PART 25
A week after releasing the Education spell they participated in the first joint void exercise involving the militaries of every nation on Kellaran.
It began in the void opposite the sun from the real demons where Mark and his family had tested their power. There they faced simulations of the demons’ small rock world and every demon in it, all run by gods of Kellaran and The Triax. There was no way to know if the simulated demons’ strength matched that of the real ones, but they faced more than eleven billion demons in the exercise. Only a hundredth of them were greater demons, and there were only a handful of DemonLords.
Only those with a combat score of five thousand or less were allowed to fight unrestrained. Those with more power than that were allowed to command, but were forbidden from using their own power in combat, and only allowed to fight with spelled swords and shields that they were issued by the organizers that gave an expert fighter a combat score of about fifty. No concentration of power or simulacrums were allowed. Every soldier fought with his or her own power and their own bodies, along with whatever spelled items and equipment they could procure. They were still allowed to co-ordinate their forces with a Command Link, and they would certainly have been quickly slaughtered without it.
After fourteen hours of battle they had only defeated half the demons, and had destroyed less than a tenth of the tunnels and caverns.
Then their enemy surprised them by Translocating to Kellaran, where they all started attacking two Clan-Holdings in a desert in the center of Kletiuk with a combined area equal to that of Venak, and two sizable cities.
the tide when the battle moved to Kletiuk. There the demons initially dominated the battle again, half of which
Kellarani to bring much of their non-void-qualified fighters into the fray, and those reinforcements were
back to their rock in the void, where the battle continued in their tunnels and caverns for
over half the total population of the world, had been ‘killed’. But all the simulated demons were dead. All
and Sent their armor home their bodies and expressions drooped like flags when the wind dies. As the tension of battle and the brave face they presented for the troops drained from them, Mark sat down hard on the sand, almost letting himself drop, and leaned back on his
thigh with Fire on the left side of her lap and Six on her right, and they all cuddled together. Both her children had tears rolling down their faces, but they kept their composure otherwise as they tried to
curled around them and against them, Povon curled around him, and Kragorram curled around her. Dragons don’t cry, but the same emotions were plain in their behavior. Occasionally they gave each other or the small folk
us, and this demon had a sword it’d taken from someone and it still had demon-fire and spells because it was using them when it had to. But when it killed the Sylvan right beside me it didn’t use any of that. It exposed itself to considerably greater risk to get in close enough to grab her by the hair at
fight today if we were still like that. But now…” She paused and shrugged. “A lot of those I was commanding would have given their teeth