Heroine Creation: All My Summons Are Custom Made

Chapter 248: Let Mummy Play With You [Bonus Chapter]

The next pack came charging from the broken market steps, four Slug Demons dragging themselves forward in ugly, wet masses while two Humanoid Demons raced behind them on bent, unnatural legs.

Their bodies were all wrong in different ways—too many ribs showing through stretched flesh, too much black saliva at the mouth, too much hunger in the eyes.

One of the Slug Demons opened its folded maw and spat a line of corrosive sludge across the stone, trying to force the two women apart.

"I have it!" Thor answered with a crack of lightning that split the spit in midair and turned the front half of the charge into smoking ruin.

Kestrel slid in from the side immediately after, her body moving with clean, ruthless balance. She cut once through the first Humanoid Demon’s wrist, then stepped through its line and drove the second Dragonsword across its abdomen in a flat, efficient slash that spilled black-purple blood over the street.

The spectre behind the blade snapped its jaws at the creature’s head a half-second later, and the thing’s scream ended in a wet collapse.

Thor planted her warhammer into the ground and let lightning spread in a branching web from the impact point.

A Slug Demon convulsed as the current coursed through its body and burst apart in a shower of steaming corruption.

Another tried to retreat and Kestrel caught it from behind with a twisting serpent cut that went through the spine, the ribs, and the lower jaw in one smooth motion. The creature dropped in two pieces.

Thor looked at the carnage, then at Kestrel, then at the cluster of demons still trying to gather themselves deeper in the street.

"Fifteen."

Kestrel’s eyes narrowed. "Twelve"

Thor’s mouth curved. "Slowpoke."

Kestrel scoffed and crossed the street in a sudden blur of motion, her twin blades coming together and then apart again in a flash of white and green.

A pair of Bug Demons had just clambered over a fallen cart when one of the dragon spectres surged through the lower bodies and tore them both clean from the waist up.

The other spectre whipped around her shoulder and snapped at a Winged Demon trying to escape over the rooftops, dragging it down by the throat and slamming it into the stone hard enough to crack the wall behind it.

Thor laughed out loud. "I am truly jealous now! Will you teach me how to use swords if I taught you how to use a hammer?"

Kestrel tilted her head and answered by cutting straight through the injured Descending Demon before it could recover. The white snake dragon spectre devoured the rest of the movement in a hiss of light and blood.

"If I ever need to bolt some nails, I’ll take you up on your offer."

Thor’s expression spoiled, but right after, she smiled, completely impressed by Kestrel Highcastle. "Twenty-three," she said.

Kestrel smirked victoriously. "Twenty-seven."

"Hmph," Thor scoffed. Now she was going all in.

She slammed both hands down onto her hammer, drew in a deep breath, and let the storm answer her in full. Lightning built around her like a living crown. The air began to taste sharp and metallic. Then she moved.

"Storm Break."

A surge of lightning detonated outward from her body in a broad circle, not a scattered burst but a directed bloom of violent force that erased the first row of approaching Demons in a single sweep.

Fallen bugs, Winged Drakes, and one overconfident Humanoid all vanished under the impact, their bodies stripped into ash, sparks, and fragments of ruined flesh. The shockwave kicked dust and broken stone down the street and sent the windows of the nearest cliff homes shaking in their frames.

Kestrel turned at the edge of the blast and immediately cut another pair of Demons apart before they could reach her back.

Her gaze narrowed.

"Oh, so now we’re doing that."

Thor grinned, more than a little wickedly. "You were getting comfortable."

Kestrel looked thrilled. She slashed her swords to her sides and raced faster towards the incoming horde.

These ones came from the broken stairway ahead, eight of them at least, mixed types and mixed shapes, all of them snarling and clawing and pushing through the miasma in a wave of rotten instinct.

Kestrel met them head-on. She didn’t wait for Thor to break the line to break apart. She drove directly into the middle of it, one Dragonsword high, the other low, the dragon spectres twisting around her in overlapping arcs of lethal white.

Every motion was exact. A cut to the left shoulder of one Demon, a reverse slash across the neck of another, then a step inside a Burrower’s leap that turned its own momentum against it.

One of the monsters tried to bite her arm and she answered by twisting her body and using the hilt of the blade to smash the jaw sideways before the sword itself finished the kill.

Thor barked, "Thirty-nine!"

Kestrel heard that and answered by taking the head off a Fallen Demon with a clean downward stroke. "Forty-three."

"Fifty-three!"

"Sixty!"

The next wave slammed into them almost immediately, as if the town itself had decided to throw every demon in the district at the two of them at once.

Humanoids came over the market steps. Burrowers cracked open the stone from below. Winged Demons dove from the damaged rooftops. A Slug Demon crawled up the side of a collapsed stone stair and sprayed corrosive muck into the air.

Thor answered first.

Her hammer spun once in her hand and then struck the ground in a pillar of pure thunder. Lightning shot up through the strike and split into several forks, each one ripping through a different Demon.

One Winged beast was caught mid-dive and electrocuted so violently it burst apart before it could hit the ground. A burrowing Bug Demon half-emerged from the stone and was instantly cooked from the inside out. A Humanoid Demon tried to swing at her from the left and collapsed into a smoking heap before the claw landed.

Thor lifted the hammer and looked over at Kestrel with visible satisfaction.

Kestrel, meanwhile, had already turned into the next attack.

The twin Dragonswords moved so fluidly they almost looked like one weapon splitting into two only when they needed to.

She passed through a pair of Winged Demons, one blade severing the first at the hip while the other spiraled upward to take the jaw from the second.

The dragon spectres followed those motions like white flames with teeth, and one of them wrapped around a descending Demon’s torso before tearing it open in a flash of luminous violence.

"Seventy-seven!" Thor declared.

Kestrel finished off a Humanoid Demon, slicing it from shoulder to waist then spinning her sword and dropping it low. "Eighty-one," she said smugly.

Thor grumped.

Kestrel laughed loudly now, her head tipped back as her delicate shoulders and breasts following the motion. "Who knew the great captain of the Valkyries was such a loser?!"

Thor raised a brow. "A loser?" She immediately lifted her hammer and pointed to the far away crowd of red freaks coming at them. "Lightning Rain."

The sky immediately answered.

A deep, rolling crack split the air overhead, and then the first bolt came down like a blade thrown by Heaven itself.

Then dozens more followed, falling in a violent cascade of white-blue fire that struck the Demons one after another, hammering through their bodies with such force that the whole front line of the horde erupted in heat and smoke.

The lightning streaked down in thick, relentless sheets until the entire swarm became a field of burning wreckage.

Demons screamed and burned. And after the storm ended, there was nothing left of the charge except smoking black bodies scattered across the ground.

The street went quiet in the aftermath, only the low crackle of fading electricity and the distant hiss of scorched stone left behind.

Kestrel’s laughter died in her throat.

She stared at the corpses. Then at Thor.

Thor placed her hammer on her shoulder and met Kestrel’s stare with a big, proud smile.

"A hundred."

*****

Farther down one of the side streets, another group of Demons had begun gathering, drawn by the sound of the slaughter. They were slower than the pair’s current pace, but there were enough of them to turn into a problem if they were left unchecked.

Slug Demons led the charge, their thick bodies dragging trails of miasma across the stone. Winged types circled above them. A pair of Humanoids shoved through the middle, growling as they tried to coordinate the line.

Suddenly, a terrifying sound entered their field of awareness.

A laugh.

Soft at first, then clearer, curling through the darkened street like smoke with a smile in it.

The Demons all froze and turned.

Hovering above them, framed by a cloud of red smoke and the crooked black line of Deathrock’s upper walls, was the Mother of Gehenna.

Her white hair drifted against the gloom like a pale banner. The red cloud beneath her rolled lazily at her feet, and the expression on her face was one of delighted wickedness, as though she had wandered into a children’s game and found the rules charmingly easy to abuse.

"Oh," she said, eyes gleaming as she looked down at the gathering Demons below. "My poor sweet children. Why the rush?"

Her lips curved wider.

"Come now," Spectra purred, extending one hand toward them with languid, theatrical grace. "Let mummy play with you."