The Adventures of
the Jade Dragon
Episode
9
The Jade Dragon’s Return
Email:
Lespion@msn.com
Chapter
6 Demon Trap
The incubus lurked on the roof of the stately
townhouse he had first visited. His
original victim was gone now; the demon had taken her for himself, but his
senses still detected the presence of other potential sexual
partners. He refrained from acting;
however, there was something about one of them that made him
cautious. Carefully he shifted
his position and listened.
“What could have happened?” Natassia
asked. Her voice was filled with
anxiety. “They can’t
simply have disappeared into thin air, but no one seems to have heard or
seen anything.”
Everything seems to be as it should be,”
Huan Yue said. “There is
no sign that they were taken by force.”
Natassia knitted her finely arched
brows. There was a hollow feeling
in the pit of her stomach. She
knew that they were up against a supernatural being and could not hold back
the feelings of dread connected to the disappearance of Sun Lin as well as
Suzi, and Melissa and her daughter.
She also knew that anything that could abduct four women without a
trace could just as easily have come after her or her
daughters.
“There must be clue somewhere,” Natassia
said. “Keep
looking. I’m going to check
the room where Suzi and Solange were attacked.”
She jogged off to the upstairs
bedroom. So far nothing had been
done to repair the shattered window where the incubus had
entered. The servants had all
been sent on holiday. It
wouldn’t do to have any of them see the comings and goings of the most
famous of
Entering the room gave her an eerie
feeling. It had been here that
Suzi and Melissa had encountered the forces of evil and it seemed to her
that the room still held a trace of the demon’s
aura.
There was nothing in the room out of the
ordinary. The window had been
boarded up and the glass swept up from the
floor. Disappointed, Natassia
turned to leave and then heard a slight noise behind her.
She turned just in time to see the sheet of plywood
covering the window give way under the impact of a heavy
body. Her eyes widened as a demonic
creature burst into the room. She
knew at once what it was from Suzi’s
description. It was not the demon;
it was the incubus, the monster that had raped
Solange.
The monster wasted no
time. Its feet had hardly hit
the floor before it had launched itself across the room toward the astounded
heroine. Natassia had a brief
glimpse of a gaping fang-filled mouth, huge clawed hands, and a powerful
body, and then the beast was upon her.
Any normal woman would have been overwhelmed,
but Natassia was not normal. The mystical gem known as the
Dragon’s Eye,
gave the dark-haired heroine the strength of a dozen ordinary men and superhuman
quickness. Fast as the incubus
was, Natassia was faster. Hardly
seeming to move, she shifted her weight slightly and delivered a devastating
counterattack.
As the incubus sailed harmlessly past, she slammed
her fist with jackhammer force and rapidity into the monster’s
ribcage. There was the sound
of breaking bone and the incubus was hurled across the room with such force
that it shattered the large mahogany wardrobe that it crashed
into.
Natassia stood and surveyed the defeated beast,
her hands going unconsciously to her
hips. “Bit off a bit more
than you could chew, didn’t you?” she
said. Then her eyes widened in
disbelief as the incubus slowly pulled itself to its
feet.
“What in god’s name…,” Natassia
began and then realized God had nothing to do with
it. She was facing an opponent
from the demonic realms. It would
take more than a single punch to take it out.
“Alright,” she said slowly, “if
that’s the way you want…”
She didn’t get a chance to finish before
the incubus launched itself across the
room. Once again Natassia easily
sidestepped the beast’s awkward rush and slammed her fists into
it. This time she didn’t
stop with just one punch but hit it with triphammer rapidity landing at least
a dozen blows in just milliseconds.
This time the incubus didn’t stop flying until it slammed halfway
through the wall.
To Natassia’s considerable annoyance the
demonic creature slowly pulled itself to its feet, shaking bits of plaster
from its massive shoulders. It
hardly seemed hurt, or if it was it had remarkable healing
powers.
“The damned thing is just like me,”
Natassia thought. “It heals
as soon as it is damaged. How
do I destroy this thing?”
At that moment a sound behind her caused her to
turn slightly. Vala stood in
the doorway, her eyes wide with surprise.
“Get back,” Natassia
shouted. “Let me
handle…”
The incubus slammed full into her, hitting her
with such force that she was driven completely through the interior wall
of the room and into the hallway.
The impact left her semiconscious.
The power of the
Dragon’s
Eye gave her incredible strength and healing ability, but it did
not make her invulnerable. The
incubus took full advantage of her bewildered state, ripping open her white
blouse.
Natassia was wearing her white Nova costume beneath
her street clothes. For a second
the demon looked at the costume in confusion then dug into it with his claws
and attempted to rip it from her body.
To the fiend’s surprise and consternation the skin-tight white
material did not tear. It was
not surprising considering that the costume was constructed of synthetic
spider silk, a fabric that was stronger than
steel.
The brief respite gave Natassia the time she needed
to recover. The healing power
of the
Dragon’s Eye surged through
her, restoring her strength. She
struck out at the incubus, attempting to free herself from his
grasp. This time, however, she
did not catch her opponent off-guard.
He blocked her blows and seized her wrists in his powerful
grip. Natassia twisted her body,
attempting to move her legs beneath her in order to drive her feet into the
body that pinned her to the floor.
The incubus, however, matched her
speed. He grappled with her,
forcing the heroine into a wrestling
match.
It was strength against strength and both combatants
were evenly matched. Melissa
was a little quicker, but the huge size of incubus meant that he did not
have to move as fast. It got
down to a matter of who would wear out first and in this too they were they
were almost equal. Possessed
of demonic powers the incubus could not be worn down and Natassia’s
power was continually restored by the
Dragon’s
Eye.
Natassia, however, was far from comfortable battling
at close quarters. She wanted
to defeat the incubus, not wrestle with
it. Using all of her considerable
skill she battled to break free, making use of every trick of close combat
that she knew.
She almost
succeeded. Wrenching loose from
the demon’s grasp she drove her fists into its face, flattening its
nose and driving it back. It
was at that moment, however, that the demon’s searching claws discovered
the zipper that sealed the back of Natassia’s
costume. With an amazing dexterity
it opened the back of the costume even as the heroine’s fists smashed
again and again into its face.
Seemingly drawn by instinct, it revealed Natassia’s exquisite
back and discovered the golden belt that encapsulated the
Dragon’s
Eye. A flick of a single
razor-edged claw tore the belt from her
body. Natassia’s superheroine
powers evaporated like a drop of water in a caldron of molten
steel.
The demon knew of the change almost as soon as
Natassia did. He felt the change
in his opponent. For a brief
instant he stopped to savour his victim.
The heroine now struggled helplessly in his
grasp. Her long raven-black hair
swirled wildly as she fought to escape, and her back arched frantically as
she pushed against him. Eyes
now wide with fear she searched desperately for the belt that held the secret
of her power. Tantalizingly,
her demonic foe dangled it from one claw, holding it just out of her
reach.
Natassia reached desperately for the belt, but
the demon pushed her to the floor and pinned her there by placing a knee
of her chest. Almost contemptuously,
if the incubus was capable of such an emotion, it hurled the belt out the
window. Then it began to remove
the heroine’s costume.
Pinned beneath a monster that weighed over three
times what she did, the heroine struggled
desperately. She faced a horrible
fate if the incubus had his way and the terror of the situation gave her
the strength to almost break free.
For a second she slipped the grip of the incubus, but with lightning
speed it caught hold of her ankle.
It seemed to wait for a second and then lifting her bodily and ignoring
her frenzied attempts to escape it carried her to the
window. With remarkable ease
the incubus swung out of the window, caught hold of the edge of the roof
and pulled himself to the top of the house, taking the half-stripped heroine
with him.
The roof provided the incubus with what he wanted;
the time and privacy to have his way with the now thoroughly terrified
heroine. The incubus pushed her
onto the roof tiles, using his weight to pin her in
place. Then he removed the spider
silk costume, peeling it from her body like the skin of an orange.
Natassia bit back a shriek of horror as her clothing
was stripped from her. Ever-present
in her mind was the fear of the huge phallus that was now only inches from
her loins. She also remembered
the terrible injuries inflicted on Suzi and Solange when they had been raped
by the demon and the incubus; injuries that were so severe that even the
power of the
Dragon’s
Eye had not been able to heal
them.
Her fear gave her renewed
strength. Twisting her supple
body, she braced her feet against the chest of the incubus and attempted
to fight him off. It was, however,
to no avail. Almost scornfully
the incubus seized her legs just above the knees and parted her thighs, and
then in a tauntingly leisurely fashion lowered its heavy body, its huge phallus
descending toward her gates of pleasure.
Natassia thrashed wildly, but the incubus had
her. With cruel deliberation
it positioned itself and then stroking the glans of its heavy phallus against
the lips of her vulva it began to work its way into
her. It took its time, apparently
unconcerned over being interrupted.
Apparently it felt secure on it rooftop refuge; especially as it was
shrouded in darkness.
That mattered little to Natassia, however, her
terror mounted as the incubus slowly forced its way into
her. A terrible pain tore through
her loins and with it another sensation, one she had never experienced
before. Her strength was being
drawn from her. The incubus was
soaking up her energy like a sexual
sponge. As he carnally subjugated
her he absorbed her strength into his massive body, feeding on her like some
gigantic sexual leech.
The agony that ripped through her body as she
was completely conquered was
unbelievable. She opened her
mouth and screamed and then suddenly the incubus was
gone.
Moaning in pain and too weak to move, Natassia
simply lay where the incubus had left her, but a roar of anger made her turn
her head. The incubus had reared
up to its full seven foot height.
Its back to her, Natassia could barely see what it faced, but her
keen eyes caught the gleam of steel.
A second later her ears rang with the shout of a battle
cry. Her daughters had
arrived.
With a supreme effort, Natassia forced herself
up on her elbows. She was almost
completely exhausted, but she was able to raise her head enough to witness
the battle that was taking place on the roof of Suzi’s
mansion.
Dancing toward the incubus were three figures,
their trim bodies just visible in the light of the
half-moon. Natassia wanted to
shout a warning; tell her daughters and Huan Yue to save themselves, but
she was too weak. It took all
of her strength just to raise her head far enough to observe the
battle.
She realized as she watched that this was what
she had trained her daughters for.
They were going up against a force of
evil. It was, however, sooner
than she or her companions had planned.
Their daughters were to be introduced to the perils of being superheroines
by degrees, not thrust suddenly into the most deadly danger
imaginable. But it was already
too late for Solange.
Melissa’s daughter had experienced a most brutal heroine
initiation. And now it appeared
that Sun Lin’s daughter and her twins were to experience the same baptism
of fire.
The incubus pulled itself up to its full height,
looming over the three girls. On
the sloping area of the rooftop it would have a distinct
advantage. The girls’ ability
to fight the monster lay in their agility, but there was precious room to
avoid their hulking opponent on the limited area of the
roof. One slip and they would
face a possible killing fall or even worse, falling into the clutches of
the incubus.
And yet, the girls were not completely at the
beast’s mercy. Lari and
Vala were armed with seven foot
pudao, ancient Chinese weapons that were deadly in the hands
of a trained fighter. Each weapon
consisted of a four foot wooden shaft surmounted by a gleaming sword-like
blade with a deadly cutting edge.
Just behind them Huan Yue held her
jian,
a sword identical to the keen edged blade that Solange had used to attack
the incubus. However, what good
these weapons would be against the powers of a supernatural beast remained
to be seen. Natassia held her
breath as the incubus moved to attack.
In front of the advancing fiend Vala stood
calmly. She twirled her
pudao
like a majorette twirls a baton, seemingly unconcerned about the hideous
creature that was fast closing with her.
And then the incubus attacked.
Vala waited until the last possible millisecond
before making her move. It was
then that the remarkable ability to communicate with her sister became
evident. The claws of the incubus
grazed her skin as she darted aside, but her daring maneuver achieved its
purpose. The incubus had exposed
its entire right side to her sister.
Lari leapt forward, and thrust her
pudao deep into the chest of the
incubus. To Natassia’s surprise
the keen blade ripped the monster open, spewing gore over the
rooftop.
The incubus lurched back so violently that
Lari’s weapon was almost torn from her
grasp. It howled in pain, whirling
to face its deadly foe. Vala
came in from the other side, her twin weapon penetrating the body of the
incubus just below the armpit. The
keen-edged weapon sank into the fiend’s flesh and emerged from the top
of its shoulder. With an
ear-splitting shriek the monster whirled on its new assailant, spinning both
girls from their feet. Then Huan
Yue entered the fray. The
incubus was directly in front of her, pierced by two
polearms. She put everything
she had into her attack. The
jian swept in a great arc. It
contacted the neck of the incubus just above the
shoulder. The demonic creature
didn’t even scream as its head detached from its
shoulders.
For a few seconds the giant torso stood there,
and then it seemed to evaporate, turning to a dark vapour that dispersed
into the night. The three girls
stared in disbelief. It seemed
impossible that they had destroyed their giant adversary so
completely. They looked about
them in bewilderment and then the twins remembered their
mother.
“Find the
Dragon’s
Eye,” Natassia said weakly as her daughters huddled around
her.
It took the three girls over ten minutes to descend
from the roof to the garden and locate the gem; an agonizing ten minutes
for the defeated Natassia who feared that somehow the mystical gem might
have been lost, but finally a glad cry from below told her that it had been
found. Five minutes later Vala
placed the glowing green stone in Natassia’s hand.
To Natassia’s immense relief she felt the
healing power of the stone flow through
her. She feared that it might
be blocked as had been the case with Suzi and Solange, but within seconds
the almost erotic sensation of her body being restored told her that everything
was as it should be. For a few
seconds after her body had been regenerated she lay quietly, her chest rising
and falling slowly, and then realizing that she was lying nude on a rooftop
in the middle of the night she got to her
feet. She felt no sense of
triumph. The incubus seemed to
have been defeated, but the Jade Dragon, Scorpion, and Solange were still
missing. The thought of what
sort of ordeal that might be suffering filled her with a morbid
dread.
“My god,” Natassia
thought. “I barely
escaped. What sort of ordeal
must my friends be suffering?”
The demon hissed in
anger. There was a sudden absence,
an absence that told him his incubus was no
more.
“So,”
he growled,
“yours friend, Nova has destroyed my
pet. She will pay for
that. She will pay with an eternity
of pain.”
He looked at the slumping body of the Jade
Dragon.
“First, however, I will
enjoy the girl and I will do it using the body of the greatest of
heroines.”
An image flashed through Melissa’s mind of
what the demon intended. “Oh
no,” she gasped. “You
can’t do that.”
It was a vision that was truly repulsive; one
in which the Jade Dragon stripped the skin from Melissa’s shrieking
daughter and then raped her anally using a dildo of immense proportions while
Melissa, chained to the wall, watched helplessly.
“Don’t worry,”
the
demon taunted.
“When
I am finished with you daughter you will have your
turn.”
Melissa shuddered and bit back a whimper of
fear. What the demon intended
to do to her made his torment of her daughter seem almost
pleasant. And then the evil presence
was gone from her mind. Overcome
with exhaustion from her long struggle, Melissa sank to her knees, no longer
strong enough to stand. She
didn’t even protest as the demon seized her shoulder length hair and
dragged her to the wall where he shackled her so that she could enjoy the
show.
Azz
Garul contemplated his victims, reviewing his
actions. He was thoroughly enjoying
this world. He had defeated and
humiliated two of its greatest heroines and was now about to torture the
daughter of one of them. Even
better, there were still several heroic women still
uncaptured. True, they had somehow
destroyed his pet, but that made their future defeat even more
enticing. And he would use the
greatest of them to help him in that most pleasant
task. He reached out his mind
to the Jade Dragon.
She was strong; much stronger than he would have
imagined. Fortunately, his violent
assault on her body and her semiconscious condition allowed him to penetrate
the outer defences of her mind before she was even aware of his
attack. Only then did she respond,
and her reaction was ferocious.
The heroine counter-attacked with everything she
had, using all of her mental resources to drive him from her
mind. He let her come at him,
drawing her on, and then when she thought she had him, he ruthlessly crushed
her resistance.
It was a form of mental
rape. Bit by bit he broke her
down, destroying every mental barrier she erected, bending her to his will
and completely subjugating her. He
sensed her fear and frustration as he slowly invaded her
mind. Mentally he jeered at her
enjoying the dismay and terror as he conquered
her.
“You are mine,
heroine. I will do to your mind
what I did to your body. You
will become my slave both physically and mentally, and then I will use you
to destroy your friends and your
daughter.”
The heroine’s reaction was one of complete
dismay, but somehow, she found the psychic strength to attempt one more act
of defiance. Almost contemptuously
he crushed her resistance, delighting in her final and complete humiliation
and defeat. Her mind caved in
before him and then he was triumphant, invading the innermost recesses of
her psyche.
He pushed forward mentally, intent on completing
the violation of his victim’s mind and suddenly encountered something
he had never found before. It
was a sealed off section of the heroine’s mind; a region that he did
not yet control. With ruthless
determination he pushed aside the last barrier and found himself in a place
beyond his imagination.
He was standing at the bottom of what seemed like
an endless flight of stairs. High
above him he could see the outlines of what appeared to be a temple, behind
and to either side was a splendid mountain
vista.
“What
is this?” he growled.
“It is eternity,” said a somewhat familiar
voice.
He blinked.
Standing on the stairs before him was the Jade
Dragon. She was dressed like
a Chinese princess in the finest of green silk gowns; her gleaming black
hair piled high on her head and fastened with pins adorned with
gems. She was a vision of stunning
beauty had the demon the eyes to see it.
The demon, however, saw merely the woman he had raped and
subjugated. Somehow she was
marvelously restored and stood before him with a poise and confidence he
found alarming.
“Eternity?”
the demon echoed.
“Where is this
place?”
“This is the
The demon blinked
again. At the base of the staircase
was a granite statue. He could
have sworn that it was not there the first time he had looked, but even more
alarming was the fact that the statue was that of the
incubus. However, it was somewhat
changed in form. It had the same
demonic features, but now it was dressed in the armour of a Chinese warrior,
complete with spear. It was crouched
as if to fend off an enemy.
“You cannot do
this,”
the demon roared.
“I
will destroy you!”
“I think not,” replied the heroine with
perfect calm. “You thought
you were in control when you invaded my mind, but you were only allowed to
go where I wanted you to go. I
led you here. And here you will
remain.”
“Filthy
whore!”
the demon raged. He lunged toward
her and found that his feet would not
move. He glanced down and saw
that his taloned feet were now part of the stone landing upon which he was
standing.
“You cannot do this!”
he
screamed.
“No,” said another voice, “but
I can.”
The demon looked
up. Another woman now stood on
the staircase next to the Jade Dragon.
Her perfect skin was as white as the finest marble and her eyes flashed
violet, deepening to
“No,
Azz
Garul,” the woman commanded.
“You will never kneel again.
From now on you will remain here with your companion and guard my
domain. Should anyone attempt
to enter you and your companion will prevent them.”
The demon opened his mouth in protest, but no
sound came out. He noticed that
like his companion he was now accoutered like a temple
guard. His frozen hand grasped
a spear and he was crouched in a position of
readiness.
“A fitting fate,” the goddess
said. “The demon will now
live forever in this world; a guardian of my domain for all
time.”
The Jade Dragon
nodded. “And now I must
return. My companions await
me.”
“Your return will be painful, but it is
necessary,” the goddess replied.
She raised her hand as the Jade Dragon faded and then
disappeared.
Sun Lin returned to a world of
agony. Her body was as she had
left it, hanging in chains from the ceiling of the
vault. A few feet away Suzi,
Melissa, and Solange were still captive, all of them hanging helplessly in
their chains. She attempted to
move and an incredible wave of pain shot through
her. Gasping, she assessed her
situation.
She had defeated the demon, but she and her companions
were still prisoners. It was
unlikely that anyone knew where they were and all of them were suffering
from the effects of their captivity and the brutal torture of the
demon. Almost every part of her
body hurt. The venom the demon
had injected into her when he had raped her still burned where he had touched
her, and he had touched her almost
everywhere. Not surprisingly,
the pain was most concentrated in her anal and vaginal
region. Every attempt to move
sent pain surging through her, but she could not simply remain
still. Her strength, such as
it was, would not last much longer.
She had to escape or die in chains.
She gathered her strength and strained at the
chains, but fell back exhausted.
The demon’s chains held her
inextricably. She tried again
straining her exhausted body, but once more was
defeated. She hung panting in
the chill air of the vault, her sweat drying on her body and chilling her
even further. She began to shiver
and had to fight for control of her battered body.
She was utterly
beaten. Her mental battle with
the demon must have taken much longer than she
thought. How long had she been
hanging in the vault? From the
look of her companions it was quite some
time. The wrists and ankles of
her companions had been rubbed raw as if they had been desperately attempting
to escape. Apparently they had
struggled until they were so exhausted that they had collapsed.
They were not unconscious, however; at least not
all of them. Melissa raised her
head and Suzi groaned. “What
happened?” asked the blonde heroine.
“One minute that monster was here and the next he was
gone.”
“He is gone,” gasped Sun
Lin. She was almost too exhausted
to speak. “Now we must
escape.”
In answer the other two heroines jerked at their
chains. But it was clear from
their heavy breathing that they were not in much better shape than Sun Lin
was. All three women were so
close to exhaustion that they were close to passing
out.
Sun Lin calmed herself, thinking how ironic it
would be to have defeated the demon, and yet still die because she could
not escape his chains. Her strength
was fast failing her and her fellow captives showed no sign of
recovering.
“There must be something I can do,”
she thought. "Some way of overcoming
this challenge.” The problem
was, she could think of nothing to solve the
problem. In complete desperation
she tried once more to break her chains.
The effort was wasted, leaving her even weaker
than before. She saw that Melissa
and Suzi had met with the same level of
success. Both heroines were now
slumped in their chains, no longer possessing the strength to
stand. It seemed that the demon
had won after all.
“This can’t be,” she
gasped. “I can’t die
like this.”
Natassia paced back and forth in the study of
Suzi’s home. She wasn’t
acting much like a heroine or a woman who had spent her youth in a Shaolin
monastery, but she was almost beside herself with
worry. Suzi, Solange, Melissa,
and Sun Lin were
out
there somewhere and he had absolutely no idea where to find
them. Their disappearance was
so complete there was almost no doubt that they were in the hands of the
demon. God knows what horrors
he would be putting them through.
She forced herself to stop walking and sit in
one of the comfortable chairs. It
wouldn’t do for Huan Yue or the twins to see her like
this. They were looking to her
for guidance and she had to at least appear calm even if she churned with
emotions. Right now the three
girls were in the kitchen preparing
lunch. It gave them something
to do and also offered some protection in that they were
together. There was no telling
when the demon would strike again and there was no sense in taking
chances. Their performance against
the incubus had shown that they could more than hold their own when they
worked as a team.
She racked her brain trying to think of someplace
where the missing heroines might have been taken, but it was of no
use. There were simply too many
possibilities and there was also the frightful thought that the demon might
have taken them to his realm. She
had no idea if that was a possible, but if that was the case then she knew
she would never see them again.
“Stop, Natassia,” she said
aloud. “This is getting
you nowhere.” Having chastised
herself she fought for calm, seeking the Taoist meditative techniques she
had mastered.
Her breathing
slowed. Eyes closed she closed
off the outer world and sank deep within
herself. She could not find the
answers to her dilemma in her conscious mind; perhaps they would be revealed
in her subconscious.
She swam through a sea of darkness, sinking deeper
into the ocean of her mind. Ahead
of her she could see a tiny point of light.
It was something that she had
not experienced before. Slowly
she willed herself to move toward it.
The point of light grew until it encompassed most of her
vision. Then she saw that there
was something – no someone – sitting at the centre of the intense
glow.
“Sun Lin,” Natassia
breathed.
Sun Lin was sitting in a lotus position, the light
surrounding her. Smiling, she
looked directly at Natassia. Then her smile faded and she
spoke. “Natassia, you have
come. I hoped you
would. This is where you will
find me…”
It took Natassia only minutes to reach the great
cathedral and not much more time to break into the vaults below the
church. There she found the four
women. None of them were conscious,
but they were alive and that was all she
needed. Breaking the chains that
held them she laid them out side by side, and then kneeling before each she
placed her hands on them and called on her healing
powers.
As the bodies of the beaten woman healed, Natassia
experienced something new. It
came upon her as a sudden flash of
insight. She realized that she
could do more than heal her companions’ bodies; she could also heal
their minds. It was something
she had never been able to do before and she knew where the power had come
from.
On leaving the
The power to heal the trauma experienced by her
friends was more important to her than anything else she could have been
given. Gently she set their minds
at rest, erasing the psychological scars from their
minds. She did not destroy their
memories; instead she merely removed the feelings of horror and self-loathing
from their psyche. They would
have full recollection of what had happened to them, but would no longer
suffer the nightmares associated with sexual violation and
torture.
Natassia kept her patients asleep until she was
finished and then she awoke them.
It would have been a grim awakening had she not used her healing
powers. As it was, Solange awoke
with a start, staring wildly around her.
Only the presence of her mother seemed to reassure the inexperienced
girl.
“It’s alright,” Melissa said to
her daughter. “You’re safe
now.” She had to exert
considerable self-control to keep from
shivering. Like the other women
she was nude and Natassia had brought no
clothing. There wasn’t much
left of the night attire that the demon had cut from their
bodies.
Sun Lin watched the mother and daughter
interaction. She spoke a few
words of thanks to Natassia and then as the heroine left to find some clothing
and arrange some transportation she went over to her long time
companion.
“I would say that this was a real test of
our new skills,” Sun Lin said.
“Yours perhaps,” Melissa
said. “I am afraid I
didn’t put up much of a fight.
Exactly how did you defeat the demon?”
“Master Zhou showed me the way,” sun
Lin answered. “I had to
allow the demon to invade my mind in order to lure him into a place where
he could be defeated. The demon
was a supernatural creature and could only be defeated by supernatural
means. By pretending to resist
I tricked him into entering a conduit that was connected with the
Melissa nodded. She and her daughter were huddled together for warmth while they waited for Natassia to return. She felt somewhat subdued. As Sun Lin had said, they had tested their new skills and had succeeded to defeating a powerful enemy. But it had been a near thing. She could only hope that the next trial would involve more human enemies.
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