Disciple of a Demon

Our group was on the final hallway before the beam chamber after traveling down many corridors. Just one more stretch of running, then some stairs and we’d be there.

The walls were full of laser scoring marks, clearly some harsh battles happened here. It wasn’t until we hit this area that I was seeing damaged wasp parts. But they were just fighting pirates still, right? It seemed like they had an easy time taking them out in the other room.

-WARNING! DARKNESS DETECTED!-

“What the!?” I stopped, motioning for everyone to stop as well. “Darkness!”

Shadowy gunk collected over the metal floors.

The pirates, now with glowing red eyes, raised up from the ground. They didn’t look like normal people or ghosts, rather more pale and very grinchly faced. Something was very wrong with them.

What really spooked me was their shadowy aura of darkness. Only demons dealt with the stuff. Which means that demons were involved in this somehow!

“Me and Me crew can't let you lads and lassy's pass here.” Ghostbeard spoke in a reverberated tone. “Now I reckon its time wer’ shown’ yee’ how we really fight!” he shouted, raising up a black and red blade in one hand and his gun in the other.

He took aim at Indena, but Uncle was quick to intercept his first bullet.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Ghostbeard fired off three bullets!

Uncles energy blade deflected all of them, but the bullets that he blocked were still whirling through the air, homing right back for him.

Indena used her fire magic to send walls of flame out and stop the bullets.

“That’s a new trick!” Indena commented.

“He heh…” Ghostbeard gurgled out a chuckle. “With these new powers, I be livin’ a dream. I can do anything I want!”

Ghostbeard fired off more bullets, these ones glowing red and shrowded in dark energy. But Mella reached out with her mana powers to catch the bullets like before.

WOOV!

The bullets went right through her mana trap! Uncle and Indena had to dodge out of the way. There quck maneuvers were met with the blades of some very speedy pirates.

“What happened?” I whined. “Why didn’t you catch the mana bullets like before?”

“They are no longer simple spirits, they are corrupted by darkness. I cannot manipulate that.”

Well that sucks! Looks like we needed to use stardust to attack them now. That's the only thing that can destroy darkness.

Ghostbeard was at least twice as strong, and triple as fast as before. It took the full focus of both Uncle, Indena and Marek just to hold back him and his crew.

In the mess, Mella and I were cut off from the rest.

“Go!” Uncle ordered me. “Take the wasps and stop the intruder!”

“Okay!” I shouted back, tugging Mella to the stairs leading to the beam chamber. Five wasps followed us in.

We made it to the chamber, but nobody was here. At a first glance everything seemed normal, but then I took a good look around…

There were red pentagrams drawn all around the floors. Writing was drawn upside the walls and up to the top of the dome, ending just at the center energy shield that allowed the mana beam to pass through to the sky.

I’d seen this once before, it was about a year ago. Someone named Janus was doing something like this inside one of the mana generating towers in my homeland of Elysium. He was part of an organization known as the Family of Sai. Indena came from that same group too.

Janus told us that he was trying to blot out the sun. I had a feeling this had something to do with that.

“This demonic craft…” Mella swiped her finger over one of the pentagrams, getting red ink on her hand. “I had no idea we were dealing with something like this.”

“These guys are evil. They want to make the world dark forever so demons can take over!” I told her.

Mella looked at me with an unreadably blank stare, then pulled her hat over her face.

She stood for a moment. Whenever her hat was down, she was thinking hard about something…

Her hat shot up with a non-existent wind, almost flying off her head. Her eyes were in a wide shock.

“Why did I not see this before!?”

Mella began running to the chamber door, but it slammed shut. The lights on it glared down on us.

That door shouldn't have locked! I tried to interface with it, but it wasn’t responding.

Mella put her hands over it, like she'd done with the front door. It was magically sealed.

“Curses!” She kicked the locked door.

“What’s wrong, Mella?” I ran up next to her. “What’s wrong!?”

She was so flustered. We weren’t exactly stuck in the room, since there were other exits. So something else was going on.

“We fools! Brining the Evil One with us like this...we handed her over on a silver platter!”

This had to do with Yamin? But what about her?

Mella leapt back, charging up an energy ball and shooting it at the door.

BOOM!

But nothing happened. The Ferronium alloy wasn’t going to budge that easy.

“There’s no choice. We have to stop whomever is leading this madness.” She turned to me. “He is above us, how do we get to him?”

Uh…uuh…I’m not sure I was keeping up with her!

I accessed the security systems, and she was right about the person being above us. From here there weren’t any paths leading to the roof. But we had an option available.

Normally, stepping into a hyper concentrated stream of mana was a death wish, but since I had access to the towers systems, I could manipulate the beam to act more like a gravity lift that would take us to the roof.

Mella was all for it, ready to do whatever it took to reach the top.

Worry crept into me. If I messed this up, she’d be atomized. It might even burn me too, but I was made of indestructible metal, not flesh.

Before I even had a chance to change the settings, Mella took initiative and used her own magic to change up the mana stream to our liking. Being a mana witch does have its perks, I guess.

We stepped into the mana beam. Both of us slowly levitated upwards toward the roof, where this mysterious enemy awaited us.

~☆☆☆~

Just when we hit the outside, I used my wings to force myself out of the makeshift gravity lift. Mella manipulated the mana to do something similar.

Thunder crackled above us. Terrible storm clouds had turned the sky black as night, only illuminated by red bolts of lightning.

There were piles of lead gathered around the tower roof inside of big red circles. Fire was rising up from the drawn circles. The lead was slowing melting down, glowing a bit on the edges.

A cloaked man was standing on part of a raised metal floor, very patiently awaiting us. He wore a smiling theater mask.

His arms spread out, showcasing the things he’d done here as if it were meant to be entertaining.

“Welcome,” he announced. “My awaited audience! The show is about to begin, and you’ll be the first to witness it.”

He had a radio voice, very easy to listen to, booming with charisma, but that made him seem all the more twisted.

“Cease this at once!” Mella shouted. “If you continue to tamper with the natural world, I will be forced to eradicate you!”

He cupped his hands together and let out a cheer of satisfaction.

“YES! That’s the script I was looking for! Please, keep to your role for the final performance.”

This guy must have been in theater club growing up, because he sure was dramatic.

A bio scan of him showed he was human, but he reeked of dark energy. If Janus was any contribution, he probably had a corrupted crystal heart in his chest too. That made him very dangerous.

“Do you wanna’ blot out the sun too, just like your friend, Janus?!” I interrogated.

“Janus…you know that fellow?” He put a hand up to the chin of his mask. The theater mask magically changed from happy to sad. “What became of him, is he alright?”

He had a genuine concern in his voice, so he definitely know who he was.

“Answer my question first!” I ordered.

“Oh my! We’re already improvising. Very well,” he chuckled, his mask returning to happy. “Blotting out the sun is quite the over simplification of our dream. In our vision, the sun masks the true nature of man, covers it with light. But snuff out that light, and then we’ll see the darkness that truly rules the motivations of man.”

That was almost exactly what Janus told me before.

“Oh!” he cheered. “Speaking of which, we have a celebrity in our midst! No, the star of the show has taken the spotlight! Yes, the voices of the stage hands confirm it.”

He sounded nuts! Was he talking about me? Janus recognized I was an Exceed almost right away.

“Are you talking about me?” I asked, keeping an angry look on my face.

“Hardly anyone knows you. You may be the heroine of the show, but no star.” He shook his head. “No. Another is backstage, preparing for her role.”

“You couldn’t possibly be referring to the Evil One, could you?” Mella grit her teeth and took an offensive stance.

“I prefer to call her, the Free Spirited One, personally. But a rose by any other name is just as sweet.”

He was looking for Yamin, and whatever vendetta Mella had against her was part of this. Did we mess up by bringing her here? How could we have known that they were even looking for her? Maybe he didn’t know she was here until just now.

Mella looked at me, anger lighting up her eyes a rich purple colour.

“This is why I told you, we must kill the Evil One before she takes root!”

“I can’t let you kill Yamin!” I shouted back. “That goes against my commandments!”

“Fool!” Mella shouted, clenching up her face with conflict. “Ordinances must be followed...you are lawful, after all. But even so, our enemy is before us.”

I have strict commandments that humans cannot die under my watch. I can never kill, or allow one to be killed through inaction.

“What a show!” The masked man clapped his hands. “Brava! Good show! Conflicts arise among the heroes, but they pause their dispute to focus on the main threat. I couldn’t have written a better script.”

His theatrical speak was really getting on my nerves. He probably had a mustache under that mask that he was tempted to twirl whenever he spoke.

“Forget that,” I said to him. “Why did you have these pirates get all this lead?”

“And what are your plans for the Evil One?” Mella added.

It took the theater man a few moments to think his answer over, but he snapped his fingers when he had something.

“Those pirates are mere projections of the past. Echoes of souls that I puppeteer back to life. All I needed to do was tell them all this lead could be made into gold, and they did the rest. A rather greedy bunch of nitwits. Were they entertaining?”

Echoes of history? So, I guess they weren’t ghosts after all.

“Mella, what does that mean?”

“I am unsure,” she said. “Something about it seems familiar to me.”

I was thinking that too. She had the power to bring dead animals back to life, but spiritually, not physically. That’s how she can use animals to fight for her. But I don’t think she can do that to humans. Maybe this guy knew how to do that.

“Fret not!” he announced. “All will be explained, in the second act,” he chuckled. “Assuming you all survive through the script.”

“What about the Evil One?” Mella reminded him.

“Oh, yes. Do you think I want to spoil the end of the show for you? Ha Ha! Never. But, I’d love to hear your theories.”

With how vague Mella’s descriptions were of this Evil One prophecy she kept brining up, I had the feeling that she didn’t know much about it either. On order of the spirits she followed, they must have just told her that she needed to stop this evil person, or bad things would happen.

That was just my theory. I didn’t want to bring it up now, or else our enemy would probably take advantage of that knowledge.

Speaking of knowledge, I didn’t even know this guy’s name. “Who are you?”

“You may refer to me as. The Actor,” he waved. “It is my one dream in life to entertain all humanity with truth and justice.”

Justice, yeah right! What sort of justice is blotting out the sun? He was a bad guy, through and through. We needed to stop him before he destroyed the world with his weird theatrical games.

“Now, why don’t we skip to the climax, my dear heroin?”

His hands raised up, glowing with bright red energy. He then stretched them out as far as he could, and all the pentagrams around the floor lit up.

“By the power of Lord Belphegor, I command you, spirits of Hell, to rise in the name of your prince!”

Elongated bodies of darkness, like very tall and slender solders, rose up from the pentagrams. At their core was a red light, beating with evil energy.

In front of The Actor, a massive shell peeked out from one of the circled star shapes. A beast like demon crept out from the floor, sporting the head of a lion, six bear like legs, and a big shell on its back. It also had a really long tail.

“Now, let the show begin! Do make this an entertaining first act, would you?”