“All right,” Nira said, withdrawing her hand and watching him carefully. “I won’t do that. Don’t pop, please.” She turned to Gamarron. “Can you fight it by yourself?”
The monk was grimly silent for space of two more messy deaths. “No,” he admitted.
Renna bared her teeth. “All my poisons were ruined in the water.”
Kest conferred quietly with his little salamander. “Maybe if I had a herd of rhinos I could do something, but I’m not even sure about that.”
“And I wouldn’t fare any better than they are,” sighed Tychus, pointing to the dying Naga. “Rather worse, in fact.”
They all looked to Guyrin, and he realized he was pulling tufts of his own hair free with panicked hands. He tried to say something, but he just laughed helplessly.
Gamarron shook his head and said, “He’s far too unstable. We should run.”
“Can we outrun it?” Kest wondered, his voice shaking. The demon disemboweled a screaming Naga and shoveled her glistening guts into its nightmarish maw.
“No,” Gamarron whispered. “It has seen us – it will follow when it’s finished with the Naga. They can run for days at a stretch.” He turned to look at them one by one, his eyes sorrowful. “I am sorry I brought you here to die.”
Guyrin was shaking with laughter. Die here. Torn to bits. Crushed under the earth, Drowned in the depths. It was all just death, in the end, but for someone who had sincerely hoped to eat himself into an early grave, it seemed like only the worst of options were on offer. Renna took ahold of his shoulders with an exasperated sigh, trying to capture his gaze with her own as she so often did when she was trying to calm him or get his drugs into him. He was suddenly desperate for another dram. But she said she’d given you the last of it, didn’t she? Is that what she said earlier? “Calm down, Guy. Stop that laughing, you idiot, now stop!”
The demon caught the tip of the tail of the very last Naga as it tried to flee, and methodically stomped on its spine step by step until the warrior female was prone and screaming for death. The clawed feet smashed down into her humanoid torso, granting her wish, and then crushed her head for good measure. The evil, purple-skinned thing turned toward them, a basso chuckle rumbling through the cavern. He took a step toward them, coughing out something in his guttural language.
“He asks who will be first,” Gamarron informed them dully.
Guyrin’s hands spasmed, and his dirty nails pierced his palms. The pain brought him back to the surface. No drugs. No peace. No life. Crushed and eaten and drowned and murdered and wasted. Heart beats at one hundred sixty per minute. Twenty-two milliliters of blood pass through the major arteries per second. If he rips off my arm, it will take sixty-eight seconds to lose enough blood that I pass out. If it’s a leg, forty-three. His hands beat against his skull spasmodically. I am a tool! I am a tool! Why doesn’t he tell me to do something?
But he was, Guyrin realized. Gamarron was telling him to die. He would rather they all died than let Guyrin loose. And just like that, new vistas of possibility opened up in his mind.
If he’s telling me to die, I can do that very effectively. I’ve been working on it for years. And I can make it the way I want it to be. He laughed again, but it was a sound that rang with triumph. His limbs freed themselves, and he stepped forward. The discord of the Chaos Shard still beat against his thoughts and threatened to drag him into oblivion, but he felt energized. If that was what killed him, well, that was fine too. He shook free of Renna’s hands and walked boldly in front of the others, placing himself before the demon. It cocked its head and rumbled at him, still ten paces away.
He raised his hand at the monstrous creature. “Me first, me, pick me!” He laughed again. He couldn’t seem to stop.
The demon sprang forward, and his friends cried out in fear. They are my friends, aren’t they? How odd. He closed his eyes and dove into the Chaos that infused every fiber of his being, letting the material world he usually saw refract and shatter into discrete strands of information. It flooded him, overwhelmed him. He opened his eyes and knew that they shone like the sun. “LIKE A BUG!” he roared, each phoneme of his words bouncing at oblique angles off his consciousness. It had been a very good joke in his head, but he worried he’d missed something in the delivery. Ah, well. Do demons even have a sense of humor?
He pulled the unravelling threads of his being together within the raging cascade of the Chaos and pushed, willing the world to bend to his will. He hadn’t pushed this hard on purpose for a very long time, at least not when mostly sober, and he nearly lost his handle on it. He felt the pressure building within him, spiraling out of control. The raging sun of the Chaos Shard beat on him like a hammer. But he held on tenaciously, and reality snapped back into shape according to his will. He was the master of reality, and he shook with the power.
His struggle had lasted an eternity, but the demon was still stretched out before him, talons extended to rend his flesh. Guyrin extended his hand at head height and brought it down through the air as if pushing something earthward. The demon slammed into the cavern floor under some immense, unseen pressure. It groaned in protest, its fingers scrabbling on the stone mere centimeters from Guyrin’s feet.
And then it popped.
Black blood and viscera flew in all
