Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

crowd; every man, woman, and child there dominated by an outside force beyond any human resistance. Appalling thoughts and needs and desires thundered inside their heads, and their bodies leaped to obey. Every foul thought and sick impulse ran wild in the blood-soaked terraces, while the hidden ELFs laughed and laughed, savoring the forbidden pleasures by proxy, and feeding on the released psychic energies.
    There were old names for creatures like this that preyed on Humanity. Very old names. Demons.
    Vampires. Eaters of souls. But no name was more cursed in the Golden Age of Empire than that of the ELFs.
    And the true horror of it; the possessed knew what they were being made to do. Helpless inside their own heads, they could only cry out at what their bodies were doing. Even those who survived this atrocity would Spend the rest of their lives remembering it. Mental torture was just another pleasure, another source of energy, for the ELFs.
    Lewis and Finn came roaring in on their gravity sleds, faster than the human eye could follow, howling their war cries. Finn's call to battle was his own ancient family name; Durandal! Lewis inherited his from the blessed Owen: Shandrakor! Shandrakor! The proud names stood out against the howling, and the ELFs looked up and saw their enemy coming; and a concerted mental roar of hate came boiling up to meet the descending Paragons.
    The moment they revealed themselves, their minds blazed out like balefires on the instruments on Lewis's sled, marking their positions in the crowd. Lewis's heart sank. There were twenty ELFs present. Even with an esp-blocker to protect him against direct mental attacks, Lewis was in trouble and he knew it. If the ELFs even thought they were losing, they'd make every man, woman, and child in the crowd kill themselves. Hundreds of thousands of innocents, dead in a moment. Twenty ELF minds working together could do that. One last spiteful gesture.
    Lewis carried an energy weapon on one hip and a sword on the other, and a force shield on his arm.
    And that was all. Usually, it was enough. Disrupters took a mere thirty seconds to recharge between shots these days. Though of course the sword was still the preferred, more honorable weapon. Neither of them much use here and now. The gravity sled had a great many built-in protections, but no offensive weaponry at all. Twenty ELFs . . . Think, dammit, think!
    Lewis skimmed his sled low over the heads of the heaving crowd. Close enough to count the bodies, see the blood and the torn flesh, and the possessed faces transfixed with outside pleasures. What the hell were twenty of the bastards doing in one place, out in the open? Four or five was a more usual grouping, and even then they usually preferred to hide somewhere secure while they worked their evil; close
    enough to affect their victims without having to expose themselves . . . But the closer the connection, the more minds the ELFs could control, and the greater the pleasure and energies to be gained.
    And, just maybe, they wanted to see it all for themselves . . .
    Twenty ELFs. Hundreds of thousands of victims. This wasn't just a feeding frenzy, Lewis realized slowly. This was a statement. A warning, a threat, an insult to the King to be. Leave us alone. You don't rule us. No one does, not even our own kind. Leave us alone, or we'll do terrible, awful things. We'll make your people butcher and slaughter each other, and we'll eat it up with spoons. Do what we wilt shall be the whole of the law.
    We're ELFs. You're just human. We'll do whatever we want, and you can't stop us.
    Wrong, Lewis thought coldly.
    Even as Lewis grappled with what to do, the enemy revealed themselves. In their arrogance, in their hatred and contempt for mere Humanity, the ELFs rose up out of the possessed crowd to show themselves, and taunt their enemy. Twenty ordinary-looking men and women flew up into the air, floating high above the writhing mass below them, and called out mockingly to the two Paragons, defying them.
    Their eyes glowed golden, bright as suns, and blasphemous self-generated halos circled every malevolent head. Their presence beat upon the air like giant wings, and then lashed out against the Paragon's esp-blockers, trying to smash aside their defenses through sheer brute power.
    Lewis cried out despite himself, as something vile trailed fleetingly across the edges of his mind. As though a monster had hammered its fist on the door to his soul, demanding to be let