Chapter 33
The demon leader here had his weapon stripped by me, but he was a chatty one. Perhaps I could learn something.
"You are a fool," he spat, "and I have no intention of continuing to waste time with your words. Who sent you?" he demanded, and I let a little bit of surprise show on my face, which only made his eyes narrow even further.
"I knew it. Xanthas. Krosan." He started reeling off names, watching my face closely and giving me a wonderful opportunity to sweep his legs out from under him and smash the spear so firmly into his side that it boomed with a devastating crack, followed by him coughing up a mouthful of black demonic blood.
"I knew it," he spat, and for a second, I thought about leaving him alive, simply for what other chaos he might cause if I let him back out into the world thinking one of these other demons had sent someone to damage his plans and his relationship with the Demon Lord.
But there was simply no good reason to leave a demon alive.
Still, I did learn several important new facts.
One was that there were most certainly multiple factions vying for the Demon Lord's attention, and by the sound of it, the Demon Lord himself had demanded a cessation of infighting.
For a Demon Lord, that showed a fairly heavy and powerful hand at work.
It wasn't impossible, but it was certainly difficult to achieve.
Demons simply didn't play nice, and forcing it was no easy feat.
With him wounded on the ground, I stood over him, leveling the spear, ready to plunge it into his chest. "I'm still curious where the Demon Lord has gone. If he's not present, will he maintain the peace he's promised?"
The demon beneath me shook his head. "Don't do it," he said through gritted teeth. "We can work out some sort of deal. You're clearly stronger than I am. Perhaps with my intelligence and what I've built here, there are still great rewards to be had if we work together."
I loved when demons began bargaining. I had learned that it was the ultimate sign that I had completely won. They were prideful creatures, but once bent, the powerful became submissive.
"Am I interested in bargaining with demons? Maybe another time," I said, thrusting the spear into his chest and twisting. He survived the first thrust, though as I twisted and destroyed more of his internals, he coughed, sputtered, and groaned as life bled out of him.
However, it was at this moment that his eyes fluttered, his sclera turned black, and a red pinprick appeared in the center of each eye.
"Who dares step into my territory?" I had no doubt the being seeing through his eyes was the Demon Lord himself.
"There you are," I said, smiling down. "And here I was nearly certain you had abandoned the Amazon."
"You test me, Tenebrious," the Demon Lord said, and I was practically giddy with excitement. Seeing through the other demon's eyes, he hadn't had access to any more powerful inspection, nor was he able to see through my ability to hide in the shadows.
"I do not test you," I said, sticking my chin up, trying to be as cocky as the many demons I'd seen in my past. "I simply have no interest in serving an absent lord."
"Your folly will be punished," the Demon Lord spoke through the dying demon's mouth.
"Only if you catch me," I baited him. "Besides, it is clear you have left the Amazon, or this wouldn't be the first time we've interacted."
The Demon Lord let out a put-upon sigh. "Your people are an exhausting lot. I wasn't aware any had slipped amongst my forces. But I will scour every tenebrious from this world. Tell me what name I shall give your dying kin to curse with their last breath."
I laughed. "I have no need to make your hunting easy, oh, absent Demon Lord," I continued to mock him, hoping to draw out some clue. But he remained stoically silent at my words.
"I will come for you soon," he promised. "We will see how bold you are when I am not absent." He said the last word with bite, only to blink, and the color returned to the demon in front of me, as did the previous demon's own mentality. He blinked and gasped with a dry, croaking tongue.
"The boss and I had a small conversation," I said, smiling at him, pulling out a smaller blade. "Now smile. I want you to look friendly when I mount you on the mantelpiece."
My words instead caused a scowl.
"You don't put heads on a mantelpiece," he gasped. "You're not a demon." But those were his last words, as I had no more time to play around. I severed his head, done with him rather than risk his realization spreading any farther than it already had.
I looked up from what I'd been doing to see Almeria had made short work of much of the tribe. Many of them cowered and hid from her while she held talismans in her hands and picked demons out from amongst their number.
"Come on," I said with a nod of my head. "We must go. We've already ruined this village plenty."
She blinked ever so slightly at my words, nodded, and shoved the nearest tribesman aside before rushing after me as I ran as fast as my feet would carry me.
A sense of danger tickled the back of my neck before the sky went dark. Sinister clouds billowed through the air, and a booming howl ripped through the Amazon.
"What—" Almeria said beside me, and I shook my head.
"Seems I managed to rile up the Demon Lord." I grinned. "Whoops."
Almeria chuckled and kept pace with me. "How did you manage to upset him so much?"
I wrinkled my nose. "The Demon Lord quite dislikes disloyalty, as you can imagine. When he peeked through his followers' eyes to see another demon ruining his little human farm, he didn't take it well."
She blinked. "It worked? You're kidding me."
"Yup," I said with a grin and didn't stop beating my feet against the ground to make sure we kept putting more distance between us. I could sense his anger flooding through the rainforest as he tried to use every demon he had in the vicinity to find me.
"I assume we're not going to any of the other tribes now," Almeria said.
I shook my head, my mind trying to figure out what the Demon Lord was planning and where I needed to be to stop it. I could practically feel his senses sweeping the area for me.
Regardless of whether he found me, he was going to have a violent reaction to all of this.
"We should go to the city," I said quickly, gauging the gloom that seemed to fill the sky. "If he's doing his best to scout the whole area, the Mul Branova and the city will stick out like a sore thumb," I reasoned. I intended to protect my own.
I pulled out a rockie-talkie and squeezed it until it clicked.
Amanda's voice came from the other end. "Lord Bran, what is it we can do for you?"
"In case you don't see it already, I seem to have upset the Demon Lord, and I suspect he's about to go on a small tirade of the area. I need you and the rest of the Mul Branova to protect yourselves and get word to anyone else in the region to gather their followers and remain safe. We can’t have anyone off on their own right now," I told her.
"By your order, Lord," she said quickly, and I had no doubt it would be done. Amanda and Jenny had served me well through everything we had encountered so far.
I immediately pulled out another rockie-talkie. "Merlin, I need a lift back to the city."
"Oh?" came her voice, curious. "Wouldn't have anything to do with the fuming Demon Lord huffing and puffing, now, would it?"
I chuckled. "It might." I glanced up to see the gloomy clouds racing with dark purple light and the howling wind take shape into a furious roar.
"I'll get you to the city. I just need to know where you are," she told me.
"I'm with Almeria heading back from one of the tribes." I paused to glance at her for more.
Almeria leaned over to the rockie-talkie. "If you remember where the first instance is, we can be there in ten minutes." Almeria grabbed my hand and started running, pulling me along with her. If she knew where she was going, I wasn't going to be the one to hold her back.
***
It must have been longer than ten minutes, because by the time we reached the clearing where the instance used to be, Merlin was already there, shifting from foot to foot. "Oh, good," she said quickly, shadows swallowing us both and dropping us in the city without preamble.
I wondered briefly why she was in such a rush, only to look into the sky and notice a swirling purple cloud overhead. “That funnel looks ready to drop a tornado at a moment's notice.” It wasn’t natural at all the way purple lightning seemed to race through it as the clouds pulsed ominously.
"I thought so, too," Merlin said, turning to me expectantly. "So… any chance you'll explain what you did?"
I nodded at the massive structure above us. "Just out killing demons. It seems I pissed him off."
"Clearly," Merlin said dryly.
"Yeah, well, I pretended to be a demon gone rogue and challenged his authority. This is the kind of reaction I expected the first time I pretended to be the Demon Lord, but I still don't understand why he's putting on such a show now," I told her.
Merlin simply nodded. None of us knew enough to fill in the gap. The Demon Lord had clearly lost his temper, but at the same time, I couldn't help but wonder why now. Either way, we'd find out shortly, of that I was certain.
The roaring of the clouds above continued until it hit a fever pitch, drowning out all conversation below.
Dozens had gathered in the church square.
Mul Branova and nuns were standing next to each other, not concerned about their differences in the wake of the sky turning dark with purple demonic clouds.
The swirling funnel began to shift until it resembled a thousand ghostly skulls swirling high in the air, each howling and promising death to those below. Like the funnel cloud it resembled, it began to dip, pinching down like a tornado. As it did, the Demon Lord's voice filled the air.
"My people, the time has come," the voice boomed above everything else. "Today, we harvest our long-cultivated garden. In the flourishing Amazon, we have sown many seeds."
Those words made me frown as the funnel shrank lower, and the people on the ground all stared up with wide eyes.
More than half of them had a purple rune affixed to their foreheads.
They began to glow brightly, their eyes losing focus and their heads tilting back as they went slack, losing strength in their limbs and falling to their knees as their souls were ripped out of them, sucked upward into the whirling maelstrom, only to disappear within one of the many ghastly clouds swirling above.
Merlin beside me gasped. "They— They—" She couldn't quite get the words out, and I couldn't blame her. What we were watching was an absolute horror.
"The Demon Lord has been using this place to farm humans, but not how we expected," Almeria said. There was a certainty in her voice that belied the heat in her eyes. She would kill the Demon Lord for his actions today.
I had to agree with that sentiment.
The nuns cried out and cast a number of spells, as if quickly trying to find one that would resolve the issue at hand.
But nothing they could do could help, as I started to piece it all together.
The Demon Lord had fragmented his soul into such tiny morsels that I couldn't even detect it with Soul Gaze, and he had spread them throughout the population here.
Humans in this city had become tools for him to grind more levels and strength—simply another body providing power to him.
He had been preparing to consume the entire region. The reason demons were controlling the groups and hiding in leadership positions was that each and every human was slowly grinding out levels and stats for the Demon Lord.
I had thought this whole place was meant to provide more human hosts for his army, but I was wrong.
It was a selfish ploy in which he had mass-farmed the area with thousands of hosts, and now all of the fragments jumping into the sky were small specks of the Demon Lord's soul. Even this wasn’t his whole being.