Questionable Origins 10 (1/2)

“Oh, me, oh ,my,” Lucius mumbled to himself. “I see, so that’s how things are.”

The old demon released the nephilim triplets from the fluffy embrace of his tails, allowing them to collapse in a small heap in the back of the wooden cart. Whatever he did while rooting around in their heads must’ve taken its toll, as they showed no signs of waking up. He stood up and casually waved his cane around, prompting a column of white sand to rise from the ground. It assumed the shape of a giant hand that grabbed hold of Kora and Boxxy’s magical coffin and gently unloaded it from the vehicle. Once both he and the object were safely on the ground, he turned to face Xera with a business-like smile.

“Your master is a clever little box, isn’t it?” he remarked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked while crossing her hands.

“It managed to piece together that what is happening to your fiend-friend is not, in fact, caused by the Demonbane curse.”

“Are you sure you haven’t gone senile, old man?”

“Quite sure, yes,” he grinned a little wider. “Now, you and your spidery friend over there are obviously ignorant on the matter, so allow me to impart some knowledge on you. However, I must insist on a bit of privacy first.”

Lucius took a deep breath and stabbed the bottom of his cane into the sand beneath his feet. The luxurious palace-like building in the background dissolved into a multi-colored mass of sand that began spinning around him and his ‘guests,’ creating a swirling dome of prismatic dust. It blocked out the countless flickering stars overhead, replacing them with a crude imitation of a blue sky complete with blurry white clouds and a fake sun to provide light.

This trick’s purpose was, as Lucious implied, to obfuscate their presence from all prying eyes and ears, especially those belonging to the Goddess of Chance. Having met with Boxxy and its crew a few times over the past two years, he was well aware that Nicholas liked to broadcast its adventures for all the Beyond to see. Which, given the sensitive nature of the information he was about to divulge, was simply bad for business. Admittedly the djinn’s guests had yet to pay for his services, but he would simply bill their boss afterwards.

“Very good!” he cheerfully declared. “Now, to clarify on my earlier point. You see, the Demonbane hex does not simply destroy demons.”

Yet more sand swirled around him, clumping together into the shape of a miniature six-armed fiend just above his open palm.

“It unravels the bonds that hold together the lump of thoughts, emotions, grievances and resentment that we call a soul.”

He smacked the mini-fiend with his cane, causing the sand to explode and disperse into a small cloud.

“Lesser demons are incapable of pulling themselves back together, as it were, and would simply dissolve into the Beyond’s background noise. But a Ranker is made of sterner stuff. For those of us who have ascended past the state we are born in, we would not be faced with oblivion, but a downgrade.”

The floating dust particles then began to reassemble back into a mockery of Kora’s form, only this time it was missing a pair of arms.

“Yet that is not the fate that awaits that girl over there. Rather than being reduced to a simpler iteration of herself, she is instead facing total collapse.”

The fiend-shaped lump then crumbled into a pile of sand that fell on his palm and slipped between his fingers as it rejoined the rest of the Pearly Dunes.

“So then… something else happened besides the Demonbane exposure?” Xera asked.

“Tktktktkt,” Drea chittered as she revealed herself. “Those guys were using a lot of strange magic. Maybe that was responsible?”

“Not quite,” Lucious rebuked her. “Looking into the memories of those three whelps has allowed me to pinpoint the cause. Observe.”

The sands of the desert began swirling and forming together in accordance to his will yet again, only this time the scale was much bigger. Rather than a miniature demon or a fake mansion, what they formed instead was an entire street, complete with people, fences, lamp posts and houses. Xera and Drea had some difficulty recognizing the place, at least until they saw sandy duplicates of the nephilim sisters.

It was at that point they realized this was a reconstruction of the scene where Boxxy found Kora. It then became apparent that ‘reenactment’ was a far more apt description, as the imitation triplets began moving. Robin was leading the other two, obviously trying to cover them with her wider frame. A cultist bearing a creepy-looking hammer then appeared out of a corner. He raised his weapon and prepared to take a swing at them while screaming some garbled nonsense that vaguely sounded like ‘For the Mistress!’

“Oi! Don’t you dare touch my kids, you worthless sack of shit!”

Kora’s massive body then appeared from behind the triplets’ backs, punching the cultist in the face so hard that he crashed into the building across the street.

“D-dad?” Robin mumbled as she stared up at the fiend’s back. “Is that you?”

“Heya, kiddos,” she winked at them over her shoulder.

“Father!” Lydia gasped.

“Daddy!” Madeline cheered.

“Sorry I let you out of my sight,” Kora added as she turned to face a group of cultists in front of her. “It won’t happen again.”

She then proceeded to beautifully pummel the humans into the ground over and over. Her experience acting as Boxxy’s meat shield was showing, as she expertly protected the girls while simultaneously dealing with the rabble. The first assailant then reappeared, swinging his cursed hammer straight into her left guard. The demon blocked it, but the arm she used to do so crumpled like paper as she screamed out in agony.

“Suffer, heathen!” the man gloated when he saw her reaction.

“No, you!” Kora retorted.

She then tried to boot him in the face, but her kick lost all power when her opponent parried it with the handle of his hammer. What followed was a brief exchange of blows between the two of them. However, Kora was obviously on the losing end. Having lost the element of surprise and with the cultist constantly regenerating, she was not able to force him back like she had initially. The Demonbane weapon, on the other hand, repeatedly broke through her defences no matter how hard she tried to block it. It would not have been as big of an issue if she dodged out of the way, but that would mean giving the bastard a free shot at her daughters.

The triplets, on the other hand, were mostly powerless. Robin, who was unarmed, and Madeline, who was not a fighter, could only stare with bated breath. Lydia tried to use her Priest magic to restore Kora’s vitality, but it was clearly not enough. They couldn’t just run away, either, as those damned cultists kept coming at them while Kora was busy with the hammer wielder. They had to be close enough to her so that she could swat the hooded creeps away at a moment’s notice, but that only opened her up to taking more hits from the Demonbane.

It didn’t take long for the archfiend’s strength to finally give out. A nasty blow to her knee had broken it completely, forcing her to stumble and fall to the other. Three of her arms had suffered multiple fractures and dangled uselessly from her shoulders while a fourth was already disintegrating from the fist up. Her opponent smirked under his hood and brought down his weapon upon her head, which she just barely managed to catch by grabbing both sides of its head with her two remaining arms. The cultist struggled to liberate his weapon, but the archfiend’s grasp proved to be far too solid for him to do that despite her gritting her teeth from the pain.

“Why must you stand in my way!?” the man howled at her in frustration. “You’re just a heartless demon! The lives of those three abominations should mean nothing to you!”

“Abominations?” Kora growled, her anger surging forth like a raging rapid. “You dare say that about my kids? My kids?! They’re worth a hundred million of you pathetic fucks!”

Surging forward with newfound strength, the demon finally wrestled the hammer from the man’s hands. Now disarmed, the cultist had no way of stopping Kora as she began to viciously pummel him into the ground with his own weapon.

“Fucking! Worthless! Piece! Of! Shit!” she enunciated between each strike. “You dare! My kids! They’re mine! Mine I say! You can’t! Have them!”

She tenderized him over and over and over until he was left as a literal bloody smear against the cracked pavement. She had crushed him so utterly that even his supercharged vitality could not keep up with the demand.

“As for your stupid-ass toy!” she howled. “It will never hurt what is mine ever again!”

The archfiend then let go of the weapon, making it momentarily float in place before gravity could pull it to the ground.

“Shield Crusher!”

Kora then struck the item’s business end from the left and right with her fists, from below with her knee, and from above with her forehead. The simultaneous attack proved too much for the hammer to withstand, causing it to shatter and explode into dozens of fragments, many of which embedded themselves in the fiend’s body. Kora then stumbled backwards and began to fall.

It was at this moment that the sand-fueled theatrical presentation came to an abrupt halt.

“Did you see it?” Lucius asked the other two demons.

“All I saw was an idiot doing something unnecessary,” Xera sighed.

“S-same here, tktktktk…” Drea mumbled while twiddling her claws.

“Exactly!” the old fox exclaimed, his smile so wide it made his face seem broken. “An archfiend risking her immortal existence to protect a mortal of her own volition!”

“Isn’t that just, like, parental instincts?” the ex-succubus pointed out. “She’s a moron so I can see her falling for such-”

“Nonsense!” he interrupted her. “Demons don’t have such trifling drives! Or do you believe your own mother would ever stick her neck out for you like that?”

“Ugh…” she groaned. “No, I sincerely doubt she would ever do that.”

“But then… why did Koralentrepix, tktktktkt, do that?”