Chapter 6: Chat, Am I Cooked?
Chapter 6: Chat, Am I Cooked?
I was far from an expert on demonic behaviour, my degree was traditional, a joint honors degree in Economics and Finance, not any of the military adjacent courses that sprung up following the government’s formal recognition of the demonic threat, and I’d taken it straight into a job in the industry. Even so, there were things that I couldn’t help but recognise, that anybody still alive knew as a matter of survival, and this was near the top of the list, tied as it was to one of the mainstream theories regarding the origin of the enemy.
Demons did not have a fixed shape, their form and function varying drastically to a degree that made categorisation a nightmare and caused bureaucrats the world over to tear their hair out. Every incursion was slightly different, whether in form, numbers or tactics, though sometimes sharing superficial similarities, just enough to lure the defenders into a false sense of security, and to their deaths shortly after. Not even the mascots, purveyors of magical knowledge that they were, had much to say on the subject, leaving people scrambling towards empirical analysis to try and find some answers, and it didn’t take long for researchers to note the prevalence of an odd purple mist, accumulating wherever demons began to operate in numbers.
They named the phenomenon miasma, recycling the name from antiquated medical texts long since discredited by the advent of germ theory. This purple mist, as the theory goes, was in fact the true existence behind the demons, a gaseous and nearly intangible soul that emerged from the void of another dimension, prompting inserting itself into whatever was nearest and best suited to ruining everyone’s day. The theory had many proponents, as it explained why the demons tended to resemble objects or species common to the area, amped up by chaotic magic and an insatiable lust for human blood. England fared pretty well, all things considered, being an area with mild weather conditions and a noticeable absence of natural or manmade disasters. Only a few regions were wiped off the map, and even that stopped after all things nuclear were banned and dumped into the ocean posthaste.
The public service announcements left things out, I quickly discovered, such as the fact that miasma carried the smell and taste of rotten eggs, reminiscent of a gas leak, and inhaling it was like swallowing a mouthful of feathers, all of them tickling my throat on the way down. That didn’t last for very long, thankfully, but even a brief bout of frenzied coughing was too much for my taste, pun intended. All things considered, I was almost thankful when the free floating miasma congealed into more demonic rats; those, at least, were something that I could fight back against.
Big, rabid, and identical to the one I already dispatched, the main danger they presented was in their sheer numbers, all of them flooding out of the corridor with teeth bared. Fortunately, I was now consciously aware of my new magic, and significantly more dangerous because of it. A one-handed swing killed the first through the door, even a light tap to the neck being enough to kill when boosted sevenfold. My free hand also stabbed forward, my finger poking a second rat in the eye, the additional force from my glove stabbing straight through its brain in the process, though I took a claw in return, cutting a trio of deep red gashes from shoulder to hip. A third fell to a hastily improvised bicycle kick, my heel piercing straight through the soft underside of a furry throat.
Three proved to be the limit, as I was quickly running out of limbs to commit in the face of the onslaught. Thankfully, the corpses left behind didn’t fade immediately; they decayed quickly, yes, in the manner of all demons, but that still bought me precious seconds during which their lingering bulk blocked the surviving specimens behind them, something I made full use of to take my first steps forward into the tunnel. Doing so flew in the face of my instincts, recoiling in pain and telling me to flee, but doing so meant exposing my back to an unknown number of predators; compared to that, facing them in a bottleneck was by far the better option.
As the next wave forced their way past three piles of dust, I stabbed the nearest with my cane, still favouring the eye as a soft door to the squishy brain beyond. It died instantly, gone limp by the time my weapon withdrew, its body keeping two more compatriots entangled in the narrow tunnel. I repeated the trick, scoring another scalp for my efforts, but unfortunately the previous had decayed enough by now to let the third and final rat take a bite at me. Quite literally in fact, as its front teeth plunged into my wrist; that didn’t save it from retaliation, as I kneed it in the stomach, layered with enough force to turn its insides to mush, but it did leave me with two gaping holes in my forearm.
Altogether, the surprise assault left me bleeding but alive, the miasma also retreating, having spent itself summoning half a dozen demons in a hurry. Now no longer at risk of choking, I advanced into the tunnel proper, the interior very spacious compared to the previous, though no longer curved downward, instead maintaining a flat path ahead. I followed at a brisk walk, alert for the arrival of more enemies, though my eyes frequently strayed to my wounds rather than the road.
They were deep, the cuts across my front deep enough to expose bone, and the holes in my arm likewise piercing all the way through. I’d seen colleagues collapse from much less at the workplace, and even called an ambulance for them once, yet now that it was my turn for treatment, I was left strangely unbothered. Even the pain was manageable, feeling like a handful of really bad paper cuts; not pleasant in the least, but entirely possible to power through. In fact, as I squinted, I could see the edges clotting in place, and unless I was mistaken, the holes in my hands were just a little smaller than the last time I looked. It wasn’t instant regeneration by any means, but it was still far faster than I’d never healed before. My status page didn’t show anything new that might explain it, so I could only guess that maybe all magical girls got accelerated recovery by default?This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Whatever the reason, it was enough that my wounds were closing in by time, which combined with dismissing and recalling my outfit left me in top condition after just a few minutes of convalescing. Just in time too, as the tunnel began to curve, and I turned a corner to be abruptly faced with the visage of Hell. Okay, maybe that was a bit dramatic, but bear in mind that up until this point, the environment had been normal, even if the occasional enemy was not. Going from a mostly ordinary underground setting to a vast, diseased, building sized pair of lungs, disgorging vast clouds of miasma with each languid pulse, I could be forgiven for being a bit shocked.
The lungs were already bad news by themselves, but even worse was the sheer number of rats standing guard, more of them than I could count, resembling nothing less than a single corpulent mass of fur, claws and teeth. I’d been getting better at dealing with them, improving with each taste of combat, but even so, I was confident in dealing with maybe a dozen at a time, given room to dictate the terms of engagement. Faced with well over ten times that number, I knew that I wouldn’t amount to more than an easy meal if I made an attempt on the lungs.
“This is way above my paygrade,” I concluded, knowing a lost cause when I saw one, and turning right around.
I dismissed my cane, working my phone with both hands as I backtracked. I wasn’t sure how the MAGIActivate app stayed connected, when the phone itself didn’t get a single bar of signal, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Someone needed to deal with what looked like an incursion in the making, preferably someone with the experience and firepower to level a block or two. I didn’t exactly feel ready to introduce myself to magical girl society, but life rarely waited for something like that, I reflected as I brought up the Message tab.
[Set Name:]
Of course, to actually chat online, a name was required. I’d yet to decide on a magical girl name, but judging by the messages I could see scrolling past, there wasn’t much uniformity, with people using everything from government names to random strings of letters and numbers.
[Name set as Informer.]
I wasn’t in the mood for anything funny, mindful of the biblical plague just a room away, so I picked the first vaguely relevant name I could think of and got straight down to business.
[Informer: Hi everyone. Hope I’m not interrupting anything, but I’ve found a possible incursion and was wondering if anyone could help?]
My message stayed on the front page for barely three seconds, before vanishing in a rush of chatter about summer fashion, luxury perfume and the results of last night’s Super League game. I was pretty sure people saw it, assuming every magical girl got the same visual acuity I had, but I couldn’t deny being a bit worried at the lack of response; what can I say, I was a member of generation smartphone, immediate stimulation was the name of the game for me in all aspects of life.
[You’ve been invited to Chat Group: Outer London Defence
Accept/Reject?]
It was obvious in hindsight that group chats existed, but how was I meant to find them as a newbie? Hitting accept, I found myself in a much smaller group, one sparse enough that there were actual prolonged pauses between messages as the norm, looking back at the timestamps of events before my arrival. That didn’t last for long, as I already saw the telltale dots of people typing away.
[NotLikeThis: Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Skeptigirl: Another one? Wasn’t there an outbreak northside just last week?
DragonDeez: She said possible incursion, as in, not started yet. Reading ain't just a dead town down south ya know?
Skeptigirl: *** you *** * ***, can’t you be **ing positive for once in your ***ed up life?]
The first few responses weren’t exactly encouraging, trending towards joke responses and doubt and quickly derailing into a profanity-filled catfight, though the filters blocked out most of the latter. I briefly wondered what it said about humanity, that even the super secret magical girl app needed a profanity filter to comply with Gawain store rules, before refocusing on the toothier issue at hand.
[MoonPunisher: Coordinates and details? Spawners/guards/type?
LondonBridget: What she said; where are you at? Pop your beacon and we’ll be right over.
Scarmiglione: Please don’t rush the beacon everyone, you know the mascots hate that ****. Wait for details and team assignments if needed.]
Thankfully, the chat at least partially lived on to its name, as more serious voices showed up to drown out the flood of garbage.
[Informer: I saw a pair of overgrown lungs, maybe three floors high, spewing miasma every time it breathed. Lots of overgrown rats protecting it on the ground, maybe stuff flying overhead as well but couldn’t see clearly past the mist. At least a hundred rats, likely more. Not sure about types or what a beacon is, sorry. Still my first day on the job.]
I ducked my head reflexively, finding that I’d walked myself back to the entrance of the low-hanging tunnels, all while my eyes were glued to my phone; a feat of multitasking that I’d have killed for during my corporate days.
[ToxicWaist: Lungs, plural, with over a hundred guards? Can’t be more than hours from bursting, that’s bad news bears for real.
Schrudinger: First day as a magical girl and you stumbled on a spawn room? Who’d your ancestors **** off last century?
Miazmar: Crazy? I Was Crazy Once. They Locked Me In A Room. A Rubber Room. A Rubber Room With Rats. And Rats Make Me Crazy. Crazy? I Was Crazy Once. They Locked Me In A Room. A Rubber Room. A Rubber Room With Rats. And Rats Make Me Crazy. Crazy? I Was Crazy Once. They Locked Me In A Room. A Rubber Room. A Rubber Room With Rats. And Rats Make Me Crazy.]
Chapter 6: Chat, Am I Cooked?
Chapter 6: Chat, Am I Cooked?
I was far from an expert on demonic behaviour, my degree was traditional, a joint honors degree in Economics and Finance, not any of the military adjacent courses that sprung up following the government’s formal recognition of the demonic threat, and I’d taken it straight into a job in the industry. Even so, there were things that I couldn’t help but recognise, that anybody still alive knew as a matter of survival, and this was near the top of the list, tied as it was to one of the mainstream theories regarding the origin of the enemy.
Demons did not have a fixed shape, their form and function varying drastically to a degree that made categorisation a nightmare and caused bureaucrats the world over to tear their hair out. Every incursion was slightly different, whether in form, numbers or tactics, though sometimes sharing superficial similarities, just enough to lure the defenders into a false sense of security, and to their deaths shortly after. Not even the mascots, purveyors of magical knowledge that they were, had much to say on the subject, leaving people scrambling towards empirical analysis to try and find some answers, and it didn’t take long for researchers to note the prevalence of an odd purple mist, accumulating wherever demons began to operate in numbers.
They named the phenomenon miasma, recycling the name from antiquated medical texts long since discredited by the advent of germ theory. This purple mist, as the theory goes, was in fact the true existence behind the demons, a gaseous and nearly intangible soul that emerged from the void of another dimension, prompting inserting itself into whatever was nearest and best suited to ruining everyone’s day. The theory had many proponents, as it explained why the demons tended to resemble objects or species common to the area, amped up by chaotic magic and an insatiable lust for human blood. England fared pretty well, all things considered, being an area with mild weather conditions and a noticeable absence of natural or manmade disasters. Only a few regions were wiped off the map, and even that stopped after all things nuclear were banned and dumped into the ocean posthaste.
The public service announcements left things out, I quickly discovered, such as the fact that miasma carried the smell and taste of rotten eggs, reminiscent of a gas leak, and inhaling it was like swallowing a mouthful of feathers, all of them tickling my throat on the way down. That didn’t last for very long, thankfully, but even a brief bout of frenzied coughing was too much for my taste, pun intended. All things considered, I was almost thankful when the free floating miasma congealed into more demonic rats; those, at least, were something that I could fight back against.
Big, rabid, and identical to the one I already dispatched, the main danger they presented was in their sheer numbers, all of them flooding out of the corridor with teeth bared. Fortunately, I was now consciously aware of my new magic, and significantly more dangerous because of it. A one-handed swing killed the first through the door, even a light tap to the neck being enough to kill when boosted sevenfold. My free hand also stabbed forward, my finger poking a second rat in the eye, the additional force from my glove stabbing straight through its brain in the process, though I took a claw in return, cutting a trio of deep red gashes from shoulder to hip. A third fell to a hastily improvised bicycle kick, my heel piercing straight through the soft underside of a furry throat.
Three proved to be the limit, as I was quickly running out of limbs to commit in the face of the onslaught. Thankfully, the corpses left behind didn’t fade immediately; they decayed quickly, yes, in the manner of all demons, but that still bought me precious seconds during which their lingering bulk blocked the surviving specimens behind them, something I made full use of to take my first steps forward into the tunnel. Doing so flew in the face of my instincts, recoiling in pain and telling me to flee, but doing so meant exposing my back to an unknown number of predators; compared to that, facing them in a bottleneck was by far the better option.
As the next wave forced their way past three piles of dust, I stabbed the nearest with my cane, still favouring the eye as a soft door to the squishy brain beyond. It died instantly, gone limp by the time my weapon withdrew, its body keeping two more compatriots entangled in the narrow tunnel. I repeated the trick, scoring another scalp for my efforts, but unfortunately the previous had decayed enough by now to let the third and final rat take a bite at me. Quite literally in fact, as its front teeth plunged into my wrist; that didn’t save it from retaliation, as I kneed it in the stomach, layered with enough force to turn its insides to mush, but it did leave me with two gaping holes in my forearm.
Altogether, the surprise assault left me bleeding but alive, the miasma also retreating, having spent itself summoning half a dozen demons in a hurry. Now no longer at risk of choking, I advanced into the tunnel proper, the interior very spacious compared to the previous, though no longer curved downward, instead maintaining a flat path ahead. I followed at a brisk walk, alert for the arrival of more enemies, though my eyes frequently strayed to my wounds rather than the road.
They were deep, the cuts across my front deep enough to expose bone, and the holes in my arm likewise piercing all the way through. I’d seen colleagues collapse from much less at the workplace, and even called an ambulance for them once, yet now that it was my turn for treatment, I was left strangely unbothered. Even the pain was manageable, feeling like a handful of really bad paper cuts; not pleasant in the least, but entirely possible to power through. In fact, as I squinted, I could see the edges clotting in place, and unless I was mistaken, the holes in my hands were just a little smaller than the last time I looked. It wasn’t instant regeneration by any means, but it was still far faster than I’d never healed before. My status page didn’t show anything new that might explain it, so I could only guess that maybe all magical girls got accelerated recovery by default?This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Whatever the reason, it was enough that my wounds were closing in by time, which combined with dismissing and recalling my outfit left me in top condition after just a few minutes of convalescing. Just in time too, as the tunnel began to curve, and I turned a corner to be abruptly faced with the visage of Hell. Okay, maybe that was a bit dramatic, but bear in mind that up until this point, the environment had been normal, even if the occasional enemy was not. Going from a mostly ordinary underground setting to a vast, diseased, building sized pair of lungs, disgorging vast clouds of miasma with each languid pulse, I could be forgiven for being a bit shocked.
The lungs were already bad news by themselves, but even worse was the sheer number of rats standing guard, more of them than I could count, resembling nothing less than a single corpulent mass of fur, claws and teeth. I’d been getting better at dealing with them, improving with each taste of combat, but even so, I was confident in dealing with maybe a dozen at a time, given room to dictate the terms of engagement. Faced with well over ten times that number, I knew that I wouldn’t amount to more than an easy meal if I made an attempt on the lungs.
“This is way above my paygrade,” I concluded, knowing a lost cause when I saw one, and turning right around.
I dismissed my cane, working my phone with both hands as I backtracked. I wasn’t sure how the MAGIActivate app stayed connected, when the phone itself didn’t get a single bar of signal, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Someone needed to deal with what looked like an incursion in the making, preferably someone with the experience and firepower to level a block or two. I didn’t exactly feel ready to introduce myself to magical girl society, but life rarely waited for something like that, I reflected as I brought up the Message tab.
[Set Name:]
Of course, to actually chat online, a name was required. I’d yet to decide on a magical girl name, but judging by the messages I could see scrolling past, there wasn’t much uniformity, with people using everything from government names to random strings of letters and numbers.
[Name set as Informer.]
I wasn’t in the mood for anything funny, mindful of the biblical plague just a room away, so I picked the first vaguely relevant name I could think of and got straight down to business.
[Informer: Hi everyone. Hope I’m not interrupting anything, but I’ve found a possible incursion and was wondering if anyone could help?]
My message stayed on the front page for barely three seconds, before vanishing in a rush of chatter about summer fashion, luxury perfume and the results of last night’s Super League game. I was pretty sure people saw it, assuming every magical girl got the same visual acuity I had, but I couldn’t deny being a bit worried at the lack of response; what can I say, I was a member of generation smartphone, immediate stimulation was the name of the game for me in all aspects of life.
[You’ve been invited to Chat Group: Outer London Defence
Accept/Reject?]
It was obvious in hindsight that group chats existed, but how was I meant to find them as a newbie? Hitting accept, I found myself in a much smaller group, one sparse enough that there were actual prolonged pauses between messages as the norm, looking back at the timestamps of events before my arrival. That didn’t last for long, as I already saw the telltale dots of people typing away.
[NotLikeThis: Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Skeptigirl: Another one? Wasn’t there an outbreak northside just last week?
DragonDeez: She said possible incursion, as in, not started yet. Reading ain't just a dead town down south ya know?
Skeptigirl: *** you *** * ***, can’t you be **ing positive for once in your ***ed up life?]
The first few responses weren’t exactly encouraging, trending towards joke responses and doubt and quickly derailing into a profanity-filled catfight, though the filters blocked out most of the latter. I briefly wondered what it said about humanity, that even the super secret magical girl app needed a profanity filter to comply with Gawain store rules, before refocusing on the toothier issue at hand.
[MoonPunisher: Coordinates and details? Spawners/guards/type?
LondonBridget: What she said; where are you at? Pop your beacon and we’ll be right over.
Scarmiglione: Please don’t rush the beacon everyone, you know the mascots hate that ****. Wait for details and team assignments if needed.]
Thankfully, the chat at least partially lived on to its name, as more serious voices showed up to drown out the flood of garbage.
[Informer: I saw a pair of overgrown lungs, maybe three floors high, spewing miasma every time it breathed. Lots of overgrown rats protecting it on the ground, maybe stuff flying overhead as well but couldn’t see clearly past the mist. At least a hundred rats, likely more. Not sure about types or what a beacon is, sorry. Still my first day on the job.]
I ducked my head reflexively, finding that I’d walked myself back to the entrance of the low-hanging tunnels, all while my eyes were glued to my phone; a feat of multitasking that I’d have killed for during my corporate days.
[ToxicWaist: Lungs, plural, with over a hundred guards? Can’t be more than hours from bursting, that’s bad news bears for real.
Schrudinger: First day as a magical girl and you stumbled on a spawn room? Who’d your ancestors **** off last century?
Miazmar: Crazy? I Was Crazy Once. They Locked Me In A Room. A Rubber Room. A Rubber Room With Rats. And Rats Make Me Crazy. Crazy? I Was Crazy Once. They Locked Me In A Room. A Rubber Room. A Rubber Room With Rats. And Rats Make Me Crazy. Crazy? I Was Crazy Once. They Locked Me In A Room. A Rubber Room. A Rubber Room With Rats. And Rats Make Me Crazy.]