Tom scrambled back a little, trying to take a defensive stance. However, just before the demons reached him, they let out high pitched howling noises, clouds of smoke sprang from nowhere, and the demons disappeared. “What the hell?” Tom said in surprise.
What were these two up to? Tom quickly looked around, suspecting a trick. The two demons however, were gone. He couldn’t see them anywhere, as far as he could tell, they’d gone back to the Abyss. The question was, why? It really didn’t make any sense.
“Cute,” said a voice from the crowd of soldiers to Tom’s left. Tom glanced over and saw the first demon slowly emerging from the crowd. “Perhaps you can scare pip squeaks into pretending that you destroyed them, so that they don’t have to fight; but it won’t work with me.”
“No, you’re going to have to get rid of me the hard way, asshole. That lightning trick ain’t gonna work on me either. So you’d just better be prepared for a long fight.” As he spoke the demon marched closer. As he finished speaking, Tom judged that he was just at the right distance.
“I don’t think so,” as fast as he could, Tom spun and landed a spinning back kick to the demon’s stomach. The demon moaned in surprise and bent over. As he bent, Tom quickly repositioned himself. Breathing as he’d been taught, Tom began a series of quick punches to the other’s face. Using the full force of his body, but keeping his shoulder’s fixed, he jabbed as quick and hard as he could at the demons face six times, kiyaing each time. Shifting his balance, he then executed a right crescent kick. Unfortunately, because of his leg construction, he didn’t coordinate it properly to get it as high as it should go. He’d intended to hit the guy’s chin, instead, Tom’s hoof impacted on the demon’s shoulder, spinning it around and to the ground.
Tom backed up as far as he could. As he did so the other demon slowly got to its feet. Tom charged through the air. He was attempting to do the double flying back kick that he’d used so successfully on the dragon. Unfortunately, he realized as he flew by, this demon wasn’t as large as the dragon, and it was a lot more mobile. The demon had simply seen him coming and leapt out of the way at the last second.
To his surprise, Tom kept going. He tried to slow himself down with his wings, but before he could decelerate appreciably, he found himself plowing through soldiers. Only vaguely did Tom hear the screams. All he could really note in those few seconds, was the thumping of bodies against his hooves and body. Hardly recognizing what he was seeing through the blood that was spurting everywhere, he came to a stop, about a two hundred feet from where he started.
Standing up dazedly, he unthinkingly looked at the mangled corpses around him. Uncomprehendingly, he noted calmly that at least one man’s head had been popped off. Some soldiers were missing limbs and many just had their guts hanging out. How could he have done this? Slowly he realized that at least some of the damage had come from the fact that they’d been tightly packed and had weapons drawn.
So in reality, the only ones he’d really mangled, were those in his hooves’ path. The other’s had just been jammed aside as he plowed through, and they’d accidentally sliced and diced themselves and their fellows. Wanting nothing more than to get away from the death he’d caused, Tom took the only open path out, back the way he’d come. As he emerged from the bewildered and wounded soldiers, he saw the other demon laughing at him. This was almost too much. “What the hell is your problem? It was your soldiers that got creamed!”
“I am laughing at you. You’re nothing but a fool.”
Tom was getting annoyed, this jerk was laughing, and now he’d noticed some fool wizard chanting something at the periphery of the clearing made by the soldiers. Tom couldn’t tell what the guy was chanting, but a black cloud seemed to be forming in front of the wizard. Tom didn’t know what the man was doing, but he imagined it wasn’t for Tom’s benefit. Angry, and lashing out, Tom once more charged the laughing demon. Again, the demon was ready, except that this time Tom didn’t do quite what was expected.
Instead of trying to physically throw the other demon, or punch it, Tom simply attempted to grab one arm and spin the demon around. He was simply trying to throw it off balance and make it stumble. His ploy worked. The demon stepped aside as Tom charged up and in the process added to the momentum that Tom needed to grab its arm and jerk it off balance and away. Stumbling on its goat-like legs the demon accidentally backed into the mumbling wizard and his black cloud, just as Tom had hoped.
However, the results were more than Tom had bargained for. The demon ran into the wizard, thus throwing off his concentration.
Now, distracting a wizard in the middle of casting a spell is never a good idea. If a wizard loses control of a powerful spell, bad things can happen. This is especially true when the wizard is casting a Cloud of Disintegration, as this one was doing. Unbeknownst to Tom, C.o.D’s are one of the few spells that can permanently discorporate demons. It also happens to dissolve anything that gets in its way. Including casters that lose control of it.
Thus it was that Tom heard only a very short yell, as the cloud expanded and completely engulfed the demon and the wizard. C.o.D’s are very efficient, the victims feel only a momentary instant of infinite pain as their cells are ripped into their component molecules, which are in turn disassociated into their constituent atoms. At this point the victims feel absolutely nothing as the atoms are stripped of their electrons, and then the protons and neutrons are ripped apart. Suffice to say, one need not even mention any thought of pain as the nucleons are split into quarks and so on it goes down to the primordial energies and particles which may make up quarks. Naturally, a theoretical magic student may wonder at what happens to the incredible amounts of binding energy that are released in this occurrence. Unfortunately, the best theories simply state that this energy goes into feeding the cloud, allowing it to grow. After all, it takes an awful lot of energy to rip things apart on this scale in the first place.
It is also fairly easy to see that it would be nice to have a wizard controlling said cloud, otherwise it would disintegrate things, grow and eventually eat everything. Unfortunately, in this case, the controlling wizard was eaten by the cloud. Now, actually, Lenamare, who was observing from the castle wall, wasn’t too concerned. He wasn’t positive, but he was pretty sure that the cloud couldn’t get through his wards. After all, the wards were pure energy to begin with. Thus at least he and his school would be safe.
Exador, on the other hand, had no such protection. Therefore, he quickly decided that instead of messing with more demons to fight Lenamare’s demon, he would do his best to try to get the cloud under control, before it ate his army. By the time he got close enough to begin work on trying to control it, it had quadrupled its size and had eaten four horses and five soldiers who hadn’t realized the problem in time to get away. Naturally it was also dissolving the earth below it as well.
Tom though, didn’t really care about the cloud. He was simply exhausted and sick. He was just glad that he apparently had no more enemies to fight. Without waiting around for further orders, Tom took to the air to head back toward the clearing with the wizard in it. As he flew off, his last glimpse of the army was of some new big shot wizard waving his hands, and of soldiers finally having the sense to run away from something obviously dangerous.
It took very little time for Tom to return to the clearing. By the time he was coming down for a landing he was already preparing something nasty to say to the wizard about the timely backup he’d received. The words died in his mouth as he quickly noticed the state of the clearing.