The Vorpals
A pack of roughly fifteen red-tagged monsters the Desperado Club keeps locked behind a single padlocked door at the end of a secret service passage: the abandoned practice arena of the defunct “Demon Tamer’s Guild,” posted with a hand-scrawled don’t-open-this-door warning. Outrageously dangerous and unidentified even to management, every party that has tried to clear the room has died. Carl walls the door off with blast plates and sandbags so his Astrid ambush won’t spring them by accident, but when the demon Minge breaks loose instead, the cornered Astrid invokes them by name as the only thing that might kill the demon. As Mordecai explains, “vorpal” is a condition, not a species — the divine mirror of “feral”: where feral means a creature has been touched by the Nothing, vorpal means it has been deputized by the gods, a celestial guard or foot soldier of the deities turned into a living suicide bomber. A vorpal can be any race or creature, and the condition can stay hidden until a demon draws near; the closer the demon, the stronger and angrier the vorpal grows — it senses demons, is drawn to them, and pulls their aggro. They won’t wander far from a dead demon but will kill anyone near them, and if cornered into a losing fight they explode, so killing one up close kills everyone in the room. Once they have bathed in demon blood they dissipate and are transferred back to the celestial realm. They stay on their floor unless a demon lures them up (Mordecai’s worry: Li Na, a demon-race crawler, would draw them upstairs). Here they swarm down through the club, tear Minge apart in a spray of yellow ichor, and then fade.
Book 6 appearances
- Chapter 31 — Carl reinforces the locked door behind which they sleep so his ambush won’t free them.
- Chapter 32 — Astrid unleashes “the vorpals” as a desperate weapon against the rampaging demon Minge.
- Chapter 33 — Mordecai explains what a vorpal is — a divine condition, not a species: celestial guards deputized by the gods, drawn to demons, that explode if they think they will lose.
- Chapter 34 — They tear Minge apart below and keep killing through the lower club, set to dissipate now that they have bathed in demon blood.
Related entries
- Astrid (Character)
- Minge, the Minor Feral Demon (Creature)
- The Desperado Club (Place)
- Mordecai (Character)
Browse
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- Everything debuting in Book 6, Chapter 31
- All of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride