If the demons in the water weren’t terribly keen on attacking me before, they practically flee before me now. Using Wraithfire to its fullest extent is deeply draining on my magic power, which I need to keep my Phantom Shape running, so I limit the former to a tiny wick of a flame at the tip of my finger, no larger than what I might find on a candle.
Of course, that tiny wick is enough to ignite the water behind me, leaving a burning trail in my wake. The demons in the water go out of their way to avoid me when they see that.
Rather than bother chasing them, I continue on towards the riverbank. I could try to roast some demons and Devour them, but I have far more pressing matters to attend to. I refuse to waste precious minutes of my Wraithfire on small fry while a miniature war rages on above me.
With the whale-demon dead, nothing harasses me as I glide through the water, phantom fins aiding me in my path. The demons in the river must recognize the threat I possess, because every last one of them gives me a wide berth. I wonder what it looks like from above.
Soon enough, my legs brush against freshly-turned soil. The riverbed still bears the marks of Noren’s assault with it, and my feet sink nearly ankle-deep into the muddy soil when I finally start walking instead of paddling.
My tattered clothes are completely waterlogged. I’ll have to ask Sierra for another new set when this is over.
As I squeeze as much liquid as I can out of my top, I survey the area around me. I saw earlier how devastated this area is, but it’s a completely different story on ground level. From my vantage point atop the whale, the area looked like the ruins of a once-proud city, smoldering and drowning under the pressure of a thousand demons.
Here, though, what used to be the city center is unrecognizable. The tallest standing structure—besides the towering black trunk of a tree that the system insists on calling a flower, of course—can’t be more than ten feet tall.
Charred wood and broken brick line the ground, mixing with earth overturned by skills and footsteps alike to make a uniquely irritating surface to tread on. My skin is tough enough that it doesn’t harm me much, but it’s something I need to watch out for. Enough shattered glass dots the place that it’s a non-trivial worry.
Corpses human and demon alike adorn my surroundings, crushed and slashed and ripped apart. A hundred different deaths decorate the broken ruins around me. It’s beautiful in a morbid sort of way.
I try Devouring one or two of the corpses, but as has occurred once or twice before, they give me nothing. They’ve likely been dead too long.
The bulk of the fighting is occurring more inland, going off the sounds of shouts and screeches. Enough debris is stacked up on the unrecognizably damaged remnants of the city center to obscure my view of the bulk of it.
My objective wants me to kill the “Flowering Demon,” and I fully plan on doing so.
First, though, there’s someone else I need to eliminate.
Locate Person tells me where Noren is. He hasn’t gone far—at level 6, Locate Person’s range is only 600 feet, but that’s a lot of distance when demons run rampant through the ruins.
I start making my way forward, picking my way over rapidly-decaying corpses. This place doesn’t have much wraithfire, I notice. It doesn’t have many demons, either, which is a little confusing. There’s fighting up ahead, yes, but there’s a dead zone here.
And then a high keening rips through the sky, accompanied by the wind whistling as if a thousand arrows were tearing through it.
When I look up, I find that my comparison is closer to reality than I’d like.
The tree’s branches are pulsating, and it proves why the system gave it its name when jet-black flowers sprout along the length of its branches, growing from leaf to fully-formed plant in moments. As their petals unfurl, each new flower twirls and bursts, sending oblong black shapes soaring into the air by the dozen.
They spread out as they fly, wind or magic carrying them, and they start dropping. With my powerful Mind (Speed) and Body (Speed) assisting me, I can predict where the ones closest to me are going to drop and avoid them, but there’s a lot.
The first demon-seed slams into the ground, gravity and magic enhancing the impact it makes to the point that the earth cracks beneath it. The second lands less than half a second later, and then all I can hear is the thunderous crack-crack-crack of seed after seed further breaking the ruins of the city center.
As I dodge and weave, keeping myself out of the shrapnel radius of the dozen that are landing in the no-man’s-land I’m in, I realize why the city center is as ruined as it is. The demons here are more powerful, and the people more plentiful, but the real primary threat is this tree and its… spawn?
Spawn is the right word for them, it turns out. Before the thunder of seed impacts has even died down, the first ones start moving, limbs and tails and claws extracting themselves from a thin black shell.
There’s no living humans for another hundred feet, and they’re dealing with their own problems just beyond a half-collapsed wall of stores.
Nine demons surround me, each of them half again my height. Their twisted bodies are slick with the fluid of the eggs they’ve crawled forth from. All nine are malformed, reminding me of the defective EVs that I was born with, but I know from experience that deformity doesn’t necessarily equate inability.
They seem unsure on whether or not to attack me, so I make the choice for them. Announcing my presence will be less of a problem when the humans I’m here to kill are fighting their own demons.
Wraithfire explodes forth from my hands. With the sheer amount of detritus around us, it’s not long before a body catches, then another. Wraithfire is powerful enough to ignite the air itself—all the material around it is perfect fuel for it.
I have to keep stoking it, though, which takes the majority of my magic power while it’s active. As hungry as it is, the wraithfire won’t spread if I don’t force it to.
Using up my magic power proves to be worth it when the wraithfire reaches all nine of my new opponents, setting them ablaze. They haven’t even chosen whether to fight me or run, and they’ll never get to make that choice. The newborn demons die screeching, joining the burning corpses around me on Ravendale’s most dangerous funeral pyre.
I let my focus on the wraithfire die down, giving myself some time to regenerate my magic as I walk forward. Noren hasn’t moved that far, and Locate Person tells me that the other members of his party are closer to me.
Locate Person advanced to level 7!
I draw on Stealth. The area we’re in is relatively wide and open now that the buildings here have been utterly decimated, but the utter chaos of the demon swarm fighting the people who’ve gathered here is more than enough to mask my movements.
I catch sight of other humans when I crest a small hill of burning bodies and broken building. A few of them are looking towards the fresh fire I’ve set, but most are fighting off the demons that spawned from dropping seeds. It looks like they’ve largely spread out, which is good for me.
There are more people than I expected. I know there are likely opportunists, adventurers looking to get some loot out of this. The late Baron’s guards are probably also here.
Notably, I don’t hear the distinctive noise of the UCC’s rifles. Are they not present?
I can worry about that later. For now, I have some people to kill.
With the roaring flames behind me and the screeching demons in front of me, Stealth makes it trivially easy to creep up on my first victim. I don’t recognize him, but he’s a Warrior of some kind. He wears the Baron’s crest, but he’s alone, fighting off a crab-like demon with eyes covering its entire body.
I don’t waste time or energy using Appraise. He’s fending his opponent off with a sword, but it’s one-on-one and he’s not winning by much. He can’t be that strong.
As he sinks his sword to the hilt in the crab-demon’s largest eye, I leap onto his back and sink my teeth into the back of his neck, injecting him with my Paralyzing Bite.
Before he can scream, I slit his throat too. I add an Enhance Bleed to that for good measure. Blood geysers out of the red smile I carve, and I Shape Blood it right back into his mouth, choking him and stopping any sound he might produced in his tracks.
The Warrior is dead before he hits the ground.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [5/10]
I use Shape Blood once more to cover the crab-demon with blood, hopefully giving the appearance that it’s to blame for the Warrior’s death.
It works a little too well. Before I can Devour my prey, a pair of women shout out in dismay. An arrow sprouts out of one of the demon’s remaining eyes a second later, then another.
Someone screams, and I whip my head around just in time to see a body flying through the air, thrown by some enemy or another. It hits the ground with a crash.
That draws the potentially hostile attention away, leaving me alone with a dead man and a dying demon.
Devour granted +101 XP!
This man was low-level, it appears. Thoroughly disappointing. At least my wounds start to close faster now that I’ve eaten him.
Temporary Skill Unlocked: Swordfighting
Your attacks with a sword deal 250% more damage.
Useless.
Devour granted +17 XP!
Objective: Restore your soul
Targets devoured: [11/???]
The demon is even more disappointing, but at least it provides my soul with some nourishment.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the man I killed was one of the only easy marks in this area. As I Stealth my way around, dodging demons that don’t care to attack someone that appears to be one of their own kind, I observe group after group of coordinated fighters.
I suppose that anyone that’s stayed alive this long here has to be strong.
Despite my perfect memory, it starts to grow a little overwhelming.
Finally, my eyes land on a party of three. They’re resting at the moment, hiding behind a mostly-collapsed brick wall. Half a dozen demons lie freshly dead at their feet.
They shouldn’t see me coming.
I take the long way around, tiptoeing over corpse after corpse, and I manage to get onto the other side of their wall, ready to pounce over it.
As I ready myself, steel scraps against brick. It’s only my inhuman reflexes that allow me to Bloodstep a couple of feet backward, dodging the spear that one of them has thrust through the wall.
“Well, subtlety didn’t work,” I say. “This might.”
I cast Wraithfire. Relentless isn’t providing fuel to me right now, so I draw on the last reserves of power I have to send a sweeping wave of annihilation out at them, consuming the wall and the people behind it.
They die screaming.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [8/10]
“Demon!” someone shouts from far behind me.
I turn around to see an unfamiliar form clad in simple chain armor nearly two hundred feet away.
More of the ruins have been destroyed by the wave of demon-seeds than I thought.
An arrow flies towards me, but it’s fired from far away enough that I’m able to dodge it.
I’m not, however, able to dodge the wave of force that detonates out from the shot, sending me tumbling head over heels until I slam headfirst into a concrete pylon. Blood trickles down my cheek from the impact injury, but Demonic Heritage means I can avoid worrying about brain damage.
Another arrow sails towards me, then another, and I Bloodstep away to dodge them.
I’m running dangerously low on magic power. Another couple of Bloodsteps and another use of Wraithfire is about as much as I can realistically manage right now, I think.
And the number of enemies after me are only increasing on both sides. Thankfully, Noren hasn’t taken notice of me yet. It’s irritating that I’m not going to be able to assassinate him right now, but it’s the smart choice to avoid him.
I cast Locate Person once to confirm that I’m at least a few hundred feet away from him, then reuse the skill once more.
Find Sierra.
As it turns out, I don’t even need to actively seek her out.
“Evelyn!” Sierra shouts from above me. I look up to see her hovering in the sky along with a distinctly uncomfortable Adrian. The man’s blade is glowing with runes I haven’t seen before. I wonder what the deal with that is.
“I told you that you just needed to look for the fires,” Adrian grumbles as the Blue Mage lowers both of them.
Sierra snaps her fingers, and a shield forms over the three of us, pale and translucent.
“Pissed off the Baron’s men, did you?” she asks, a mischievous glint in her eye.
“You could say that,” I say.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she tells me. “Adrian and I have been fighting the tree, but then he says he saw you, and then we had to abandon it, and then—oh, you understand.”
“I do,” I say.
Sierra sighs. “This is a rather complicated situation, isn’t it? Couldn’t you have chosen to kill someone else?”
She seems surprisingly nonchalant discussing my cold-blooded murder of the baron. I like that.
“You always find people with the worst habits,” Adrian comments.
“Yeah,” Sierra says, nodding. “Yeah. Alright. Now that we—“
An arrow makes contact with the edge of her barrier and slows to a stop midair. Sierra sighs, gesturing towards it, and it crumbles away into ash as I watch.
“We have a lot of things to kill,” Adrian says.
For once, I’m in agreement.
“I’ll keep us safe,” Sierra says. She opens her mouth to say something else, then pauses. The Blue Mage frowns.
The earth beneath us rumbles, and I realize too late that I haven’t checked Noren’s position in over a minute.
Just outside the barrier, an effigy of a man forms itself out of earth and concrete and bones, magic shaping it into a near-perfect replica of a familiar old guard.
The stone shatters, and Noren walks out. His comrades are nowhere to be found, but somehow, that just makes his individual threat appear larger.
I’m running on empty. This would be a tough challenge at the best of times, and now, Relentless is only giving me fumes.
“Sierra Jade,” he enunciates coldly.
“Noren Foldwinter,” Sierra replies, equally icy. “What a pleasure.”
“The pleasure is mine,” Noren says dryly. He inhales deeply, gesturing once to impale an incoming demon with the same earthen spikes he used on me earlier. Before he speaks again, he offers me a hateful glare.
“What’s happening?” Adrian asks. He grips his sword, his eyes flicking towards Noren, then me.
“Sierra Jade and Adrian Stahr,” Noren repeats. “You are in the immediate presence of a demon.
“Kill it.”
If the demons in the water weren’t terribly keen on attacking me before, they practically flee before me now. Using Wraithfire to its fullest extent is deeply draining on my magic power, which I need to keep my Phantom Shape running, so I limit the former to a tiny wick of a flame at the tip of my finger, no larger than what I might find on a candle.
Of course, that tiny wick is enough to ignite the water behind me, leaving a burning trail in my wake. The demons in the water go out of their way to avoid me when they see that.
Rather than bother chasing them, I continue on towards the riverbank. I could try to roast some demons and Devour them, but I have far more pressing matters to attend to. I refuse to waste precious minutes of my Wraithfire on small fry while a miniature war rages on above me.
With the whale-demon dead, nothing harasses me as I glide through the water, phantom fins aiding me in my path. The demons in the river must recognize the threat I possess, because every last one of them gives me a wide berth. I wonder what it looks like from above.
Soon enough, my legs brush against freshly-turned soil. The riverbed still bears the marks of Noren’s assault with it, and my feet sink nearly ankle-deep into the muddy soil when I finally start walking instead of paddling.
My tattered clothes are completely waterlogged. I’ll have to ask Sierra for another new set when this is over.
As I squeeze as much liquid as I can out of my top, I survey the area around me. I saw earlier how devastated this area is, but it’s a completely different story on ground level. From my vantage point atop the whale, the area looked like the ruins of a once-proud city, smoldering and drowning under the pressure of a thousand demons.
Here, though, what used to be the city center is unrecognizable. The tallest standing structure—besides the towering black trunk of a tree that the system insists on calling a flower, of course—can’t be more than ten feet tall.
Charred wood and broken brick line the ground, mixing with earth overturned by skills and footsteps alike to make a uniquely irritating surface to tread on. My skin is tough enough that it doesn’t harm me much, but it’s something I need to watch out for. Enough shattered glass dots the place that it’s a non-trivial worry.
Corpses human and demon alike adorn my surroundings, crushed and slashed and ripped apart. A hundred different deaths decorate the broken ruins around me. It’s beautiful in a morbid sort of way.
I try Devouring one or two of the corpses, but as has occurred once or twice before, they give me nothing. They’ve likely been dead too long.
The bulk of the fighting is occurring more inland, going off the sounds of shouts and screeches. Enough debris is stacked up on the unrecognizably damaged remnants of the city center to obscure my view of the bulk of it.
My objective wants me to kill the “Flowering Demon,” and I fully plan on doing so.
First, though, there’s someone else I need to eliminate.
Locate Person tells me where Noren is. He hasn’t gone far—at level 6, Locate Person’s range is only 600 feet, but that’s a lot of distance when demons run rampant through the ruins.
I start making my way forward, picking my way over rapidly-decaying corpses. This place doesn’t have much wraithfire, I notice. It doesn’t have many demons, either, which is a little confusing. There’s fighting up ahead, yes, but there’s a dead zone here.
And then a high keening rips through the sky, accompanied by the wind whistling as if a thousand arrows were tearing through it.
When I look up, I find that my comparison is closer to reality than I’d like.
The tree’s branches are pulsating, and it proves why the system gave it its name when jet-black flowers sprout along the length of its branches, growing from leaf to fully-formed plant in moments. As their petals unfurl, each new flower twirls and bursts, sending oblong black shapes soaring into the air by the dozen.
They spread out as they fly, wind or magic carrying them, and they start dropping. With my powerful Mind (Speed) and Body (Speed) assisting me, I can predict where the ones closest to me are going to drop and avoid them, but there’s a lot.
The first demon-seed slams into the ground, gravity and magic enhancing the impact it makes to the point that the earth cracks beneath it. The second lands less than half a second later, and then all I can hear is the thunderous crack-crack-crack of seed after seed further breaking the ruins of the city center.
As I dodge and weave, keeping myself out of the shrapnel radius of the dozen that are landing in the no-man’s-land I’m in, I realize why the city center is as ruined as it is. The demons here are more powerful, and the people more plentiful, but the real primary threat is this tree and its… spawn?
Spawn is the right word for them, it turns out. Before the thunder of seed impacts has even died down, the first ones start moving, limbs and tails and claws extracting themselves from a thin black shell.
There’s no living humans for another hundred feet, and they’re dealing with their own problems just beyond a half-collapsed wall of stores.
Nine demons surround me, each of them half again my height. Their twisted bodies are slick with the fluid of the eggs they’ve crawled forth from. All nine are malformed, reminding me of the defective EVs that I was born with, but I know from experience that deformity doesn’t necessarily equate inability.
They seem unsure on whether or not to attack me, so I make the choice for them. Announcing my presence will be less of a problem when the humans I’m here to kill are fighting their own demons.
Wraithfire explodes forth from my hands. With the sheer amount of detritus around us, it’s not long before a body catches, then another. Wraithfire is powerful enough to ignite the air itself—all the material around it is perfect fuel for it.
I have to keep stoking it, though, which takes the majority of my magic power while it’s active. As hungry as it is, the wraithfire won’t spread if I don’t force it to.
Using up my magic power proves to be worth it when the wraithfire reaches all nine of my new opponents, setting them ablaze. They haven’t even chosen whether to fight me or run, and they’ll never get to make that choice. The newborn demons die screeching, joining the burning corpses around me on Ravendale’s most dangerous funeral pyre.
I let my focus on the wraithfire die down, giving myself some time to regenerate my magic as I walk forward. Noren hasn’t moved that far, and Locate Person tells me that the other members of his party are closer to me.
Locate Person advanced to level 7!
I draw on Stealth. The area we’re in is relatively wide and open now that the buildings here have been utterly decimated, but the utter chaos of the demon swarm fighting the people who’ve gathered here is more than enough to mask my movements.
I catch sight of other humans when I crest a small hill of burning bodies and broken building. A few of them are looking towards the fresh fire I’ve set, but most are fighting off the demons that spawned from dropping seeds. It looks like they’ve largely spread out, which is good for me.
There are more people than I expected. I know there are likely opportunists, adventurers looking to get some loot out of this. The late Baron’s guards are probably also here.
Notably, I don’t hear the distinctive noise of the UCC’s rifles. Are they not present?
I can worry about that later. For now, I have some people to kill.
With the roaring flames behind me and the screeching demons in front of me, Stealth makes it trivially easy to creep up on my first victim. I don’t recognize him, but he’s a Warrior of some kind. He wears the Baron’s crest, but he’s alone, fighting off a crab-like demon with eyes covering its entire body.
I don’t waste time or energy using Appraise. He’s fending his opponent off with a sword, but it’s one-on-one and he’s not winning by much. He can’t be that strong.
As he sinks his sword to the hilt in the crab-demon’s largest eye, I leap onto his back and sink my teeth into the back of his neck, injecting him with my Paralyzing Bite.
Before he can scream, I slit his throat too. I add an Enhance Bleed to that for good measure. Blood geysers out of the red smile I carve, and I Shape Blood it right back into his mouth, choking him and stopping any sound he might produced in his tracks.
The Warrior is dead before he hits the ground.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [5/10]
I use Shape Blood once more to cover the crab-demon with blood, hopefully giving the appearance that it’s to blame for the Warrior’s death.
It works a little too well. Before I can Devour my prey, a pair of women shout out in dismay. An arrow sprouts out of one of the demon’s remaining eyes a second later, then another.
Someone screams, and I whip my head around just in time to see a body flying through the air, thrown by some enemy or another. It hits the ground with a crash.
That draws the potentially hostile attention away, leaving me alone with a dead man and a dying demon.
Devour granted +101 XP!
This man was low-level, it appears. Thoroughly disappointing. At least my wounds start to close faster now that I’ve eaten him.
Temporary Skill Unlocked: Swordfighting
Your attacks with a sword deal 250% more damage.
Useless.
Devour granted +17 XP!
Objective: Restore your soul
Targets devoured: [11/???]
The demon is even more disappointing, but at least it provides my soul with some nourishment.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the man I killed was one of the only easy marks in this area. As I Stealth my way around, dodging demons that don’t care to attack someone that appears to be one of their own kind, I observe group after group of coordinated fighters.
I suppose that anyone that’s stayed alive this long here has to be strong.
Despite my perfect memory, it starts to grow a little overwhelming.
Finally, my eyes land on a party of three. They’re resting at the moment, hiding behind a mostly-collapsed brick wall. Half a dozen demons lie freshly dead at their feet.
They shouldn’t see me coming.
I take the long way around, tiptoeing over corpse after corpse, and I manage to get onto the other side of their wall, ready to pounce over it.
As I ready myself, steel scraps against brick. It’s only my inhuman reflexes that allow me to Bloodstep a couple of feet backward, dodging the spear that one of them has thrust through the wall.
“Well, subtlety didn’t work,” I say. “This might.”
I cast Wraithfire. Relentless isn’t providing fuel to me right now, so I draw on the last reserves of power I have to send a sweeping wave of annihilation out at them, consuming the wall and the people behind it.
They die screaming.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [8/10]
“Demon!” someone shouts from far behind me.
I turn around to see an unfamiliar form clad in simple chain armor nearly two hundred feet away.
More of the ruins have been destroyed by the wave of demon-seeds than I thought.
An arrow flies towards me, but it’s fired from far away enough that I’m able to dodge it.
I’m not, however, able to dodge the wave of force that detonates out from the shot, sending me tumbling head over heels until I slam headfirst into a concrete pylon. Blood trickles down my cheek from the impact injury, but Demonic Heritage means I can avoid worrying about brain damage.
Another arrow sails towards me, then another, and I Bloodstep away to dodge them.
I’m running dangerously low on magic power. Another couple of Bloodsteps and another use of Wraithfire is about as much as I can realistically manage right now, I think.
And the number of enemies after me are only increasing on both sides. Thankfully, Noren hasn’t taken notice of me yet. It’s irritating that I’m not going to be able to assassinate him right now, but it’s the smart choice to avoid him.
I cast Locate Person once to confirm that I’m at least a few hundred feet away from him, then reuse the skill once more.
Find Sierra.
As it turns out, I don’t even need to actively seek her out.
“Evelyn!” Sierra shouts from above me. I look up to see her hovering in the sky along with a distinctly uncomfortable Adrian. The man’s blade is glowing with runes I haven’t seen before. I wonder what the deal with that is.
“I told you that you just needed to look for the fires,” Adrian grumbles as the Blue Mage lowers both of them.
Sierra snaps her fingers, and a shield forms over the three of us, pale and translucent.
“Pissed off the Baron’s men, did you?” she asks, a mischievous glint in her eye.
“You could say that,” I say.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she tells me. “Adrian and I have been fighting the tree, but then he says he saw you, and then we had to abandon it, and then—oh, you understand.”
“I do,” I say.
Sierra sighs. “This is a rather complicated situation, isn’t it? Couldn’t you have chosen to kill someone else?”
She seems surprisingly nonchalant discussing my cold-blooded murder of the baron. I like that.
“You always find people with the worst habits,” Adrian comments.
“Yeah,” Sierra says, nodding. “Yeah. Alright. Now that we—“
An arrow makes contact with the edge of her barrier and slows to a stop midair. Sierra sighs, gesturing towards it, and it crumbles away into ash as I watch.
“We have a lot of things to kill,” Adrian says.
For once, I’m in agreement.
“I’ll keep us safe,” Sierra says. She opens her mouth to say something else, then pauses. The Blue Mage frowns.
The earth beneath us rumbles, and I realize too late that I haven’t checked Noren’s position in over a minute.
Just outside the barrier, an effigy of a man forms itself out of earth and concrete and bones, magic shaping it into a near-perfect replica of a familiar old guard.
The stone shatters, and Noren walks out. His comrades are nowhere to be found, but somehow, that just makes his individual threat appear larger.
I’m running on empty. This would be a tough challenge at the best of times, and now, Relentless is only giving me fumes.
“Sierra Jade,” he enunciates coldly.
“Noren Foldwinter,” Sierra replies, equally icy. “What a pleasure.”
“The pleasure is mine,” Noren says dryly. He inhales deeply, gesturing once to impale an incoming demon with the same earthen spikes he used on me earlier. Before he speaks again, he offers me a hateful glare.
“What’s happening?” Adrian asks. He grips his sword, his eyes flicking towards Noren, then me.
“Sierra Jade and Adrian Stahr,” Noren repeats. “You are in the immediate presence of a demon.
“Kill it.”
