A shout rose forth as Ogrijek perceived what was happening just before the charge of the overpowering enemy force struck. He tried to take flight upward, but it was as if he were tethered. His followers then tried to escape likewise with the same result. Then the rush of the enemy was upon them.

When masses of demonkind fight each other, there is little or no use for magical energies. Light and fear, typical demoniacal weapons, have no effect on others of their kind under such circumstances. Most of their other magical powers are likewise of limited effect, short range, or require too much concentration. Simply put, when demons battle other demons, primitive striking weapons, fangs, claws, talons, pincers, mandibles, and the like are the most effective and immediate means of dispensing with foes.

Some aerial combat would have been taking place in this struggle, but Graz'zt had seen to it that the battle would be held down to the surface of the stratum. This he accomplished through the dark energies he had drawn from the Theorpart, and the effect would last long enough for the battle to be fought to its conclusion. His monstrous sword resting atop one mountainous shoulder, the three-hundred-foot-tall demon king watched the horde of attackers impact raggedly upon his own solid lines. The zubassu fought very well once they realized that they had no chance of escape, no opportunity to turn coat.

Parodies of bears and goats, horses and wolves, apes and gorillas and buffaloes, weasels and boars were jumbled with insect, skeletal, amphibian, bat, reptilian, fish, arachnid, bird, and human parts to form the companies and regiments of demons who fought each other. At least that is how it appeared. Toad-man bit pig-owl as the latter used taloned forearms to rend the former's flesh from its slimy back. Elephantine monstrosities trampled chimerical horrors, as little wolverine-faced demons used iron teeth to sever leg tendons and worm-bodied half-camels spewed acidic secretions over all before them. All that happened in mere seconds, and then the initial wave of the attacking horde was broken, reeling back. Graz'zt laughed, and the sound was like that of a volcano clearing its throat prior to eruption.

"Demogorgon! Come forth and face me alone!"

Naturally, the demon king named failed to come forth as demanded. In fact, although Demogorgon and his allied lords and princes heard the challenge clearly enough, they were busy trying to determine what had gone wrong. Ten thousand of their demon troops had fallen in the first rush. They outnumbered the force of Graz'zt heavily. Yet not a hundred of the ebon-hued demon king's soldiers had fallen, the zubassu had not Joined the attackers, and Graz'zt was an enormous figure daring to stand before them all without regard for dweomer or power sent against him. It was true enough that little or no magic played a part in the combat between demon hordes, but their leaders — king, prince, lord, or greatest demon — certainly had recourse to such powers, for they commanded a wide and terrible spectrum of magics and similar energies.

At Demogorgon's enraged command a barrage of lethal bolts, killer forces, and demon-shattering spells were sent to vaporize the insolent figure that rose like a colossus before their burning eyes. The forces struck, visibly and invisibly, and the smoke-black Graz'zt seemed to shake and thin and nearly disappeared under the withering power sent against it. Well it should, for enough force to destroy a small mountain had been expended. "Again!" screeched both of the demon king's baboonlike heads. "Finish him!" Then, suiting words to his own actions, Demogorgon released his most potent and deadly attack, beams of lambent green shooting from the eyes of one head, dull maroon from the orbs of his other. Similar powers discharged from the princes and lords of demonkind there with him, also played upon the foolishly exposed and enlarged form of their hated foe, Graz'zt.

Suddenly the figure shrank abruptly, seeming to collapse upon itself. "Victory, Emperor Demogorgon!" Trobbo-gotath, a greatest demon of earth, rumbled in fawning fashion. "Do I order a new assault to finish them?"

Before Demogorgon could answer, he saw the distant line of the enemy center rolling aside to left and right. Were they about to run? "What... ?" said his left head as the right turned to try to peer through the gap.

Then Graz'zt, now but a thirty-foot tall giant, strode into clear view between the parted regiments of his demon horde. In his hand he held a little figure that he tore into two parts even as the demon king watched. The huge ebony arm windmilled. A tiny speck sailed up and out, toward Demogorgon, like a stone shot from a great trebuchet. Lizard-quick, the demon king avoided the missile. Both heads bent to see what had been aimed at him. The thing was Ogrijek's head. "We are undone...." the right head yammered, and the left was too terrified to speak.

Graz'zt was simply walking with impunity toward the horde that had but recently threatened him. With a roar composed of bellows, shouts, squeaks, yammers, and all forms of similar noises, the demon soldiers who served the black one followed with glee. They rushed forth to fall upon a force many times larger than their own. Why not? Before them was Graz'zt, invincible and triumphant! His hands shot forth blasts that blew the opposing horde into nothingness, a hundred at a time. Then the demon king was among the foe, and his massive sword played upon them as a scythe upon a field of ripe grain. Down fell lowly dretch and rutterkin, kerzow and goat-horned clobdroo. Malvachnu demons were as swine in a slaughter, and great lords of ogre size and humanoid form as impotent as lambs before the black blade of Graz'zt.

The left battle seemed unaware of the debacle taking place in the center. Var-Az-Hloo and Abraxas collided with Baphomet's corps and began a terrible melee that slowly ground down the latter force. The bull-headed demon prince and his companies of demonkin were not yielding an inch, only being gradually overcome by the superior numbers of the enemy.

So too on the right. The fungoid and slime contingents of Zuggtmoy and Szhublox were ideally suited to meet the disgusting horde under the even more loathsome Kostchtchie. The foul things commanded by the demon queen and the slime lord felt no revulsion when facing the terrible array of deformed giantlike demons and their ilk. Of course, neither did those minions of the bandy-legged Kostchtchie fear the obscenities that came to do battle with them. Hulking demons spread the plain of Ojukalazogadit with bits and pieces of toadstools and amoeboid monsters while they, in turn, were dissolved, rotted, and made into puddles of putrid ichor by their implacable opponents. It was fortunate for the attackers that there were so many of their own, for a dozen of Zuggtmoy's things, or the smutty warriors of Szhublox, died for every soldier who fell in Kostchtchie's horde. The demon queen hooted and the reserve moved up. The situation was in doubt.

"We must retire, king," Mandrillagon chittered nervously as he hurried up to where Demogorgon had positioned himself. "If we do so immediately, the enemy turds will have to take some time to finish off our cowardly troops, and we can be well away — safe and gathering fresh contingents!"

Demogorgon thought about that with his left brain while the right assessed the field before them. His vaunted mass of demon soldiery scarcely outnumbered the opposition by two to one now, and Graz'zt, accompanied by a half-dozen lords and greatest demons, was beginning to cut a swath through the very middle of the horde to get at him. Then there was a great commotion on his left, and Demogorgon used both heads to see what was happening there. A company of conflagranti, dreaded fire demons, had managed to take Var-Az-Hloo's division in the flank. Trouble there too!