We stumbled through the portal into the underground lab, and the familiar sight of high-tech equipment humming around us felt like stepping from one nightmare into another. My ass still hurt from riding that demon horse, and Takezo looked like he'd been used as a pi?ata at a particularly violent birthday party.

  A ding of a level up echoed through my head. Nice.

  Marge rushed toward us immediately, her glasses catching the fluorescent light. "Oh my God, what happened?"

  She went straight for Takezo, whose left arm still hung at that wrong angle, blood seeping through what remained of his suit. Her hands glowed with a soft blue light as she reached for him.

  "Is Isabella around?" I asked, already knowing the answer but needing confirmation.

  Simon looked up from his monitor station. "Still recovering. The only message I know is to expect her on Sunday. How did it go behind the portal?"

  I nodded and uttered, "Sorry about this." With a slight spin, I punched her in the side of her chin.

  Her shields cracked and broke upon impact. Her head snapped sideways, glasses flying off, and she crumpled to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

  "The fuck?" Simon jumped up, hands already glowing with threads of golden energy stretching between his fingers like a cat's cradle made of light.

  I charged at him. No way to explain this, and it was better for him to actually get beaten up. He was going to understand that after recovering.

  Simon flicked his wrist, and those energy strings shot toward me, wrapping around my legs. They burned like acid where they touched, even through my thick, anti-radiation suit. I grunted and pushed forward anyway, the strings cutting deeper but not stopping me. Two more strings hit me, these in the chest, burning through the suit and into my body.

  "Have you lost your mind?" Simon shouted, weaving more strings into existence.

  I raised my arms to block as Simon sent a net of those burning threads at my face. They wrapped around my forearms, searing through the suit's fabric, but not doing anything to the gauntlets. The smell of burning material filled my nostrils, but I kept pushing forward, closing the distance.

  But Takezo had already circled around him. He reached Simon’s back, silent as death. Before Simon noticed, Takezo hit him with his sword’s pommel into the back of the head with a dull thud.

  Simon's eyes rolled back, the energy strings vanishing as he pitched forward onto the concrete floor.

  Takezo stepped back and did the move through which he slashed the blood off his blade in spite of not having cut anyone.

  Water exploded around us.

  Marge knelt on one knee, arms raised, summoning what looked like a small tsunami from nowhere. The water slammed into me, cold and violent, throwing me back against the wall.

  Before the water reached Takezo, black lightning covered his blade, and he slashed. The lightning cracked through the air and struck Marge.

  She convulsed once, then collapsed, the water falling away like someone had turned off a faucet.

  “Too much!” I shouted and scrambled to her, water soaking through my ruined suit. Marge wasn’t a warrior mage.

  I got to her and knelt above her. She wasn't breathing. Her lips were already turning blue.

  Shit.

  I tilted her head back, checked that her tongue wasn’t stuck in her mouth, and started compressing her chest, trying to remember the training from years ago. Her ribs creaked under my hands, so I put less strength into it.

  Yes, there was supposed to be some breathing done too, but I still had the helmet on and was probably covered in radioactive shit anyway.

  The delusion of Kallisto stepped next to me. “Press faster, and move the hands half an inch towards her left shoulder.

  I moved the hands and sped up.

  Takezo ran to us, carrying a medkit he found somewhere. He dropped it on the ground next to her, popped it open, and rummaged through.

  Kallisto bent over the medkit. “He needs the small syringe and the green vial’s contents.”

  “Small syringe and green vial,” I shouted.

  Takezo grabbed the syringe, ripped open the needle packing, and attached the needle to the syringe’s tip. He stabbed it into the vial and started drawing in.

  Marge moved, gasping for breath. Water bubbled from her mouth as she coughed. Alive, but drowning in her own summoned water.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Takezo grabbed her arm, stabbed in the syringe with demonic precision, and pushed the contents in. Marge shook, rolled to her knees, and started vomiting.

  I caught her hair, so she didn’t vomit over them, and to hold up her head. She vomited water and her earlier lunch, and also coughed up water from her lungs.

  She passed out, going slack in my hands.

  I lifted her up and put her on a nearby table. Her breathing seemed to be stabilized.

  I exhaled. "Sorry," I whispered, though she was too out of it to hear.

  I left her there, breathing but unconscious, and moved to Salieu's cage. The demon professor sat inside, watching us with those unsettling, crazy eyes. The blue runes of the cage cast weird shadows across his face.

  "Kallisto wants you back," I said. Takezo, meanwhile, found the cage's control panel. "We’re sending you back home."

  Salieu tilted his head. "Oh, I will go home. One day, the Goddess will give you to me, and then we will have so much fun together."

  “You’ll need to get in line. Yushi has dibs on me already.” A smirk found its way to my face. I glanced at the delusion of Kallisto. “Tell me when to stop.”

  The cage's door clicked open, but the magic-blocking runes still shone. I opened the door, stepped in, and punched Salieu in the face. His head jerked back, hitting the cage. I stepped in and followed up with a rib-breaking uppercut.

  I unleashed a frenzied barrage of punches at him. I promised to bring him back, not that he was going to be in good shape. And since the runes blocked the use of magic, of which I had practically none, he had no chance.

  His entire rib cage shattered, organs underneath slowly turning to mush. Teeth flew all over the cage, one of his horns shattered by the cage’s wall, and one eye popped out of his socket as the skull next to it broke.

  “That’s about enough,” Kallisto said.

  I stopped the next punch. Salieu slid down by the bars, knocked out, barely alive.

  Takezo stared at me from the control panel, eyes wide.

  I walked out of the cage, took off one gauntlet, and took a pad of paper and a pen from Marge’s table. I wrote He was resisting on the paper, returned to Salieu, and struck it into a hole in his chest.

  After I put the gauntlet back on, I grabbed him by the remaining horn and dragged him to the portal. I glanced at Takezo. “I’ll need you to cut me so I can cover him in blood.”

  With a slight hesitation in his step, Takezo walked to me. His blade flashed, opening a line across my forearm that immediately gushed red. The pain stung sharp and clean, brighter than the burns from Simon.

  I held my arm over Salieu, letting the blood run down over his head and shoulders. Takezo stood next to me patiently. Once I bled enough on Salieu, making him look like something from a horror movie, I grabbed him by the horn and shoved him into the portal.

  He went through, mostly. His legs stuck out, the portal refusing to take all of him at once.

  I rolled my eyes. "Fuck me dead." I stepped to the side, looking at my forearm to see if it still bled. It didn’t.

  Takezo rushed to the other side. His blade blurred through the air. He cut Salieu cleanly by the portal. The waist and legs fell on our side, and the upper half on the other side.

  I glanced into the portal and saw Siegfried bending above Salieu.

  Fuck.

  I made a huge mistake. Salieu’s cage wasn’t in the line of sight from the portal, so that wasn’t a problem, but me cutting my arm to cover him in my blood was.

  My idiot self forgot that they could see through the portal for a while after it was used. That meant the demons now learned how we passed through the portal, and more importantly, that it was my blood that allowed anyone to do that.

  Damn it.

  With nothing I could do, I turned from the portal and walked to the side. As I walked, I almost stumbled over the barrel with my blood. Right, I forgot about that. I rubbed my face with the steel palm of my gauntlet. “Fuck.”

  Ding! Level up!

  Not the time for that, damn it.

  Takezo walked to me. “Are you all right?”

  “I just showed them that my blood is the key to getting people through the portal.”

  “Right…” Takezo drew a slow breath. “We should have used one of the barrels.”

  “Yeah.” I took off the gauntlet as I was just smearing blood all over my face. I fished the phone out from the pocket and dialled up Isabella.

  She answered on the first ring. "I’m listening."

  "Don’t overreact. I will explain everything once we’re home."

  Silence for a heartbeat. "Will you?"

  "I know what this looked like through the security camera you almost surely have around the portal."

  “The six cameras, yeah. They alert me when someone passes through the portal.”

  “Right, so don’t overreact. I’ll explain everything.”

  "I’ll start preparing some very creative punishments." She hung up.

  Right. Well, this time I earned them. "We should grab what I promised Kallisto," I said, heading for the exit. "There's an electronics store on the way."

  Takezo looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "What?"

  "I promised Kallisto that, in exchange for you, I’ll bring her some entertainment. In particular, I promised her a phone with something fun to watch."

  We walked out of the portal lab as if nothing had happened. About two dozen guards watched the perimeter, but they didn’t know what was happening downstairs, not even that there was a portal, and they had seen us come back bloodied quite a few times already. They didn’t ask questions, not ever before, not now.

  We got back into the company Mercedes. I drove while Takezo stretched his formerly broken arm, both of us looking like we'd been through a meat grinder.

  “So,” Takezo said. “Want a hint as to what to give her on that phone?”

  “I was thinking about some classical movies, like The Lord of the Rings or stuff like that.”

  “Nah, that won't work. Put there a pile of memes and as much anime as it can fit.”

  I spat out, almost driving into the ditch. “What?”

  “Think about it. In the Void, there are many dimensional pockets and smaller worlds. But they are, almost all, technologically different or behind Earth. Theatre plays are as old as leisure. A movie or a TV series is just a recorded theatre play. Fun, but nothing groundbreaking. But an anime is an art form that literally cannot exist without modern Earth technology. Even here on Earth it was only made by one country. We don’t have that in the Void. Nobody does.”

  “That doesn’t mean she will like it.” I glanced at him with a side eye. “You’re talking from experience, aren’t you?”

  “Yep. When an older demon first sees anime, it takes about two to three months out of their life because they can’t help but binge-watch an unreasonable amount of it. It’s just that new and so out of the demonic usual, that we can’t help ourselves.” He rubbed his chin with his hand. “For Kallisto, put there Eighty-six, Bleach, and some random selection you deem appropriate. You seem to be understanding her pretty well.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t even seen the first one, and Bleach? That’s ancient.”

  “So is she, and trust me, she will love them both. Once, I sat down, turned on the first episode of Bleach, and got up after the episode three hundred and sixty six finished. She will see herself in them.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. What about the memes?”

  “That’s for her to learn the format. Elder demons have insane meme game, so you really want her to use the format sometimes.”

  No, I wasn’t going to ask for details on this one.