The demon spat and murmured:
“Glory to the Dominion…”
Leaning down to Teland, I asked quietly:
“How do I get chao? By killing beasts?”
He looked at me with such pity that I wanted the ground to swallow me up rather than hold that hopeless, despair-filled gaze.
Chapter 13. Such is the Demon’s Path
IF I WERE ASKED TO DESCRIBE the Inferno, three words would have been enough: gloomy, dreary, dismal. But words like those don’t say much about the hilly landscape dominated by fiery shades of red; the strange weather, as if sentenced to ever stay the same; the heavy sky, hanging like a ceiling right above my head… The only place like the Inferno that I could remember was the area where the Ordeal had taken place, though even then, the resemblance was distant. Even the Nether had been far brighter. And the Moon seemed to have more color than this place.
The Inferno was a new game dimension not yet unlocked to players, but playing Dis as a demon..? I didn’t envy those who would choose that path: leveling up in an atmosphere this grim seemed like a ticket to depression.
A couple of gawkers tagged along behind me as I walked away from the elder’s house, a devil with a shovel and a capering imp who dropped sarcastic comments about how dumb I was all the way to the gates:
“The tiefling’s daddy is done! You’d have to be a dumbass to try to do the impossible to save him!”
“The kid must have hit his head,” the devil bleated. “He hasn’t even got two dozen chao, there’s no way he’ll get a thousand!”
“Master Kerass will be doing a big favor to the Dominion when he disincarnates this brainless idiot!”
The couple followed behind me, but kept their distance. Apparently, I wasn’t invited to partake in their analysis.
“Still, there must be some catch here, Zeonar,” the imp squawked. “Did you see how sure he was when he gave that promise to Master Kerass?”
“Hold on!” the devil bleated, then spoke more quietly: “You think he has a secret cache? But why, Tarbas? I don’t get it. Why would a starless one hide chao that he could absorb?!”
“No, not that!”
Tarbas, hopping, lowered his voice to a whisper, and the devil gasped:
“You think this pipsqueak found a vilespring?”
The imp screeched in displeasure and the voices quietened. I slowed my pace, listening, and my perception let me learn something interesting:
“…what you say!” the imp hissed. I looked back – the devil was looking around nervously while his companion kept on talking: “Did you get your horns all twisted?”
“Vilesprings of chao are just tales!” the devil whined.
“Tales, my tail!” the imp objected, stopping. “I found one myself when I went out past the first hundred ells.”
The imp cast a glance at me. I turned away and kept walking. The pair followed.
“You’re lying! I don’t believe you! Why didn’t you say anything before, Tarbas?”
“I’m not! I swear on Belial’s member!”
“Somehow I don’t see a single star on your horn…” the devil said doubtfully.
“Because the vilespring was small!” Tarbas the imp hissed even more angrily. “Just twenty thousand particles! Those were hard times, almost all of it went on living…”
“Twenty thousand!” Zeonar whistled. “That’s a mountain of chao!”
“Hah! There are some springs with easily enough for a yellow star!”
He said something else, but I didn’t make out a word. Turning back, I saw that the devil and imp had stopped and were arguing furiously. A ‘vilespring of chao’? I mentally rubbed my hands – that would make a great explanation if there were questions later about how a small and weak tiefling had gotten so much of the valuable resource.
Now all I had to do was get some chao. I couldn’t wait to test out my strength on the local mobs. If this was the sandbox, and the minimum level the players would start their demonic lives with was 700, then in theory, I would have gotten along fine here even if the buggy system hadn’t used my million-strong stats as a base when it sent me to the Inferno.
The gate guard, a demon who must have been hundreds of years old judging by his horns, waved a hand at me:
“Back into the Void, little Hakk? Does your father know?”
“Kerass locked him up,” I sighed. “He said he’ll take his chao and mine if I don’t get him a thousand particles.”
“A thousand?!” the demon gasped, then scratched his head. “Well, he has the right. But the town will remember this and put him in his place if it comes to that. Glory to the Dominion!”
“Glory to the Dominion…”
I went quite some ways out of Tiefling Nest, but didn’t see a single mob. The spiky two-tailed hyenas that sniffed the earth at the base of the town walls turned out to be pets, marked green as friendlies.
Teland had said that chaos metal scares beasts away, so I kept on walking, looking for a potential source for farming chao. Incredibly, Cartography wasn’t leveling up, even though I was exploring a whole new world. Maybe it was because the Inferno was cut off from Dis, or maybe because I was in a sandbox where the skill wouldn’t level up. It didn’t matter for now, anyway.
The important thing now was to get out of the boondocks. Thirty years on foot to the Ruby City was too long, even with Flight and Clarity. While I made my way there, Eileen would take over Kharinza, the Destroying Plague would conquer Disgardium, and some alchemist would invent a frost-resistance potion and there’d be no more point to this caper.
To get out of the Nest, I needed to get recruited into the legion, and that meant getting at least one white star. I had no way of knowing what might happen after I earned a place in Belial’s army. There was no point in guessing, but old man Teland had told me the main thing – legionaries were allowed on vacation to the Ruby City. That was all I needed to know for now.
I looked around, studied the land all the way to the horizon – not a single living… uhm, that is, demonic creature. Although… I felt an unpleasant gaze on me. Two, even. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my skin raised in goosebumps.
Continuing impassively on my journey, I reached a thicket of strange bushes with long, meaty leaves, walked into them and disappeared into Stealth. Then I slowly emerged from the opposite side, trying not to disturb the branches, and quickly flew twenty yards away.
The feeling of eyes on me fell away. I hovered in the air for five minutes, then finally saw blurry figures blending in with the ground – like the shadows of two tiny clouds crawling along the earth. Only when they were right beneath me could I properly make them out: the imp and the devil that had followed me to the gates.
I slowly landed behind them. If they spotted me, then at least the tiefling Hakkar would be on the ground and not in the air.
“He surely found a vilespring,” Tarbas the imp squeaked. “You saw how confidently he was walking, didn’t you? I feel it in my tail, he knows exactly where to go! If not a vilespring, then he definitely has something hidden somewhere!”
“Bullshit.” The devil jumped up and down, inspecting the bushes where I’d disappeared. “I think the kid just decided to wait until Master Kerass leaves for the legion, then come back. Enough of this. Let’s head home.”
“No way, Zeonar. You go where you want, but I’m following him. And when he reaches his vilespring, heh-heh…”
“I don’t like this,” the devil muttered. “That boy is just about to lose his father, and now he has you to deal with, Tarbas…”
The imp jumped from foot to foot indignantly, snarled:
“Don’t anger the prince! Look at you, goody two hooves! The law of chao is simple and strict: if you’re not strong enough to defend yourself, then your chao must go to someone stronger!” He stopped jumping up and down, whispered hotly: “What if there’s a million, buddy? We’ll split it all fifty-fifty! We’ll each get a star and sign up for the legion! That
’s our dream! Do you want to betray our dream because you feel sorry for some stinking tiefling?”
“Pfft, I don’t feel sorry for him! Heh! As if…” The devil straightened his back, clapped the imp on the shoulder. “Come on, we’ll fall behind! Even if he doesn’t have anything, there’s a little chao in him, right?”
The devil guffawed and the imp giggled. Bastards! I thought indignantly, although Hakkar had died because of me.
Leaving the devilish dreamers behind me, I flew back into the thicket, came out of stealth. I walked noisily out of the bushes back the way I’d come, toward Zeonar and Tarbas. I made sure to jump and whistle as I walked, smiling from ear to ear as if I’d found treasure. Or a vilespring of chao. Or a cache. I hadn’t decided yet.
“Oh, hey there!” I said. I didn’t know whether Hakkar knew the devil and imp’s names, so I just waved. “What are you doing here?”
The imp, two heads shorter than the devil, jumped up and elbowed the other in the ribs.
“I told you!” he squawked excitedly, then grinned: “Hakk, little one, Zeonar and I were worried about you and decided to come help you with your challenge! But I see you’ve handled it yourself! You found some chao?”
“Uhm…” Would Hakkar have admitted to it? I doubted it. I looked down, dropped my shoulders and whined: “No! I didn’t find anything! Poor father! He’s going to have to give up his chao to Master Kerass! And poor me! To face death so young…”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the devil slowly walking around to get behind me. The imp continued to distract me with talk:
“Oh yes, what a shame…” he said, clicking his tongue, but his excitement came through as he hopped from foot to foot. The imp clearly had poor impulse control. “But such is the demon’s path, little Hakk! Don’t be sad. The main thing is that you tried, right?”
He gave me a look full of false sympathy. The imp wasn’t much like Shuutz’Utz, the minion who served Defiler the warlock from the Children of Kratos at Kinema. That one was clean and sleek, and had seemed larger. Tarbas, by contrast, looked like a stray dog. Mangy fur, large horsey teeth, uneven and jagged as if he chewed stones with them, cloudy eyes covered in a yellow film – altogether, this particular imp must have been at the very bottom of the food chain in the Inferno.
Emitting an abrupt bleat, the devil dropped his spade down on my head, but I didn’t see what happened to him next – the imp leapt at me with a roar. Unlike Shuutz’Utz, Tarbas didn’t have the ability to throw fireballs, so he just sank his teeth into my neck.
Both attacks were suicidal. Reflection fired the damage back and the attackers flew away. Whether I wanted it or not, I’d have to kill them both, otherwise they’d kick up a fuss in the town, and either the tiefling would have to disappear, or I’d have to end them all, including Hakkar’s father. I didn’t want that. Better for the two local gankers to breathe their last.
The devil crashed down. The imp groaned, grabbing at his throat and staring at me balefully from beneath his brows as if trying to decide whether to run away or try to kill me again. Or he just didn’t know what was going on. I took a step toward him and he crawled backwards, his eyes locked on me.
“Tarbas!” I said to him. “Is that how you decided to help me? By ending my suffering? Well, thanks for the ‘help.’ And most of all, for the new knowledge. Now I see that the Inferno is no different from my world – there are good peop… good sentients and bad ones. Bad ones like you.”
“What? What are you talking about?” the imp wheezed, staring at me through his filmy eyes. “You managed to absorb some chao, Hakkar? Have mercy… Zeonar and I have a dream… We just wanted to get into the legion and serve for the glory of the Dominion! Sorry, but we have no chao, it won’t do you any good to kill us!”
“Oh, little Tarbas. Don’t you see? I don’t need your chao. I’m not of your world.”
Understanding flickered in his eyes, the pupils lighting up with fire. A wave of hatred flooded through me, but when the imp spoke he fawned, tried to curry favor:
“What? Not a demon? But how? Who are you? You’re kidding around, right, Hakkar? I remember when you were a little baby, heh-heh! Such a cute and funny little tiefling… I see you’ve been lucky enough to find a vilespring, so why not…”
Who-oo-osh! The hard spike at the end of the creature’s whip-thin tail suddenly hit me right in the face. Equanimity hadn’t yet worn off, and the eye he hit was undamaged, but Tarbas’s own eye burst and oozed down his face. The imp screamed and grabbed his face in pain.
Behind me, the devil began to climb to his feet, swearing profusely. He didn’t seem to know what had hit him, and now he looked around in confusion.
“What happened, Tarbas?” Then he looked me up and down. “The kid is alive? Why?”
Zeonar moved his astonished gaze from me to the agonized imp, who groaned, his hand pressed to the gaping wound of his eye:
“That ain’t Hakkar! It’s a mortal!”
“What?”
The imp spluttered:
“Have mercy, we’ll repay you! I don’t know what you need, but please, have mercy! We thought you were Hakkar! We just wanted to achieve our dream, get a little chao for our first stars!”
I shook my head.
“So if you knew how strong I was, you wouldn’t have attacked? Were you possessed by the devil?” I laughed. “Convenient. It’s okay, imp, don’t be sad. Such is the demon’s path, after all. The main thing is that you tried, right?”
The first Hammerfist put the rising devil to rest, the second split the imp’s horned skull as he tried to cover himself with his arms in horror. My inexplicable anger at the demon dreamers hadn’t gone anywhere, and it was a strange feeling. I had a thousand corpses on my conscience, but even after the unavoidable explosions of Plague Fury in Darant and Shak, when I needed to show the tranquil peoples of the Commonwealth and the Empire how dangerous the Destroying Plague was, I had felt pangs of conscience for the deaths of the innocent NPCs. Now I felt nothing but satisfaction.
Their bodies disincarnated, leaving only a scattering of tiny particles.
Chao particles: +79.
Chao particles: +151.
Chao earned at current level (0 white stars): 287 / 1,000,000.
I didn’t bother picking up their stinking rags and the spade. I’d gained a quarter of the chao I needed. I needed to find a fat mob…
Going into Stealth and activating Flight, I ascended a hundred yards into the air. For miles around I saw neither mobs nor demons. The townspeople must have been avoiding this area because of the pack of marauding inraugs that Teland had mentioned. Maybe the ordinary mobs were hiding or had been eaten by the high-star incomers.
I wasn’t sure I could find them fast. In all my time in the Inferno, I hadn’t felt so much as a light breeze, which meant that the inraugs wouldn’t find me by scent alone.
I flew in a spiral, widening the circle each time, and forty minutes later I finally saw thirteen monsters moving, heat emanating from them. From above, they looked like a pack of red and brown lions. I dove down to get a closer look and see how big they were. The resemblance to lions ended with their muscular, flexible bodies. A mane full of long, sharp needles ran down their backs from bony heads inset with red-hot eyes. In place of a brush, a spike adorned the tips of their tails. The tops of their skulls were crowned with growths of bone.
The pack ran along in single-file, sniffing as they went. A two-headed monster the size of a purebred bull headed up the group. Every step it took left a burning, smoking imprint that flamed for several seconds.
My stratospheric perception showed me the giant’s nameplate clear as day:
Ber’og, Inraug Alpha, Tier 4 Demonic Beast
Local boss.
Yellow stars: ✫✫✫✫✫
White stars: ✩
The other inraugs were of various levels and had between one and three yellow stars, but they too were all tier 4 Demonic Beasts. I didn’t know what the tiers mea
nt.
My learned carefulness kept me from leaping before I looked. I came closer to the pack, hovering twenty meters above it, picked out the weakest inraug, straggling along at the back with a single yellow star on its crown. I aimed at that one and fired off Spirit Hammerfist. My Unarmed Combat didn’t let me down – without making a sound, the inraug collapsed head over heels and curled into a ball. One corpse! The pack continued on, noticing nothing.
Pressing my advantage, I went into Clarity and put down the other eleven inraugs with ordinary Hammerfists to save my spirit. I left the alpha for last, to see if he was a match for me at normal speed.
I landed right in his path, then left Clarity.
Enemy of the Inferno (Disgardium Book #8): LitRPG Series Page 26