Demonic Devourer ch. 104

Ninth Circle

To be honest, I’m surprised I haven’t unlocked a proper coercion skill of some sort by now. With the way the system works, I should have gained Interrogation or something similar through the process of extracting information from those who created me.

Speaking of which—I understand that those who have filtered into this hell are the ones who are actually capable of diving to the Ninth Circle, which means their power isn’t great enough for the barrier between hells to stop them, but I still find myself disappointed by the pathetic showing they’ve put up.

Sierra. Interrogating. Progress.

Using the Titan-speak, as Sierra calls it, is an incredible waste of magic and power, but it’s a skill that will only improve with practice. For some reason, the system also hasn’t provided me with a skill for this. I expected it to be a feature of my Proto-Titan class, but so far all that has yielded are the ones relating to my nullspace—Descent, Manifest, and Annihilate.

Sierra and I have a number of running theories on why that is, but none of them seem more likely than the others.

We can only hope that this newest development aids us in finding an answer.

By the time Sierra makes her way to my side, Del Taas is a broken shell of a person.

She makes a face seeing him.

“Don’t like the blood?” I ask. Not a question I would typically ask, but I’m desperate any separation I can put between myself and the ideal Sapphire has set for me.

“It’s fine,” Sierra says. “Just a little messy. Is he willing to talk?”

I glance down at the barely-living mess of blood and gore. “Once I give him the ability to talk, yes.”

I truly do wish Devour could pick out individual skills and keep them instead of just temporarily granting me access to them, because that Perfect Null domain looks useful. Yes, it folded to my power, but I don’t think I could’ve managed that from outside its barriers.

As it is, I’ve Devoured enough of his body to push my Divine Demon class up a few levels. The individual levels are quickly growing meaningless to me—I have reached level 145, and my skills have leveled up with me, but the difference between Blood Magic being at level 1 or 25 is miniscule next to the difference between it being at Silver or Diamond tier, which in turn pales next to the power of my proto-Titan abilities.

Not for the first time, I wonder if the system simply stops being as useful at higher Categories.

Baseless speculation does us no good right now, sadly, so I use Hemokinesis on the parts of Del that are no longer within his body and Hemorrhage on the parts that are. The distinction is less clear than I imagine he’d like, but he should be able to speak again now.

Unlike the last couple of times I’ve done this, he doesn’t immediately try to fight back. Siphon has enough usages now that I can freely use it to sap lower-level skills, so nothing he’s done has come close to affecting me.

“Alright,” Sierra says. “Del, do tell us more about the hells.”

His primary class reads as Helldiver to my Appraise. I do hope he has useful insights. The six who first arrived were all wetworks specialists. They had a fair bit to say on the matter of souls, but none of them could help us with the more prescient issue of reality breaking apart here. I know that I can survive the void, thanks to my Voidtouched trait, but I don’t know how Sierra will fare in nonexistence even with her vastly improved power now.

I told Del that it took his sister seventeen minutes to break, which, strictly speaking, is true. What I failed to mention to him is that seventeen minutes in, she died. I think I’ve gotten better with managing the bloodflow, but I don’t have an intrinsic sense for others’ biology like I do my own.

In short, we still don’t know anything about the hells because Mel was significantly less willing to speak than her brother.

“They… nothing can exist in a vacuum,” Del says. His voice is glassy and unfocused, which may be because I eliminated half of his sensory organs. He shouldn’t be in that much pain right now—I’m reasonably sure I disconnected his nerves from the rest of his body. What’s left of it, at least. “That includes the hells.”

“It quite looks like a vacuum from where we stand,” Sierra points out.

And it is. After a somewhat ludicrous number of Annihilates, the two of us have turned the Ninth Circle into a wasteland. Half of our new special skills no longer work; reality degradation has chipped away at the territories in places until it is neither our domain nor Sersui’s.

“The void is anything but a vacuum,” Del asserts, his voice growing stronger. “It is the foundation upon which our world is built. It is the beginning of everything, and it is the end.”

The explanation he’s giving me almost jogs something in my amalgam-memory, but it just barely misses. It’s deeply frustrating because I know why that is. Yet another reason to kill Sapphire.

“The beginning and the end,” Sierra says, unimpressed. “You’re spouting contradictions to buy yourself longer to live.”

She doesn’t entirely believe that, I can tell. I’ve been with her long enough that I can tell now. This is a fear tactic.

To be fair to him, he doesn’t have much longer to live.

“No,” Del snaps, actually managing to sound angry. “The void is the baseline of our world. Our reality can only exist because it has that framework to lay on.”

“That’s reality,” I say. “What are the hells, then?”

When he doesn’t answer, I reconnect his nerves to his brain. Sierra makes a face at the sound of his screaming but doesn’t complain otherwise, so I keep it up for a solid minute or so before ending it.

“If you answer, there’ll be less of that,” I lie. “You might even be able to survive.”

Sadly, my amalgam doesn’t have much in the way on the topic of extracting knowledge. I do know that this would be more effective if I also had Mel or someone he truly cares about to work with, but I exhausted that option when I ate her.

“The—gods help me—the hells are to our reality what a shadow is to an object,” Del chokes out.

“Projections,” I say.

“Not exactly.” Del tries to shake his head before realizing that he currently has control over exactly his mouth. “Just as every object has its shadow when the sun shines on it, every aspect of our reality casts its conceptual shadow over another part of the universe.”

That barely makes more sense than his initial explanation.

“So the hells are reflections of reality?” Sierra asks. “Then why are they so similar to the Titan nullspaces?”

Del barks out a weak laugh at that. “If the sun shines on a mountain and a man, which will you first see the shade of?”

“You still haven’t given us anything useful,” I say. “How are we supposed to surface?”

“Find the gaps,” he says. “Surfacing is about finding your way back into the sun, so to speak.”

“Then there’s a skill for it,” I say. “Or an area. Where do we go? Can you lead us?”

Can I eat your for the skill? I don’t ask.

“You must not think in terms of the system,” he says. “Not in the rigid, defined lines that we have enforced upon ourselves. The hells are closer to the primordial void than reality, and their chaos means that there are points where their barriers run closer to concept than actualized magic.”

Del is surprisingly coherent now. I’m barely managing to keep blood flowing to his body, which is scattered across an area roughly the size of a small house, but he sounds as lively as he did when he first entered. Not at all like he’s half a second from dying in the clutches of his greatest enemy. This topic must be his life’s work.

Either that, or his brain has gone into such complete shock that he no longer processes us as threats. I don’t particularly care either way.

“Then we find where the hells are… less real?” Sierra asks. She frowns. “I thought we could use the destruction of a hell as fuel to send us to another.”

“I could spend a week telling you about the reasons why the destruction of a hell is the wrong concept to send you anyplace but the void,” Del says. “But—“

He stops dead in the middle of his sentence, abruptly enough that I have to check if I actually did just kill him.

No. He’s just not speaking. Del’s mouth is moving, but words aren’t coming out.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why.

“If you’re not allowed to tell us about that,” I say, “then tell us exactly how we’re supposed to make it to the next hell.”

The information he’s given us about the nature of the hells is intriguing, and it implies things about the system itself that I really want to delve into, but that’s something that’ll have to wait until after we escape this degrading reality.

“Like I said,” Del continues, “the system is not your friend here. It is not a god.”

“But the ghosts of dead gods speak through it,” I say. It’s happened to me one too many times. Hells, I had a god-fragment strapped to me until I ate it to advance to Category 1.

“Those are not ghosts,” he says. “They—“

He falls silent once more, and I find myself wondering what he was silenced for. Are the dead gods actually alive? Have they been immortalized in the system?

And what does Sapphire not want us to know?

“Continue,” I say.

“In the hells, concepts are of more import than they are in the material world. To traverse them, you must eschew the magic presented to you by the system. It limits you.”

“The Coalition helldivers use items, though,” Sierra says with a frown. “You used a skill.”

“A skill and a class that I earned. That I created. Attempt an Appraise on the diving kits. Just try.”

Sierra and I look at each other.

“Well,” I say. “It’s a next step.”

“It is,” she agrees. “Should he live?”

“I think he might know more about the world than we do,” I say. “He can be a resource. He lives.”

“No,” Del says. “Please, no. Just release me.”

“You’ll die,” I tell him flatly. “Give me a second, Sierra.”

I start gathering the pieces of his body back, using Hemokinesis to bring him back into one vaguely coherent mass of flesh and blood. He doesn’t even resemble a human anymore.

“Please just let me die,” Del begs. “Let me be reborn anew. I will abandon your project forever. You will never see me again.”

“You lost the privilege to decide when you die when you came after us,” Sierra says simply. She reaches a hand out, and soft blue magic envelops the pieces of his body.

He must still have a sense for magic, because his empty, bloody eye sockets widen as her magic flows over him. “No. No, please, STO—“

And then he disappears into Sierra’s Personal Space.

“That’s that, then,” I say. “Let’s see about getting ourselves out of this hell.”

Around us, the hell that is Sersui’s nullspace continues to break.

#

“I don’t know how much longer this place is going to hold,” Sierra says, looking around us.

The cracks in the hells are visible now. It’s like the world around is is made of glass that has been repeatedly struck by a hammer. The draw of the void, previously so unremarkable that neither of us even noticed it, is the same odd mixture of compelling and wrong that it always has been.

It’s different from the times I encountered it beneath Ravendale and the various fragments around Whitestar. Here in the hells, it feels more primal. And at the same time, somehow, it’s familiar. The contradiction between wrongness and familiarity is difficult to process. Yet another question to add to the growing pile of general oddities that plague this world.

That people are able to simply live out their lives without questioning these issues is honestly a mystery to me, but I suppose most people also don’t become Titans.

“It’s falling apart,” I agree. “More motivation for us to figure out how to surface. I don’t know if we can survive the hell collapsing.”

“That’s going to be difficult,” Sierra says. “It is not an exaggeration to say we’ve relied on the system for all of our magic to this point.”

“How long do you think we have?” I ask.

Sierra stretches a hand out, Manifesting her nullspace into existence. I still don’t know the exact rules of hers, but where my nullspace can only destroy, hers balances the slices of twisted emptiness that tear through the hell, patching them up for the time being.

“Days, maybe,” she says.

“That fast?” I ask. “These are reflections of Titans. Shouldn’t they last longer than that?”

“We’re not the shadows of anything,” Sierra reasons. “And there’s no angels here, which means the lack of an anchoring presence.”

“Then we’ll just have to break through,” I say, shrugging. “Should be simple enough.”

“Evelyn, that’s…” Sierra frowns. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“You said it yourself,” I reply. “When has that ever stopped us?”

Agreement, she answers, a bright smile wiping away her expression.

We both realize it at the same time.

This. Not. System. Neither of us have the same level of casual control over it that the Titans do, but the system hasn’t provided any skills to communicate nor any information about the network. The web of Titan speech that connects all of us throughout this world and the rest is, as far as we know, wholly separated.

Opportunity, Sierra says. Exploit.

“Absolutely. It’s a start.”

I extend a hand, and she takes it. Even though the concept-laden speech is starting to tire me magically, I speak one more time. We. Can. Win.

In that instant, more than just words pass between us. Thousands of ideas, images, concepts, and abstractions pass between us, and its conduit is the connections that us Titans inexplicably have between each other.

One of its conduits. Even under the system’s watchful eyes, magic can transfer through different mediums.

A faint spark of magic—raw, untouched, unmanipulated magic—pulses from my hand to Sierra’s.

She turns to me, eyes wide, and plants a kiss on me before I can comment on it. When she pulls back, her grin is beyond cheerful. It’s crazed, the same demonic smile that graced her lips when she first unveiled her true power.

“Now this,” she says, “is something we can work with.”