Zac looked around the table, glad to see the demons smiling at his 'joke'. He felt a little less good when they burst into full-throated, uproarious laughter.
"Contracting with a demon isn't a door prize, you twerp!" Halphas managed to choke out, slapping Marchosias on the shoulder so hard the wolf stumbled. "A grand prize! Hah!"
Marchosias was the only one, other than Zac, who wasn't laughing. He just looked so very, very tired. Zac flashed another smile at the wolf, his resolve hardening. 'There's always a white whale,' he thought, sizing up the Captain. 'The real grand prize. The one you take home to meet the folks and show off at the high school reunions because he's classy and professional and drives a sick-ass convertible that somehow keeps his hair perfect. Yeah, those other losers are still paying off their student loans while I'm getting pumped full of pups in a penthouse.'
"Avatar. Pay attention."
Zac shook his head, a heavy hand on his shoulder jostling him from his fantasy. It was Skarg.
He looked around. Everyone had stopped laughing. They were all looking up.
Zac tilted his head back, following their gaze.
The world dropped out from under him.
The high, vaulted ceiling of the dining hall was gone. In its place, swirling with impossible clarity, was a perfect, bird's-eye view projection of the battlefield. It was a dizzying, terrifying perspective. He saw ranks of gleaming, silver-armored paladins clashing with hordes of monstrous, chittering demons on a blasted plain under a blood-red sky. He could see individual sword swings, bursts of holy fire, and the splash of black ichor.
The projection was so sharp, so real, that for a terrifying moment, Zac felt like he was falling. Vertigo seized him, and he gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white, convinced he was about to plummet a thousand feet into the very real, very high-definition battle below.
"Whoa," he whispered, his earlier bravado completely gone, replaced by a profound, gut-wrenching sense of scale. "What is that?"
"Oh, it's just a projection," Bune's Left Head said calmly, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.
"Using necromantic energies, I can reassemble the memories of the recently deceased," the Right Head explained, sounding like a museum tour guide. "Think of them like a network of disposable cameras. They are a bit like goldfish, though… very short attention spans… so what we are witnessing are the memories of those who have most recently fallen, on a five-minute delay."
Zac nodded, dumbstruck. He stared up at the impossible vista, his vertigo slowly subsiding. He could see what Bune meant. There were fuzzy patches in the celestial battle, areas of static where the memories of the fallen couldn't fill in the gaps coherently. It was like watching a live broadcast with a few dead pixels.
His concentration was shattered by a loud screech of iron on stone.
"NO!" Marchosias barked, shooting to his feet and pointing a claw at the ceiling. "The flanking Capras commandos should be covering for each other! I said bounding overwatch, not a full-frontal charge! IDIOTS!"
Zac couldn't help but smile. The terrifying Captain of the warband, the brooding wolf daddy, was acting like an old guy getting passionate about a football game, yelling at the players on his TV. It was absurdly, unbelievably endearing. 'Oh,' Zac thought, a wave of warmth spreading through his chest, 'I would so celebrate with him if his team won. Or console him if they lost. I would console him so hard.'
The rest of the demons watched with the detached interest of jaded sports commentators.
"Sloppy," Halphas grunted, picking his beak with a chicken bone. "They're letting the paladins dictate the pace. I would have hit them with a pincer movement thirty seconds ago."
"Look at that one," Andras chuckled, pointing with his cigarillo at a particularly brutal skirmish where a massive, horrible, ape looking demon was tearing a knight in half. "Gusion's boy. Good form. Messy, but effective."
Nock sighed dramatically. "All brute force and no finesse. A truly elegant commander would have broken their supply lines and forced a surrender through attrition and poetry. Far more civilized."
Skarg just grumbled. "Why are we even watching this? It's just grunts killing other grunts. What's the point? We should be down there."
"The point, Furfur," Marchosias growled, sitting back down heavily, "is to assess the enemy's new tactics. To see what this 'detection system' is capable of." He gestured up at the swirling chaos. "We are looking for anomalies. Anything that deviates from their standard doctrine."
The demons grumbled but fell silent, their eyes once again turning to the ghostly battle unfolding above them. The only sounds in the room were the distant, spectral clash of steel and Skarg still noisily chewing on a piece of centaur gristle.
The longer Zac watched, the more uncomfortable he became. At first, it had been a spectacle, a movie, a game. But the sheer, unrelenting brutality began to wear on him.
The two tides of armies crashed against each other like waves, a roiling sea of silver and black. Where the waves broke, bodies piled up, forming gruesome new terrain that the next wave would climb over. Blasts of holy light rained down from paladin formations, lances of pure sunlight that vaporized demons where they stood. In response, shadows on the ground writhed and stretched, and gouts of hellfire erupted, swallowing knights whole.
It wasn't a battle with a clear beginning or end. It was just a continuous, grinding process of mutual annihilation. This was the eternal war Ose had spoken of, and it was horrifying.
"Is it… is it a bad thing that you all are here?" Zac asked quietly, his voice barely a whisper in the echoing room. "If the demons lose the fight… is it all over? Will we have to retreat from the Pit?"
The question was met with a ripple of confused, amused, and mocking reactions.
"This is just a skirmish," Marchosias rumbled, his eyes still glued to the battle, never once looking at Zac. "A fight over tertiary vantage points that won't even be relevant in a week. The front lines we are watching are for posturing. We cannot allow them to move without inflicting losses. It is a matter of principle."
Zac swallowed hard. He watched a demon with too many arms and a paladin with a flaming sword violently stab each other in the face, collapsing together in a tangled heap. Posturing.
"But the demons," he said, correcting himself, "I mean… we… are incurring losses too. A lot of them."
"They will lose more," Marchosias said, gritting his teeth. "They will lose more if those idiots would just follow my fucking plan!" He shot to his feet again, leaning over the table as if he could physically will the ghostly troops to obey. "You illiterate hellspawn! Go to the fucking left! PINCER! PINCER!"
Zac sighed. He didn't really know the rules of this particular game, but from where he was sitting, it looked an awful lot like Marchosias's team was losing. And losing badly. The silver tide of paladins was pushing forward, slowly but inexorably, their holy light seeming to gain ground with every wave.
The battle just seemed to continue on endlessly. 'I guess that's why they call it the eternal war,' Zac thought, his initial shock already fading into a profound sense of boredom. The hunky, dysfunctional demons around the table were far more interesting than some epic, large-scale battle between good and evil.
As Marchosias continued to yell tactical advice at the dead, Zac began to ship the demons together in his head. Skarg and Nock were the obvious hate-fuck couple, all repressed tension and violent foreplay. Halphas and Marchosias were the power couple, with Bune as their overworked, underappreciated polyamorous partner who did all the emotional labor. Andras was the mysterious ex who was still secretly in love with all of them and caused drama out of jealousy. Zac's mind, he had to admit, was a dangerous and deeply degenerate place.