Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (detective books to read txt) 📕

“Go!” I ordered my magical allies, pointing my black crystal staff at the Doomsday Demon. “Go and do your worst, fellas!”

As toads started to fall from the sky and drop onto the Doomsday Demon, the Undead Wolverines bounded away, but the Lighting Skink took the lead. The slick, sinuous thaumaturgical beast shot forward, blue lines of energy running along its gleaming flanks and its glassy teeth bared. It closed on the demon like a cheetah and leapt straight for its throat, claws slashing as it propelled itself through the air.

It hit the Doomsday Demon and froze. It spasmed violently, glitching in and out of existence as smoke rose from its predatory body.

“Shit!” I cursed.

The Undead Wolverines dived into the flank of the Doomsday Demon, like a bunch of overzealous NHL defensemen piling onto an opposition center. They too froze as soon as they came into contact with their foe. They started twitching, their undead flesh smoldering.

It was obvious that the Doomsday Demon was surrounded by some demonic aura that melted flesh and magic alike. The body of the Lightning Skink was sucked into the Armageddon Sphere in the form of ectoplasmic goo. The Undead Wolverines did the same. Along with every last toad that fell from the sky.

“Fuck!” I yelled.

The blue light from the sphere was glowing brighter and brighter. I imagined it would not be long before some poor guards from the Castle of Ascendance came up here to investigate, like a bunch of hot blondes inadvisably exploring the basement in your typical B-grade horror flick. I guessed that their initial reaction would be to try and kill this Doomsday Demon with conventional weapons. They’d be wiped out as easily as one, two, splat.

“Leah!” I yelled. “Can you rig up a bit of magic on the door that will stop anyone stumbling in here and getting themselves killed?”

Leah gave me a thumbs-up and a wink and headed for the door, taking the circuitous route around the Doomsday Demon.

“You’re not going to say anything? No empty words of good luck?” I called after her.

Leah turned. “I was going to make a joke about your luck and life,” she said, “but life beat me to the punch!”

She had a point there.

“Great, Justin, very selfless, you’ve taken care of the potential collateral damage like a good boy,” I said to myself, “but those good intentions are going to come to the square root of absolutely fucking nothing if that Armageddon Sphere goes off! Now, think, man, think!”

Leah was back in no time at all. She fired ribbons of sparkling Chaos Magic at the Doomsday Demon as she ran toward me, but her spells were absorbed by the hellish entity just as easily as they had been before.

“Well, I’m out of ideas,” she said with resignation as she pressed her back to the statue of a fat Orc that we were sheltering behind. “I wonder what it’s going to be like to be blown into dust and then compressed into a single atom—if that’s what’s going to happen.”

“Wait—be quiet a second,” I said.

Something that Leah said to me a few minutes before had only just sunk into my brain.

“How do you kill something that is more myth than living being?”

“...something more myth than living being…”

“...more myth…”

You fought fire with fire, didn’t you?

Maybe you had to fight myth with myth.

We needed a myth of our own.

And I just so happened to have one dangling at my belt.

Time was of the essence, and only time would prove whether this theory of mine held any credence.

I stepped out from behind the statue, ripped the wooden capture orb from my belt, and threw it toward the Doomsday Demon.

“Fuck it,” I said, “let there be dragons!”

The dragon I had captured expanded into being in the blink of an eye.

It was as long as two buses, amber in color, with a pair of eyes that were completely black except for the vertical amber pupils.

It looked regal, it looked legendary.

It looked like the embodiment of light, the very antithesis of the Doomsday Demon.

“Go get it, big boy,” I growled.

The dragon might have been old—ancient, in fact—but he had lost none of his zest for a good fight. Dragons, so I had learned since defeating this one in a battle of wills, fought until they died. There was no such thing as defeat for a dragon. They either won or they gave up the ghost.

The dragon lumbered toward the Doomsday Demon, which regarded it with the same frosty contempt that it had reserved for Leah, Mallory, and I. It looked scornful right up until the dragon hit it with a burst of the gelatinous amber spray that it spewed instead of fire.

Mallory had once told me that the reason that Amber Dragons fired this amber goo instead of fire was because they preferred to eat their meat live. They encased their prey in porous amber, trapping it. It allowed the captured prey to still breathe through the dense, glutinous substance, but rendered them completely incapable of moving. When the dragon wanted to feed, it simply chewed up its victim and released all the blood and juices from the amber casing, which it then digested along with the victim.

I had no idea how this skill would translate to something like the Doomsday Demon, but I was sure as hell happy to find out.

The fact that the gelatinous amber affected the Doomsday Demon at all was a promising start. Whether it was because the spray of liquid amber was issued from a creature that was just as much part of the mythology of the multiverse as it was part of the physical world of Avalonia, I could not say for sure. All I knew was that the deluge hit the