The Geiger relic had long been dormant, powered down to save the sanity of everyone within a half-mile radius of its incessant clicks, chirps, and other unscrupulous noises. Walking five miles westward or eastward did nothing but squander a day away. In total agreement, they accepted their fate at the hands of the radiorum. This was the point of no return. The job had to be seen through to completion, so said Confessor Genesia. Mostafa was the only one to hesitate, but even then, he still agreed. They all had their reasons, whatever it may have been. They all had a chance to turn back, to return to civilization and live a life with minimal scarring.

  Just beyond the edges of the scattered tree-line stood a conglomeration of uniquely rectangular, square-like structures, made from what appeared to be concrete. Many of them had iron bars positioned within very squarish gaps in the walls, resembling some underground dungeons that Claudia knew of. Further building the skyline behind it were structures of various materials, all with different designs, some human, some not, but all were laid out in an identical foot print of the pre-cataclysmic city.

  “I thought everything was destroyed in an explosion?” She mumbled aloud. “Mostafa, does the map show a layout of the city?”

  He walked up beside her and laid out the old map in front of them. “I don’t got any detailed ones. Just a rough approximation of the terrain and locales.”

  “Then we’ll have to map this out ourselves,” she said with determination.

  “Wait a minute!” he objected. “You can’t be serious. We’ve seen that it’s still standing. We did what we were hired to do. We can go back, get resupplied—”

  Claudia pressed a finger to the man’s lips, silencing him. “We’re not done yet. This city is supposed to be nothing but a memory. Someone rebuilt it.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Boris joined in with the question. “And if someone did, I’m pretty sure we’d be inventing a problem walking blindly into it.”

  “I need to know…” her voice trailed off. Her curiosity had thoroughly peaked, not with gleeful excitement, but in abject fear. Her heart sank into her stomach and she swallowed a particularly large globule of saliva. “Grandfather Iovinus needs to know if the inquisition will have to be reinstated.”

  The word set Mostafa and Boris off. “Inquisition?!” Boris echoed his concerns with a raised tone of voice. “You can’t be serious. The inquisition will burn this entire region to cinders. What if there are other humans in there? Ones who survived the cataclysm?”

  “No human could’ve survived the cataclysm,” she said, lowering her head and removing her helmet. “Whatever you know of Huma’s history, throw it away. It’s propaganda created by the throne. Pre-Cataclysm, the country was known as Emporia. When the old gods fell out of favor, Torcall fell with them. Late into the third era, humanity discovered something that bordered on insanity. There was a massive device designed to test the boundaries of science. They called it a particle collider.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m getting to it,” she sneered. “This device, instead of proving science correct, ripped open the first rift into the hells.”

  “Bullshit,” Morgan commented. “I was told that the hells arrived because the gods abandoned us.”

  “One of the many false stories designed to protect humanity’s dignity. Leaders of every generation shifted the blame from hubris to outside influence, to justify everything that followed. Regardless, four thousand years of war saw much of this region depopulated and glassed. There was a big containment facility here that failed and exploded. It released so much energy that it vaporized everything within twenty-miles of it.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  Claudia cracked a wicked ear-to-ear grin beneath her helmet. “I have my ways. Believe it or not, I’m well connected within the church.”

  “If everything was vaporized, how do you explain all those concrete structures?”

  “I can’t and that’s what has me absolutely stumped. None of this should exist, and yet it does. The only logical reason is that someone came back and rebuilt the city, but who, when, and why?”

  “So, then, confessor, what’s the plan?” Boris asked.

  “Same as always. We go in, investigate, and bail. I fear we may find a whole demon colony here, and if we do, we cannot stay.” She pulled the Geiger relic from her hip and flipped the switch. The relic chimed consistently, with the needle flicking between yellow and green. The device detected a higher dosage of the radiorum. She surmised that the city itself would likely have the heaviest concentration. “I don’t know to what effect the radiorum will do to us in such a high concentration.”

  There was a silent nod of acknowledgement from the three men. They’d already once agreed to their collective fate and did so again, albeit with slightly more hesitation than before.

  As they neared the city limits, the wild and natural ground gave way to pavement, old and cracked, weathered to near unusable. Any markings had long since disappeared, but it served as a clean and speedy way into the city proper. Walking along the smooth blacktop road, they glanced at the various structures around them. Reminiscent of a brutalist-era construction, a post-hellish invasion construction style that used the least amount of resources, the structures lacked any design, featuring plain scratchy, undyed concrete walls. Windows were made of thin glass panes, locked in place.

  At the intersections of the streets were tall metal poles with lanterns posted atop, although in the daylight, they were unlit. Looking down the side street, row-houses lined the road with concrete stairs going up to each door. The lack of paint made the entire block look like one giant building rather than separate units. If the domiciles were inhabited, then their residents lacked any creative interests.

  “Should we knock?” Morgan asked.

  “I don’t know if anyone is home,” Boris commented.

  It was eerily quiet when Boris walked up to the door of the dwelling. At first, he kept his knocks soft, hitting the door two or three times before waiting. After the third try, he straight up slammed a fist into the door. Still, no noise echoed from inside the house. “It’s locked, and no one is home.”

  “It is the middle of the afternoon. Perhaps they are at a workplace?” Claudia thought aloud. She then called back to him, “Try the one next door.”

  Boris walked up to the next door and slammed a fist into it twice. He heard movement from inside as something stiffly walked toward the door. Locking mechanisms inside came undone, and the door cracked open. Light flooded inside a darkened space, revealing a humanoid figure with blue skin and horns, wearing seemingly casual loungewear. The door then slammed shut before Boris could get a word out and the locking mechanisms reengaged. “The hell?”

  The door then re-opened. Standing at an impressive six and a half feet of well-defined muscularity with faded olive green skin, the one-tusked orc glared down at Boris. He wore no shirt, but the animal skin kilt made him look even more barbaric than most orcs. “What do you want?” he asked with a very strong bass-heavy voice.

  Boris took a step back, intimidated by the orc’s presence. His words were lost entirely.

  Claudia removed her helmet and quickly moved to position herself between the orc and Boris. She put on her best public-relations face, a wide smile and upbeat voice. “I apologize for the interruption to your day, sir. My companions and I are looking for the city-center. Could you, by chance, give us directions?”

  The orc rubbed the back of his head, saying, “yeah, just follow the main road on the left there. At the end of it is a T-junction. Go left, then take the second right and follow that to the end of the street. It’ll dump you right into central park where the town hall is.”

  Claudia bowed her head with a deep inhale. She smelled something familiar inside the dwelling. “I appreciate it. Have a good day.” She then turned about, hurrying down the steps to her traveling companions.

  “Where are we going?” Mostafa asked.

  “Follow me,” she replied. She equipped the helmet and led the way, taking one last glance at the dwelling. She had smelled the rotten odor of a demon. If not for the orc, purging it would’ve been easy.

  ***

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The orc closed the door on them. He hesitated for a moment, then looked through the peephole. He recognized the armor, the helmet. The shimmer it radiated discomforted him. Torcall had come to bring havoc to his home, and he’d dodged it by the luck of the rabbit’s foot he kept affixed to his belt. He placed a firm hand on it. It was still fuzzy, still emanating that same lucky feeling he’d always known it to. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  From the other room, a feminine voice called out to the orc, “Are they gone?”

  The orc pushed off from the door, slapping the locking mechanism active. “You can come out now. They just wanted directions.”

  A small faded-blue humanoid, roughly five-foot tall with horns that spiraled over her head toward the back, stepped out from around the corner; a hellion of Vamtimai. “Oh good. I was afraid they’d come for little ol’ me.”

  The orc walked over to her and scooped her up, bridal style. “Worry not, Xensha. I’ll keep the Torcallists far away from you, no matter what it takes.”

  The hellion gave him a genuine smile and wrapped her arms around his massive neck. Pulling herself up, she planted a kiss on his cheek. “Good,” she whispered. “Shall we go lie down and enjoy the afternoon?”

  The orc nodded and walked toward their shared bedroom.

  ***

  Following the instructions given to them by the orc, they found themselves at the end of an alleyway, with no other exit than to go back the way they came. The structures around them had plenty of doors and windows overlooking the corridor. Each floor had a balcony made of wrought iron. Some rugs hung from them, likely being aired out after a day of washing.

  Boris looked to Claudia, then to the balconies above. “Damnable orc gave us bad directions.”

  Claudia paused and thought about it. “No, I don’t think it was bad directions. I think it was deliberately misleading. There’s something going on and he didn’t want us to know about it. The place reeked of the stench of Vamtimai. I should’ve expected false guidance.”

  “That’s the great deceiver, right?” Morgan inquired.

  “You have been listening, good.” She complimented, in her own belittling-sounding way. “We’ll double back out of the alley and try a different road. I hate that they designed this place to be a maze.”

  However, as they doubled back, they found themselves accosted by a bipedal creature with dark scales that shimmered like an oil spill in water. It towered above them by several feet, resembling a large crocodilian beastfolk, but behind its head was a massive crown, like a giant scaled fan. Boney protrusions stuck out at regular intervals, showing where and how the bone gave it a flared shape. It was rigid, not able to be retracted like some nuisance lizards.

  Six-inch claws stretched from its polydactyl fingers. A massive battle scar stretched from the front of its lip all the way back to its right eye. It had scarred over, but the chunk of flesh missing from its lip revealed a newly grown tooth.

  He wore a kilt made of dried reeds glued down to a thin cloth and held up with a thick leather belt. Across his chest was a large circular metal medallion held in place by a leather harness, the only actual form of armor he wore. Resting on his shoulders, pinned beneath his arms, was a large double-headed fan pole arm. Made of a solid wooden core, a large bronze hand-fan-like blade was mounted to both ends of it. Lapis lazuli decorated the faces of the pole arm.

  “Oh, today is going to be a fun one,” he said with a lowly growly voice that rumbled with each consonant spoken. He tilted his head to the side, cracking the joints in his neck audibly, then lowered the pole arm off his shoulders. He turned to face the group and, with a disappointed sigh, asked them, “For what reason is a priestess of Torcall doing all the way in Orzzorik? No, wait, let me guess: The church wants you to reclaim old human history?”

  “And what’s a crocodilian beastfolk doing serving demonic masters?” Claudia snapped back.

  He breathed in, expanding his chest in a non-threatening way. As he breathed out, a hiss escaped his lips. “I suppose one could say that I found a new job that came with benefits,” he said and parted his mouth, showing off shimmering pearly white teeth. “I got dental.”

  Claudia dragged her tongue across the surface of her front teeth. It felt grody, slick, and almost slime-like. She’d left her toothbrush back at the church dormitories. She shook the thought from her mind. It was irrelevant to the situation at hand. “I want to meet the person in charge of this city,” she demanded.

  The crocodilian beastfolk chuckled, although it sounded more like hissing through huffs of air. “You want to meet the archfiend in charge? That’s bold for someone of your insignificance, priestess. You must be new to the fields. You don’t even have large shoulder pads.”

  “New or not,” she spoke through gritted teeth. The crocodilian wore her patience thin. She only hoped that the other three were ready for a real fight. “Pads or not, I’m a sanctioned confessor of the Church of Saint Galvisius and have come to cleanse this land of its unholy ties to the hells.” There was no point in hiding it anymore. The armed guard before her would not be helpful.

  “Was it so hard to simply tell the truth?” He spat in a mocking tone. “You paladins and clerics are so determined to behave all godly that you just bullshit right alongside them. At least the demons tell it straight.”

  “That’s what they want you to believe. What pact have you made with the demons here?”

  “Is that an answer you really want to know? What if I told you that I could simply wave my hand and negate your magic? Would that get you to be less hostile to someone a year from retirement?”

  “Retirement?!” She raised her tone, almost breaking form into hysterical laughter. The idea of retirement while in a pact with a demon was laughable. Service to demons never ended, they were eternal. At least, until they ate the spirit of the pact holder. “You can’t be serious about that. Demons famously hold on to their pacts well beyond one’s death.”

  “Is that what the church teaches you? You’re more indoctrinated than I suspected.” He grabbed his doubled headed pole arm with his other hand and took a deep breath. There was a look of conviction that overtook him. “Very well. If you’re so convinced of Torcall’s teachings, then defeat me. If I surrender, I will take you to the archdemon. Otherwise, I release your spirit from its imprisonment with the megalomanic, self-titled ascended god. We have a deal?”

  That phrase ground something in her soul. Hearing the word deal felt jarring, like the crocodilian man before her was actually a proper demon in disguise. She quickly muttered a few words beneath her breath, and her eyes glistened with a gilded shimmer. She stared at her contender intently, analyzing him for any magical prowess that he may have. However, she saw no mystical aura around him. He was just another mana-less warrior. Her battle plan just got a lot easier.

  The crocodilian rolled his eyes and craned his neck, cracking the joints once again, and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. With no response, he let out a disappointed sigh. “So be it.”

  However, before the crocodilian could make a proper move, Mostafa stepped forward, holding his arm straight out at him. He flexed his wrist and something small and needle-like ejected from his leather bracer with speed and precision. The mini-dagger hit the crocodilian in the chest, piercing the flesh between his ribs. “Claudia, it’s your turn.”

  The sudden stumbled backward brought the confessor out of her analytical tunnel vision and she shook her mana-vision off. “Torcall protect us from the deeds of the devil’s servant before us, grant us your divine shielding!”

  A mostly translucent yellow bubble wrapped around each of them like some sort of magical barrier, and it moved with them. Boris drew his claymore and charged at the crocodilian and swung wide, but was met with the wooden haft of the pole arm which successfully deflected his swing.

  Morgan followed up after him, bringing down the maul only to have it deftly deflected with the flat face of the fan blade.

  The crocodilian countered with a forward shove, using the pole arm as a bodily extension to force distance between himself and the two men. Then he followed it up with a wide swing, cutting across Boris’ chain mail and sent sparks flying.

  Mostafa ran around the left flank and quickly swung the saber twice, catching the leathery skin of the crocodilian and put to gashes across his back. A slick green goo clung to the open wounds.

  The confessor raised her staff high into the sky, chanting loudly, calling upon the power of her god with unrelenting fervor. From beyond the clouds, a person-sized spear made of divine light came hurdling down and pierced the crocodilian in the chest. It detonated into a thousand and one fragments, cutting chunks out of his flesh and decorated his snout with gashes and cuts.

  It hurt the crocodilian quite a bit. Blood trailed down from his chest and puddled at his feet. Yet he still stood there, unwavering. The two men before him weren’t the threat, not to the same degree the confessor was. He braced himself and pushed off the ground, barreling forward, shoulder checking both men out of the way. Then, with one wound up swing, cleaved across the front of the heavily armored priestess. The fan blade cut across her armor, gouging its steel, but because of its softer nature, the bronze blade dulled almost instantly. Following through on the swing, he spun about, adding momentum to the follow up swipe which caught her staff and knocked her onto her back.

  Boris ran up behind the crocodilian and thrusted the sword forward. It pierced his back and ruptured out his chest with a gush of blood. He then forced the hilt down, which drove the blade up into the chest cavity before yanking it out. The wound left behind revealed the light from the other side and a gasp of air escaped from the crocodilian.

  Thump

  The crocodilian’s body dropped to the road without so much as a last-ditch fight. Claudia pushed herself back onto her feet with the help of Mostafa and approached the corpse. She scoffed and stepped over his unmoving body without so much as a single grain of respect for the fallen warrior.

  Boris turned to Morgan, who, while not offended, didn’t appear exactly thrilled by the fight that played out before them. Boris asked, “Why does it feel like murder?”

  Morgan pulled off his bucket helm. “Because these are people and not monsters like goblins or slimes. Corrupted by demons or not, I don’t think it’ll ever feel right. Got to do what we got to do. See the job finished and honor our end of the deal. It’s not like we have a way out at this point.”

  Boris tightened his grip on the hilt of the blade. The padding material had become so thin that he could feel the steel tang of the sword itself. It felt as uncomfortable as the emotions that swirled in his mind. “What about you, Mostafa?”

  The cartographer sheathed his saber. “I’m a pacifist. This entire trip I’ve turned a blind eye to Claudia’s reckless abandon with picking fights. With you guys.” He paused and smiled at them. “I know that when you two fight, it’s to keep us alive. The only reason I made the first move was so that she wouldn’t abandon us the moment the mission was done. She’s more than capable of going home without us. I didn’t want us to be left behind.”

  Boris wrapped his arms around him. “What would we do without you, brother? Smart thinking, though. I hadn’t even considered the idea of being thrown away.”

  “Between the three of us,” Mostafa began. “The fleeing hellion with the child, she’s not dead. I killed a boar and told her to evacuate the town. I think they’re all in Carrhae.”

  Morgan slung his maul over the shoulder and equipped his bucket helmet. He then walked away, not wanting to hear anymore of it. He remembered the fogginess that overcame him after Claudia banished the succubus. For now, he buried that secret alongside his own, even if it made his heart and moral compass ache.