Through the Demon Fog

The snow was piling quickly, making it hard for us to frantically trudge through it, especially me who was almost chin deep.

We raced from the house as fast as we could, tailed closely by those locust demons. They ambushed from the tops of darkened trees wherever they could, and we had no way to fight them all, so we just kept going with the hope that their was a solution ahead.

After Indena let out a flurry of nasty swears, heckish fire wafted from her hands like a flamethrower. Her unapologetic attack aimed at the snow, melting out a temporary path and making it much easier for us to escape the demons. But for all the fire, its light couldn't pierce through this dense darkness. That's where I came in.

We had to use stardust to beat this pitch black terror. I'd used up a lot of my stardust energy, so I didn't have enough to make any substantial objects to light the way.

There was one thing I could do. My body had some very low reserves left over that I could tap into. So I let some of that stardust flow through my hair and cause it to twinkle and brighten up.

My now lambent hair pierced the darkness, but only gave a few extra meters of sight. Hey, that was better than nothing. Plus an added bonus was that the demons were less bold and gave us some personal space.

"How long can you glow for?" Indena asked.

Making my hair glow wasn't using much energy, so I was able to hold it for a while.

"I have enough stardust to keep it going for a while."

"I hope so," Indena said as she continued blasting the snow with fire. “I’ll do my job, you do yours.”

Her question made me think of something too. She was blazing our path non stop, so she was going to use up a lot of mana.

"How about you?" I asked. "Don't waste all your energy on the flamethrower."

Her fires grew brighter, turning slightly white hot as if responding rebelliously to my words of caution.

"I don't care. This kind of situation is exactly why I have this magic. So trust me, I'm not wasting anything."

Fire countered the cold really well. I saw why she picked it of all things, given her history. But that didn't stop the fact that all that magic energy was getting burned up for fuel. She’d be tapped out in no time.

At this point, Indena was fighting both demons and her phobia simultaneously. I couldn't envy that set of hurdles she had to jump over.

*BUMP!*

Both of us almost tripped into an odd dip in the ground. Something had already melted the snow in that spot.

A weird water sludge was pooling up there, and there were these awful looking creepy crawlies swimming around in it. More of these puddles were scattered around.

I detected a lot of sulfur in the air, so I warned Indena to stay back. The sludgy parts made me question what else was in there though, ‘cause a puddle of liquid sulfur certainly shouldn’t have looked like that.

I went to dip my hand in to analyze the stuff, but Indena yanked me away quickly.

“Hey! Don’t touch that crap. Didn’t you just warn me?”

Breathing sulfur was fine for me, but humans didn’t have that same luxury.

From the brief scan I got from grazing the surface, it seemed to have a similar composition to the portals Janus made last year. carbon, sulfur and other occulat elements. Definitely evil in nature. They might have been related.

I'd need more time then we had to figure more out. We didn't want to stay here much longer since the demons were catching up, so we got moving again.

The snow started to pick up. It was getting bad and Indena was shivering. Even her fire wasn't enough anymore to melt all of it away.

"Are you doing okay?" I asked her.

"No. I'm a wreck. This doesn't bring back good memories."

I was sure it didn't, especially since she almost froze to death as a kid. But there was one thing she had now that she didn’t have before…

"I'm here. You aren't alone," I reassured.

Her shivering slowed a little. What I told her clearly had some reaction, but she remained silent. I hoped that meant she felt a little better.

~☆☆☆~

Indena kept blasting away piles of snow with her fire magic as best she could. Lucky for us, my glowing hair was keeping the demons away, but they were right on the edge of my sensors, which were already having a hard time piercing through the fog of darkness.

One thing was for sure, the map had a new icon pop up for demons. It looked like some kind of creepy five sided star with an angry face in the middle. There were lots of them around us, keeping up in the shadows as we moved.

They only attacked now when they had a distinct advantage, usually when we'd stumble under some rocky overhang or large tree. I tried my best to find areas like that on the map so we could avoid them, but with this demonic fog of war it was really hard.

"There’s gotta' be a way to upgrade this map..."

The HELP menu said it was possible, so I did a system wide scan...

-Upgrade menu now available!-

Haha! That's what I like to see!

An icon that looked like an arrow heading up to a plus sign appeared on my hotbar. I opened it up to find only a few things were able to be upgraded. I had to level up more and train skills to unlock more. That's typical for an RPG. The map was one of those things I could upgrade, thankfully.

According to this, I gained skill points at every level, so I could use those to boost the power of things.

All I could really do was increase the sensor range by about a meter and a half. That pushed back some of the fog of war, but not much. I was locked out of upgrading it further until I leveled up some more and used the map regularly.

That didn't really help much, did it?

Oh wait, it didn't just give me a radius boost. It also linked the map up to the Monster Compendium in my HELP menu. Now I could pull up a quick tab of info on any enemies I'd encountered just by focusing on them while using the map. That would be good in a pinch!

As promised, a quick tab opened up when I focused in on the avatar for the demons. I unceremoniously decided to name these guys Locust Demons so it wouldn't be blank. Not very original, I know, but I'm too panicked to be more creative.

*ZAP!*

A lightning bolt startled us as it struck a tree off to the side. It was one of the lightning wolves. The little runt, by the looks of it. He looked all beat up, like he was in a bad scrap.

"Oi, dog's back."

He was limping toward me, and he let me pet him a little bit. It looked like those cuts on him were pretty bad, so I tried using healing magic.

"It's not healing him."

I was just wasting Incantation Points. Maybe healing magic didn't work on monsters?

"No, it won't work on this guy," Indena chimed in. "You have to heal monsters with their element."

Oh, so his elemental power healed him? Obviously that was lightning.

I didn't have lightning magic, but I did have electrical energy in my body. I could share a few gigawatts with him. My heart produced a lot of electricity, so this wasn't even a blip on my radar.

I transferred electricity into my right arm crystal and let it flow into the runt by pressing the crystal up against his body. His wounds started to heal instantly, and he even looked a tiny bit bigger too.

Maybe that's why he liked me, because I had so much energy in me that he needed that helped him grow.

He instantly perked up, then started running off in a random direction. He stopped, then turned back to us, like he wanted us to follow him.