DeSean leaned his head against the truck’s step bar. He was sinking into a new level of misery he hadn’t experienced before. Overdrawing on magic made his mind feel sick, withered, and abysmally weak.

Everyone else was standing around him, conversating over him, the words lost on him. He couldn’t focus. Maybe if he added Od to Focus, he’d be able to mentally endure the backlash. But then, he wouldn’t have been able to summon Lylothia.

I did it, DeSean thought woozily, a smile growing on his face. I actually summoned a demon, an important one at that. Damn, I feel like a silly kid again.

DeSean wanted to laugh despite his condition. But a new development cut him off before he got to cheering and cackling like a madman. He felt a pinprick behind his ear, then he heard a voice⁠—Lylothia’s throaty and sultry voice.

“Can you hear me now, mortal?” asked the demoness.

DeSean glanced around him for her body but did not see anything. Nobody else was paying attention to him while he was sitting still, so he whispered, “Uh, yeah. How are you establishing communications?”

“Do not be impressed, mortal, for this is but a fraction of my capabilities,” the demoness said haughtily. “I’m upset with you. My introduction was ruined. I’ve been made to look silly.”

“I apologize,” DeSean said simply.

The demoness huffed. “Well, I’m still interested in you. I was listening closely to your world’s development, and hearing your exploits made you one of my key investments.”

She’s not putting all her eggs in one basket. There were a lot of questions to ask, but that could be saved for later. At least she implicated that the ears in the ground did serve a purpose. The demons were listening. Or at least the highly noble ones.

DeSean forced himself to climb to his feet, leaning against the truck. Quinton tried to help, but DeSean waved him off.

“There’s a lot I want to talk about, Lylothia, but we’ve been standing in an exposed position for too long,” DeSean said openly, hinting to the others he was communicating with his summoned demon.

“Since we’ve made contact, I can’t listen to your circumstances through the dimensional ear trumpets. It will take more mana to establish a direct perception connection. Please inform me of your situation.”

“How much do you know?” DeSean asked.

“You’ve used one of your gunpowder weapons to stave off an attack upon your caravan. Then you came to a stop somewhere in a windy and grassy place with bellowing animals.”

DeSean looked across the fields of tall grass rippling under the nightly wind. When he looked past the farm’s fence, he saw a pen for cows watching their caravan closely.

“Excuse me!” a male voice shouted from behind DeSean.

DeSean turned and saw the accountant waving at them. “Are we going to stay⁠—”

“Shut the fuck up and stay in the vehicle,” DeSean snapped.

“I’m inclined to believe you’re ordering around an imbecilic subordinate and not a might princess,” Lylothia hissed into his ear.

“Imbecilic subordinate.” DeSean turned away from the accountant. “Anyway, we’re going to move into the farm, but we have to clear the site of hostiles first. It’s not an abandoned place, and I don’t know if the farm owner decided to take up the offer of salvation.”

Lylothia harrumphed. “Salvation? Is that what one of the Heavenly Tyrants calls it? Well, no matter. The war grinds forward, and we must see you rise above the crushing wheels that break the backs of weaklings.”

DeSean held his breath, feeling an excited buzz.

“You have enough Attunement for me to boost your stats. But while I do so, I won’t be able to talk until you raise your Attunement further. Or you deny the stat boosts using your intent. Will this suffice, my little mortal?”

“It’s DeSean, or Seargeant Solomon, ma’am.”

Lylothia chuckled. “Survive, and impress me, my dear, and we shall better acquaint ourselves. I do not wish to know you so closely when your life is fleeting, like a little flame in a wintry storm.”

“I’ll take those stat boosts now,” DeSean said. Without another word, he felt the pinprick behind his ear fade.

DeSean felt like collapsing to the ground again. A surge of newfound strength kept him up on his feet. He felt heat around the joints and along his muscle fibers. His center of gravity felt smaller and easier to control. He didn’t know why, but he felt like he could do a backflip if he wanted.

The changes kept piling in from there. DeSean’s next breath was stronger, his wounds didn’t feel as impactful, and he had more energy. Even better, he experienced an electric charge across the surface of his brain, which led to his vision, hearing, and other senses sharpening. His mind felt clear. Faster, even.

“D, what is it now?” Quinton asked.

“I’m starting to wonder if going with you is a bad decision,” Mariah said.

“Have faith, child,” Allison said.

“Status Tablet,” DeSean said.

DeSean Dante Solomon (Basic Human)

Records: [Chaos Marked]

Main Path: [Locked]

Skills:

Od Level: 45 (+15)

Strength: 6

Agility: 7 (+5)

Endurance: 7 (+5)

Focus: 8 (+5)

Magic: 17

Free Od: 0

“Have faith indeed,” DeSean chuckled. Fuck yeah, the demonic magic choice worked out better than I thought! He still felt like his mana depth was shallow, and he was suffering through slight retardation, but he could push through that.

This was way easier than fully summoning Lylothia. He wasn’t a wholly dried-up fruit, and the humming current was back, even weak. On top of that, he felt the connection of another… force… supplementing his own aura.

Nice.

“Okay, I’m back, and I’m ready to go,” DeSean said. “We’ve delayed for too long. If there’s an Enlightened Chosen on the farm, they might be set up to take us on. Quinton’s going with me to clear the way forward. Allison, you’ll drive the truck. Mariah and Roberto will keep watch for the flanks. Everyone else will follow behind you.”

“Are we going to stay at the farm if it’s, uh, secured?” Roberto asked.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we get there,” DeSean said.

The kid screwed up his face.

“What D is saying is we’ll think about it further when we’re safer. It might not be safe enough for us to stay here too long.”

“I remember Mr. Riley being an old crodger of a man who won’t take well to trespassers,” Allison informed. “So, be wary of him or any of his family, taking potshots at us. I would hope this concludes peacefully, but….”

“Thanks for the warning, Mom,” Quinton said sincerely.

DeSean grimaced, looked across the gate, and tapped his finger on his rifle in thought. They’d been standing here for an awfully long time. How come nobody came out to see what they were up to? It spelled bad news, honestly.

“Let’s go,” DeSean ordered. Quinton pushed the gate aside while DeSean held overwatch. Then they stalked forward with guns raised, angling toward the farmhouse. There was a fence in the way that kept the cows penned.

“Do you see any bulls?” DeSean asked.

“Cows can trample, too,” Quinton replied. “But no, I don’t see any bulls. They don’t usually keep them with the cows.”

DeSean vaulted over the fence. Quinton swore under his breath and followed the Marine into the enclosure. They stalked between clusters of cows, the bovine animals watching them closely. DeSean looked back occasionally and watched Allison drive the truck down the trail, the headlights piercing through the dark.

The sedan with the family and the van of university students followed behind Allison. The vehicles were moving at a slow pace for them, which was a pace that required DeSean and Quinton to move at a faster clip.

Quinton was breathing a little harder by the time they made it across the cow enclosure. DeSean tossed him a mischievous glance, keeping his Agility and Endurance boost to himself. He started to scramble up the fence when Quinton’s hand clapped onto his shoulder.

“That’s going to lead to the bullpen, partner,” Quinton said.

“We’ll either go over this wall or go over the fence to our left.” The trail leading to the farmhouse was to their right, which would put them in direct line of sight of anyone watching their approach.

Quinton looked to the left. Darkness encroached as a cloud cover hid the moonlight and the shine of celestial eyes. DeSean could make out the outline of a barn with green sidings, but little more than that.

“That’s not half bad, actually,” Quinton said, able to see more due to his higher Focus. “Skip over the fence, circle around the barn, then we’ll have the backside of the house.”

“Now you’re thinking like a grunt.” DeSean bolted past Quinton and clapped him on the shoulder. The big blue-eyed blond swore again, hoofing it to keep up.

With the +5 addition to his Agility, DeSean could already tell he was moving faster, easier, and with more perk to his steps than ever before. It wasn’t a big increase to his overall mobility, but his years of physical training as a Marine made these incremental improvements feel magnificent. He wasn’t superhuman yet if you discounted his Attunement stat. Still, he could tell he wasn’t far away from surpassing human limits.

DeSean and Quinton got out of the cow pen without incident. They ran down a small gravel path winding between animal pens and crops. They slowed down when they reached a Danger Area⁠—the gap between the barn and their cover behind the farm animals. They crossed it carefully with their weapons up, covering as many angles as possible.

DeSean knelt at the barn’s corner, Quinton staying on his feet behind him. At the same time, Allison drove the truck to a stop in front of the house. The headlights illuminated a porch with two rocking chairs and a swinging bench chained to the ceiling. Nobody was standing on the porch waiting to greet the caravan with a welcome or a weapon.

“Could they have gone to bed?” Quinton asked.

It was late into the night, so there was a possibility there. But DeSean doubted a farmer out in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t be privy to all the noise the caravan made driving down to their farmhouse.

Allison honked the truck, the vehicle blaring obnoxiously.

“Mom,” Quinton groaned.

“I… wouldn’t say that’s a bad idea,” DeSean commented on Allison’s behalf. “If the farmers are asleep, they wouldn’t be now.”

DeSean was going to give it two minutes before he and Quinton started encroaching the house from the side. They would enter, forcefully if they have to, then clear the building. A low whimper somewhere inside of the barn caught DeSean’s attention.

DeSean and Quinton shared a look. They listened harder. The whimper sounded again. It didn’t sound like an animal. Not exactly.

DeSean signaled for Quinton to watch the house. Once the big blond affirmed with a nod, DeSean crept to the barn’s entrance. He stopped when he saw a strange, oily handprint on the white frame of the barn doors. Looked like blood.

DeSean carefully slid the door aside. He saw impenetrable darkness, forcing him to flip out his phone and use the flashlight app. He tucked the buttstock into his armpit and tread forward carefully. There weren’t any animals in the stalls, but he cleared each one methodically.

It’s not a good idea to check this place by myself. Standard operating procedures for room clearance would want him to have a four-man team at the very least. Four operatives could cover most if not all angles together.

Everytime DeSean moved to check a stall, he was exposing his back to a potential attack. That got his heart rate up. His added Focus was nice, but it wasn’t going to save him from someone who patiently waited for their opportunity in a dark corner out of his line of sight.

DeSean was clearing them successfully, though. He was about to check on the last two stalls when a gunshot rang out from outside.

He was out of the barn almost instantly, Quinton at his side. They sighted a bent-over old man with a shotgun pointed at the sky.

“Whoever you are, you ain’t welcomed!” roared the old man from his porch. “I tried ignoring y’all, but now you’re gonna get the business end of my long gun here if you don’t reverse your ass out!”

DeSean walked up to the side of the house, rifle up. Quinton walked ahead, his rifle lowered, raising a placating hand.

“Sir, sir, please calm down,” Quinton said. “We aren’t the type of people that like to disturb anyone’s peace willy-nilly. But right now there’s a state of emergency, and you might’ve seen it when you got the⁠—”

“I don’t care about some false messiah’s salvation! Whatever garn darn thing they put in my head, they better get rid of it. I know the government would come after me eventually, but y’all are a little too late to hound a man that’s already one foot in the grave.”

The old man kept his shotgun raised toward the air. He turned from the truck to Quinton and back. He seemed like he couldn’t focus on who to direct his ire toward. He was just going to shout angrily at anybody close.

Another person, a man in his thirties with a slight beer gut, walked out. He had a phone in his hand. “I got the cops on the line, and I’m about to tell them to come here if you all don’t leave!”

DeSean shot the phone out of the man’s hand, nearly surprisingly himself with his snap judgement and quick aiming. He fired again before the old man could respond with more angry rhetoric or a shotgun blast, missing the old man’s head on purpose.

“We don’t have time for this!” DeSean snapped. “Put your fucking gun down, or I’ll blow a hole through your head.”

To Quinton’s credit, he didn’t contradict him. He tensed up hard, however, holding in something that might not agree with DeSean’s tactics.

The old man gazed shakily at DeSean. He huffed and dropped the shotgun. “What now, varmint? You gonna shake our family down and hold us for ransom like it’s the wild wild west?”

“Quinton,” DeSean deferred.

“We want to settle down here temporarily and get a sense of what could be the end of the world,” Quinton said. “You may not be aware, but we just left behind the city, and we’ve been through a couple of conflicts.”

With me at the center of trouble, DeSean thought.

“I know this is awfully rude of us, but we’re facing desperate times, and my friend here is the type of Marine that’s a little twitchy,” Quinton said, throwing DeSean under the bus.

Eh, I deserved that one.

“Did you have to shoot my phone?” asked the younger farmer. “I wasn’t honest about saying I had the police on the line. I meant to scare you off.”

“It’s probably a good thing you didn’t call the police,” Quinton said.

“So, varmints like you can do as you please?” the old man spat.

“Because the police could be compromised, and we don’t have much time before Earth stops being home,” DeSean said. “So, are you going to let us in or are you going to let us in?”

“Um, I believe you repeated yourself there,” said the younger farmer.

“He did that on purpose, you idiot boy,” grouched the old farmer. “And the answer is no and no.”

DeSean considered taking things to the extreme, but the old man had stopped being hostile. DeSean had no good justification to force his way with pure violence. Not yet, at least.

Quinton shook his head. He looked ready to say something, but the driver’s door to the truck popped open. Allison came walking up.

“Mr. Riley, it’s been a long while! It’s me. Darrel’s girl.”

The old man, Mr. Riley, squinted at Quinton’s mom. His face wrinkled up with a beaming smile. “Allison! My, it’s been a long while indeed. You’ve grown.”

“You’ve been saying I’ve grown for twenty years now.”

“Doesn’t stop being true!”

Allison and Mr. Riley caught up, talked about the situation, and came to surprisingly friendly terms. DeSean’s group could be accommodated temporarily, at least for the night, but they had to stay away from the crops, animals, and the barn. Following those rules, they could park their vehicles around the farmhouse and figure out how the rest of the night would fair from there.

“Looks like things worked out for the better,” DeSean said as one of the women of the farmhouse came out to hand Roberto another pair of pants. Good.

“Yeah, seems like we scraped by even with you shooting at innocent civilians,” Quinton muttered lowly.

“I had to cut through the bullshit so⁠—” DeSean found a meaty hand grasping the front of his shirt and wringing it. Quinton gave him one shake before holding him close.

“Look, man, I’ll be honest with you and say that was highly disturbing. If you slipped up, you could’ve injured them. Or worse.”

DeSean blinked up into Quinton’s furrowed brow and wondered why he was getting berated. Oh, yeah, he hadn’t seen action like I have.

Quinton was saying more, and DeSean dialed in to hear, “...you gotta act with some restraint toward people, man. Even if the world is going to shit, what separates us from bandits is our decency as people.”

“Hm, nah.”

“Nah?”

“I probably won’t be decent toward actual bandits,” DeSean said, grasping Quinton’s wrist. “I also act how I see fit, and so far, we’re getting by pretty alright.”

“One of these days, your fast-acting, indecent actions are going to get someone killed.”

DeSean scowled. He threw the bigger man’s arm aside. There were no hard feelings. DeSean could see Quinton was stressed and uncertain. The blond did his job for the military without having his boots dirtied by another nation’s dirt. DeSean could still remember the feel of rubble and destruction he treaded over for miles.

He could still hear the strangled, blood-curdling screams of men wanting their mother’s embrace in their dying moments.

“You two done measuring dicks,” Mariah said, standing a dozen feet away.

“Hah.” DeSean snorted. “You’re like the little sister I never wanted.”

“I’m not little. I’m eighteen, and I act a lot older than you.”

“Wow, she’s eighteen. The world revolves around her now.” DeSean turned to Quinton.

The Air Force veteran shook his head and walked away. He joined his mom at the front of the porch.

DeSean and Mariah shared a look.

“How much you bet they’re hiding something in the barn?” he asked, keeping in mind the bloody handprint and the whimpering sound. He hadn’t finished clearing it.

“I was planning on checking later just to be sure it’s safe,” she said lowly. “If there’s anything freaky going on, it’s in the barn.”

“Just like TV?” DeSean asked.

“Yeah, just like….” She scrunched up her nose. “No! It’s not because of TV. It’s because I’m being smart.” Mariah tilted her chin upward.

You’re trying too hard, kid, DeSean thought. If he was searching for a little sister with a hard personality, Mariah might be in the running.