Chapter 6-174: The Portal is Closed (1/2)

“Hah, hah...” Sergeant Hilda was hyperventilating, looking around and knowing she should be dead. Instead, she saw that the ground around the three of them was untouched, and the devouring fires that had turned everything around them to molten ruin weren’t getting within ten feet of them.

Centered on Warrant Officer Sama.

The pale-skinned, dark-haired Dame Grace just closed her eyes and issued a prayer of thanks to providence and Mithar for sparing them to fight another day. She had not known that the demon would blow up on death, but it didn’t change her resolve at all. Destroying it was something that had to be done, and perhaps one of the greatest uses of her life possible.

If there was one way for a mortal to sell their life, taking out a balor had to stand near the top of the list!

Sama stood up, staring at the white-hot center of the explosion, drawing a slight smile at the sight of the vivisized stone starting to spread out into the area and devour the demonic essence distributed by the explosion.

Then there was that hugeass Sword, eight feet tall, driven into the molten ground by its own weight, glowing with heat over there.

“Tremble!” she snarled to nobody in particular, took three steps, and jumped.

Tremble’s song was joyous as she hacked down into the jagged Blade, cutting a gouge a foot deep into the demonic metal, searing it with vivic flames, Blessed energies, Sundering, Breaking, Axiom, and Banefire. The mixed array of energies began to burn at the thing, devouring the Evil and Sin it was empowered with, and Tremble began to feed.

Sama left her Sword there to devour the balor’s Weapon. The Damned thing was a Zeks Sword, 72k of gold value, 144 goldweight. Properly Burned and Devoured, it was worth months of work and effort, and she was definitely going to make use of it.

“Everyone with a Named Weapon, bring it here!” she shouted out crisply, totally ignoring the dazed looks on everyone’s faces. “And do not touch that Whip!” she added, pointing at the barbed thing lying amid the molten ground, untouched by the blast.

Her Floating Forge unwound from her back as she walked towards the Whip, staying above the molten ground. She grabbed the meter-wide Disk from where it was floating, and without ceremony, used it to shovel the Whip up off the ground from where it was laying... and the Forge naturally lit up with its built-in Pattern for digesting magic items.

The Whip writhed, but could not escape the Forge. Sama walked up out of the blast area as the rest of the company gaped at her, set it on the ground, and started to build an empowerment Pattern around it.

“Smith! Put a Disk up above this! Everyone who wants some free empowerment for their Named Weapons, stack them on the Disk, and sit down to guide the power into them! Everyone else, stand watch!”

With a crunch, a certain Gritworks mini-gun was the first Weapon to come down on the Disk. Sama raised an eyebrow.

“I have just Named him Demonbane,” Hilda declared in satisfaction, while Dame Grace put her personal Sidearm onto the Disk as well. Threads of vivus were already starting to spiral up to the Weapons, so Sama just pointed for them to sit down as she gouged out the Empowerment Pattern in the soil.

With shouts, the rest of the women who had appropriate Weapons, berated into Naming them during basic training by Sama, hurried forward to deposit them. In the end, a dozen Weapons were scattered on the Disk together, and all their wielders sat down in the circles of the Pattern on the ground to guide the Empowerment.

It was enough to take each Weapon from Einz to Zvei. Twelve goldweight was not an amount to just pass up so easily!

Multicolored flames were spitting demonfire sparks on the massive Sword, while the Whip was writhing and burning in her Flying Forge’s fires. Sama looked around coolly, especially up at the sky, where the Shroudcloud was dissipating back into normal Haze.

There was still a line of chaos in the sky, and Sama’s eyes turned in the direction of the border.

Well, it looked like things were making trouble there, too. She would have to do something about that...

==========

Back to the present...

“Wait, you’re the Guardian Bitch of Portal?” I had to blurt out. Hey, I didn’t make up the name.

Sama smiled smugly. “Spent the rest of my tour there. Wasn’t as horrible as it could have been.”

With the border officially smudged there, and lots of fallout from the rupture in the Veil, Elemental and Fey spirits had started trying to force their way across the border, damaging the marker stelae there and trying to get free to wreak havoc as they pleased.

Into that bit of chaos had strode the Guardian Bitch of Portal, who had erected a Challenge Circle right between the border markers there and taken on all those spirits, one by one, using first a borrowed Sword, and then her own, over the following week.

Nothing had gotten past her. When it stepped into the Circle with her, she hacked it apart. Spirit after spirit, from wind walkers and air Elementals to wendigos and dream-eaters, had entered that circle to cross the border and had been hacked down. She hadn’t used vivus on them, so they weren’t perma-dead, merely returning to wherever to be reformed and reincarnated, but not once had she lost.

Standing there all night long, daring them to come down from the wilds of the north, and when they did, they died.

The Circle of Portal was one of the most famous Challenge Courts in the world now. The best melee combatants in the country went there to test the spirits of the north and stop them from passing the border. If they lost, or nobody dared to challenge the spirit, it could pass the border without further effort.

Oddly, none of the really powerful spirits had materialized there after Sama stopped coming, as if those challenging them were unworthy of them. It had irked some of the egotistical Dragon Warriors looking for a fight, but when they started to get beaten up by less powerful creatures, they finally realized what she had managed to do, and went home chagrinned and ever more eager to get stronger.

She’d always been Masked; the troops there never mentioned her name, and it never got into the media.