Demonic Devourer ch. 60

Hidden Objective: Giantkiller [COMPLETE]

You have killed a being that is more than 100 levels higher than you.

Reward: Trait enhanced - Relentless

Now applies in situations where your opponent’s Category outclasses yours.

Hidden Objective: Early Domain [COMPLETE]

Despite only being Category 0, you have managed to summon a domain without annihilating yourself.

5000 XP rewarded!

Hidden Objective: Backlash [COMPLETE]

You have used a skill too far above the magic level of this region. You will suffer for this.

5000 XP rewarded!

Hidden Objective: Divine Mark [COMPLETE]

You have successfully survived divine intervention.

1000 XP rewarded!

Backlash prevents an increase in level.

The only downside of my new special skill, I soon realize, is everything.

For one, I can’t fucking level up.

For another, though I controlled its primary attack, the domain itself is dangerous passively, which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that Sierra and Adrian were both in its range. Neither of them have suffered fatal damage, but they’re going to need time to recover. Even more time, in Sierra’s case.

And, of course, the system’s warning that there would be backlash was, in fact, completely warranted.

I can’t use any of my active magic, though my resistances and traits appear to remain active. I can barely move my lips to speak, and walking is totally out of the question. Pain courses through me as well, but between Pain Resistance and my innate ability to completely ignore it, that part’s less of a problem.

Some amount of time has passed since I killed Rylar, and it says something about what the backlash has done that I’m not entirely sure whether that time is measured in seconds or hours. The sun’s position hasn’t changed that much, so it probably hasn’t been terribly long.

Adrian is the first to stir. As the one suffering from what I presume is the least backlash, he gets up onto two shaky feet and surveys the surroundings.

After his water magic, Rylar’s Pressure Amplification Domain, and my two special skills, this place is a mess. The air still burns around us even though I’ve released my Soulpyre, and a solid fifty feet radius around us is blackened, burnt, and otherwise broken thanks to our combined efforts.

The Hydrokinetic’s face is a mess of burns, which is probably my fault. Every step he takes looks pained, which is probably not entirely my fault.

“Broken fucking gods, Evelyn,” Adrian says, coughing. “What the fuck? Like, seriously, what the fuck? Was that a domain? You’re level fucking twenty! Gods, I—I need a smoke.”

Instead of grabbing a cigarette, though, he goes to Sierra. The Blue Mage’s symptoms have died down a little, which makes me think the containment facility she was in was exacerbating it.

Oh, that’s not all. Looks like the bracers have been damaged. My skills’ effect, no doubt—there’s no mistaking the blueish burn and what looks like a combination of white and black energy still eating away at the bands.

She gains her lucidity slowly, over the course of minutes. Adrian talks quietly to her through the process, and I don’t bother trying to listen in. I still cannot move.

Eventually, Sierra rises. The black veins still plague her, just like they do Adrian. I don’t doubt that there’s a ton on me too.

“Thank—excuse me. Thank you, Evelyn,” Sierra says, clearing her scraped-raw throat midway through the sentence. “For saving me. Us.”

Sierra brings her lips to my forehead, kissing me lightly. I have to admit, it kind of amuses me that she just doesn’t care about the blood still seeping out from my broken eye-socket.

“The—the body,” I croak out, barely able to get the words out. “Rylar’s. Keep it—intact.”

“Hate to break it to you,” Adrian grunts. “You didn’t leave much of a body.”

I don’t need a body to Devour. So long as I left some part of him in one pieces, be it a smattering of blood or a bone or something, I can consume him. I can’t use the skill yet, but I need it. I need to grow my power until even Sapphire is crushed by the weight of my skills.

“I—“

“I got it,” Sierra says, getting up onto one knee and snapping her fingers. “Any remaining part of the body works, right?”

A pale blue screen shimmers forth from her hands, passing over the bloody, torn apart mess I’ve made of Rylar’s corpse. I can’t see all of it from here, but I catch the edge of her magic passing over the area where his body was. The blood disappears. Dimensional Storage? Her Personal Space? I can’t tell.

I manage an affirmative grunt. I’m surprised that she still has magic even with backlash worse than the both of us put together, but I suppose that her abnormally powerful class was her Red Mage one, not the Blue Mage one that I last saw was level 17.

“Well, seeing as we’re all fucking useless right now,” Adrian mutters, tapping the ground with his sword, “We should probably find a safe place to rest.”

“I take offense to that,” Sierra chuckles. “I still possess more power than you. I would still be considered a force in my own right.”

She starts coughing immediately after she says that, collapsing onto the floor. Sierra makes a sound somewhere in between a diseased cough and a cat choking on a cigarette, and she hacks up blood.

“Right,” Adrian says, sounding unconvinced. He draws his sword, the cold steel somehow looking unimpressive in the face of the earthshattering powers that we’ve all been forced to display lately. He taps it against the broken cliff under his feet, sighing. “Good to see you’re doing better.”

Coughing up blood is doing better? Well, given the state I found her in, I suppose that’s true enough.

“I’d kill for something better than this fucking cig,” Adrian mutters, striking another one with a minor flame skill.

Where the hells does he keep getting those things?

“We can’t always get what we want,” Sierra says, her voice raw. “Gods. I shouldn’t be talking.”

“You really shouldn’t be,” Adrian says. “I gotta say, you’re the only damn person here who can do anything right now other than stab some shit real good, so I’d save that energy for something better.”

“I can
 probably bite something,” I offer grimly. That gets a weak chuckle out of both of them.

After a few seconds, Adrian speaks again. “I can’t believe I’m supposed to be the responsible one here. The lady that Rylar was working with—“

“Sapphire,” I interject.

“You know her?” Adrian asks. “Okay, sure, Sapphire. She killed, like, three-quarters of the guards on the cliff. We have some time before someone starts to wonder why a solid hundred-foot chunk of the wall just blew up. What’s your backlash looking like, Sierra?”

“Bracers made it worse physically, but the magic is still here,” she says. “I can use it all if I need to, but I hope you understand why I shy away from using my Red Mage class.”

“I’m out for two days,” Adrian says. “Until then, I’m just a paper plane here. Level 8 outside the Crowned Islands
 broken gods. Do you know of any safehouses around here?”

Sierra shakes her head. “Evelyn, do you know
 how long yours will last?”

“No,” I say. Talking is getting easier, but I can still barely move the rest of my body. “First time.”

The passenger in my head is silent. This is unknown territory for me, and the idea that it’ll last several days is
 disconcerting, to say the least. I killed the first of my creators, someone who was apparently vastly overleveled for this region of the world.

At this point, I know that taking a life of someone this significant has consequences. I’d much rather not be around to see those come down on this place.

“I can still move,” Sierra says, “Only myself, though. Can you?”

“Climbing is doable,” Adrian replies. “And yeah, I can help Evelyn along.”

“What?” I ask.

“Then we should start,” Sierra says. “I have the body—if you can call it that—in storage, now. If there is nothing else, it is best for us to get moving.”

“Alright,” Adrian says. The smell of cigarette smoke drifts closer to me. “Come on.”

He kneels besides me, and I feel rough hands under me.

“Here we go,” he grunts, lifting me up. “Sierra?”

“R—ugh, ready,” the woman in question replies. She hacks up more blood in the middle of her sentence, but she doesn’t seem to be dead or dying yet. “Here we go.”

I see her flutter across my vision, her telekinesis propelling her, and then I’m weightless.

“Hold on,” Adrian grunts.

I hear metal clink against stone, my perspective flipping end over end as I see the sky, the ground, the cliff, the sky again. We start slowing down as Adrian uses his low-level sword and mobility skills, grabbing onto the wall or stabbing his sword into the cliff. Sparks fly with every impact, and it jars my body awfully, but the pain is nothing.

Though I’m not entirely sure what we’re going to do next, I fully support the idea of getting the hells out of Novarath. Aside from whatever’ll happen in the wake of Rylar’s death, the city probably isn’t going to be happy about the majority of their guards dying.

We hit the ground later than I’d expect, though I’m a poor judge of distance while Adrian is carrying me one-handed.

“You still alive in there, Evelyn?” Adrian asks as we hit the ground, grunting as he bends his knees. “Would be a bit awkward to lose you now, y’know?”

“If you keep jostling this much, no,” I reply drily.

He snorts. “Sierra! Let’s get moving!”

I don’t bother keeping track of where we’re going. Situational awareness is good, but if someone attacks us now, I’m going to be useless. That’s just how it is.

Eventually, we make our way under a wooden roof, and Adrian deposits me with a huff. After a bit of fumbling around, he manages to set me on my back, and I stare up into a broken roof.

“Not the best accomodations, I must say,” Sierra says.

“You know the village talks,” Adrian replies. “If you wanted to sleep somewhere nicer, you shouldn’t have fucking uncloaked in a Cat 0 zone.”

“Understood,” Sierra says sardonically. “Remind me what you just did, again?”

Adrian laughs. “Yeah, yeah. Might as well have been playing with matches compared to our little experiment here.”

They haven’t even asked me anything about my existence as an experiment. That scares me, just a little bit. What kind of person just trusts another so blindly? I want to know more about their pasts, to identify what makes them tick, but they just
 don’t care?

Or maybe they do, and they’re feigning their disinterest. I can’t tell.

“Well,” Adrian says. “I’d love to talk about next steps, but the two of you look just about ready to roll into the grave. I’m gonna see if I can’t dig up a medkit somewhere. You should sleep.”

“I can manage mild healing,” Sierra says. “But yes. Sleep after.”

Sleep. That’s almost a foreign concept to me. As far as I know, I don’t need it.

I don’t plan on sleeping. I need to get my skills back. I
 need to advance. I
 need to


My eyes drift shut.

My sleep is dreamless.

________________________

Sunlight is no longer drifting in through the holes in the wooden ceiling when I wake. My body twitches when I roll over, the aftereffects of the backlash still taking hold within me. At least I can move now.

I try to raise myself out of bed, which is when I realize that Sierra is right next to me, her chest rising and falling with a regularity that indicates unconsciousness. Her arms are wrapped around me, and she glows a soft, pale blue.

My skills haven’t returned yet, though my body has healed thanks to Demonic Heritage. I'm still missing a hand, which not even Restore Self was able to fix. Hopefully, using more magic power to activate that skill will fix my hand. That’s a question for when I actually have my magic back, though.

I extract myself from Sierra’s grasp, surprised at how quickly my ability to move has returned.

This vessel is stronger than expected.

Excuse you, I think. I’m a little more than a vessel, especially because I’m still the one piloting my own body. You’d do well to remember that, prick.

Sapphire did describe the experiment to create me as one that would create a “demon of unparalleled growth,” and I was the only survivor, as far as I can tell. That comes with some benefits, I suppose. If it removes my backlash sooner than it would normally be gone, I have no quibbles with it.

“Oh, you’re up,” Adrian says, tapping his sword against the sandy ground. He’s wearing a silver mask over the lower part of his faith, I notice. It’s not an object that I’m familiar with. “Broken gods, you’re recovering fast. Then again, could be the Category. You’re still a zero, so I guess it makes sense.”

“How long?” I ask. “What’s our status?”

Adrian unclips the mask from his mouth, shaking it out and coughing before shoving it into a cloth bag that’s definitely too small to hold it. The bulge of the mask disappears into nothing, and he stores the bag in his somehow-intact pocket.

“Relax,” he says. “It’s been, what, six hours? Six of the quietest hours Sierra’s had in a while, too. You got magic skin or something? She hasn’t been dealing with the backlash nearly this well until now.”

“That’s the time,” I say. “Status?”

“I heard a lot of shouting,” Adrian replies. “Some fighting, too. Not much of it spilled out past the city, though. They hit the fishing village, but they left in, like, fifteen minutes. Nothing of note here.”

“And where is here, exactly?”

“Not a safe house, but something similar,” Adrian replies. “Ask Sierra about it when she’s up. I don’t know the details.”

Speaking of which, the girl in question is starting to shake again. With nothing better to do, I take one of her thrashing hands in mine. Somehow, that seems to call her down.

Adrian shakes his head in disbelief. “I’m not even going to ask how that works. Sierra confuses the fuck out of me already, and you’re even worse.”

“You don’t seem to be very difficult to confuse,” I say, defusing the jab with a smile. Amalgam knowledge helps me with my humor, guiding me in the absence of my Acting skill.

The Warrior snorts. “Fair’s fair.”

We sit there for a while, Sierra’s warm hands in mine. Adrian explains that he has some food and water stored in his impossibly small bag, and he tosses me some dried meat to chew on while we wait for Sierra to awaken.

He’s not sure about our next steps either, so our conversation turns to different subjects.

“I wanted to see the world,” he tells me. “I think I still do, but broken gods, parts of it are scary.”

The world is bigger than I thought. When I ask him to name a list of places he’s been, it takes him nearly ten minutes before he’s done listing states, kingdoms, empires, and every other kind of polity under the sun.

“And I haven’t even seen a tenth of what it has to offer,” he adds, tapping his sword against the ground again. It’s a bit of a tic, I notice, the same way he drums his fingers against his legs when he’s feeling antsy. “I need to get stronger.”

“I can sympathize with that,” I reply, surprising myself with how genuine I am.

After that, he fishes around in his obviously magical bag, withdrawing a deck of cards. “You play?”

“I can learn,” I tell him, freeing one of my hands from Sierra’s.

The currently-only-Blue Mage stirs from her sleep about forty-five minutes later. In that time, I manage to win two games of what Adrian calls “drops.” I also lose twenty-seven, but that’s beside the point.

“You two look
 remarkably alive,” Sierra croaks, not letting go of my hand as she sits up. “The hideout works, then.”

I gesture for Adrian to toss me a bottle of water, and I offer it to Sierra.

“Yeah,” Adrian says. “The shit with the item or whatever worked.”

Item? I wonder what he’s talking about for a moment, and then I realize that one of my resistances has been active this entire time.

Antimemetic Resistance advanced to level 6!

That would keep people from chancing upon us.

“You feeling alright?” Adrian asks. “I don’t want you to get hurt moving.”

“I feel like death,” Sierra replies, taking the water from my hand and drinking three-quarters of the entire bottle before she continues speaking. “We must move despite that. It is only by chance that one of the other Jades has yet to come to our location.”

“Shit,” Adrian says. “You’re sure?”

“Someone summoned a domain,” Sierra says, frowning. “I do not know how or why they did so in a weak region, but it damaged my bracers. The Jades aren’t getting what they want out of this, and they can find me. They will find me.”

“The domain was me,” I say. “Where are we going?”

Sierra doesn’t even seem to register the latter half of my statement, instead turning towards me with her eyes wide. “Truly?”

I nod.

She takes her hand out of mine and throws her arms around my shoulders, squeezing me tight enough to make a human breathless. I
 can’t really say that I dislike the sensation.

“That is genuinely incredible,” she says. “I thought you managed to break through the first, but to overpower it—are you seriously only level 20?”

“Not for long,” I say. I can already feel the slightest hint of my skills returning to me. If that’s any indication about the rest of the system, then my XP will be coming soon too.

Sierra shakes her head. “Even the weakest domain should require ten times your level. I do not think I can adequately express how completely bullshit you are.”

The sudden curse gets a cough of a laugh out of me.

I accept her praise with a nod. “I’m glad you made it out alive.”

“I’m glad too,” she says, leaning forward and planting a soft kiss on my lips. “Oh. Apologies. We have yet to set expectations for the relationship between us. I—“

“It’s perfectly fine,” I say, smiling. “I don’t mind.”

She’s a valuable ally to have, and somehow, the connection makes me feel more grounded. More like a person, despite the fact that I am not and never was a human.

It’s an odd sensation, but I must admit that I like it.

“You said we needed to get moving,” I continue, changing the subject. “When? Where?”

“Right now,” Sierra says. “And
 I don’t know. We need to lie low. I’d like to get far away from here, but any transportation outside of the Seven Kingdoms will be too easy for the Jades to track.”

“Whitestar?” Adrian suggests. “If we don’t totally uncloak
”

The Blue Mage thinks on that for a second. “I think we can manage that. What time is it?”

“Sometime between sunrise and sunset.”

“Very helpful.”

Sierra uses a skill to create a floating blue screen in front of her, wincing as she does. “I think there’s a train further down the cliff we may make use of. Is the outside secure?”

“Think so,” Adrian says.

“Then we go now.”

We don’t waste a single second. This place is, in fact, not a safe house, and there’s no real resources here other than the cot that Sierra and I were sleeping on, so we’re able to just take off without having to pack anything up.

Outside, the beach is even more barren than I remember it. After hours spent in the underground of Novarath, it feels a little odd to stare upwards and see the infinite ceiling of the stars above us, but I adjust to the beauty of the sight quickly enough to keep it from affecting me.

The twin moons glitter over us as we make our way through the sand as hastily as possible. All three of us are inhibited in some way by the backlash, which makes it an awkward affair, but we manage.

According to Sierra, the train station’s a solid five miles away, so we have a fair distance to cross. Thankfully, nobody stops us. Whatever investigation is going on in Novarath, it’s either stopped or has turned inward. We stick close to the massive cliff face, exposing ourself to the top as little as possible.

As we walk, I feel my skills start to return.

Truly an abnormal existence.

It’s fragile. When I try to manifest a Misty Mirage, a shock of cold, soul-shattering pain flickers through me, and I disable the spell as quickly as possible. The backlash still isn’t gone, is it?

Still, it’s disappearing far faster than Sierra’s or even Adrian’s is. Maybe it’s because I’m part demon. Maybe it’s because of my passenger. Maybe it’s even because I’m only level 20, and I just so happened to use a skill that I definitely shouldn’t have access to.

Whatever the true answer is, I can’t deny that it’s helpful.

By the time we’ve hobbled a mile and a half, I’m able to create a Soulknife with no issues.

I think we’re around our third mile when the skills start to come naturally, my Hemokinesis functioning without issues.

“Sierra,” I whisper. The area around us is dark and completely void of any trace of human civilization, but the quiet feels sacrosanct. “Do you still have the blood?”

“I do,” she replies, equally as quiet. “Would you like it?”

“Please,” I say.

I’ve waited long enough.

As blood and mashed up corpse-bits fall from a soft blue panel, red and black energy meets it. Just like with Simon’s arm, it’s much harder to consume than anything else I’ve gotten used to eating recently, but I manage.

Bit by bit, I Devour Alexus Rylar’s corpse.

Warning: due to reduced body integrity, Devour has granted reduced XP.

Devour granted +102933 XP!

Calculating levels


You have advanced to level 51!

Hidden Objective: Orders of Magnitude [COMPLETE}

Increase your level by more than 25 levels in one fell swoop.

Trait earned: Anomalous

“What the fuck,” Adrian breathes, “did you just do?”