Blood Magus Chapter 83

It didn’t take long for the demon Astrys had beaten up, Withstrom, to accept Zeth’s original terms—fight for him in exchange for the one human life, plus any additional ones he may claim from attacking Inquisitors in the case they needed to defend him. And after that, the second demon, Sinthar, accepted pretty quickly as well. Zeth imagined he didn’t want to receive the same treatment Withstrom did.

Once they made the deal, Zeth nodded, spinning around. “Alright, let’s head out. This situation is time-sensitive.”

Withstrom groaned and began walking behind him, clearly unhappy with the present situation, and Sinthar followed as well. Astrys strode next to Zeth, sharing in his quick pace to get out of the base and get to town.

Zeth called back to the two other demons, “Oh, and you’ll be taking orders from me and from her. So my command for you is to do everything she says, with the same priority as you do everything I say.”

At his words, both demon’s glanced at each other, frowning, but said nothing. Zeth paid them no mind, looking ahead again to keep rushing for the lair’s exit.

As they walked, though, Withstrom hurried forward, closing the gap between him and Astrys so he was standing just behind her. Zeth saw out of the corner of his eye as Withstrom quietly muttered something into her ear.

“No,” Astrys suddenly said loudly, “I will not give you the order to roam free and kill as many people as you wish so that you may break your summoner’s hold on you.”

He stared at her, eyes wide. “What are you—”

“Back away from me,” she said, “and do not speak unless spoken to.”

Withstrom was forced to comply, backing away so he walked alongside Sinthar behind them once again.

Zeth had anticipated them trying something like that when he told them Astrys’s orders would be on the same level as his, and had also anticipated Astrys’s response. He was very glad to be able to trust someone like her. Though, he still couldn’t get out of his mind the thing she’d done that he had certainly not anticipated.

She’d spoken just now to Withstrom with a calm, stoic voice, same as she always did. But just a few moments earlier, she had been the perfect picture of rage, screaming at him while practically beating him half to death. The moment the two demons accepted Zeth’s deal, though, she had simply stood up straight once again, her furious face returning to a neutral position and voice returning to normal like nothing had happened.

Zeth had felt scared when she’d suddenly showed off her anger, but instantly changing her entire emotional state like that? It practically terrified him. It made him wonder who this person was who he’d been spending all this time with. And he didn’t intend to let his questions go unanswered.

“Hey,” he muttered, leaning over to speak with her. “So, uh, what was all that?”

“Withstrom attempted to convince me to subvert your command, assuming I would be as disloyal to you as he was. However, I—”

“No, no, not just now,” he said, “earlier. You totally blew up at him all the sudden when you were negotiating. What the hell was that?”

“Ah, I apologize for stepping out of line. I knew you were in a hurry and so I assumed you would not want me to waste time asking your permission for everything I planned to do. If my assumption was wrong, I ask that you understand and forgive me for my mistake.”

“No, I’m not mad at you for it. You got them to accept the deal—it was a success. I’ve just…never seen you act like that before. You were so aggressive, it surprised me. Were you pissed at that guy for something? Did he do something to you in the past?”

She nodded, looking relieved when Zeth assured her he wasn’t upset. “It seems you took my actions at face value; I thank you for the compliment to my acting skills. But I was not actually angry in that moment. In fact, I do not believe I have ever met that Withstrom man in my life—or, if I have, the conversation was unimportant enough to be completely forgettable. But I was made to memorize all of the noble families in our area as a child, including some basic information on each member, in order to ensure I could make connections and build political capital effectively. Of course, that did not work out particularly well, but I still did it, and I still recognized his name.”

“Wait, what? So everything you said back there about having met him in the past was a lie?”

“Of course. The threats I made about going back to our realm and killing him and his family were ones I cannot keep, with my given situation. Returning to my realm would not only leave me imprisoned and unable to reach him, it would spell my instant, certain death by execution. However, threats were the most effective negotiation strategy, and so I wove a story to make them more believable. No reasonable demon would ever kill another of our kind simply because a human summoner wanted them to. But if that demon already held a grudge and was looking for a reason to kill this other demon, suddenly they may believe it, and do whatever they can to appease their aggressor. I pretended to be angry, unreasonable, and ready to commit an atrocity. And whether or not Withstrom was one hundred percent certain I was being truthful in that moment, he at least felt the chances I was genuinely ready to harm him were high enough to take a slightly suboptimal deal with a human in order to keep himself safe.”

“So you were totally pretending to be mad back there? You weren’t even a little pissed off?” Zeth breathed out, impressed. “It was pretty believable.”

“You seem to be regarding me as having done something special. I have not. This is simply the way demons negotiate. I would consider myself to be decently skilled at it, but acting aggressive and willing to resort to murder is one of the best ways to utilize your aura of fear. Learning to falsely portray anger is considered to be a basic life skill you teach to children. Of course, it is easier to enhance emotion rather than invent it outright, so typically you find a small annoyance and inflate it out of proportion with your actions.”

“So that’s what you were doing, then? He’d already done something to anger you? Because it looked like you went pretty hard on the guy, even if it was just for the sake of negotiation.”

“...Yes,” she eventually replied. “I suppose I felt irritated seeing the way he was treating you. Sinthar was acting more typical, simply attempting to get what he could out of the deal by convincing you to take a higher price. But Withstrom was directly insulting you and wasting time to make you upset, presumably just for the sake of his own entertainment. I will admit that I have taken to you, and seeing one of my kind deliberately harm you in such a manner may have caused me to enjoy the process of doing the same to him. When you hold my life in your hands, I am reluctant to allow a situation where your opinion of me may be lowered by the actions of another of my kind.”

They continued out of the base, taking a quick stop for Zeth to equip his identity-concealing outfit and grab the few portable Hellfire Rituals he had prepared. With that, he was ready, and they exited into the forest.

Once they were outside, Zeth instantly began running toward town, eager to waste no more time, and the demons jogged alongside him. And as they progressed closer and closer to their destination, a distinct sound became clearer and clearer.

Screaming.

The shouts of countless people echoed through the trees, all originating from the same direction. When he realized what he was hearing, Zeth doubled his pace. At least there were still people alive, but he had no idea how disastrous things had become. He just hoped the Inquisitors had taken care of most of the monsters, at least.

He followed the familiar path he always took into town, passing through foliage and past tree trunks, feeling his heart beat harder and harder as the seconds passed and the sounds became louder. But then, just as they were about to get close enough to be able to see the edge of town, Zeth spotted movement ahead.

It was a young couple, sprinting through the trees and ducking beneath branches, with the man holding a boy in his arms who only looked to be a few years old.

“Come on,” the man was saying to the woman who ran alongside him, “let’s just get out of…”

He stopped as he spotted Zeth and the demons that surrounded him. They were relatively far off, so it didn’t seem like the fear aura had reached any of them yet, but that didn’t stop them from striking fear into the hearts of anyone who lay eyes on them naturally.

“Honey, what are you doing?” the woman asked, not having seen Zeth yet. She grabbed his and and began tugging him away. “We need to—”

Her eyes went wide when she glanced over in the direction he was looking in. She gasped in horror and stumbled back, which seemed to shake the man out of his stupor. He gripped the young boy close to his chest, taking a cautious step backward as well. With a shaky voice, he begged, “Please, leave us be. We mean you no harm.”

But before Zeth could respond, another noise rang through the forest—this one far from human. Bursting through the treeline came a fleshtaker, sprinting through the foliage in a hunched position as it let out a hair-raising roar. Zeth watched it lean to the ground, sniffing for a second before its head snapped in the direction of the family with manic energy, ready to pounce.

They turned to run, but Zeth knew they wouldn’t get more than a few feet before it caught them. So he looked back at Astrys and the other two demons, pointing at the monster. “Kill it.”

Instantly, the three of them charged forward as the fleshtaker pounced to close the distance between it and its prey. Astrys arrived first, likely because she was putting more effort into this fight than the other two, and leapt forward to tackle it to the ground. She caught it in the air, and it let out a screech of frustration as she grabbed on and fell to the ground with the beast. It flailed around in a mess of claws and teeth, but Astrys managed to keep it in place—though, Zeth noticed she was definitely struggling with it more than he’d ever seen a demon struggle to fight against a human.

It raked its claws against her face and she winced, but it didn’t leave any wounds in her skin as she reached out to grab its arms and pin them to the ground, doing all she could to keep the panicking monster in place.

“Take off its head!” she shouted back at the other two demons, who had slowed in pace when they saw Astrys contained the monster.

“Understood,” Sinthar said, stepping forward and wrapping his hands around the fleshtaker’s skull. Its many mouths bit into his skin, but still didn’t manage to cut into his skin, even if it certainly did look uncomfortable. He yanked on it, but couldn’t seem to detach the beast’s head from its neck.

Withstrom knelt down next to the monster as well, flexing his clawed fingers before he stabbed them downward into its throat, piercing its tough skin and sinking an inch deep into its flesh, as the fleshtaker screamed in pain, but not all the way through. He drew his hand out, looking noticeably disgusted at the clumps of blood and bile that now covered his fingers, then jabbed them back down with renewed force, this time sinking fully through its neck and weakening it enough for Sinthar to pull its head from its limp body.

Zeth watched from afar, seeing the family of three gasp as they watched the display of brutality and power, their eyes darting between the demons and Zeth as they clearly wondered if he was going to sic his minions on them next. He waited for them to run off, but they stood there as though petrified. Were they trying to stay still so he wouldn’t notice them? Or maybe they were just frozen in fear?

He waved his hand, shooing them away. “Go on, get out of here. It’s clearly not safe, can’t you see?”

The man nodded shakily, pushing the woman to turn around and hurrying to usher her away.

Zeth walked over to the fleshtaker, glancing at its corpse. The three demons had easily killed it, and it looked like even Astrys alone could’ve taken it out without much risk of harm coming to her—that was good. It meant all three of the demons could split up and take on monsters by themselves for maximum efficiency.

But it hadn’t been effortless for them. That made sense, of course—these were monsters from the Sixth Realm, not the First. They would naturally be far more powerful than anything that originated from here, and so even a demon would start needing to actually try in order to kill them. Sure, it took two strikes instead of one to cut its head off, but what did that matter? They were still practically invulnerable to harm against them.

His mind, though, begged to differ. As he watched the fight, Zeth thought back to what he’d seen when the Inquisitors were killing monsters pouring from the mineshaft. They’d been outnumbered and overwhelmed, and one of them had even been killed by a fleshtaker that took them by surprise. But at the same time, they were cutting off those things’ limbs with single swipes of their swords. Sure, the eye dog monsters seemed pretty weak, but clearly fleshtakers were in their own power bracket, and the Inquisitors hadn’t struggled at all in harming them. And after seeing a trio of demons put in some work striking the beast several times in order to take it out, he was forced to wonder what a fight between a demon and an Inquisitor would look like. He’d always assumed Astrys would easily be able to beat one or two of those soldiers, and he still suspected that’d be the case, but maybe the fight would be a lot closer than he’d originally thought.

Still, there was a more pressing issue than that going on right now. If this fleshtaker was running around in town completely unharmed, it meant there were likely a lot more monsters that had also gotten past the Inquisitors without meeting any resistance. He needed to stop them. And besides, with the number of powerful monsters running around out here, there was bound to be a bounty of blood around every corner. Once everyone was safe, he would be foolish to miss the cleanup.

“Come on,” he said, striding forward as the demons followed. “The town should come into sight soon right past those trees. And once we arrive, we’ve got some monsters to kill.”