The Specter is one of the more powerful apparitions. Much as the wraith they are unable to do anything in sunlight. Like the wraith their touch is also draining, but the specter drains away not your life force but who you are. Draining away your skill and competence along with your vitality. While they do retain the appearance of the life they once held, they have lost everything of what they were. Some cases of rough understanding have been reported but do not doubt that any specter has already gone mad in their hatred for those who still have life. They are sometimes confused with ghosts, luckily ghosts are more dangerous but they also still have a sense of self and who they are. – Common Monster

Adrian

This is going to be difficult, they should be resistant to magic and elemental damage as well. Does my magic count as the same thing as far as magic resistance is concerned? I should be able to do something to my weapons, make them count as magical. I’ll try elemental energies first, but if that does not work I will have to try to get a spiritual attack to work.

More and more of these imps/quasits are manifesting and attacking, only a few have appeared close to me, one is quickly cut in half by K and the bloody fire that she created on her blade. The fiend was harmed by her attack and it begins to dissipate; its body fading into a red mist.

Abagail fires the rifle she is using at one of the fiends closer to the squatters, it is blown to bits but those bits are pulling themselves back together just as the wounds for the squatters’ firearms close themselves.

I pull out one of the many spears I still have in Void Cache and charge the iron spearhead with electricity as two of the fiends move onto my dimension and charge me. I move out of the way of one of them, they move about as fast as the Althaen soldiers did. The other I manage to hit with the spear, it was only a glancing blow but it was enough to let me know that the electricity did nothing.

At least the glancing blow knocked the creature away from me. The kinetic forces still do affect the quasits, just the damage does not stay if there was not a magical force behind it. I release a stream of fire at the fiend that my spear knocked back to test the effectiveness of my fire, ineffective.

I need something else, should I try frost fire? Or just skip to attempting to mimic some sort of attack on the demonic spirit that is controlling the physical body? Attacking the spirit if I can get it to work will be more effective. It would do more than just force the demon to retreat to wherever it is that it came from.

I hear a scream from Abagail, she got hit by something from these demons. Bryan moves out of the corner my eye. He moved to protect her, that is good. She won’t be able to harm these creatures. She really need to start performing the functions of a bard in a fight. Support.

I block another clawing flyby tackle from a quasit and try to freeze it with frost fire. There seems to be some damage from that. Their resistance to cold is lower than the resistance or maybe immunity to fire and lightning. It is not enough though, only a bit of the creature froze and they are getting larger and larger as they feast on the squatters. One of them is almost as big as a person now. The only reason why there are still some of them, the squatters, alive is that the fiends seem to fight each other over the flesh of the fallen humans.

K destroys another of the demons, I can hear both of the twins chanting something. Not the same spell but something to deal with these demons. A dull warm light appears near Lysan, the fiends within its small radiance seem to be moving slower and it is easier to counter them.

I strike at the nearby creature, willing my spear to strike its spirit rather than the physical form. The spear passes straight through the demon, not what I wanted, I think. The demon does not seem to be harmed. I defiantly did not strike it physically did I miss? Or did I hit the wrong dimensional space?

Whatever it was the quasit flees from me. Maybe I did hit or was close to hitting the spirit. This is harder than just creating fire and letting it go wild. I glance at the spear to see that it is indeed still there, though it has become partially transparent. Did I make it ghost touched?

I feel a demon claw at my leg and swing the spear at it, I try to force the spear to strike at the spirit of the demon once more. This time the spear does do something, it passed through dirt without any trouble, and after the shaft passes through the fiend it screams and flees from me. Then the spear flies out of my grasp. It just phased through my flesh, it was no longer a solid bit of matter.

This is not going to work, I relieve myself of the burden of sustaining the change to the spear and in begins to fall and become physical again. I hear a demon scream behind me, I guess K or Bryan killed another. One that was about to sneak attack me.

I need something else, I need to that change to something else that will hold together or not matter if the part that injures the demons leaves the rest. Projectiles maybe? Or should I try to make this shift and make some sort of soul burning fire?

I hear Abagail begin to sing some sort of song, I guess she has learned some sort of bardic music. I don’t have time to pay attention to the words but there is magic in them. I can tell that much, the fear of losing to these demons is fading.

I pull out the weapon that I have been using the most since this all began, a pistol. Perhaps I can make this change to the bullets as they are fired. As before it takes most of my focus to do whatever it is that I am doing. I think I am shifting the weapon to be more ethereal than physical.

Whatever it is, the bullet I fire passes through the nearest quasit without harming the physical form of the creature, but it is clearly in pain. This is doing something, at least it is causing more pain than the ice that my frost fire earlier did. I release a few more bullets at the creature though I have to slow down to make sure that the bullets are changed by my magic.

The demon ceases to act and the other fiends rush at the body and cannibalize it. Why would they do that? Is it because whatever I did does not harm the physical realm? The flesh is still usable for them maybe? Whatever the why, this does give me some easy targets. Even if they are growing from cannibalizing each other’s bodies.

I empty the rest of the magazine into the piled-up fiends. Soon all of the quasits are gorging on each other, and I am starting to doubt that this was a good idea. Unlike the growth I saw when they consumed the squatters, there does not seem to be a loss of volume when they consume each other. Is it better to fight the few dozen smaller fiends or a couple ones larger than an orc?

I see a torrent of blue fire burst out from behind the house. That is near the cellar’s entrance. Shit, there is fighting over there too. An explosion happened over there. Are they, my family, going to be ok? I need to deal with this and get over there. I can harm the creatures but they are just cannibalizing their fallen, this does not happen when K cut them down.

Both the physical and the spirit needs to be harmed to deal with these demons. Maybe if there was only a single creature this attacking the spirit would work but if they are going to just consume each other’s physical form for strength this is a pointless method of attacking. I glance at the others, they seem to be confused as to what is happening. Didn’t the trio fight some of these creatures back in Althrá.

“Do something that will harm their physical bodies.”

As I speak that they seem to jump back to the moment. Is this not something that they have seen before? K begins to chant something and a dark purple flame forms before she throws it at the demon pileup. The ball explodes once it contacts the now larger quasits. Some sort of variant fireball. It is laced with something else, probably negative energy. It was strong enough to harm them, though some of them were unaffected. The larger ones.

I guess their magic resistance is based on their physical form then. Could I just duplicate the spell K just did? That is a bigger spell than the others I have seen, how many can she cast? At least it stopped them from eating the ones who have fallen. There are only a few left, six to be exact. And they are not pleased with the end of their feeding frenzy. At least some of them were injured by K’s spell.

They charge us, faster than when they were smaller, I manage to shoot the one that went after me. It slowed the creature down but there was no lasting damage as my bullets are not magical, at least without me doing something to them. Another thing to add to my list of things to learn once I have the time. I switch to a spear as the demon recovers from the kinetic force of the bullet.

The others parry and attack the demons that went after them, though Abagail uses the same strategy I did to simply postpone them. The quasits are now all much larger and seem hardier. At least that is what I can see from the wounds that the others inflicted simply did not harm the creatures as much as they did when the quasits were smaller.

I defiantly shouldn’t use that method to kill demons again. Something to harm the body is required or they will just use each other for food. I am unsure of how to slay these things now, at least it is simple enough to dodge and block them. With whatever that light Lysan created they are only about as fast as an Althaen soldier though the force behind their blows is far greater. It is no wonder why these creatures were destroying that world.

We are pressed from the attacks of the fiends, as we are effectively fighting five against six. Abagail cannot handle being in melee with one of these, and I am struggling to keep my spear between me and the creature before me.

I cannot seem to do significant harm to it, though the trio and Bryan are able to harm their own enemies. The spells they placed on themselves or the weapons themselves are able to permit one to harm the fiends.