Готовый перевод Настучать в бубен / Hit the tambourine: Глава 20-10

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Stepan reacted in time as his opponent's reserve grew and his aura seemed to open even wider, leaking power in huge volumes. Demonic pumping straight from Inferno. An old problem when fighting demons. They, if aided by their brethren, could be far more problematic than a mere spherical demon in a vacuum. Judging by the way this bastard has been drastically drugged, saving resources is out of the question. It's a perverse parody of divine assistance. The scarlet seal on the chest of the naked winged asshole with snow-white skin grows and covers his whole body in a fraction of an instant, becoming not just a pattern, but already an armour. And he immediately attacked, striking at a speed comparable to that of a shaman accelerated by the indwelling.

He would have laid down there. But, as in the training not so long ago, the shaman, who had updated the Goat's cheater summon, surrendered to the will of other people's instincts, allowing the spirit to lead the battle, while he recoiled into the background. The entity, animal, and simple, not able to be surprised, and therefore used to perceiving the world in a completely different way, was not used to falling into a stupor. It accepted the enemy's newly increased speed stoically, as a fait accompli, without wasting time on adapting and searching for a solution. Covered in a blanket of pinkish energy, like a pile of ghostly bubbles from bath foam, the enemy's limb struck with the power of an industrial press, no less. And yes, the blow was not with a hand, but very much with a foot, and with a U-turn, as if this turd had decided to fancy himself a Chuck Norris impersonator. Not fast, no, almost instantaneous! And still the Goat reacted, taking the blow on his crossed forearms and just flying away like a skittle, beautifully slamming his whole body into the wall of the house, which was already shrivelled after a lightning bolt from one of the spirits had struck it, and after the contact simply folded like a cardboard. Though it didn't look like much, it was a clever move, both to break the distance and to test his toughness and resilience, and he didn't have to worry about being vulnerable in the air, because the Goat was a master of short blink-and-jump.

He-they got up instantly, stretching with a crunch and tearing off the remnants of his spell-damaged clothes and battle-scarred cloak, leaving only his trousers and his belt, on which dangled a pair of the last of his puppet-catchers, a couple of small sacks with prepared cursed earth, and a few clay figurines. On the same belt, he hangs the mask that has fallen off his face, no longer able to stay on his distorted face, simply because his horns won't let him wear it. The pause lasts for a few seconds, while the winged man, who is floating from the force that has come upon him, comes to his senses, and the intangible opponent, who has dived into the spheres, stealthily, as it seems to him, approaches the shaman-not-shaman from below. Exactly it seems, because the Earthman's sensor groups are still active, including those that monitor the battle not close but far away, as far as it is generally applicable in the description of spheres. So to speak, they are sitting in ambush, having cameras with an awesome zoom, if we speak in human terms. They noticed this sneaky and spotted it, at the same time explaining why the Winged One is stalling so much time. He was waiting for a combined attack, waiting for Thu'Zi'Kh, who was still holding on. And the bastard couldn't help but try to poke and prod, to get in his head, to confuse and throw him off balance, otherwise he wouldn't be a demon.

"M-m-m, what a cute little animal, what a beautiful goat!" The laughter and mockery in his speech tries to enter the ears and, if not to seize control, then to shake up the psyche a little more, to force it to answer as he would like. "Will you bleat, my dear, will you bleat for me? Who's a good goat, eh? Who's a good goat?"

The creature never seemed to realize how absurdly high the spirit's resistance was. Especially when combined with the shaman's existing knowledge and properties. It didn't realize that it would be able to shave off such submissions without even concentrating. And the shaman realized that the demon from the pumping up of forces clearly began to skid and began to be stupid, to make mistakes, as if falling under his own vice ... or not his own, but that of the one who gives him this power, having first let it pass through itself? Power invested and seconds spent, and all for what? To convey through the sound of words a compulsion that would make Stepan admit out loud that yes, he was a “goat”? It was especially ironic when coupled with the fact that he had indeed become partly a goat, but the demon could hardly realize it. And yet Stepan answered, even if not in the way the creature wanted, obeying the naivete that came from his fatigue, the pressure on his mind, and just the desire to stretch time. Again, it was impossible not to make a reference to the classics, if the opportunity presented itself, even if no one would understand that reference.

The weave of the boon he had been preparing all this time was completed, applying it to himself and Goat, activating the “blessing of unity with the subtle world”. Before taking the four maximum levels of knowledge in the new talent branch that he had been working so hard to master, such a load would kill or cripple him. Yes, a blessing could indeed strengthen a spirit, but if it strengthened a spirit planted in the body, the effect was even stronger. And here the spirit itself played a role, its original power. Goat was, though small in origin, huge in strength. He was a higher spirit, closer to the top of his rank. So Stepan had to listen to the Winged One's taunts, had to ignore Thu'Zi'Kh's increasing surrender, and silently rejoiced that at least Sylvia was able to cope with her opponent, cutting off a few more bloody tentacles in front of the astonished guard and pushing away a fellow who was holding a decent cleaver in his trembling hands, without taking it out of its sheath and holding on to the blade instead of the hilt. But the shaman had time, managed, finished, weaved two blessings at once, covering both the spirit and himself, restoring the reserve with the token, and answering the creature's request.

"Ja!" He smiled as if he'd been given the entire supply of souls from half of Inferno, apparently thinking for a moment that he'd sold the shaman, and Stepan continued for himself, stretching out the phrase in a vomitous and vile tone. "Ja! Ja, Shub-Niggurra-a-a-a-at!"

About half a moment later, before he went on the attack, the Earthman promised himself not to joke like that again, and to be careful about mentioning the crazy fictions of the mad Arabs as if they were really fictions. For fuck it! No, he felt no response to his words, no one and nothing paid any attention to his eulogy, Little White Goat ignored them too, anticipating a quick slaughter. What frightened the shaman was the way the demon reacted to his words, a superior and deadly demon, probably ancient and having seen a lot of shit that would make a dozen Stepans go crazy. Because the demon, hearing this phrase and seeing how strictly after it Stepan's aura, strengthened by an unnoticeable blessing, pulsed, and the strength in it increased as if it was being pumped from somewhere, just like his own.... The demon shuddered, stepped back, and, bitch, Stepan was willing to bet, freaked the hell out.

The blessing came to the finish line and began to literally flood the aura with concentrated power, for every unit of his own reserve spent, as if adding another three and a half units of pure and stabilized to harmless ether. Time, already quite malleable to his manipulations, seemed to slow down even more, but without slowing down, Stepan began to perceive even more of everything per unit of time. And first of all, he silently and without any special effects shifted in space, moving five meters to the left. At the place where he had been recently, the fabric of reality unfolded, and blue tentacles of weightless smoke tried to embrace the place where he had been a moment earlier. But only two sacks of earth, a rag doll sprinkled with glittering and not quite material blood, and a clay figurine of deception were embraced.

He had pumped a lot of reserve into the contact curse, reinforcing it with raw ether, since the blessing was working anyway. The impact was a chaotic distortion of ether flows with an entropy-static message. Roughly speaking, everything within a radius of one and a half meters simultaneously froze and rotted, and this applied to subtle bodies too. The demon's essence was one entire subtle body, and if the creature had been weaker, it would have ended up there, when it tried to feel Stepan through his blood and received through the same blood a counter curse that did not allow it to break the distance in time, to block the cursed ground or simply to throw off the extra tentacles like a lizard's tail. But the creature was strong and experienced, so it survived both attacks and wasn't even badly hurt, only that it lost its fighting spirit. Stepan helped it to lose even what it hadn't lost, appearing beside it again faster than thought, coming out of the jump almost exactly at the same coordinates, throwing the last of the rag dolls and repurposed clay dupes into the bubbling cloud, which became carriers of new curses, and into which the shaman poured the reserve and blessed ether without any economy.

It didn't kill the creature. Though the new wounds were serious. At least a quarter of the mass of that smoke was blown away, and the remains dived into the spirit world, clashing sharply with the spirits that had come calling. Turquoise and Aquamarine were also there, actively fighting the creature that had fallen into their native habitat. Not the most convenient opponent, but they knew what to do with such a thing. The most important role, however, was played by a specialized elder, the one the shaman had never called to fight the vile sleeping thing in the ruins of a long-dead and cursed village. Now this spirit had been called in to torment an even more fearsome shit, and the spirit was doing a good job of demonstrating what the fuck he was asking so dearly for his services. Floating in etheric weightlessness, the statue of the masked maiden promptly blocked the creature into several separate barriers, simultaneously stabilizing and short-circuiting a chunk of the spirit world, literally turning it into a pocket trap before his eyes. Harmless to its allies and a deadly trap for its only guest, the entity was not bad at countering spirits, and it had come here with the idea of countering the shaman, but it still had a hard time, especially when wounded.

The misty, shapeless host of Inferno's foulness was still just tearing through the first barriers of his cage, trying to reach the statue or at least dislodge some of the lesser spirits tormenting him. The mocking shaman in the bundle with Goatblade blinked, appearing beside the Winged One, slightly to the side, almost behind him. He'd been holding back in his training fight with the vampiresses, trying not to hurt them, avoiding touching them with his nails, horns, and hooves, because one touch with them could mutilate their aura. Stepan did not spare the bastard demon. He struck with his hoof directly into the centre of the mass of the bastard, which had time to react. Bosted by the direct and intensive support of his superiors, the freak was only a little slower than the shaman in his transformed form, and also very resistant and strong. He put up a block with a ghostly feather-laden wing, each feather being, at his will, either a defensive barrier or an attacking demonic enchantment. Half of those feathers were immediately gone, another third were simply knocked out, causing them to scatter in random directions like unstable fireworks or secondary detonating ammunition, and the wing itself sagged, ruptured, and added more to the hand he had set up.

Had the creature been more material, the shaman would have heard the ringing crunch of bone, but as it was, only an unnatural twist of the elbow before sending the bastard flying. Blinking again, the shaman did not move his feet, nor spare the reserve, which, with such support by blessing, was more quickly spent on the boon itself than on combat movement. The young man appeared on the course of the creature's flight, immediately disappearing again and missing a blast of bubbling power, appearing on the opposite side, almost getting hit in the face with a blade woven of scarlet flame, but leaving again in a teleport. The creature immediately turned in the air, spreading its wings and striking at the place from which the shaman reappeared, strictly behind the demon's back. But Stepan left from there even before the enemy turned around and covered the entire space in a three-metre radius with an extremely nasty barrier. He didn't even leave, he practically didn't appear, only hinted about his stay there, and immediately disappeared.

The bewildered Winged One flies up sharply, realising too late that he has been tricked. Stepan appeared out of nowhere, not at all near him. The snow-white goat-man, covered with long and shaggy ghostly hair and a face as ugly as the tax rate of recent years, appeared next to a long lady who was finishing weaving another infernal enchantment. This kind of crap should have restrained the still not badly resisting dog demoneater and, if not to kill at last, then to a greater extent to limit the manoeuvre. The long macaroni was extremely agile; it was able to get out of standard traps, get through barriers, or simply bypass them, and reached out, reached out with its huge mouth to the flesh of the Inferno inhabitants, which was so sweet for it. The hoof struck again, now under its knee, nearly tearing off its legs and causing the spells to shower down in small sparks, not harmless if they had not hit someone with the shaman's current resistance index. The creature screamed in pain and rage, the chameleon colouring on its body losing its smooth hypnotic quality to some epileptic's dream, and the demon tried to stab an infernal beam at the goat.

The Goat mewled again, contemptuous and vicious, unnatural to the point of nausea, as if the ominous valley embodied in sound form, delivering several blows, sharp not claws but nails, thick and ragged, leaving a multitude of scratches and literally fresh the creature alive, stripping the multi-coloured hide, seeking to throw off the hands and tear the protective barriers. The demon made them with enviable tenacity, seeking to push back and discard the shaman and the entity planted within him. A jerk, as if hooked into flesh, another jerk, to break the long arm, almost tearing it from the shoulder and pull the creature to its knees. Even on its knees, it's taller than the shaman in its form by almost a head, and then its face is right in front of the Earthman's face, exhaling some colourless but not harmless smoke. Blinking, he avoids the spit and gets behind the creature, which tries to push itself in the back with telekinesis and break the distance, but he prevents it, dispels its push, striking with a fist in the back of the head, partly demolishing a piece of the skull, partly bending it backwards. Alas, it's not fatal to the demon, though the energy there is mangled pretty badly too.

Blink again. A long and thin thread arrow, fired by a Winged One who has taken off, passes through him, trying not to let himself be deprived of his ally's support. The huge bony gorilla is still occupied by the spaghetti dog. The Bloody Joker is unable to overpower the artefact-armed Sylvia, even after depriving her of almost all of her blood control at the cost of even more of her stored souls. The Intangible desperately tries to escape from the spirit world while it is literally tormented by a coordinated pack of intangible predators. Not without casualties on their part, for he destroyed several small ones and one strong one, and force-fed another strong one some of his smoke, and he took control and tried to attack the statue. He failed, but he distracted the senior spirit and thus won some freedom, pushing the boundaries of his cage a little further and destabilising the trap pocket. In the meantime, the thread arrow hit the battered, painted demoness, but it didn't hurt her, it soaked into her, spurring her regeneration, which made her leg twisted the other way, her shoulder joint no longer threaten to fall off on the next move, and even her skull less flattened.

Blink-teleport. The shaman was in the air, right above the winged man, tapping him on the top of the head with his hoof and breaking his caste. The barrier bursts like a soap balloon. The second, not a full screen, but more like a shield, also cracked, but like glass. Demons crossed arms take the main impulse, spreading it all over his body, absorbing the damage by pumping up the forces from Inferno, and the demon himself flies down faster than a stone, accelerating his fall and in the fall hitting with a volley of feathers from his wings, almost all of them remaining. It lured him out, reaches Stepan, deliberately set up and now closing the trap, slamming the net down - the feathers don't attack, they spread out in a wide sphere, blocking teleports and movements, blocking them even harder than they were already blocked. Slowing, shackling, clouding, freezing...

With a disdainful bleat, Goat slipped between-here-and-there, surfacing back above the demon again, not even disturbed by its blocking. The movement of this entity, a Higher Entity, operated on very unusual principles, and the standard methods of blocking were not that they didn't help at all, but had much less weight. Further, resistance and personal power, crazy strength and weight of the spiritual body of the entity, as well as strengthening of all of the above by the witchcraft goodness, worked. Under such doping, the Goat could jump for a long, long time, could gallop. The hoof struck again, but now not pushing, but prodding, forcing him to spin in a free and uncontrolled fall, only to be grabbed by his wrist a moment later and almost impaled on his horns. The Winged One would have been finished, but a burst of force from the portal, where the still shrieking Laghan took on a new note of agony, allowed him to overcome the spirit's grip for a moment and then almost manage to push it away, tearing the wool covering his body a little, even burning it in places. The horns didn't do any damage, simply because the creature twisted around and ripped out its arm, along with a piece of the appropriate energy and part of the flesh-enhancing souls, leaving it in Stepan's grip.

The shaman clenched his fist, grinding the bursting crap to a pulp and with a stream of Goat's negative power breaking the attempt to curse himself through the mess, throwing the resulting bomb at the demon. This was where he was surprised and even a little panicked. Undermining some of his power by literally sacrificing a permanent chunk of his self, he was very well invested in the attack and made sure to stick it to his opponent's body and aura. He certainly wasn't expecting that the lump of flesh and fur stuck to it could be ripped off the shaman's body and fly straight into his face. At the last moment, he managed to deactivate his creation, sending part of the blow through the channel to Inferno, but the colourless and at the same time alluringly ghastly flames still burned him, leaving massive burns on his body, and burning his wings completely, leaving only parts of the bone skeleton. And these were not easy wounds either, for forever, or at least for a long time!

The shaman was about to rush towards it, but was immediately displaced from reality when a wide and very tricky beam struck from the breach, incredibly bright, but with a colour that made you forget that the colour existed the moment you saw it. And since you forgot the colour, you can't see the attack, so there you go! The shaman bleat again, obviously something profane, though he couldn't say what he meant by it, because the colour was unreal to human or mortal consciousness, even with a divided body. However, where the Goat had not helped, the situation was saved by numerous observers, who were no longer hiding in the sky, watching what was happening on the ground, and therefore had warned him in advance. The beam went somewhere in the sky, perhaps to set fire to the asses of angels, if they were within a radius of at least eight or nine kilometres, and the portal again faded and became even more unstable. Trying to overcome the right of ashes had not gone in vain. The stronger the pressure on this thing of the demonic profanity, the stronger the resistance of the world becomes. If it is removed, then the forces do not affect the profanity and demonic energy. Every single smaller demon, called only to support the rupture, has already given itself to this rupture without a trace, but this only slightly slowed its degradation.

The shaman tried to get out of the blink next to the rapidly regenerating and seemingly soul-crediting Winged One, but changed his mind at the last moment, fooling both himself and the creatures following him. He found himself back near the place of his fusion with the Goat, where a Formless fleeing from the world of the spheres had almost made its way out into reality, its smoky tentacles outstretched into reality. With blows of hooves, horns, and fists, he crushed those clumps of smoke into smaller lumps in a split second, simultaneously encouraging the spirits in the spheres to devour the creature more vigorously, and shifted again. The almost fully recovered Winged One successfully struck the spot where the Earthling had recently stood, again strengthening and slightly patching up the smoky one, only that one had already been forced back into a hopeless fight with Stepan's entire retinue of spirit battles. The Earthman doesn't look to see what's wrong with Smoky, he reappears next to the long demoness who has not yet regained consciousness, tearing off her already damaged arm, running his fingernails over the skin, and freshly skinning her alive, finally ruining the hypnotic effect of that skin. The infernal slime that replaces the demons' blood evaporates from his fur without even being absorbed, burned away with particles of goat fur, but that fur also regenerates, though slower than the demons' pseudo-flesh, and the demons inflicted fewer wounds on him. The scorch marks he had received from the contact with the Winged One were almost healed in the past ten seconds.

He again knocks the creature to the ground. The watching spirits see the winged leader describe a long parabola and dash downward, eager to help the smoky one escape as a more promising and useful ally. A desperate point-blank attack sweeps in close as the shaman blinks again, sending a lump of bloody stuff mixed with particles of the demoness' flesh through where it will reappear a moment later. The creature doesn't have time to attack again. The first blow to the head demolishes the rest of the skull, the second punctures the sternum, almost reaching the core of the essence, almost tearing the grape cluster of souls captured by the demon. But instead of finishing the almost ready creature, Stepan, spouting mental swearing in a thousand four hundred and eighty-eight floors of intolerance to representatives of infernal kind, again shifts into two quick teleports of seventy meters each, finding himself next to another battle.

Thu'Zi'Kh fought quite competently and was quite successful against the bone gorilla, even though he was exhausted and wounded, although the fight was funny. One couldn't break through the defense of the other, and the other had no way to catch the first and strike it properly. The spirit shimmered around the creature, pressed on it with the presence of pure hunger and thirst to quench hunger, now and then tried to lean closer and cover it with a layer of its spiritual power, to liquefy the armor of bones, to weaken the infernal presence, to suppress the aura and clog the nodes with malicious plugs. And the huge demon tried to grab the spirit and not let it go, to take advantage of its advantage in armor and survivability, to tear the annoying pasta into pieces and trample these pieces into the broken paving stones. And so it was, when the demon's maneuver forced him to collapse the wall of some barracks, he was literally like an elephant in a china shop. Or a fox in a henhouse. There were a lot of people in the barracks, mostly kids, who had been busy sorting through some herbs and shit.

It meant nothing to the spirit. He had his own goal, and the concept of the order “protect the youngsters so that the demon does not let their blood and auras for feeding or impregnate them with brain-dead concentrations of vice” would not be understood, and the demon was already set up for a quick massacre. The shaman managed, as if Christobal, dammit, Hosevich, appearing right in front of the demon, with his aura suppressing the nauseating and suffocating grip of vice, driving away this vice from the brains and souls of children and teenagers, before the battle began sorting seeds and shoots.... of the local analogs of poppy, cannabis, hashish and coca? Well, yes, who else to invite to harmful production, but those who are not pitied, such a beautiful world.

The impact of the massive carcass of Stepan, who for a moment had been surprised to find himself in a clandestine drug lab while saving the children, dislodged him and dragged him across a floor covered with debris, whispers, and dust from construction putty, which had clear hoofprints. He was partially turned around, and almost jammed his horned, furry, and yet warped face into a vaguely familiar and deathly pale face. His consciousness, which had been dispersed and perceived the world in a surprisingly complex way, recognized at once the victim of a long-standing curse, whom he had almost cured but not cured one not too cheerful evening that had turned into night, when he had been struck with humanity and thirst for healing practice. The world, though it seemed frozen, but it only seemed so, and Stepan jumped up and right in a jump, he jerked both hooves into the center of the gorilla's chest, right into the bone face sunk in that chest. It crunched, cracked, groaned, and howled as blue and pink slurry flowed from under the cracked bone armor, and the evil carcass, which had lost all its intentions, took a hasty and a little wobbly step back.

"You again!" The shaman barked, pointing a finger with a thick, flat nail on the end into the face of the pupil-dilated youth, who was frantically clutching a shiv in her fingers.

He would have said something else, but there was no time. He'd only put that phrase in because he needed at least a second's respite after two very long teleport jumps before his ability to blink was restored. Still, this spirit property was, albeit uniquely exotic and cool, but it was meant for lots of short blinks, not long-range jerks. For manoeuvring combat, not stalking or shortening the distance. The girl, whose aura, by the way, was again unhealthy and slowly degenerating faster than the estimated time, rolled her eyes and collapsed unconscious. It was either a Vice or the aura of Goat, which could turn off a weak gifted person and make him a grey stammerer for life. Well, if he survived, he would make sure that his appearance did not leave the local children with bedwetting for life.

A new step. Now it's quite short. Even shorter than a normal step, to catch up with the gorilla and give it two consecutive blows with his fists in the already cracked mask, and then turn on one leg and hit the other, with a hoof, right in accordance with the precepts of Chuck Norris. The hoof fell partially into the mask, under which there was hidden a mouth, or some other hole, of the kind that children are not allowed to see. There were teeth there, but they couldn't grab a leg and hoof and grab it to hell. They'd been knocked out along with the mask bone. If he'd had any supplies left, he'd have thrown a couple of сгкыув pouches in his mouth right away to keep the bastard busy, but he didn't have any. He accelerated and shoved the creature with his whole body, and then Thu'Zi'Kh, who had gathered his strength, wrapped his arms around the wounded creature and began to gnaw on one of its arms. The Earthman slid back into the passage, aiming to finish off the long demoness, but he realised he was too late.

The Winged One had indeed managed to pull out and even patch up the battered Smoky. He was trying to help the Bloody, aiming at the still struggling Sylvia with his feather, the last of his remaining feathers, which had miraculously not burst after a hoof strike had knocked it off its wing. Well, it was Stepan who considered the blow apt in the long run, for there was no way to test it, no way to inflict it. The shaman emerged from the blink and whipped up his arm, the same arm that had recently grown back but was still more of a prosthetic enchantment than actual pseudo-flesh. The elbow of the arm sprayed straight out, and the backlash and attempted embrace of the smoky one with his smoke was met with nothing but emptiness. Again a step, again leaving and so five times, working in a pair of creatures successfully crowded the shaman, having understood the tactics of his attacks and defences, and Goat leading his movements showed amazing for the beast cunning, but still animal predictability. He showed another seven seconds and no less than two dozen blinks before abruptly breaking the pattern, showing the demons who had relaxed that they were the stupid and primitive creatures, and he, bitch, was an intellectual and a personality!

In an instant, instead of just an attack with fists, which should have been met with an attack in response, and then the escape of blinking Stepan, a primitive, but powerful spell of witchcraft type flew towards the Winged One. Slowing down, a suggestive drizzle on reflexes, an attempt to fuck the demon in the brains and, characteristically, partially successful, for the Winged One was so dazed that he actually slowed down. Smoky was struck with a deadly nail in the coffin by the locking of the paths, which he methodically and even mockingly countered with a very familiar defence, almost the same as the one that Laghan was using. The weak and not particularly sophisticated locking burst and fell apart at the seams, unable to find a point of application, as if the creature's aura had become too liquefied and therefore invulnerable to such a pinpoint attack, for it needed a body frame in which to lock the paths. The sneer from the image-expression of the incorporeal creature would quickly disappear if it had time to react. Beneath the layer of flamboyant and threatening witchcraft lurked a very well-disguised banishment from reality.

The shaman managed with this banishment to hit not just a shapeless body, but the very centre of the demon, its cluster of souls, for which the creature was dragged into the spheres. Not deep, Stepan's hook was not set up for such a thing, no, only beyond the very boundary of reality, to the topmost layers of the high spheres. There, Aquamarine, Turquoise, and the immovable statue, supported by the rest of the evil spirits, were already waiting, having renewed their forces, restored the order of battle, and learnt from the previous experience. The demon rushed into battle with the desperation of a doomed man, trying not only to break through the cage-lacuna that had closed around him again and was much stronger than the last time, but also to try to become possessed by one of the spirits. But it was clear to him, Stepan, and even the spirits themselves, that the creature would not escape from this hospitable place a second time.

The snarling and shrieking creature-leader lunged forward no worse than Goat himself had a little earlier, losing control and howling in frenzy, in pure pain, in uninterrupted pleasure. Howling, feeling his victory drain away as the misbehaving shaman, showing quite the opposite of what the creatures had prepared for before the encounter, delivers one blow after another. Laghan's howl echoes him as a wave of power passes through the portal again, temporarily making the creature even faster than the Goat and, though not resilient, so survivable that for a couple more moments, there is no fear of hooves or horns. The Right of Ashes, having received such resistance, became even stronger, and the spent reagent of the highest level of quality possible gave such a plus to the power that the portal-break, despite all attempts to keep it, became even more faded and trembled. And it was not yet being attacked directly, not yet being hit by temples or city mages, because the time had barely been three minutes, even less. Another flicker of the portal, and out of the breach in the shape of the body of one unlucky demoness, who once again became a pawn of her own Mistress, the hand of the one who was the basis of the portal, distorted and as if melted like candle wax, burst out. She pulled out and clutched at the edge of the breach, not letting go, which began to undermine the stability of the breach even more.

The Shaman-Goat again meked something profane, disappearing and escaping from the enemy's blow, then from another blow, and another. About the sixth second of such dances came a message-image from the spirits in the world of spheres, as well as more detailed images-evidence from the spirits-observers. The Shapeless one jumped and ended up literally sandwiched between the barriers of the Senior Spirit. The shaman, by that time the seventh time only since Goat's summoning that he had restored his reserve with a Token, sent a clear and unambiguous command to check. To check everything and everyone, more importantly, to check each other. The demon demonstrated a very strong ability to possess exactly the spirits, this parasitic embedding in their nature, and the moment of his death, the young man did not like. Too small was the release of forces, as if burned and released were only part of a bunch of souls. He was right, and it took the spirits another four seconds to notice the attempt of one of the strong entities to get away without being seen, then to open the disguise and the entity itself, and then to finally kill the enemy.

Along with his death, now final, came the liver-piercing groaning hiss of the Winged One, which tried to make a homing strike at the shaman, putting into him at least three dozen souls and a lot of its forces, and on top of it a part of flesh, above the elbow of the already damaged arm. Stepan jumped twice, three times, but the thing kept following him, homing in on him in the real world, in the spheres, and even in the place-state through which the blinking Goatman moved. On one manoeuvre, the shaman knocked a large cobblestone out of the paving stones with a hoof strike, dodged a few of the leader's more conventional blows, blinked a few more times, watering the stone with blood and creating a deception, the watering being done precisely between the blinks, so as not to be seen by his opponent. He had certainly expected such a trick, had seen it performed by the shaman, but had not expected the specifics of the execution.

The shaman appeared next to a somewhat recovered demoness-stick, who was eating a smiling man in leather armor, who was a guard, a mercenary, a bandit, or something else. She greeted the shaman's appearance with a spit of scarlet and white slurry, which he habitually passed over and slapped her ass with the palm of his hand. It would have been intimate if the buttocks hadn't already been chewed up by his previous blow, and if the force of the slap hadn't given such momentum that Jaspera's fractures in the not-so-old training session would have seemed like minor bruises. The flying creature also helped itself to levitate, accelerating and breaking the distance, glad that the shaman had struck on the pushback and not too hard, instead of grabbing it hard and finishing it off. He ignored the retaliatory blow with some kind of net that was supposed to restrain his movements and a suggestion that tried to slow his perception, leaving again with a blink. What he couldn't ignore was the huge, glowing snake shaped like a king-sized dildo of the Bad Dragon level that had been chasing him all this time.

Because now it was stalking the demoness already! The creature was quick to compare the two and ripped a piece of stone out of its own arse, throwing it aside and not even trying to hit Stepan through it, using the reverse bridge. It was a shame, though. He'd been preparing for it, putting up his witchcraft defences, and now he was ignoring it like this! The shit was that the bait marker, which had been specially sharpened for the creature, had been transferred to its strange pseudo-flesh. Yeah, it's a little thing. It took five seconds to remove it, but the creature didn't have five seconds, not even one, and so the hovering snake-like dildo-killer pierced the long lady through, literally lengthwise. Alas, due to the demonic nature of the victim, the spell did not kill her, though it crippled her badly, and the creature would be no match for Stepan or anyone else for days and months to come.

The winged one didn't even slow down, having written off the long one beforehand, continuing to crowd Stepan with new and new attacks, becoming even faster and more accurate. He was being fed the maximum power, seemingly at the expense of reducing the remaining demons' power. The Earthman did not fight, having replenished his reserve with a token again, already feeling how bad he was feeling now and would definitely feel bad later, but not finding a way to compensate for the fatigue of auric nodes. Yes, there was still the ultimate enhancement, also a meta-skill that gave a wild bonus to characteristics, but he wouldn't have time to adjust the increased attributes to the still active blessing in conjunction with the sub-settlement. At least for a few moments, but he'll lose momentum, which is like death nowadays. And so, yes, so it would be a good option, even on the fee in the form of a slip of Her Milfness can be put the dick, he already fucked in the brains repeatedly.

//"I need to finish." A lonely thought beats in the shaman's head, surrounded by emptiness and a collected readiness to kill and survive. "I need to finish quickly."

He slid to the edge again to face the gorilla, who had already lost one paw and a piece of the other, and at the same time commanded the shattered Thu'Zi'Kh, who slid gladly and readily into the world of spheres. He slid out around the long, twitching, and trying to put up a defense. Unlike the gorilla, this creature was fragile and vulnerable to the spirit's direct attacks, and it had only been able to overpower him before in company with the Bone One, and only because of its magic, barriers, and powerful cascading blows. And now she has none of those, no strength to put up or maintain them. A moment, even less, and the jaws of the essence take another supreme demon, the second today, and the universe is covered with the last screech of the infernal creature. The spirit, who was able, thanks to the order, to overpower the aura of agrogeneration of the Bony One, which weakened and no longer constrained the spirit with the analogy of the trick “if you stop attacking me, you get a cunning curse”, which could eat even the defense of the weakened Elder, sends to the shaman an image of a hearty belch and another image-questioning if anything else is needed.

It didn't take a particularly experienced shaman to realize - the spirit hoped he didn't really need to. He was exhausted and frazzled, despite the fact that the shaman had replenished his reserve with a token. The order is given, the order is understood, and the spirit dives into the world of spheres, taking a position of ambush rather than actual threat, replenishing its strength and serving as a reserve for emergencies. And the shaman is already striking at the gorilla, knocking chunks of bone and bloody shards out of the literally crumbling pile of viscous slime of the short-lived body, which simply can not hurt him. The creature is survivable and armored, but its armor is already broken in many places, and its survivability is no longer enough to survive. It lacks high-ranking attacking abilities, nor does it have enough speed and mobility to stand up to Stepan the Goat even a little bit.

The shaman delivers eight punches with his fists, his horns jabbing at the area of the ribcage, nearly cutting the creature open like a fish, followed by a stinging hoof strike to the supporting leg, nearly causing the demon to fall. It all packed into a split second, while consciously sacrificing another pre-written-off comrade, the Winged One prepared something homicidal. And he would have had time to prepare, or force the young man not to finish the thug by interrupting his enchantment, but here a third factor intervened. And it was not the remaining spirits gathered little by little on the border with the spheres, but those who did not need to come to reality from nowhere. They already lived in it. Stepan felt with sensitivity and spiritual perception the woven magic, magic powerful, hot and holistic, magic close, and therefore he made another blink of seven meters, being on the side of the falling, like a chopped tree, Bone One.

The air around the demon flashed with the orange light of a barrier-sphere, and inside it the demon, who had not really resisted, was imprisoned. And then, already inside the barrier, the flame ignited, and it was so hot, so magically saturated, that even the Goat's fur slightly stirred. The magister was beating, no less, and there was exactly one man in the city who fit that definition. A moment of searching and the strange eyes of the Goat immediately found a couple of weave-transmitters, a kind of magical video cameras, raised up, in company with his spirits, through which Miller directed his attack. Not even ashes remained from the maimed demon. The flames burned like viscous napalm, burning first of all the magic saturation, and the demon's body, especially so quickly and hastily molded. It is, as it has been said many times, magic in its purest form. Minus one enemy, minus one problem. Goat-Stepan raised his head and looked straight into the camera, around which his bloodhounds were already hovering. To be fair, he'd given them orders to track only infernal energies and direct attacks on the shaman, so they weren't looking at classic magic.

He bleat something approving, and then he shifted again, barely in time to get out of the way of the demon's too hastily released charms, who was soaring confidently on already mostly regenerated wings. The feathers for the charms, however, did not grow new. They had to be lovingly prepared from the beginning. Demonic magic soaked a piece of space, as if to roll it into a bagel, and then that piece of space, compressed into a point, brazenly dragged into the gap-portal-break with the speed of a bullet. The pressure of the ashes became even stronger, the portal faded again, and the second melted hand of Laghan, who was trying to get out of the breach, appeared, and something told the shaman that not even her Mistress could stop her now, even though the demoness's kicking was breaking the link between Inferno and reality.

From the second and third eye-transmitters, numerous fire lances flew into the hovering winger, intense, high-quality, each with its twist, and also very frequent, literally two or three per second for each of the retransmitters. Miller was burning with napalm and the demon, even with the unrelenting pumping, involuntarily had to hold the blow, and clearly wanted to swear. Judging by the images that the shaman's spirits read directly from the noosphere, he didn't expect the magister to react so quickly. The Earthman saw and felt, traced through the power channel of these repeaters, that the attack was coming not from the tower, from which the place of battle was very far away, but from somewhere closer, which was indirectly confirmed by the power of the attacks. With the tower as a backbone, Miller's fire would be much stronger; there was no doubt about that, but it would take much longer to aim.

Stepan could take the chance to distract the enemy, but instead, he escapes from another teleport trap, which should have thrown him into the breach, only barely alive and partially whipped like cream by a mixer. Again, the fading portal. Again, a very dangerous attack, but now with an attempt at stealth, if not for the special vision and the strange eyes of the Goat, seeing in some very tricky spectra, could have missed it. Watching spirits, both on the side of the spheres and in the sky, did not notice anything suspicious until the last. But even having dodged Stepan did not counterattack, instead going into long blinks again, overloading this ability of the Goat, the last metres of the distance being covered on his own two feet, knocking out pieces of the walls of houses and stones from the pavement with his hooves, where there were stones at all.

The Bloody One, still fighting with Sylvia, didn't miss his appearance, though he wasn't happy about it in the slightest. Sylvia, who had several not particularly significant wounds healing, only stepped back, taking the opportunity to exhale a little. Even with her blade, she was weaker. She was without her blood magic. She survived only by the first blow, which successfully deprived her opponent of his ungrown arm and cut through his chest. And the creature pressed with blood, though more for show, it did not have the advantage that allowed it not only to suppress, but also to use the Scarlet Drop effectively. Much more dangerous were attempts to take control by perverted spiritual resonance, like the one used by Sylvia herself. Only the demon didn't need to drink Malter's blood or meld his own with hers. The unnatural bond his robes gave him was enough. Fortunately, Sylvia's rag dolls, which were also disposable, had successfully intercepted such attempts, reducing in number by more than half.

Even in the few moments that the shaman took to familiarise himself with the situation, it was easy to see the quantity and quality of the compulsions intercepted - love, admiration, fear, the desire to throw away the sword and hide, dragged through the return of Sylvia to her childhood and the pressure on the image-concept of a typical noble girl who did not know how to and did not master the art of combat in any form. A slow degradation of fighting skills and motor skills, combined with a growing emptiness in her head and an itch in her arse, literally a fixation on being kicked in the arse rather than swinging a blade. A couple more generally incomprehensible influences intercepted early on. If it weren't for the blade, which gave additional and extremely tough defence, if it weren't for the fact that the Bloody had to really fight and fight for life, he would have been able to squeeze through the dolls and even more so Sylvia's natural defence. The demon could bind vampires in all shapes and positions, and against dolls and other envolts he was prepared in advance.

He also met the Goat with an anti-shamanic bloody resonating attack, which should have simultaneously paralysed the blood flow and forced the organism to release so many pleasure hormones into the blood that one could become a drug addict from the very first second, and incurable by any non-magical means. The Goat-Stepan scornfully ignored this attack, immediately responding with a kick of his hoof, not particularly high, just above ground level, just on the bone of his foot. The bloody dress was blown to dust by the contact with the blackness of the hoof, and the leg was nearly fucking torn off. The return blow, also internal, but already deadly, the rapid rise in blood pressure, until you burst to fuck, supported by a dozen scarlet arrows and a cloud of mist.... just doesn't find an opponent, because the shaman's already rushing back.

Sylvia, who had received her witchcraft enhancement through the doll, swiftly severed the Bloody's other arm, right at the shoulder, and tried to gut it as well. The guts of the creature did not turn out to be intestines, and from the gutted abdomen spurted a glowing, toxic slurry, full of filth and not even scarlet, but honey, and his robes became unstable after such a wound. If Malter didn't finish him off after such a wound and loss, the shaman would put a full-length statue of a circus clown on her grave. It would be a true epic fail, as they would say on the Earth's internet. His last opponent, the bastard, was in no hurry to meet him and seemed to be considering leaving through his portal.

He was crushed by the Right of Ashes. He was torn by the wounds he'd received, hurt by the powerful pumping, the torrent of power literally scraping subtle bodies as if with a grater or sandpaper. He also remembered that there were six of them against one shaman. And there were one and a half left, against three if you counted the Magister. The creature had swept away Miller's repeaters without much damage, but the shaman could already see new ones being woven, and the ones woven earlier were coming into battle position on top of the creature. All in all, Winged One clearly wanted to get the hell out and was intent on fulfilling his desires, but he was thwarted by the shaman's return. The reset sliding and the fact that most of the way back, Goat ran with his feet, leaving potholes from his hooves everywhere he stepped and jumped, allowed him to get out of the blink clearly next to the creature. And then the Magister wove a kind of fiery cloud, not even a net, but a cloud, with which he tried not to burn the demon in the air, or to force it to land.

He landed, blocking the first lunge of Stepan-Пщфе's fist, only wrinkling his face from the impossibly black nails that ran across the smooth skin. He deflected the second lunge with a soft circular motion, attempting to counterattack and almost succeeding, only managing to get away with a blink. The creator of the rift-portal seemed to have transferred the rest of her boost to him, ignoring the burnt and maimed carcass of Laghan, slowly climbing out of the rift. She made the last of his opponents equal and even superior to the goat-shaman in speed. And the latter attacked quite sharply, hard and soft at the same time, forcing the shaman to jump and blink, because his style was obviously better in direct combat. The Goat's tactics meant constant flickering rather than face-to-face combat.

The shaman didn't understand what the demon and its Mistress were counting on, but then it was explained to him. It was as if a wave of light flew out of the creature's chest, travelling through space without harm or any effects, but Stepan's intuition, as well as Goat's instinctive understanding, cried out that he should not even try to blink now. And without blinking, the enemy's superiority in pure martial arts was evident. Shaman was angry and bewildered by the fact that the fate of him and the demon, their entire battle, was still decided in a banal fist fight. Sophisticated fucking magic! Higher summons, bitch! The most elaborate tactics of an seasoned fighter, for fuck's sake! And yet it all ends with them trying to beat each other to death - it's a fairy tale, not an isekai!

No, the shaman tried to hit with witchcraft and some manifestations of summoning spirits, and the demon would now and then, lay out another suggestion or demonic magic, but those were the auxiliary aspects, and the fists were the main combat power. Well, not exactly in the fists. The shaman and demon struck with open palms, knocking out not flesh, but spirit and aura. Though the basis of Goat's combat skill was in his teleportation-not-teleportation, he remained a deadly fast, resilient, tough, and dangerous opponent even without it. His instincts drove the shaman's arms and legs. His control shifted his torso and made his legs work. His experience allowed him to fight, though not on equal footing, but to hold his own against the enemy with some success. Which tried to push him closer to the portal, and worst of all, he succeeded.

The shaman received three wounds - a cut on his chest, a puncture on his thigh, on the outer side, and a split cheek on his face. These were the wounds of his real body and Goat's spiritual essence, and the regeneration was healing them, but not as fast as it should have been. And there was another replenishment of the reserve through the token, despite the fact that the subtle bodies from the continuous pumping through them of the aether stabilised by the boon were literally burning like a wound sprinkled with pepper. Only that the wound was not physical and not yet a wound, just an overload. Another gifted person, even one equal to him in pure strength, would have been burned to shit long ago, crippling the gift or killing him, but the elite property and the maximum gentleness of replenishment from meta-skills and tokens allowed him to still stand. He'd need a week or two of rest afterwards, though, soft and stress-free, with a minimum of magical practice.

Stepan held out under this pressure for ten seconds, and when the enemy sensed confidence and relaxed his buns a little, he simply activated the last remaining charge of “temporal awareness.”

The two of them had roughly equal speeds. The opponent remained only slightly faster, but his experience in combat, centuries of that experience, was still superior and markedly outnumbered by the beastly grasp and cunning of the shaman's body-leading Goatman. The shaman himself, for all his fighting grasp, remained almost a complete zero in hand-to-hand sword-sword-smithing. Now that their speeds had not only equalized but had become much better for the shaman, the fight went from almost a beating to an outright beating. Only now it was not Stepan who was being beaten, but the other way around.

A blow, and the destroyed prosthetic arm cracked again, breaking off at the elbow, scattering into pieces with a cheerful confetti, from which Goat had to squint his eyes, looking uninterruptedly with clockwork pupils. Another blow, and the nails with sadistic pleasure removed a part of the beautiful and in every way perfect face of the demon. A hoof kick from top to bottom shattered a foot that had been set too far out, a second one broke a knee, and a tackle tore one of the wings from the root, preventing it from flying. A lunge with horns blew off half of the skull and deprived one of the eyes, finally killing all the determination of the creature, which frankly begs, pleads, not or him, not or the Mistress to stop, to negotiate, not to bring to fuck. Stepan was sincerely deaf to the pleas, but the second one answered: an unstable shimmering portal, from which the demoness, much less burned than in the beginning, had already climbed out to the waist, flashed with new brightness and hit Stepan the Goat, who had gotten too close to him, chasing the Winged One trying to break the distance.

If it had been an attack like the one that had driven out his anti-demon packs in the beginning, it would have ended there. But this portal, bound by the will and the Right of Ashes, didn't have the power it had in the beginning and so, the meta-skill-enhanced Goat, who, simply because of his reaction speed, was able to outmanoeuvre the more skilful demon in a fight with almost contemptuous ease, managed without the teleport, which was still inoperative. He grabbed the battered demon, turned his back to the portal, threw the demon onto his back, ignoring the last working hand that tried to grab his throat, taking the blow to that very demon. His eyes did not fail either Goat or Stepan, pointing to the important fact that this time the Mistress did not make a selective attack, which would have hit only the shaman, but would have strengthened the demon.

Still not lethal, though very close to it, but Stepan would have survived, though not without injuries. Paralysis of thoughts, feelings, will, consciousness, and everything except breathing and heartbeat. Probably. And also, of course, tonnes of pleasure, which will flood the mind, dissolving the Goat, but preserving the mortal, because he owns the material body, which will take the main damage. The demon wasn't killed either, though it was pierced through, and the shaman himself was almost torn apart, having switched off the support of the dual blessing, first dispelling the one he was holding on himself, and then the one imposed on Goat. The shaman, already wobbly and weakened, but still conscious and still holding onto his contract, still maintaining the subplot, finished the Winged One.

The gift branch of knowledge, four talents in the branch, which he invested in “advanced developed practices of harmonization of spirit-auric conflicts”, allowed him not to fall off his hooves now, allowed him to gallop, ha-ha, like a mountain goat for so long, simultaneously supporting both underpopulation, and two benefits-enhancement, and a lot of additional attacks by witchcraft or spirits. He was helped to resist the knowledge from the branch of working with the spirits universally in the body. At the same time, they are extremely useful in the same healing practices. There are many other synergies, especially within the framework of the simultaneous tension of subtle bodies with a lot of diverse stimuli. And when he was tearing out the bunch-heart of the winged one with his own-not-your hand, on which not quite snow-white hair was smoking, he was still standing on his feet, but his opponent was not. He refused to die, however, and the plucked cluster was a deception, through which they tried to influence him, but it was already agony. He had to spend fifteen long seconds to literally tear his opponent's body to shreds, finding the real cluster of souls and crushing it with his hoof.

Two seconds earlier, his spirits had caught and clearly conveyed to him the images of the bloody bastard who'd fallen in battle, his head blown off and then pierced with a blade through his bloody armor-cloak, and the cluster of souls the creature had accumulated, including so many undead souls belonging to vampires of varying degrees of antiquity and deadliness. Looking around, Sylvia, clearly annoyed at being seen by quite a few people, only blinked, covering herself with a cloak of invisibility, applying an amulet of invisibility, and accelerating to the limit, disappearing into one of the blind alleys and rushing to one of the city's lairs. This order, precisely to retreat rather than run to help him, he issued involuntarily. The battle had drained her too much, she was literally on the last drops of not even blood, but strength at all.

At the same instant, the portal blinked for the last time and went out, from which at the last moment there was a stab of wild anger and an equally wild, all-consuming desire to possess, a stab of will and passion that no mere mortal could realise or endure. She who had come after him admitted her defeat, at the last moment finding not the pride but the hubris to meet her defeat honourably, only, figuratively speaking, by giving him a look full of regret. And a moment later, the very thing that started it all - Laghan - fell to the ground. Already almost intact physically, with only a couple of healing burns, shattered energetically, deprived of a considerable part of souls, which were burned out by the flow of power pumped into her body turned into a portal, and without the very seal on her back, which made her a beacon for the portal. She wanted to laugh wickedly at first, like she'd gotten out of that shit.... but then she met the tired look of a shabby, out-of-breath and barely supporting Stépan the Goat.

"F-f-f-f-uck..." There are more sincere emotions in this word of hers than in their entire previous communication, even if you multiply it by a thousand. "Maybe we can come to an agreement after all?"

Instead of answering, the shaman, gathering the rest of his strength, simply slid into the blink and came out right next to her, striking directly at the horned head of the impudent scum, involuntarily emitting a triumphant, angry bleat.

And his blow blew her head apart like a watermelon, leaving behind a cloud of scarlet color. The only problem was that he hadn't killed Laghan, but her enslaved toy. At the very last moment, the demoness herself blinked, as if a fuzzy image covered by interference, and then a staggering and clearly wounded lady, the same one he remembered from his visits to the now-destroyed inn, took her place. The bandit, reinforced and gifted by himself, had no time to do anything, but had saved her enslaver's life at the cost of what was left of her own. For about a second, the shaman was dumbfounded, simply unable to switch from the mode of muzzle cleaning to analysis, being very tired and exhausted mentally, physically, mentally and magically at once, despite the full reserve and still dispersing consciousness alchemy. Not even a dozen minutes had passed since the beginning of the battle, a full-fledged battle specifically, when he'd hit the tavern, and he'd let so much power flow through him that he'd nearly burst into tears.

Shaking his head and regaining clarity of thought, vomiting angrily and feeling that he was slowly losing control over the separation of his consciousness from that of the entity, he threw himself into the fight. In his head there was no joy of revenge, no anger even pushing forward - only endless fatigue and a sense of duty to himself, the need to finish this shit with what he had started it for. To kill the demoness, who had fucked him up so badly and, to be frank, by the intercession of Her Divine Milfness alone had not been fully taken over, was simply necessary. You can't do otherwise, it's either you fucking or you fucked, and the shaman still valued himself and didn't want to lose, not even a little bit. He had never had suicidal moods in his life, even in the harshest moments of teenage dramas, he wanted to live and enjoy life.

It wasn't that far from the tavern, but it still took him precious seconds to get to the tavern, jumping over the guards who were shocked by his appearance, rushing in a tight formation, and hiding behind hastily activated protective amulets. They'd obviously been prepared for some shit from the start, and hadn't had time to get into fighting order when the mess started. Were they going on a raid on the hot spots or something? The accompanying gifted, strong disciple, but not even an adept, also put a weak barrier in the way of the shaman, relying on the same amulets, but the carcass of Goat-Stepan simply broke through this barrier and carried on. Judging by the readings of the spirits, the gifted one who saw the aura of the runner turned a little pale, but the grey in his hair was definitely his own, so quickly do not go grey. Probably. What's the matter, they definitely don't go grey! He also had to run around a number of frightened townspeople, break the skull of some bum who took advantage of the moment and slit the throat of a burly aunt who had lost consciousness from a wave of demonic foulness or a sandbag that flew into the back of her head. The victim's throat will have to be pulled and healed by a small spirit, fattened with the life force of the marauder-douchegoba, which lay next to his almost killed.

He found himself near the tavern, where several separate groups of armed citizens were already gathered, including a very overwhelming priestess of Gaia, now doped up with goddess power to the top of her head and the tips of her nipples. The lady covered herself and those gathered with some version of divine protection, which, with the soft scent of herbs and the touch of wheat ears to the skin, prevented toxic and alluring filth from touching the human body, mind, and soul. The shaman circled her in a wide arc, sensing what she was missing. Nicely disguised, but with every fraction of a second less and less hidden infernal sorcery. A dash to the rotting pieces of logs and stones that remained on the tavern site, a jerk of power to her muscles, and the pieces of junk flew in different directions. The arrow of the self-shooter that struck him in the back only scratched the fur, not even penetrating it, but the shaman, losing control over the animal spirit inside him, gave in to the outburst of anger and threw that arrow back into the self-shooter of the shooter, breaking the expensive thing, as well as the fingers and hands of the shooter.

He was not on time. He wouldn't have had time even if he hadn't spent a fraction of an instant to throw back, for the creature that had hidden beneath the rubble, which had transported itself to the same place where it had been sitting before, covered by additional barriers, the bandit tavern-keeper-auntie only grinned contentedly, staring eye to eye, crosses to hourglasses, gave him an obscene gesture painfully reminiscent of the earthly ‘fuk,’ and then disappeared with a quiet clap. In its place appeared a rather bewildered and smiling man in a clay-stained apron and with demonic magic marks all over his body, from his shaved head to his bare feet. He was a huge boar, and despite his potbelly, he gave the impression of strength and mobility. The shaman, angry from another failure, had no time to try to remove the man's curse, and there was nothing to remove; there was no man under that filth, only an empty shell, in which the soul remained only nominally.

The man's skull did not burst, but bent like a plasticine model after an encounter with a baseball bat. No blood spurted out, nor any brains, only a solid viscous mass, resembling in many ways demonic pseudo-bodies. Grabbing the slumping corpse by the arm and nearly ripping it from the body, he tossed this time mine away from himself and the humans so that the activation of the trap would happen farther away. The priestess of the kindest of the local goddesses appreciated such a sight, as well as the aura of the shaman in conjunction with the Higher Spirit, turned pale and ordered everyone to leave in an orderly manner to that alley. Of course, no one left in an orderly manner, and she ran faster than the others, while the body of the strange man was burning through the ground and had already left a three-metre diameter hole, at the bottom of which was still boiling with infernal napalm.

Stepan paid no attention to it, trying to track the transition and find the place where the bastard had gone. She preparing it in advance, but was not in the shape to make her pre-preparedness work perfectly. The first light, the most obvious, led somewhere closer to the southern edge of the city, but it was so obvious that the shaman ignored it, instead he turned to his sensory spirits, tried to feel the channel, looked with the eyes of Goat, who also knew a lot about spatial manipulations, albeit specific. And the combined effort gave the result, indicating the approximate direction and even the point of arrival of the creature. Or rather, the point from which the plasticine man had been dragged out... somewhere in the area of the eastern wall! From there, it would be a matter of a couple of steps down the wall, and he would never believe that this thing couldn't levitate even in its battered state!

He bleated angrily, but still exerted the rest of his strength and began to alternate between running and blinking, shortening the distance and piercing the roofs of the houses with his hooves. He ignored a magical arrow that came from somewhere. He dodged a couple more with his other hand, and in response to a telekinesis attempt to throw a piece of paving stone at him, he aptly threw a piece of tile from the roof, hearing in return the painful cry of a mage who had his kneecap shattered. He ran to the wall at the last gasp, restoring the spirit's reserve, not his own, but the spirit's, because he couldn't take it anymore and spirit was ready to start spending more of its strength, saving the shaman's strength even more, but at the same time limiting his control over his body even more. Capturing the receptacle the young man wasn't afraid of, not with a contract certified by the System, but it was still a pleasantly small and very short-sighted thing to do. The spirit may well begin to rebuild the body and aura at will, significantly crippling or simply disfiguring both the external appearance, and the gift, or even the psyche.

The last blink at the top of the wall, after which it became clear that it would not jump like that again in the next few hours. The spirit simply ran out of exotic properties. It took a while to recharge. The wall met his guards, and in no small number, a full dozen of them, and five more on top, including a mage. The mage was already dead, though he retained the erection of a still throbbing procreative organ, as did a couple of the regular guards, and their blood and seed were marvelously gathered into runes glowing with an impure light, creating not so much a breach in space as a catapult through the same space. It's not a convenient portal, it's just a rip and push that you have to dive into and swim back out of. At least that was the analysis the spirits gave, and the shaman trusted them more than himself, because he saw just a moderately strong spatial disturbance.

"Boys, save me, pretty boys." She stretched out, almost sang, and at the moment the shaman appeared on the crest of the wall, she had already finished this phrase. "Thank you, boys!"

A dozen guards, with amulets and even a couple of battle wands, all at once came up and pointed their weapons at the shaman, looking at him with blank stares, some covered in a veil of passion, some drooling. The shit was that they all held their weapons quite firmly. The shaman had time, guaranteed time, and could not fail, but only if he broke through the guards the usual way, with blood and meat. The problem was that these men and one woman with tits too big for a tight uniform, outshining even Sylvia's or Jaspera's boobs, were definitely not corrupted, but rather just charmed, covered with mental distortion that any priest could remove and then wash off. He still went through them like a knife through butter, but he had to be very careful, hitting them with the flat of his palms, breaking bones and providing concussion, rather than killing them dead, throwing them off the wall.

Given the need to control the spirit as well, to direct its blows, which he simply couldn't help but make lethal without understanding the concept of limited damage.... He was again out of time, and it would have been even more infuriating if the shaman had any energy left for anger and rage. He could already see that he wasn't keeping up, and the smirking demoness saw what he saw, even taking the time to send him a kiss, trying to hit one of the bookmarks he'd found and slow him down and make him fall in love with her. Instead of falling in love, Stepan, feeling his victory slipping away, fell on all four limbs, even faster than the last of the guards standing on his feet, tensed all his spirit, activated the witch's billet, called out to the Goat and his mad strength, and then pulled the masonry. The stone withstood his power, but the joints between the individual elements, even strengthened by earth magic and almost completely fused into one monolith, did not. The demoness, who had almost finished the ritual, could only shriek and hurriedly finish her ritual when they both, along with about a ton and a half of stone, flew down the wall, straight into the fucking moat!

And they didn't make it, because right in the flight this scum activated a spatial jolt and they were swept up by a stormy river of distorted multidimensionality. It was a bit like travelling in the world of spheres, but not as dangerous for the aura, though much more traumatic for the body, which was literally whipped into a cherry smoothie. It was not so difficult to defend himself, helped by the Goat, who was able to give his body increased strength, as well as strengthen not only the body, but also part of the space around it, stabilising it and making it less susceptible to the chaos of spatial transition. Even so, Stepan flew out of the teleporter like a cork out of a bottle, throwing shreds of white fur and drops of his own shining blood around with a resentful bleat. Laghan, flying a little further away, didn't yell only because a piece of her lip had been torn off.

The shaman landed on his shoulder, tumbled, and braked against a tree. They fell to the ground simultaneously, to the rustle of falling branches and the dry crackle of the air electrified by the transfer, which trembled with magic. They were on their feet at the same time, and the shaman, looking at the tired, clearly lost most of her soul reserve, but still dangerous demoness, remembered the old anecdote about the captured bear. He didn't have much strength, but not enough to put up a good fight. And there will be a fight. The creature was staring at him with an anger so fierce that words could not even convey it, but it would be even more difficult to convey the equally fierce desire with which it radiated into the surrounding space. In the distance, at the horizon line, the shaman could see the top of the city wall, and all around was a wild and untamed plain, only occasionally broken by isolated trees and bushes and abundant swamps.

A surprisingly nasty place to die.

"You should have accepted my offer." She said, gritting the remains of her teeth, no longer desirable or seductive, realizing the portal had taken her not far away, too close to the city. "I will die, Stepan. I will cease to be. I won't escape the chase, there's nothing left to run with. But I'll ride you into this nothingness!"

The shaman could have noted with humour how exhausted the demoness was, that she couldn't even joke about riding him. But it wasn't funny. He'd known before that the demons you cornered were deadly. With the acquisition of specific knowledge, this understanding became even more obvious. Demons value two things more than anything else. Two idols they worship in a way that not even the most fanatical mortals worship their gods. The souls that fill their bunches with power. And their Eternity, for the sake of the continuation of which they will do anything they can do and most of what they can't. The souls she had lost, if not all, then most of them. They have simply burned out in the terrifying grip of the spatial millstones in which she has been twisted and turned, in which she has become the central axis. She realises she can't go home, she won't be welcomed there, not after being condemned to death and destruction, only to open a breach in reality, only to make it stable enough. Not after she had dared to break out of the trap, to free herself and thus break the portal that had become so weakened by the right of ashes that it could no longer hold her.

She was doomed and realised that she couldn't leave, but he wasn't in the best position, either - tired, unable to fight, and on the verge of collapsing into a coma, because his aura was so tired that it simply couldn't support an active indwelling. In a normal state, he would have used Goat's help to destroy it, especially a weakened one. But he wasn't in a normal state. Now the indwelling only weakened him more, weakened and held him back. He couldn't say he'd made any mistakes, he couldn't just summon this spirit and rush into battle. He knew for a fact that his head was full of bookmarks, and without the use of Silent Whiteness, he would have fallen under those bookmarks. And Whiteness couldn't, couldn't simulate the Goat on top, his resistance to clairvoyance was too high, not to mention the fact that he and the shaman would merge into one.

No, he'd done everything right in the beginning. He was let down by the demonic reinforcements. It was his unwillingness to kill everyone uninvolved, just to gut the demoness as soon as possible. Let down the mind that went to pieces, notwithstanding such a long contact with a Higher Spirit and the constant use of two powerful blessings at once. He began to make tactical mistakes that he could not make in his normal state, but it was also a justifiable risk. Without everything he had used, he simply couldn't fight at the level of a magister sitting in his tower and not another magister who was a warrior and fought in close proximity. The same bloodsuckers, not the exhausted and barely moving Sylvia, but at least Lemira, he could have called them into battle at any moment, but was so focused on stomping Laghan with his hooves that he simply didn't remember them. On the other hand, if he had remembered, he might have been too late. She had, in fact, managed to escape, to hide, and now might well take revenge, if not by seducing, then by killing the shaman.

The synergy of a lot of system knowledge, already known approaches, and the use of expensive consumables and blanks allowed him to survive the battle and almost win, despite the balance of power. Hell, he fought six Higher Demons with the Infernal Mistress's pumping and managed to defeat them all, and not to be killed by the Mistress from the first poke! Isn't that a measure of personal toughness, eh? At least, he managed to defeat one of the parties to the conflict. Now it would be better to make sure that the same actions taken in advance would not become the thing that would ruin him.

In a moment, his body is twisted in reverse transformation, his phantom wool, partly dissolving in the air and partly remaining material, falls off in phantom wisps, his horns retract into his skull, his hooves turn into feet, and his face becomes human again, as well as his eyes. In such a state, he can be stabbed by a villager with a pitchfork, although in fact such a unit is a king of battles, capable of beating the legendary Witcher. But the demoness did not take advantage of his weakness. Both because she was not feeling much better herself, and because of the spirits that rushed in front of her, which she had nothing to meet. The power of the current Stepan's call was not strong enough for the call of the Senior Spirits. They simply could not hear his tired whispering from the next room, where there used to be loud trumpets or clear commands directly in their ears. He did not have the strength even to call to the spirits of the powerful. Although it was possible to try to call them, give him a little more time. There were only Small Spirits left, and mostly those that were at least relatively close to reality. He simply couldn't reach them any further.

He missed the usual bracelets and necklaces with houses, which stored the spirits ready for battle. He didn't wear them for this fight, he didn't wear them personally. Some of them he gave to a doll, and some he left in a special ritual circle next to the totems. Stepan was afraid of damaging the subtle vessels, which were very sensitive to the melee level of the Goat, knowing for sure that within Dantmark, relying on the totems of the underground shelter, he could call them by the power of thought. And if he weakened so much that he could not call them, it would be all the same there. But now, fate had turned so strangely that something so unlikely even happened. He, a damn isekai, turned out to be only with a set of small spirits against a supreme demon who was very angry at him personally.

In a normal situation, the fight would have ended there, but the demon was in no better condition than Stepan. Even worse, because all the physical wounds he had received from the transfer in a particularly traumatic way were immediately closed under the influence of the corresponding meta-skill, and even his vigour returned. The almost empty source was worse than a sore throat during a sore throat, and the shaman intuitively understood that one more renewal of the reserve with a token and he would simply pass out from the pain, if not kill himself. He had to use his life force, and it's very good that those forces were added so sharply, and a moment later he added more when he strengthened himself with a token for plus two to the attribute of Constitution, the one ‘small temporary increase in the attribute of Constitution’. A moment later, he applies the ‘gift small temporary attribute enhancement’ as well, still in the form originally intended, rather than the enhanced version from ‘faithful servant’. He wouldn't have hesitated to use the enhanced version too, but he just didn't have time to activate the corresponding image; they had to be activated sequentially, and here he had to fight at once.

The creature tore the small spirits to pieces, trying to get closer and dripping sizzling slurry instead of the blood in its veins. It was intercepted by one of the sacrificial spirits with an arrow of pure filth. Lightning and air blades struck the creature regularly, heating the air and making the ground shake. He tried to break the distance, if not personally recoiling, then literally dragging himself off by the collar with the appropriate spirits. He had to bump his protruding body parts a couple of times against untimely boulders, but better that than in the warm embrace of Laghan. Exotic spirits also helped, and Stepan saved them because they were much more effective. The Sun spirit was not bad at blinding the bloodshot and watery eyes crosses, the cube-static slowed down and did not let her accelerate to the full program, and the confounder, which had already helped once, changing right and left in the victim's mind, made her twitch a little.

He kept pushing. He continued to zero in on his weight while pushing himself into his sides and chest with streams of pure force. He kept trying to weaken the demoness with witchcraft, while trying to call, call, call for at least one strong spirit, because such a force right now could at least shift the balance of power, if not finish the creature. The shaman was losing, feeling how slower his blows were becoming, how his reactions were failing, and the retinue of spirits was thinning. Рe had no time to replenish it with ready calls. One more charge of life restoration gives vigor and returns the lost strength. A new spurt, but now the demoness is a little faster. She, too, is regenerating, and the blows of the lesser spirits are simply not powerful enough to blow her body apart.

The invisible maw of the beast spirit almost snatched her arm off at the shoulder, but the other limb was already hitting Stepan in the shoulder, and he, expecting an attack of the foulness, received only the crunch of his bones, blood spurting from his nostrils from the surge of pressure, and he barely kept conscious. No vulgarity, no Lust, just pure power and the urge to kill, exactly what you'd expect from a normal demon. And yet, and yet he manages, once again pulling back the weightless self with blasts of wind and shifts in the vector of gravity. Again, he hits the demoness with the curse of liquefying the energy body, forcing her to take a moment to remove it before she drains the power from the reserve that no longer holds that power. Her summoned spirit attacks again as the piece of apparition is illuminated for a moment by moonlight despite the clear day. The demoness hissed, wrenching ghostly arrows from her chest and breaking them in her mangled and moldering hands.

And he succeeds.

A new indwelling, a new load, it becomes incredibly difficult to give commands even to small spirits, and to call new ones will not be possible, consciousness barely keeps at the border with dangerous psychosis, when the personality dies in the feelings of the indwelling spirit. But he stands, the antlers on his head shining with ghostly light, his distorted face twitching with pain and anger, and the pupils in his eyes growing and shrinking randomly. Concentration is no longer enough to control the small spirit planted in each eye socket. He wished to control at least one strong one. He used to do it playfully, but he's very tired, very tired, very tired. He just wants to lie down and die, and only the realisation that if he lies down, he will really die, does not let his desire to follow.

"Fucking deer!" Laghan hissed at him, grinning the gnarled remnants of a fanged grin and simply tearing off the skin and muscle clumps of her partially removed scalp with his hand, exposing the bones of her face, slightly melted by the three elemental spirits that had scalped the demoness. "When are you going to stop, eh?"

The shaman wanted to reply with something witty, but his wit had long left him, and he had to hold on to the remnants of his mind with all his might. So he does not speak, but continues to beat not with spirits, but in hand-to-hand combat. He gets closer, ordering the remnants of the spirits to scorch everything they have, and then leave, leaving only a very few defence specialists. The first of them immediately perishes in another fluid arrow of infernal energy, the second is demolished by a blow of partially grown tail with a melted thickening in the middle, the third and fourth of this tail cut off in the middle, and the shaman hits, as in boxing, in vain that he only watched it on TV. He pulls back the demoness's hands, punches himself, punches again, pulls back again, knocks out a couple of teeth, and groans in pain as she damages his knee with a kick. If it weren't for the reinforcement from the strong spirit, he wouldn't have been able to stand, but it was all right, but he'd lost his speed, so he could be a guard now.

Their fight, despite the emotions overwhelming them both, was in fact a frankly pathetic spectacle, a slaughter of two invalids, each of whom was doing more to keep from dying from his own injuries than he was to fear his opponent's blows. Again, if he had more remaining thinking resources, he would have appreciated the irony, but instead he was just hammering the demoness with his fists, and she was hammering him with claw strikes. He's far less survivable. The wounds and cuts left by the claws bother him far more, but he has tokens and meta-skill, reversing the wounds, and she only has her own survivability. Everything in this fight could have been decided by chance, could have been decided in anyone's favour, and if anything, it was. He hit an unfortunate bump that caused him to lose his balance. It was a small thing. He instantly lightened his weight and repositioned his legs, but the dying thing realised the situation too.

It was really cinematic. Two enemies killing each other in an instant. Her hand was already under his rib, in the palm of his hand, all the power left in her body flowing into her clawed fingers, and nothing prevented the creature from reaching his heart and crushing it to mush. He didn't falter either, on reflex, on systemic experience, breaking through her defences and sticking his pinch under Laghan's diaphragm, or rather, where normal living humanoids would have a diaphragm. The world seemed to freeze in place, as if they hadn't lied about every moment lasting an eternity before death.

//‘Well, at least I'll take that scum with me. For a very long time, she's been nightmarishing the world. For a very long time, her fairy tale games have lasted, and the further it goes, the scarier it gets. And every terrible fairy tale must come to an end - this one is not the worst yet. A worthy one, even.’ - That's how it goes through his head for one endlessly long second, and then the mental confusion caused by fatigue, pressure on the mind, exhaustion, and the beginning of psychosis passes, and Stepan begins to think normally, not like a pathological degenerate. - ‘Fuck, what kind of stupid infantile bullshit am I talking, huh? I want to live and let that bastard roam the earth for two more eternities! I don't want to die! Wait... why the fuck am I not dead yet?’

Suddenly, the young man, who had drifted into himself, realised that the moment had frozen not in his death fantasies, but was quite real. He is literally frozen, completely, intentionally, feeling neither magic, spiritual contact, nor the world around him. He doesn't breathe, his heart doesn't beat, blood doesn't flow through his veins, only the eyes in his eye sockets move and bulge in purest shock. He's not the only one, by the way, because the demoness's cross-shaped pupils are also moving and also expressing both absolute disbelief and equally absolute horror, so absolute that even this lustful shit gets through. A few subjective seconds pass until the shaman calms down enough to stop panicking and trying to call on the magical gift, mentally imagining himself forever trapped in such a temporary collapse. And then the good old System meets him with its images, sending him a message grasped with surprising ease by the mind, which is not so tired and exhausted. It was as if he had regained full clarity of consciousness by an unknown method and put the balls from the rollers on the original grooves.

* * *

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Переведено на Нотабеноиде
http://notabenoid.org/book/86785/585341

Переводчики: Camrad_RIP