I lay another fist into the demon, and another, and another. Dashes of smoke spurted out of his mouth, his nose, his split lips, but no matter how hard I struck there would never be bruises. Blood did mar his face—my blood, smeared all over from my cut and aching knuckles.

Seething with fury, I grabbed the demon by the scruff of his shirt and drew him towards my face. From there it was easier for him to strike me. My mount was too loose and I hadn’t bothered pinning his legs.

“Fight back, Calas!” I screamed. “Coward!”

The boys around me cheered, eager for a real fight. However, the boy lying beneath me only blinked at me with eyes that were too human. If it weren’t for that single horn atop his head, and the fact that I’d been laying into him for five minutes straight to no effect, I’d have felt sorry for him.

“I won’t hit you, Algier,” the demon said calmly. “I’m not supposed to.”

“Then I’ll keep beating you until you’re dead!”

I struck again, harder than before, laying into him with reckless abandon.

Calas the enepsi watched me with no expression on his face. “But you’re bleeding. If you don’t stop bleeding, you’ll die.”

That only pissed me off more. I screamed at the top of my lungs and landed another blow with everything I had.

“Algier!” screeched a rasping, high pitched voice from behind me.

I stopped before landing the next punch. My hand was shaking; the pain had gone numb but the damage was clear as crimson. I turned slowly and scowled at the interloper.

A koryf towered over me, her wings unfurled behind her and blotted out the sun. She wore long black robes, and her habit had been cut so that two slender horns could poke through. She frowned down her furry squashed snout at me.

“You are in big trouble, young human,” she said in a voice as stern as a switch.

With a clawed hand she yanked me by the arm off of Calas and dragged me inside and into her study.

Mother Wysterly seated herself behind her desk and fixed me with a cold stare. “Is there a single day that goes by without you getting into trouble?”

She opened a drawer and slid a first aid kit across the table. I opened it up, took out a whole roll of bandages, and started wrapping my hand up in an excessive number of layers. It wasn’t like she’d know that it was unnecessary to bandage an entire hand for some cut knuckles, or that I was doing it to look cool in front of the other SOHINORA boys.

“Calas started it,” I lied.

“And if I speak to Calas, will he say the same thing?”

I hesitated. “Yeah.”

“Ridiculous. Why do you think I’ll fall for this? Lies are pointless and only hurt others, so why do you continue to spew them?”

“I’m not lying. He started it. He said my mother was evil.”

“Your mother is evil!” Mother Wysterly boomed. Her leathery wings spanned out and swallowed the tiny room.

I shied away from her. Those wings always made me uncomfortable. They were too large and never fit in any indoor setting, yet she insisted on taking me into this tiny study where what little light could enter in through the windows behind her would be blocked out.

“When my mama comes back,” I said, “she’s going to teach me to be a demon hunter.”

Mother Wysterly harrumphed. “Again with this nonsense. She’s not coming back. She abandoned you when you were a baby.”

Mother Wysterly was a rational creature—oppressively so. Whenever she outlined the crimes of my real mother, she left little room for opposition. While the demon nun’s rationale was right, I always had this sinking feeling in my gut which told me that she was so, so wrong. I idolised my mother. She was a world infamous demon hunter—what wasn’t to like? The SOHINORA boys thought the same, which only helped to further my belief against reason that she was the most amazing woman in the world. If they said otherwise, I’d hit them until they apologised.

However, no matter how much I wanted to hurt her, I knew I couldn’t. That was a lesson I’d been taught through pain of failure. So instead, I clenched my hands, letting blood seep into the bandages.

“In case your human brain has already forgotten,” Mother Wysterly went on, “I will remind you that a life in hiding is not something a child should have to go through. Furthermore, it is too dangerous for demon hunters to speak with their family. If your mother was ever caught speaking to you, then the Demon Hunter Assessment, Monitoring, and Violent Apprehension Specialists will almost certainly be knocking at our door.”

Mother Wysterly leaned in and her wings drooped to the floor. “They will torture you to get to Terra. I know you humans like to pretend bad things only happen to others, but that is a very real threat to you.”

I turned away and said nothing. Always, that was the way she spoke. This will get you killed, that will cause you harm. She treated me like I was made of glass, that I’d break from a short fall. That’s why I hated her: she assumed I was weak, when in reality I’d been fighting and growing tougher every single day.

Nodding as though seeing something she approved of, Mother Wysterly then opened a drawer and took out a metal box. She unlocked it with a key and opened it unceremoniously.

Inside was the most gorgeous gun I’d ever seen. A six-shooter with a swirling pattern engraved across its barrel, frame, and cylinder. I was so mesmerised by it that I reached for it without thinking. Mother Wysterly snapped the box shut and drew it away.

“This was delivered to us by an unknown demon, with a letter stating that it belonged to your mother.”

My heart sank. “What? She can’t be—”

“She’s not dead.” Mother Wysterly was one of the few demons I’d met who showed a modicum of understanding towards human emotions. “If that were the case, we’d have heard it on the news long ago.” She tapped a claw onto the box. “I’ve held this for over three years now.”

“But that’s mine! Give it back!”

Mother Wysterly set her large, deep set eyes into a frown. “Nothing here is yours unless I say so, Algier. Or has your human brain forgotten your circumstances once again?”

I settled back in my chair and scowled at the box. “No, Mother Wysterly. I’m the demons’ inferior,” I said bitterly.

“Algier!” she snapped. Her wings rose up and blocked out the light. “You are a human, but that does not give you the right to be a troublemaker. Until the day you learn to behave and become a productive member of society, you simply cannot be trusted with a gun. Have your ears heard me correctly?”

I bit my bottom lip, holding back a retort. I really wanted that gun—that gift from my mother. In a strange way, I felt it would bring me closer to her.

Straining, I answered, “Yes, Mother Wysterly.”

The demon nodded. “Good. Now go knit Calas a scarf and offer it to him as proper human apology.”

Volce glared at me with his black eyes narrowed. “Are you alright, human?”

I didn’t respond at first, then Volce snapped his fingers in front of my face.

“Hey, wake up! That source could be here any second now and I don’t need a partner who’s itching to get himself obliterated from reality.”

I rolled my eyes. “I was just thinking about human things,” I said dryly.

The deuce made a disgusted face then turned to look at the barren land below.

We were hidden behind an outcropping atop a short cliff. The placement of the cliff was completely without reason, like someone had ripped the thing out of the rolling hills around it. My assumption was that the lone cliff was the aftermath of a battle.

Below us stretched a long, dry ravine that ran parallel to the curvature of the outer wall. Divots ran along the top of the ravine and snaked their way up and over the cliff where we were hiding—the tell-tale sign of the glitching digressers circling around this land over and over. There was no foliage for at least a kilometre either. Nothing could grow if the digressers were running over the land in mass. Without foliage to keep their surfaces together, the hills were now turning jagged. The digressers didn’t help.

This was the place. I was confident that it was the right time, too, if a little early.

The wall itself was within an hour’s walk from us and the sun was just beginning to dip behind it. Despite the shade, the wall was relatively bright; a faint golden shimmer of demonic magic covered its smooth pearlescent white surface.

Not that we needed the light. Markus was waiting at a closer location, ready to intercept the estray when it appeared. He was going to put out enough fire that even the rocks would melt.

Volce hovered over and rapped his knuckles on my head. I responded by swatting him away.

“I swear,” the deuce said, “if you’re getting broken feet on me, I’ll smash you into a pile of pus right now.”

I closed my eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “It’s cold feet, Volce.”

“Why? How does your feet going cold stop you from fighting?”

“Because I’ll get a chill and get sick.”

Honestly, I have no idea why that saying means. The only reason I use those expressions is because they’re obscure, non-sensical, and positively human. Plus, every other human uses them. It made me feel like I was part of something.

“So, er,” Volce started. He leaned an elbow on my shoulder and kicked his feet up in the air. “You’ve got all of these cool plans set up, but what’s just stopping someone from sniping the damned thing?”

“Look at that ravine,” I pointed out. “It runs all the way around the Ring, I’m guessing. If this estray works anything like its digressers, then that hole was dug out by sliding around the same path for who knows how many years. That’s not something you can just shoot once. It’s going to take a beating.

“But while we do that, we need someone to keep the digressers at bay. Hence, Markus is on digresser disposal. Toll has some way to make themselves disappear, so we’re letting them harass the estray until we can find its sigil. Enzi can fight at both close and long range, but her long range capacities are limited. So we’re leaving her to patch up any holes in the plan: if digressers get past Markus, she disposes of them; if the estray gets too feisty, she backs up Toll.”

I clicked my tongue. “I would have liked to come up with a better plan, but when nobody wants to tell me what rabdoses they have stuffed in their inventory, it’s not possible. Then again, I doubt they’d having something better than what they’ve shown us so far. We’ve been in some pretty sticky situations so far; they would have revealed their hands by now.”

My face hardened as I watch the wall’s shadow creep over the ravine. That wasn’t completely true. In fact, I could think of two exceptions. Firstly, Markus was obviously holding back.

No demon gets onto the Council of Ones without some real power to back up their place. Too many demons think the easiest way to score a seat on the Council is to erase another demon. They’re right, it’s just that, aside from exceptional cases, they’ll never succeed. The Council has been known to send a large chunk of its members to deal with an unwanted pest who doesn’t agree with their place. That sort of firepower is not something a single demon can overcome, army or no.

What we’d seen from Markus so far was a lot of fire and not much else. Granted, using a rabdos that freely was outside the realm of normality; the ash needed to churn out that much fire would have been insane, and Toll had confirmed he was taking from his corporeal form. But I had my suspicions that he was far from his peak. After all, in the entire time I’d known him, he’d only ever used one glove.

The second concern was Volce. Despite his persistent claims that he could give a one name a run for their money—a claim he’d failed to hold up when Markus was trying to fry him, which he had repeatedly insisted since then that it was a consequence of not having a partner back then—I highly doubted he understood how powerful one names really were. Either that, or he was doing an incredible job of hiding his strength. Neither of those outcomes sat well with me.

“Okay, so we keep blasting it until it’s charcoal,” Volce stated. “What’s the problem?”

“Third parties.”

Volce cocked an eyebrow. “But you’ve told Berlin about this.”

“Correct. Because we need a bit of extra firepower.”

“Wait wait wait,” Volce said, waving his hands. “Who gets the elimination here?”

I flashed my teeth. “Me.”

“But—”

“I told the others that as long as we do our jobs, it’ll create more opportunities to attack the estray. That’s true. But if Berlin shows up, she’s going to pop a hole in that thing so big it could end it there and then. That’ll prompt them to jump on the defensive and try to stop her from attacking. In the ensuing conflict, I slip in and finish it off.”

Volce’s jaw dropped to the floor. “But what if she just erases it before you get a chance?”

I shrugged. “If it melts that easily, any of the other demons can beat me to it, so it makes no difference. However,” I gestured at the ravine again. “I’m doubtful that’ll happen. That thing is going to be a handful. Call it a hunch.”

Not only that, but the fact that there were literally thousands of digressers, all spawned from this one thing, meant it was exceptionally powerful. Oh, we needed all the firepower we could get.

After that, I just needed one hit with Everwant to find its sigil, and then one good stab with my knife. You’re probably thinking that there are way too many holes in this plan, and you’d be right. I needed a Hell of a lot of luck to make it work. Fortunately, I had a lucky demon on my shoulder.

That fight with Berlin flashed through my mind. She’d beaten me down in a single hit, then almost erased Volce besides. Luck couldn’t beat impossible odds, so I was hoping we could tip the scales enough for me to win.

Volce crossed his arms, furrowed his brows, and started rotating in the air. “So let’s just say you do manage to get the elimination—an event which is about as likely as pigs growing horns. What’s to stop you from getting ganked?”

“You mean us, right? You’re contracted to protect me.”

“See, this right here is why I find humans intolerable.”

I smirked. “How much do you know about the Culling?”

“Er, I know it’s fucking terrible.”

He was dodging questions, I noted. I leaned back against a rock, turning away and leaving Volce to watch the barren wastes alone. His eyes were better than mine, anyway, and I needed to take my mind off the upcoming fight. My heart was beating too quickly, and if I got myself worked up too soon I’d be exhausted when the fight began.

“It’s economics,” I explained. “The points you earn in the Ring of Betrayal are exceptionally high compared to most other Rings. Therefore, you want to earn and keep as much as possible going into the next round. The best way to do that is to have the whole party foot the five hundred point cost in order to reduce your personal losses. Therefore, everyone will want to form a party and, if possible, some of those party members will go on an elimination frenzy once they get to the next ring. After all, when the party splits up, you get a bigger share of the remaining points.”

“Yeah, but why not just eliminate everyone before hand?”

“Because the exit is always guarded by other Participants. We’re going to need numbers to push through, potentially forming an alliance with other groups.”

Which was why I was so frustrated with Markus being an elimination hobo. We could have traded those demons’ continued existence for help pushing through to the finish. After all, no matter how strong a demon is, they can always be defeated with overwhelming numbers or overwhelming rabdoses. Given how little information we had, I wanted both to cut down our chances of getting crushed.

Volce rubbed his chin. “Makes sense, I guess.”

Then the deuce’s eyes bulged open and he spun himself upright. He pressed himself to the rocky edge of the cliff for a closer view and gaped off into the distance.

Alerted, my heart began to pound in my chest, far faster than when I had been anticipating the fight to come. I scrambled over to the edge and peeked out. What I saw defied all of my expectations.

A dark line was forming on the horizon. As it drew closer, all I could see was the earth washed over by a black mass: thousands—no, millions of digressers writhing in the distance that made the land look like static.

At that point, I did get cold feet. How many years had this thing been here? How many digressers was it popping out of its broken self?

“Oh, fuck no!” Volce panicked. “Fuck all of this and fuck you for dragging me into it.”

I managed a grin. His panic actually helped to settle me a little. I have to admit, seeing a demon proverbially piss their pants is a wonderful sight to behold.

“Who’s getting broken feet now?” I teased.