“Fuck,” I said. “Just when I needed one more fucking shot!”
Even though I couldn’t finish him off now, the crossbow bolts and the thunder attacks had done some pretty serious damage to him, and he was groaning, slumped against the wall, forced to dilute the focus of his power to fight off the effect of the Tree magic.
“Now,” I roared, “you die, you piece of shit! He’s down everyone, charge!”
“Wrong,” he gasped. “You think it’s ending, you fool? It’s only just beginning!”
He swung his flail weakly, launching another bolt of red lightning, but this one wasn’t aimed at us. Instead, he sent it into the cauldron of boiling blood, from which thick red smoke started to rise, while the oblates’ chanting grew more intense. They amped up the red lightning they themselves were sending into the boiling blood, and it boiled and frothed and smoked more intensely.
Then, crawling and coughing up blood and plucking crossbow bolts from his body, my uncle struggled over to the shining portal of light. He looked up at me, his eyes still the color of blood, and smiled, blood pouring out of his mouth.
“You’ll have to do a lot better than this to stand any chance against us, nephew,” he rasped as he plucked one last crossbow bolt from his body. He flung it scornfully in my direction and stumbled through the portal, his body melting into the light and disappearing.
“No!” I yelled, racing toward the portal. “You’re not getting away. Not this time, you goblin-fucker!”
It was too late though; seconds before I reached the portal, there was a blinding flash of light, and then it was closed. The stone doorway crumbled and collapsed into a pile of rubble. My uncle was gone, and I had no idea where he’d disappeared to. Hell, for all I knew, he could be halfway across the world right now, or even as far off as Yeng or the Isles of the Sun, or down in the Sunblast Desert or Targon.
“Vance!” Elyse screamed. “Forget about your uncle. We’ve got trouble!”
“Big trouble!” Drok echoed. “Very big trouble!”
I spun around and saw that the boiling blood in the cauldron was starting to take form. Two enormous red, scaly hands were rising up out of it. I’d seen those huge, clawed hands once before, through the eyes of the dead, before an entire town was annihilated.
“Oh, fuck,” I murmured. “The Demogorgon.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
From what I’d seen in the flashbacks of the dead in Kroth, the Demogorgon was not something to be fucked with, and here it was, being summoned from whatever hellish plane it usually inhabited via a giant cauldron of blood and the power of the Blood God.
I wasn’t strong enough to take on this big red asshole, not yet, so we had to stop the summoning from being completed. I would need some extra power for this fight, so I drew on the power of my skeletal troops, channeling it through my body and focusing it into the chain of my kusarigama.
“Take out the oblates before they finish summoning that thing!” I yelled, charging at the cultist nearest me. “Everyone, pick one of these assholes and kill him!”
With a united roar, my companions charged out from behind the shield wall, and the oblates were forced to put their summoning ceremony on hold to defend themselves. I’d hoped that these pricks would be easy to cut down, like Bishop Nabu’s pathetic little monks, but they were in a different class altogether.
The oblate I was charging at, a thin, gray-bearded man with piercing blue eyes, spun around to face me, red lightning crackling in bright veins from every one of his fingertips.
“You cannot stop us,” he rasped. “The power of the Blood God flows through every one of us!”
With a wordless shout, he blasted out twin jets of lightning at me. I smashed them away with a whipping lash of my kusarigama chain, but when the chain connected with the bolts of lightning, two of my skeletons exploded in showers of bone splinters and bone dust.
I only had a couple of skeletons with me, and once they were all gone, my kusarigama would lose a lot of its potency, so the need to deal with these monks was urgent. I dashed in, whipping the chain around in a wide arc at the oblate’s head. He leaned back, arching his spine, and the chain whistled through the air an inch or two above his face. He came up laughing arrogantly, red lighting dancing on his fingertips again. But what the idiot didn’t know was that I’d intended for that strike to miss.
By the time he popped his head back up and lunged his hands forward for his counter attack, I was already sliding along the ground toward him, the blade end of the kusarigama in my hand. He barely had time to glance down and see me sliding under his legs, and as I slid through them, I slammed the blade end up, directly up. It pierced the oblate’s taint, between his balls and his asshole, and ripped a destructive passage through his innards, with the point emerging from his upper back. The momentum of my slide pulled the scythe-like blade out, opening most of his torso in a horrendously massive cut.
He screamed as half of his innards fell out of his suddenly opened body, then flopped onto the ground, thrashing and spraying blood and guts everywhere as he died. I came up out of the slide running, my focus shifting immediately to the next target. As I raced toward him, I shot a glance over at the vat, and alarm shot through me when I saw that the Demogorgon’s arms
