Enemy of the Inferno (Disgardium Book #8): LitRPG Series

by Dan Sugralinov

  “We do not see the future, Initial, but what is the future if not a continuation of the present? You see an emerging river and its flow, and so you can guess where its waters will lead. If you know the features of the landscape in its path, you can make your guesses more accurate.”

  “As abstract and unclear as ever,” I said and clenched my teeth. “How did you guess that Quetzal would get the Aegis as a reward? How could you have even known that he’d get named best player of the day?”

  “You aliens from another world enter our dream, Initial, giving over to it your knowledge, feelings and hidden designs. Along with our dreams, meaning the entire universe of Disgardium, all this is that same ‘landscape,’ allowing us to see where the river of time is flowing. When you are ready, you will learn more.”

  “You know, Sleeper, I’m starting to get sick of this! When you send me on one of your little errands, like building a temple where nobody has ever set foot before, or taking out the whole Destroying Plague… Then no matter how weak I am, I’m always willing to try it! But when I ask you to give me a straight answer to a simple question…”

  “Enough!” Behemoth roared. “Forget not with whom you speak, Initial!”

  “There it is!” I shouted in satisfaction. “I have to have friends with ‘initiative,’ while you get total subordination from followers that won’t question you. You have double standards, Sleeping God.”

  “What is allowed to Jupiter…” Flaygray began, but the Sleeper cut him off with a gesture and peaceably rumbled:

  “You are right, demon. He is young and naive. Quick to judge and leap to conclusions about actions.” The Sleeping God hugged me, clapped me on the back. “All in good time, Scyth. All in good time… Alex.” Before I had time to react to that, he changed the subject: “And now… Let the demons tell us whether they achieved their goal.”

  The satyr and succubus exchanged glances. Flaygray spread his arms:

  “What’s there to tell? The Behemoth the terrible and just already knows all that his followers do. There Nega and I were, pretending to be a rich young couple on their honeymoon in Tuaf. It’s a big city, coastal, nice place for a vacation, plenty of people. Anyway, we hung around a while, smoothtalked our way into the upper classes of the local community and got an invitation to a get-together at the house of Tuaf’s Chief Councilman.”

  “What a loser,” Nega said. “The aristocracy there has no taste. The Chief Councilman’s wife, Lady Staffa… Diablo the Almighty, she has no sense of style. If there’s one thing I…”

  “Nega!” Behemoth interrupted. “Focus!”

  Nega sighed and looked at me. “Fine. Listen and learn, boss. The Chief Councilman of Tuaf, Rion Staffa, is not as simple as he appears to the citizenry. Throughout Latteria, he is better known as Nettle, but nobody knows about his second identity. In opposition to the Green League, Staffa created a gigantic organization that makes a living from thievery, robbery and the kidnapping of high-ranking individuals.”

  “Wait!” I said. Vague recollections swirled in my mind – back in my solo farming days, when I brought in the kobold renegades, and fought with Crag in the lair of the ogre Wot’al and lost… “His name is Nettle? There were plenty of bandits from Nettle’s gang around Tristad! There was even a reward on his head, but nobody ever found him!”

  “Like Nega said, Rion Staffa has a complex network all across the continent,” Flaygray answered. “And I swear on Azmodan’s member, this Nettle made a deal with a demon. And not with any old demon, but with one of the highest.”

  “Belial,” Nega snorted. “I could tell that prince’s mark anywhere. Such elegant incisions on the mortal’s soul. Definitely his hand!”

  “Beside the point,” the satyr said. “The point is, the deed is done, boss. We observed Staffa, aka Nettle. Every Wednesday he secretly disappears from the city all night. Even his wife doesn’t know. Nega checked, he casts an illusion on her.”

  “And what did he get for his soul?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” the satyr answered. “One thing is clear: something allowed him to take over almost all crime in the Commonwealth. There was a case in the Ruby City when a minor demon bought the soul of a mortal in exchange for the ability to seduce all women. What happened was…”

  “Hold on a sec,” Nega interrupted him. “Boss, before you decide anything, you have to remember – getting into the Inferno is far easier than getting out of it. Whether you get the Coals of Hellflame or not… Have you thought about how you plan to get back?”

  “Uhm… I’m undying, so I was just planning to die there. Then I’ll resurrect on Kharinza and…”

  “I doubt that,” Flaygray chuckled. “I don’t know what you were thinking, but that won’t work. If you thought about the issue at all, then it clearly wasn’t for long. Which is why Nega and I did the thinking for you.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a way to bring you back with a standard Summoning Pentagram. You see, the pentagram carries not only demons. The technology works on all sentients, but there’s an important detail – you must have at least one drop of demonic…”

  “Initial!” Behemoth boomed suddenly.

  We stared at him in shock. Motioning with his finger, he teleported the demons out of the temple and delivered a command along with an impulse compelling me to act at once:

  “Tiamat is in danger! The undead are attacking her temple! Hurry!”

  Nodding, I threw on Cold-Blooded Punisher, equipped Reaper’s Scythes and activated Depths Teleportation to Tiamat’s temple in the Lakharian Desert.

  The world blinked, and I took off into the air right away, choking on the sickening stench of rotting flesh. I shivered, glanced at the oasis created by Tiamat. A horde of undead seethed from horizon to horizon, buzzing and murmuring, groaning and growling. I made out gigantic Foul Queases and Sickening Rotters, Bone Hounds, desert beasts dripping rot, a huge zombie kraken crawling through the sand… I panicked when I saw the minions’ levels; how could I fight them? They were all over level 800!

  At the western dune, a pack of zombies was greedily picking at Crash’s remains. To summon my other pets meant to feed them to the hungry horde closing in around the hollow in which the temple sat. It was too late to save it – the only hope was to capture the Supreme Legate in a trap cell beneath Mount Mecharri. Readying Lethargy and Spirit Trap, I slid my eyes across the figures…

  But Eileen, level 854 Striking Blade of Innoruuk and Supreme Legate of the Destroying Plague, found me first.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” she shouted, extending an arm toward me. “To me, Demon Fighter!”

  Liberation protected me from the first attempt at control, but let through the second:

  Subjugate Mind: control of your character has moved to Eileen!

  My whole interface went gray – Eileen had control of my body. My character landed and she took me by the hand. My mind screamed within my skull. I tried to force myself to resist, but just couldn’t.

  The gray ability icons lit up under Eileen’s gaze. She stopped at Depths Teleportation, went through the dropdown list of locations, reached Kharinza Fortress – Castle, Level One…

  …and activated the skill.

  Chapter 5. Supreme Legate

  THE HORDE OF UNDEAD closed in on the temple. Desert Vulture Zombies rushed the columns, started clawing and pecking at them. Foul Queases and Sickening Rotters crashed in with their mighty clumsy bodies, trying to crush the stones, groaning, squelching and shedding scraps of flesh. Plague Vectors wriggled in beneath the altar to chip away at it from below.

  Among the Supreme Legate’s minions were also Hooked Mortens like my minion Kermit, Plated Scorpids, the colossal Shai-khuluda sandworms, Dead Tumbleweeds – very soon, the temple was hidden beneath the teeming undead.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Eileen summoning other legates an instant before we traveled. I didn’t see which ones before the girl activated Depths Teleportation.

  Cou
ld she kill me while I was under control? The thought flashed up in the short time it took to teleport, then instantly disappeared, washed away by a surge of adrenaline.

  Either the depths weren’t working or Behemoth’s Veil of Distortion over Kharinza prevented the deadly enemy from entering. Either way, we were taken somewhere else. The air filled with screams and shouts for help:

  “Undead! Eileen is here! Undead!”

  “Call the guards!”

  “She’s with Scyth!”

  The Legate’s Crown wreathed Eileen’s head, her long black hair snaking out from under it. Judging by how well they matched the crown, the girl had gotten two more items from the same set: black boots and shimmering silver diamond-shaped shoulderguards with a venom-green aura.

  “Well, well, well…” she said, looking around calmly. I couldn’t read anything on her dead face crisscrossed with black veins. “If it isn’t the Darant Town Hall. How did that happen? Why are we here, slave? Oh, right, you can’t answer…”

  The area we landed in quickly emptied – people flew up into the air on mounts, ran away shrieking or pushed each other aside to run through portals that opened with a snap. But not everyone managed to get away before Eileen flashed with Plague Fury, and then nobody was left in the district around us. I looked through a window into the town hall and saw an official collapsing into ashes. My Equanimity saved me.

  “I’m really starting to hate the living,” Eileen muttered, looking at me with pale white eyes like a dead fish. I understood her perfectly well. I’d gotten used to endless solitude too, leveling up far away from prying eyes in the company of silent undead servants. “Alright, you stay here, Scyth.”

  Leaving me, she moved off to one side and activated Call of the Supreme Legate. An instant later, my guess was confirmed – all the cobbles around Eileen melted into slush and then began to form into plague minions. Scyth stood staring at the town hall, unable to turn look elsewhere without Eileen’s order, but I remembered that Call didn’t level up, which meant that Eileen had only summoned ten creatures.

  My character was still under control, but my mind remained free. I thought feverishly for a way to save myself, but none of my ideas were any good. While my mind was subjugated, there was nothing I could do. And then I started thinking about what I could do if I regained the ability to move. Right then, Eileen was spending five hundred and eighty-one thousand points of Plague Energy every minute to maintain Subjugate Mind, a thousand for every level I had. Judging by her gear and how high she had leveled her legate skills, she had plenty of time…

  A battle cry came from above, then flapping wings. Who was it? Had the capital guard arrived? I heard the sound of smacking lips, then the roar of a dying gryphon, a scream from a human. Eileen must have taken out a scout in passing.

  The undead legate girl arranged her beasts around us, ordering them to patrol the area, then returned to me, sat my character down and crouched down before me, stretching languidly.

  “I watched the highlights. You did okay at the Games, slave,” she hissed almost peacefully.

  It seemed she wasn’t at all concerned to be sitting in the heart of the Commonwealth, only a few miles from the castle of King Bastian the First.

  “Thank you, Lady Supreme Legate Eileen! I’m glad you’ve been watching me play, mistress! Can I please kiss your feet, Lady Eileen?”

  “You can kiss them later,” she said, waving a hand and laughing. “And now let’s see what’s in your bag, slave.”

  Scyth opened his inventory and unloaded everything, laying it out before Eileen. The girl began to pick through my things with the curiosity of a cat, putting them into her own bag:

  “Thunderbearer… This will come in handy for my divine weaponry collection. Oh, Concentrated Life Essence? The one from..? Oh, what a shame I can’t use it.” She threw away my reward for winning the Games like some gray garbage. “Now this is more interesting – Isis’ Blessing. I don’t need it, but maybe it’ll find a buyer on the black market… Windracer… Demon Fighter’s Ferocity… Innoruuk strike me down! What is that? Skin of the Primordial Beast! No use for it with my Immortality, but… Heh heh, it’ll come in handy against those idiots from the Elites if they think of rising up against me!”

  Her altered voice sounded like an old crone’s rasp, but her tone came through just fine. Powerless rage seethed within me, blinded me, demanded action. I kept trying to return control of my character, sending mental signals to my legs and arms to move, but as before, they would only obey Eileen. If I could, I would have rolled my eyes at the slavish way my character spoke to her, like an ingratiating lackey.

  After depriving me of my material possessions, Eileen smiled wickedly.

  “Let’s get you undressed, slave.” Controlling my arms, she took off all my equipment, leaving me in my underwear. “This bracelet… Balancer? Hmm… Now that’s cool! Thanks, slave! Cold-Blooded Punisher… Awesome armor! Nether, soulbound to Scyth! So are these Reaper’s Scythes. You disappoint me, slave! Well, you’re not going to need armor and weapons anymore, so best to destroy them… Hey, this is going to make a great video! Alright, you’ve convinced me. You can kiss my feet.”

  She spoke as me again, fully controlling my voice:

  “I beg you, beautiful mistress! Allow me to kiss not only your feet, but also your…”

  You wouldn’t hear the kind of stuff Scyth went on to beg his ‘mistress’ the Supreme Legate for in just any R-rated film. Eileen was fooling around, putting on a doll show, and with every second I saw more and more how sure she was of herself. Her confidence wasn’t misplaced. In just a few minutes, her minions had easily made mincemeat out of several squads of royal guards, and the legate girl hadn’t so much as lifted a finger.

  Next she jabbed a finger at me and said playfully:

  “Pew-pew!”

  A black beam shot out of her finger. When it touched my skin, it spread over it in an invisible veil, covering my entire body in an instant.

  Absolute Suppression: for 10 minutes, you have no access to your inventory or communications, or any abilities, skills, perks or bonuses from divine protectors; you cannot dispel this condition or remove it through any other means.

  “Pew-pew!” Eileen said again, and invisible chains bound my legs to the stone pavement.

  Astral Manacles: for 10 minutes, you cannot move from this position; you cannot dispel this condition or remove it through any other means.

  With another couple of gestures, she released control of my mind and did something unexpected:

  Subjugate Mind: Eileen has relinquished control of your character.

  Plague Defense: you are immune to damage from the Destroying Plague for 5 minutes.

  “You’re welcome, slave,” Eileen grinned. “Although you’re not a slave anymore… Know that you will die only when I decide it. In the meantime, live.”

  Looking around, I stood up, but couldn’t separate my feet from the ground; it was like they were glued to the cobbles.

  Eileen turned away and looked across the square. It was littered with corpses. A twitching wave passed across them, and suddenly all the dead began to slowly rise at once.

  The veil of a Great Portal flashed up at the far end of the square. Warriors in the armor of the Commonwealth began to stream through it.

  “Can you speak, Demon Fighter?” Eileen asked. “You don’t mind having a chat before you lose your character, do you?”

  She scowled at the rising zombies. Groaning and growling, they threw themselves at the NPCs, bogging them down in battles.

  “Where’d you get those skills? How?” I asked dully. My body felt alien, my tongue obeying slowly, barely moving. “How did you do it?”

  “The same way you got your ability to fly, I suspect. You know that the Dis AI doesn’t just hand out rewards blindly, right?” Her voice dripped with self-congratulation. Eileen was reveling in her power, flaunting it to me and to an imaginary audience. “You needed mobility, and it gave you wings. I
needed a way to defeat you. I got Astral Manacles at level 700, Absolute Suppression at 800. Not gonna be a lot of competition at the Solo Arena, I think.” She cackled like a witch.

  Eileen was happy beyond measure, and in no hurry to wind down the show. All I could do was play for time, hope that things would turn around. Maybe a High Priest of Nergal would show up with a couple of Aspects of Light, distract Eileen and give me a chance to get away?

  “What are you so happy about? You couldn’t get to us like you wanted to.”

  “I had to try, I have business there,” the girl snorted. “But it didn’t work, oh well. It’ll wait. Don’t worry, I’ll be visiting Kharinza real soon, and with my whole horde.”

  “How?” I asked, realizing that since she knew the name of the island, that meant she and Mogwai had been talking.