To say it was a nice house would have been far, far too generous in the eyes of Albedo. Compared to Nazarick, she could only think, 'This is not even a shack.' She would have spat on the courtyard, but it was undeserving of her spit.
"This place reeks of depravity." She sniffed the air, "A lesser demoness would find it amusing or even pleasant, watching worms wiggle with their pathetic pickles flapping about or grunting like chimps." Albedo suppressed her shiver and allowed Demiurge to take her arm as a proper gentleman should.
"But not you, of course, my dear Guardian Overseer?" He asked rhetorically. When she shook her head, he sniffed the air, "As for me, I smell blood and pain, I swear I can hear screams from somewhere in there, but I doubt the rest of the city knows about it, or if they do, I'm sure they don't care."
"You concluded that from the lack of guards, I assume?" Albedo asked of her escort.
"I do. There is no need for guards if everybody is either in your pocket, afraid, or powerless." Demiurge replied as he closed his hand over the handle of the door and ripped it free of its lock. He tossed the door behind him to crash and splinter in the yard behind him.
"That should bring the lowest ones out, do we dispose of them? Or do you have something else in mind?" Albedo asked, looking up at the smiling archdevil, she knew she had her answer before he said a word, he did have something in mind.
Ahead, the sound of feet approaching picked up, they didn't appear rushed, and Albedo's contempt only deepened. 'Fools. Unimaginative fools. They can't even picture a real danger, so they come like it is a casual stroll in a garden even when their masters must have dispatched them. What absolute trash.' She reflected on that and decided to simply see for herself what her colleague had in mind.
They were thirty in number when they came into view, there was no formation to speak of, nor was there any uniformity, some had bits and pieces of armor, others had no armor at all, being clad in simple common clothing. They had a faint odor of alcohol on them, along with stale sweat, blood, and other less noble fluids. Some was fresh, some was clearly 'aged'. The swords and axes they brandished were often chipped, and the clubs were damaged in places from use without care.
"This is all it takes?" Demiurge pushed his glasses close to his crystalline eyes. "How pathetic." He muttered loud enough for them to hear, confusion was etched on their faces when they saw the finely dressed pair ahead of them in the long wide hall, but when his audible contempt touched their ears their faces shifted to snarls of anger, fury, and hate that erased even the obvious lust for Albedo.
"Kill each other until there are only ten of you remaining." Demiurge gave the order, and the smile on his face went all the way down to his heart.
Their fury became confusion for only the briefest moment before they began to stab and strike and cut at one another, howls of pain, the noise of metal on metal, flesh on flesh, and bodies falling to a thud on the floor went up loud enough to alert the entire estate.
Albedo's smile was frankly sultry while she watched the slaughter, but she did have one minor concern. "Will the others run, do you think?" She asked, but Demiurge shook his head without averting his eyes from the carnage of his making.
"I doubt it. Not with this level of delusion about their strength." He replied as he watched the carnage slow down and finally cease, horrified looks from the ten survivors were locked on him. Their bodies heaved up and down from the exertion, not a one was not covered in blood, and wounds dripped down their skin to stain their clothing or spatter on the little pools of red that were now thick on the floor.
"Lie on the floor. When night comes, leave this house and begin killing every criminal you know that is not here. If you are caught, kill yourselves in silence." Demiurge ordered, and as the criminals lay themselves down, he stepped on the first one, Albedo followed suit, and from living to dead, they made a bridge of the ruin they wrought, across the place of slaughter to the 'clean' floor on the other side.
The incident repeated itself several times as they passed through various parts of the estate, but with declining numbers of progressively 'better' guards.
But all met the same ends, the living serving as a bridge that grunted as it was stepped on to cross the little sea of fresh corpses they just made, and orders to kill until they died when the sun set and the night descended over the Kingdom.
"They're here." Albedo said and inclined her head toward an ornate double door gilded with golden strips and silver handles. "The voices inside have no fear in them."
Demiurge's heart fairly sang in delight, in his own private thoughts, there was nobody better fitted to be their overseer than she, not even himself. 'No, I lack the same finesse in administration, I would be adequate, but that is all.' To be her subordinate was a privilege bestowed on them all by the Forty-One and her creator in particular.
She was, in his view, even better suited than their guild leader's creation, Pandora's Actor. While the third of the three geniuses of Nazarick was on equal footing with themselves, he was too flighty, whimsical, and thoroughly dramatic in his character to lead the other guardians. 'Plus his obsession with magical items… though he might excel at researching them…' It was a pleasant thought to file away for later, for now, the door to the final chamber lay in front of them.
Ever the gentleman, Demiurge opened the door to allow the Lady Albedo to pass through ahead of him before joining again at her side.
In front of them were an array of figures, but there was one in the center who towered over them all, large, bald, thickly muscled with glowing tattoos as if he'd just prepared for a fight.
"You've got some nerve, coming in here, killing our guards. But nerve is nothing in the face of real strength. I'm Zero, leader of the Eight Fingers, and you've made a fatal mistake coming here. But at least you've brought a pretty prize…" His eyes raked over Albedo, licking his lips once, he was about to say more, but Albedo leveled her hand at him.
"Aspect of the Succubus, control desire." She spat the words out with disgust at the mongrel of a man and watched his eyes fill with love for her, at his side, two of his companions took a step back in dismay. A red haired man with a whiplike sword reached up and put his hand on Zero's shoulder.
"Hey… what-"
It was the lone woman of the group who addressed Albedo directly, "What have you done?!" She cried out, fear at last settled in on one of them.
"We keep that one." Albedo said, and then centering her attention on her male target, "Kill your friends, other than that one, and you can be my dog."
The rest of the room had one single moment of disbelief when Zero shouted out, "As you wish, my love!" He howled his obedience and turned his violence on the others with a kind of wild abandon Hilma knew all too well.
She dropped to all fours and crawled beneath the table, clutching her hands to her head as she rolled onto her butt and scooted away from the screaming combatants. 'What happened here?! What are they… what are they?!' As the madam of the capital's prostitutes, and once a skilled courtesan herself, she knew the signs of love and devotion better than anyone else in that room.
'There is no limit to how far anyone will go for love, a priest will betray his god, a husband his wife, a son his father a daughter her mother… desire rules more than any violence… but it takes time to cultivate… she said succubus… are they demons?!' It wasn't completely impossible, but whatever they were, the carnage was inescapable.
Zero was easily the single most dangerous combatant in the room, though Edstrom might have been able to whittle him down and, if working with the others, eventually kill him, anyone he got close to would only live long enough to regret letting him close, and that too, would take a fair amount of luck and skill. 'But she's not here… and even if she were, even if she were we're trapped in here…'
Hilma continued to back away, her little pipe falling from her lips at last, it clattered on the floor while she could only listen to the screams and watch as the bodies of her comrades thudded one by one down to the stone.
She stopped when she felt something as solid as a mountain against her back. 'I shouldn't have hit the wall y-' She tilted her head up and saw the mounds of supple breasts above her, the woman.
Albedo looked down at the little wretch, shaking like a frightened kitten caught in a storm it didn't understand, she bent forward and exposed her yellow demonic eyes. "You are mine, now."
No sooner than the words were uttered, than the last survivor smashed against the far stone wall, his body a shattered wreck, Hilma watched the light die in Succulent's eyes, and it was over.
"There we go." Albedo said with a dusky, pleased voice, "You're a good dog for me, aren't you?"
And to Hilma's horror, Zero, the most dangerous man in the Kingdom in her eyes, began to bark.