please, put that thing away,” Callum asked, but the young woman took her free hand and pointed the knife at her own throat.

“I’d sooner die than betray my friends and family!” She motioned as though she was going to stab herself in the throat, and Callum had to tackle her again to stop it, ending up right back in the position he’d started in.

Darren stepped in to help Callum before the young woman stabbed herself. While either of them would have been able to easily best her in combat, keeping her from killing herself turned out to take both of them working together.

After Callum pried the knife out of her hands, she reached for Callum’s dagger on his hip. It was a dagger for him, but for her, it was more like a short sword and as sharp as a razor. She nearly got it clear of its sheath before Darren slammed the blade back down into place.

When that didn’t work, she tried to bite off her tongue and bleed herself to death that way, so Darren had to dig a gag out of his Inventory. Fortunately, Cassandra had acquired quite a few of them for when Morgana was playing the role of their sexy, bottomless maid.

He pried open the young woman’s jaw and shoved the gag in, and the young woman thrashed all the while. She flailed her arms and legs, and Callum struggled to pin her in place.

“Stop thrashing, please!” Callum said. “We won’t hurt you!”

But it was no use. She thrashed even harder than before the more Callum tried to pin her. Fortunately, Darren had some restraints in his Inventory as well, and between the two of them, they tied the young woman’s arms behind her back at her elbows and bound her wrists to her ankles.

“You sure know your way around those knots!” Callum grinned as he noticed Darren’s swift work.

“It’s a practical skill,” Darren replied.

“I suppose so. I picked up some sailing knots, but tying up people is a lot harder. Still, I suppose it is the sort of thing I should learn. You never know when you have to capture a cultist alive or maybe a village girl intent on killing herself.”

The two stood over the young woman a while longer, trying to usher her to calm down. Strangely, their efforts only made her all the more anxious. Darren gave Callum a pat on the back, and they headed up into the air so they could speak where she couldn’t hear.

“Those tracks I found back at the village must have been hers!” Callum said. “That means there are still people living here in the Eastwood Kingdom after all. She mentioned a village, meaning a settlement has to be nearby! That’s wonderful news!”

But Darren’s thoughts were a little grimmer. “We came here tracking a Demon Lord.”

“Oh... curse and damn it to the Seven Hells, you’re right. Human villages don’t last long against a Demon Lord. We can’t waste any more time with this girl. We need to find a way to get rid of her so we can keep looking for our target. Maybe I can pretend to drop my knife next time we fly off. She can cut herself free of her bonds and flee.”

“Unless she stabs herself instead of running.”

Callum cursed under his breath. “We don’t have time for this sort of thing. If only she’d have just listened!”

“You did suddenly attack her from the sky.”

Callum sighed. “I suppose I need to take responsibility for that. The girl can’t die on my watch. Once we’ve dealt with the Demon Lord, we’ll have time to reason with her. Maybe we can leave her as she is for now?”

“Better keep her off the ground. Fewer bugs and beasts in the trees.”

So Callum and Darren left the young woman dangling from a nearby tree with her hands tied to her ankles and a gag in her mouth. She wriggled and squirmed the entire time. Darren draped a blanket over her since she would probably be up there for a while.

“Alright, now we need to pick up this Demon Lord’s trail...” Callum muttered as they finished their work.

A brief scan of the area soon gave Darren what he needed to continue tracking the Demon Lord down. They grew closer with each passing minute. Thankfully, the Demon Lord hadn’t gone much further despite the lead Callum’s run-in with the young woman had given it. Darren had feared that might have been enough time for it to run away, but for some reason, the Demon Lord had doubled back and circled around this area.

“I think I’m finally picking up tracks!” Callum said. “They look like giant boar tracks. Each print is the size of a dinner plate.”

“A giant felbeast, perhaps...” Darren muttered.

That would explain the Demon Lord’s unusual behavior. This was probably one of the less intelligent and more monstrous types. He’d seen many like it in Asmoth’Koteth’s army brought up from Hell. This was likely one of those, only this one slipped its leash somehow.

A few minutes later, Darren spotted the beast with his own eyes.

Absolute Analysis: Demon Analysis

• Demon Lord Jil’nareth (Fifth-Order)
• Elder sister to Yil’nareth, this demon lord was born of the Felbeast line and takes the form of a massive boar seven meters tall.
• She specializes in fire and force attacks, leaving trails of destruction wherever she goes.
• Beware her tusks, each filled with Demonic Aura and capable of destroying beings and items reliant on Divine Aura for cohesion.

This demon was nearly identical to the Demon Lord Darren had slain while defending the gates of Salsroth. The only difference was this one was about a meter larger than her brother, and her tusks were a little bigger. But there was that same hungry, fiery hatred in her eyes. She wanted to trample over villages and cities, utterly destroy them, and then devour the humans who lived there.

She was the kind of bestial demon that would stop at nothing to satiate her bottomless hunger that could never be filled. The only thing that would end her rampage would be someone like Darren finally putting an end to her once and for all.

Based on his understanding of this kind of demon, she should have turned to charge the two of them as soon as she detected their presence. And yet the demon continued doing what she’d been doing a moment before. She rammed her head into one of the massive trees. It already bore many marks from similar rammings, and this was the final blow. Its side exploded in a shower of splintering wood, and the giant of the forest toppled.

“I never knew how much demons hated trees,” Callum said.

But Darren’s heart leaped in his chest when he finally realized why Jil’nareth had been so desperate to knock that tree down. It wasn’t the tree she wanted to kill. It was the people living in its upper branches.

“Not trees.” Darren pointed to the scurrying forms on the other end of the tree. He spotted a man pulling a child from the wreckage of the building built into the tree’s upper branches like a tree house. The broken remains of a rope bridge hung from a nearby tree, and they must have once connected the ruined building to others like it.

Ever since running into that young woman, Darren had been scanning the forest floor for signs of human habitation. But that had been a mistake because the people here weren’t living in the forest at all. They were living in the tree branches above the forest. They might have passed right by another active human settlement and not even noticed because they were looking for structures on the ground instead of hidden by the dense leaf cover of the forest.

“Curses and damnation! She’s trying to attack the people living in those tree houses!” Callum pointed to the ruined trees around them. Fortunately, the others didn’t seem to have people in them, which meant the building’s inhabitants must have managed to escape before their trees fell. But the same didn’t go for the most recently toppled tree.

Darren rushed forward, harnessing the power of the universe around him to transport himself nearly instantaneously between the man and child and the Demon Lord bearing down on them.

The Demon Lord charged. Darren threw up a barricade of Divine Aura energy constructs, but the Demon Lord shook her tusks back and forth and shattered them. Darren remembered the description of those tusks from his skill and realized he was going to have to contain this Demon Lord the hard way.

While Darren fought, Callum rescued the two survivors and picked them up under either arm before hauling them up to one of the intact tree houses up above. He dove to search the ruins for anyone else in need of help, all the while keeping an eye on Darren’s fight for a moment he could lend his aid. Given the level difference between him and the Demon Lord, there wasn’t much he could do in a direct confrontation, but he could still help mitigate the damage the Demon Lord might otherwise do.

Darren took out his sword, hoping to end this thing’s rampage with one deadly swing, the same way he’d dealt with this Demon Lord’s brother.

She charged at him, and he braced himself with his Hell-Sundering Blade of Annihilation pointed at her. He could see the demon’s intent reflected in her smoldering red eyes. She planned to bash him aside like she likely had for so many other paladins like him. But Darren was not like other paladins.

When the hulking demonic boar tried to shoulder him aside, Darren’s sword bit into her flesh. She opened her mouth like she was about to swallow both Darren and his sword whole.

That was her biggest mistake, and Darren sensed his opportunity to end things once and for all. He shoved his sword straight up through the roof of its jaw, right through the bottom of its skull. If this Demon Lord’s skull was structured anything like a human’s skull, his blade should have cleaved it in two.

And yet, the Demon Lord slipped aside anyway, continuing its charge. If it had only the intelligence of a beast before, now it lacked even that. The Demon Lord flailed and licked left and right, releasing all of its pent-up power as it shook its head, trying to dislodge the sword stuck in it.

It kicked one tree, shattering the sturdy wood that had held it up for who knew how many centuries. The tree didn’t tumble, but an entire chunk was missing from it now, and the building built on top of it would have to be relocated or tumble to the forest floor when the tree carrying it inevitably died. A moment later, it slammed its head into another tree, damaging that one beyond repair as well.

Ordinarily, Darren would have simply let it exhaust itself. The Demon Lord was already dead. It just hadn’t stopped moving yet. But the human settlement above meant that he had to contain this demon lord. Both of the trees that it was trying to knock over had people on them, and Darren could see many of them desperately clinging to broken rope bridges connecting buildings.

Callum was sweeping over the wreckage as he looked for survivors. Whenever he found one, he hauled the debris off them and took them somewhere safe. That usually meant back up to their friends in the tree houses that hadn’t been knocked over yet.

Darren needed to put the Demon Lord down before she did any more damage. The only question was how to do that? Normally, he could resort to energy constructs, but the Demon Lord’s tusk allowed her to disperse such things. Perhaps he should have cleaved those tusks off before going for the killing blow.

Realizing what he had to do, Darren balled his hands into fists, knuckles cracking under his immense strength. He waited for the right time to strike, and when another massive tree began to topple, he reached out with One With the Universe to harness that immense quantity of energy.

The falling tree slowed to a standstill, granting all the people living on top of it the time they needed to flee across the rope bridges connecting the building at its top to others like it. All the energy of that falling tree filled Darren, propelling him with incredible speed toward the Demon Lord.

Fist collided with fur, and large as the Demon Lord was, she was sent flying.

Darren landed on the ground before her, and his impact carved out a crater from the forest floor. The Demon Lord finally took notice of him again. This time, her hateful eyes were filled with half-lucid madness. There was nothing behind them except the instinct to kill now.

Jil’nareth charged, and so did Darren. She tried to gut him with her tusks, but Darren grabbed both of them as he flipped around in one smooth motion, using them like handlebars to jump on top of the Demon Lord’s head.

She kicked and bucked to dislodge him, but Darren held fast with one hand, beating the Demon Lord with his other fist. He dug his heels into her, guiding her away from the settlement.

She slammed her forehead into a tree to squish Darren between it and her skull, but he slipped around to the underside of her throat just in time to avoid it.

Jil’nareth thought she finally had him in biting range then, and her jaws tried to clamp down around him. But Darren had wanted to be in this position all along because here he could finally retrieve his sword. He grabbed the handle and pulled it toward him, splitting Jil’nareth’s skull from where he’d stabbed her and out the front between her eyes.

Darren thought that would finally end the fight, but this Demon Lord was remarkably resilient. The two halves of her face spread apart, revealing a gruesome and bloody visage. He’d cut her brain clean in two, and one-half of it flopped out of the remains of her skull and into Darren’s lap. But the Demon Lord wasn’t dead yet.

She shook her head, and the two halves of her face slapped together again with a wet thud. Flesh met flesh, and her body healed at immense speed. Soon, all that was left of what should have been Darren’s killing blow was a thin vertical scar.

“You are a tough one...” Darren shook the blood from his sword and smiled. Little did this Demon Lord know. He was a tough one as well.

Man and beast met in battle once again, and this time, Darren didn’t hold back. Looking up, they were clear of the settlement. Here he could fight without worry. His sword parted flesh, which healed a moment later only to be cleaved apart once again.

The fight was too quick for mortal eyes to follow as Darren reduced the giant boar into chunks of flesh, only for her to heal and keep fighting. But even her immense healing rate could not keep up with the damage he was doing, especially when he started purifying parts of her body. It what seemed like only the blink of an eye, Darren stood alone on a field of blood and neatly sliced cubes of pork.

He pulled it into his Inventory, surprised to sense a notification from his Limitless Evolution skill.

Limitless Evolution

Evolve Lifewell (Epic) to Twin Fountains of Youth and Vigor (Mythic)

Evolve?

Darren put the actual evolution on hold for the next time he was in a good position to make it happen. He’d gotten a bit soft recently and was unwilling to wait the full three days for his skill to work its natural course anymore. He always had Cassandra at hand to speed things up. Besides, without her, sitting there meditating for three days would be rather boring.

At the moment, his time would be better spent helping Callum, who was busy saving some of the locals after this disaster of a demon attack.

Strangely, the locals weren’t as welcoming of his help as Darren would have thought. They kept their distance from him like they were afraid he would attack them. Normally, people would be cheerful at being rescued.

Darren and Callum spent the next hour helping the locals rescue their wounded, despite their skittishness. Thanks to Darren’s Inventory, getting debris out of the way was fairly easy, and the two wounded children he found in the original toppled building were easily healed with a bit of Lifewell water. Even most of the wooden boards were salvageable, though it would take a lot of work to fix. Darren placed their recovered nails and recovered odds and ends in a few piles, since none of the villagers had come out to advise him otherwise. They were all just staring down at him and Callum while they worked.

He kicked the last of the debris lying on the ground spread all around them. A broken slate lay nearby with a few simple letters and numbers drawn on it. It looked like the destroyed building had been a schoolhouse, and this had been the teacher. Fortunately, most of the children had been able to hang on to the rope bridge connecting this building to its neighbor and were able to slow their falls significantly. There was only one body in the entire mess of wood and shattered trunk. She looked like she’d been a middle-aged woman, though she was barely recognizable now that she’d been smeared into a thin paste.

“Such a shame. I was hoping we could save everyone...” Callum sighed.

“We still can.” Darren poked the dead woman’s corpse and activated his Resurrection skill. This ability only worked every if the target died very recently, so he only occasionally got to practice it. He tried to use it as often as he could since he had high hopes for what the skill might become when it reached legendary.

The woman gasped as her broken body knitted itself back together again.

“...how... what?” The woman gasped. “I’m... alive?” She patted her broken and torn dress. Beneath the ruined fabric, she was healthy and whole.

“You are alive,” Darren replied.

“I was certain my end was near! I felt that wooden pillar crush my chest, and I felt the life seeping out of my broken body. For a while, I felt like I was drifting upward...” She shook herself, wrapping her arms around her chest as she thought to reassure herself that she was alive.

Darren had indeed seen her soul drifting upward. She was lucky the demon was dead because it would have gobbled that right up if it had seen it drifting helplessly upward. Fortunately, it was already dead. With her soul still so near and traveling so slowly, his Resurrection skill had no problem putting it back in her repaired body.

“You’re alright now.” Darren laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Tell us, please. Why is everyone else so nervous about us?” Callum asked the schoolteacher.

“Ah, that’s right, you two are paladins, are you not?”

Callum and Darren nodded.

“Is that why they fear us?” Darren jerked his thumb back at the frightened villagers cowering in their homes.

“The last time paladins came through here, they traveled with some equally large men in black armor they called the Sinful Servants. The meeting did not go well for my people. And the time before that, there was a paladin who made demands of our village’s daughters. It was such a shame, we were almost ready to move back into our villages and rejoin the world, but we were swiftly sent scurrying back into our isolated tree-top homes. I think they fear you plan to reveal our new location to the Order of the Rod, which will force us all to flee again. That is probably why they are so wary and upset with you...” the woman sighed.

“I understand,” Darren replied. “We will go now.”

“Wait!” the woman said. “I am Gwen, formerly Lady Gwen, back when my family had a title worth something. I don’t have much to offer, but I would shame my family name if I were to let our saviors leave without being properly thanked. Stay for dinner, at least. You are travelers, yes? I have contacts with some of the other hidden villages, along with your Princess, who rules the only visible settlement left in Eastwood. Perhaps I can give you a map and point you to where you’ll receive a warmer welcome.”

Darren stopped, then shrugged. “Very well, Lady Gwen. We will accept your thanks.”

Gwen pointed out her tree house in the distance, and Darren scooped her up and flew her there. Callum followed close behind.

“I must say, that is far faster than climbing flimsy rope ladders!” Gwen laughed. “If we could fly, we probably wouldn’t be so wary about venturing to the ground.”

<Note>

I know, I know, you’re all disappointed, but Lady Gwen is not a love interest.