Dimly, you become aware again, feeling this time how your body is reconstituting itself; like an actual butterfly, the one animal you have found compares to the process you are going through the most, you are literally dissolving yourself inside your cocoon, skin, muscles, organ, all your flesh melting bit by bit until even your bones become naught of black and red flesh soup.
That same stuff then pulls together again, empowered by the pain, the suffering this faux-natural construction is made of, the manifold deaths of your victims serving to strengthen the cocoon's material and, thereby, yourself once you have bathed in it for long enough.
It is a fascinating process, and one you wouldn't mind going through another few times- for all that you are only a set of newly reinforced bone right now, your flesh shuddering as it reattaches to your skeletal body. The whole feels fairly pleasant, actually, being there and existing as only yourself, the source of your own powers, while your nerves and skin and all that meaty business rearranges itself.
Like stretching out after having a good, long sleep. with a lover or two next to you. One of the few sensations you can so vividly recall from the timespan of your mortal existence.
Speaking of, your customary eye has reconstituted itself as well, now that most of yourself has gone from being fluid and mutable back to the normal state of affairs, and a quick look reveals that you are still inside the old laboratory Fink kept- except for the furniture someone put down here, a big bed, some plush chairs and a couple of desks are visible from your angle.
As well as at least a dozen naked Sarahs with fox eyes and tail out.
... You don't dream anymore, but the sight has you wonder whether you're wrong about that.
Well, time to get up out of bed. Or evil horrific hell-cocoon, at any rate- same difference to you, in the end. You wiggle, and push, and your claws, grown large and sharp from the frequent use, rip and tear the soft and yielding material where for any other it would have been an inescapable prison.
"Hey Sarah," you rumble from deep within your chest, quickly taking a look around to find your sister among what you can only conclude to be her substitutes. You can't quite explain it, but they just seem a little lesser than the real one; obviously, your sister's gleaming greatness is making it impossible to hide for her!
"Hey Gabe." There you are, bare demigod descending from your capsule to find your beautiful sister, equally naked, and embrace her passionately. A scene straight out of mythology; any artist would clamor to paint it or create a statue or somehow recreate but a fraction of this moment, but no, this is just for the two of you.
Only you and Sarah to share it between, just like it's supposed to be. "You been well while I was gone?" You ask, ignoring the vast swathes of knowledge and information now crowding your mind after your recent gain in powers and prowess.
"Mmm," your sister makes, pursing her lips up at you just a little while her illusory clones gather around the two of you. Smiling, you do as she obviously wants, sharing a deep, intimate kiss with her.
"I've been well," she says, clinging to you. "The city caught fire for a bit, but I made sure to keep the parts I wanted around. The rest dropped into the ocean."
Good to know your Sarah's kept up with the good practice of never leaving any enemies alive when you can kill them instead. "Good work," you tell her, a hand stroking through her gorgeous hair like it usually does. "Anything else happen while I was preoccupied?"
"Nope, Slate took his people and left, the Vox Populi are in a cold war with the rest of the city and the rest of the city is dancing to my tune at the moment," your Little Sarah mumbles, leaning against you with closed eyes. "I've just been waiting to drown the rest of the lot with the statue until you come back."
And there's the hands feeling up your butt this time around. She really does come after you. "And what's that statue business about now?"
"After we kind of removed Fink, it wasn't like anyone needed those giant gold statues of him around anymore anyway," she says, the clones around you slowly shifting into lasciviously showing themselves off and making out with each other, absolutely beautiful copies of something even more perfect heatedly breathing aloud and all looking at you. "So I had them all melted and the stuff used to make a better statue."
"... How big are we talking about here?" You don't know whether to facepalm or laugh your ass off.
"One of the feet of your new statue is trampling one of those giant Comstock statues." That does not quite explain the kind of scale you are- "As in, the foot is the size of the giant Comstock statues."
You do the math in your head real quick. "Wait, at the weight of gold... That has to be bigger than any one of these flying chunks of islands around, how did you keep it in the air?"
"Lutece Particles don't really care about weight, just relative weight and distribution and long story short, I just used the controls for the city to leverage a few of the islands to hold it up together." That explanation makes too much and no sense at all both. Fitting, considering the subject matter. "It is also perfectly to scale."
You feel soft, slender hands taking hold of your dick and balls, gently massaging and stroking them respectively. "... I am now officially just a little afraid of seeing it," you say.
As you told the Lutece twins, you were just going to do a thing real quick before you leave; you aren't quite sure if and how it applies, but common courtesy, you reason, would dictate that taking longer than you already have is probably bad manners for all that time has little meaning to the other parties involved.
Not that you see any particular reason to really hurry, yet, which is why the first thing you do once the immediate concerns- reuniting with Sarah- are dealt with is taking a look over everything that you are taking from Columbia, from samples to technology and back.
First off, vigors. Watered-down plasmids in essence, but with interesting changes made to them, you will admit. Shock Jockey, for one, can allow one to generate unstable crystals generating and exchanging electricity wildly, a functionality most certainly not present in the original Electrobolt, and Murder Of Crows can take control of or compel (the technical documents are a bit iffy in that regard), well, crows.
Independent complex animals not born of ADAM doing its magic (perhaps more literally so than you'd have thought) directly being almost telepathically controlled like that? Why, it downright reminds you of Taylor's power, the insect-controlling parahuman notably not working through the pseudo-biological wonders of the stuff.
In other words, it might just be possible to integrate the changes made for the special effects of these eight 'main' vigors Fink MFG has been producing and selling into the more potent plasmids you have already stabilized through the careful addition of controlled FEV into the mixture.
They called you mad, but in the end you were the one to have the last laugh.
Naturally, Sarah has secured several samples of the stuff, two bottles of each you store inside of your shadow for whenever you head back to Rapture and have use of the talents of Doctor Tenenbaum and the Thinker again, the experts on the topic of this kind of biological augmentations assuredly more able to do this kind of thing than you are.
Especially without the proper facilities on hand. It would one giant pain to try and make any changes to the ways that your biological augmentatives work at the moment.
Other advances you are shamelessly stealing involve... Well, you would grab the documents detailing them taken from Fink MFG's headquarters, the company producing pretty much everything further advanced than furniture in this city, but you would have to move- and Sarah, it would seem, has just about found the perfect position atop your lap, your lovingly hard cock stretching apart her delicate little asshole.
Your sister's rosebud is all too eager to take you inside, of course, its always horny owner having wasted no time in squarely seating her slender butt onto your manhood and spearing herself on it as soon as you requested to see what spoils you have extracted from Columbia. She did, in fact, make sure to bring everything in that regard to the place you were hibernating the hard way inside of this time, and so could simply enjoy herself while you read the same things she already did a few days ago while waiting for you.
Anyway, the ecstatic fun she is having riding your lap while facing away from you aside, you simply use your telekinesis, itself gained through a plasmid, of course, to get the papers you were wanting to grab. With a quick kiss on the back of your sister's head, she herself just enjoying the sensation and squeezing down on your cock with her inner muscles without moving much otherwise, you resume what you were doing.
The airships of Columbia are... generally quite simple, realistically speaking, and not of particular interest to you beyond their aesthetics, the real treasure here being the Lutece Particle. An atom or several, trapped at a certain altitude and therefore capable of keeping structures floating as long as it is securely attached to them.
Creating them, while not what you would call easy, can be done as long as you have a good particle collider and the right environment, thanks to a few ingenious little tricks you probably have the Lutece twins to thank for. The really good stuff, then, is the technology meant to let you control them, shut down or dampen their effects to allow for maneuvering in all dimensions; entirely necessary to allow for things like all those airships, if nothing else, and certain to be invaluable to you.
Thoughts of freely floating and flying robots aside, however (they'd still need something to drive them, probably look into some form of jets or something driven by your good old fusion cores), that's the big things to be taken from this whole little excursion, your own new powers aside. Now, as for the smaller ones...
The handyman augmentations are somewhat promising as a way to advance your knowledge of prosthetics and cyborg tech, the idea to submerge a heart inside of ADAM and use it as an engine very quirky indeed, but also surprising and certainly worth considering, even if simply using fusion cores is probably easier and better. The rest of robotics and mechanics to be found are worth much less consideration, the automated turrets and gun positions less advanced than and overall just crappier versions of the things you've already taken apart and improved upon back on Earth Fallout.
And you categorically refuse to even get started on those 'automated stallions'. You do not care the reliance on regularly being juiced up with Shock Jockey to provide them with energy is a design feature to sell more of the stuff, it's just a complete waste of material to ever produce those things, not to mention they're just genuinely crappy in any environment where cars or similar exist already.
Beyond that, most of the technological advanced Fink stole from some other dimension are restricted to small, less flashy things- the skylines and corresponding skyhooks, made to support large-scale infrastructure above the clouds are inspired, though just not particularly necessary if you aren't working above the clouds in the first place, and you can probably find a better solution than magnetized freight hooks to move cargo around while minimizing the danger of dropping it.
One of your hands finds its way between Sarah's legs, rhythmically pumping two fingers into her hot little pussy much to her great enjoyment while you scan the rest of the documents. Small improvements to existing tech, adaptations to the environment... Nothing that sticks out in particular, sadly.
Ah well, Fink did what he could, the money-grubbing little goblin of a man. Not everyone can be as good at this kind of thing as you are- interdimensional theft of intellectual property isn't as simple as you'd think, after all.
Sarah's indeed very aesthetically pleasing back (you're an artist, you can judge this kind of thing) is lightly pushing backwards against you as she turns her head a little, letting her lips brush against your cheek. "How about you, did you gain anything particularly interesting? I already found the words of power for myself."
"... Please don't call it that," you request with all your heart. The chants are already bad enough when you are the only one that spews them forth all the time.
"Why not? You feel what I want! And I think you'll like it..." The feeling of invisible lips is tracing down your back, then back up your stomach and chest makes itself known, a phantom of sensation and nothing more.
"Aww, and here I wanted to try surprising you." It's obvious Sarah has had at least a couple days to work on this, too; your own version of this spell, untrained as it is, couldn't have lasted this long. "But yeah... got a couple new tricks. Including directly interfacing with minds to do stuff to them, do a little fortune teller stuff that I think could put ol' Comstock to shame, and did you know hell is actually real?"
Sarah tilts her head, her hair tickling the side of your face as she starts grinding her butt against you, the place you're penetrating her tightening up even more. "Huh, is that the religious people you ate talking or are we talking fancy demon summoning now?"
"The latter, thankfully," you laugh, an arm wrapping around her waist and holding her close. "Something to look into later. A few minor little tricks, too, but we can get on that later."
"Okay." The two of you remain like that for a little while longer, just cuddling up close and enjoying the closeness. You also do go out of your way to look into what your undead Songbird is doing, the resurrected chunks of human bits inside a large metal body currently using its chassis to patrol around outside the city and attacking any aircraft trying to get in or out of Columbia.
Just like you ordered before holing up. Seems like things are going alright, then!
... You still don't look toward the city through it, though. If you'll see that statue, you'll do it with your own eyes.
You look up at your likeness, gleaming in the light of the sun uninterrupted by the cloud cover below it. A pose speaking of a victorious conqueror, one hand balled into a fist stretched toward the heavens, the other sitting at the waist. A stoic, but proud gaze on the face directed at the world below itself.
Hair billowing as though pushed up by a wind, it also appears as though the enormous statue is indeed completely naked, muscled torso and strong legs showing the obvious care put into crafting this thing, standing upon the remains of Comstock House, the previously center of Columbia both literally and spiritually.
As Sarah said, a half-destroyed statue of Comstock is left under one of the well-articulated feet of the construct made of actual gold, while the other one is stuck inside of the currently ruined structure itself. And, of course, there is the matter of... The Penis.
It deserves the capitalization, because holy hell. "Are you sure that's up to scale?" You ask Sarah, absently fondling her butt as she stands next to you.
"Yup, absolutely," she confirms with a thumbs up.
"... How is it even held up?" You wonder. "At the weight of gold, this amount of mass just jutting out like that should be nigh impossible to keep in the air."
Your sister grins, pointing at the member you're talking about visible from pretty much any part of the city on a clear day. "Lutece Particle, duh. I had one installed inside to let it keep standing up like that and called it the Sarah Chamber, I thought it fit."
Alright, that one's pretty funny. You tousle her golden locks, matching the shining material of the statue surprisingly closely. "Well, that is a thing, I suppose. Where'd you get the manpower to have it built this quickly, or did you just use Fink's money to pay people into making something like this despite contemporary ideas about nudity?"
"Well, I wanted Columbia to have a good long last look at the most important thing in the world before we sunk it inside the ocean, so I just paid people that would do anything if it got them what they wanted, that being money, to help me enslave the population," Sarah reveals to your growing amusement and pride. "Slaves don't get a choice what they're doing. I also only had young women clamber all over the dick while it was formed, by the way, so don't worry about that!"
Your sweet little sister is really just... too precious.
The people of Columbia really are well and truly enslaved from what you can see, even though, as Sarah explains, only parts of the total population are actually forced into hard labour as it is; half the city is currently busy facing off against the poor that were 'emboldened' to come out of the literal holes they were pushed into to begin with and the other half has literally no idea what even is going on anymore.
Good enough for you either way. Incidentally, it actually turns out Sarah's people are both black and white people, recruited for their purpose especially because they don't care about skin color and instead are more into brutalizing helpless captives until the rest gets the message regardless of any of that shit.
Those men (mostly men, anyway) get the job done once again, herding the exhausted and bruised people forced to do the dirty work where they're supposed to be... That is, being brutally eaten by you and Sarah, now that neither of you will have any more use of them shortly.
It's a slaughter, and as such not particularly remarkable considering your usual conduct, though you do feel the need to remark upon the knowledge of housewives when it comes to matters of cooking. Lots of those little tricks and tips on how to make a variety of dishes always come out well in their little minds, and now at your disposal. Honestly, if you were a homelier sort and more interested in personally going around cleaning, a lot of this stuff would come in even more handy, but as it is you just sift through the additional minds you're taking for your own.
Once you're done, of course, nobody has any idea as of yet as to what, exactly, your plans for Columbia are. You already have Rapture as your very own secret unreachable city and you already cleaned it up to boot, not to mention you want to make a point and be thorough about the reason you were asked to come to this place and do your thing in the first place, and so it shall be disposed of with all due prejudice, hopefully rewriting a large enough chunk of the local multiverse to permanently remove the possibility for the whole Elizabeth becoming a powerless dictator leading a horde of angry zealots to burn down the world.
Now then, off to leave behind the blood-covered slave pens and go have a little blast. You get the feeling that that whole 'eradicating manmade structures' thing the little trumpet of wonders can do isn't the only thing going on with it...
Sarah has already departed onboard the Hand Of The Prophet, the large zeppelin since redecorated by you and repainted to show various images (she actually went and printed your head all over the thing while you were metamorphosing, which...), and so you have free reign to take on your winged and armored form containing a bunch of useful little powers right over the statue of your human-reminiscent form.
As you float up above the floating city, armor and tools steadily forming as your perspective shifts, letting you view the situation in a new light.
It is presumptuous, to attempt to lift themselves above their fellows, when in truth they all are but ants meant to prostrate before your feet. Clearly, like the Tower of Babel was torn down in biblical mythology, so too shall you return these poor fools to the ground they belong onto... and into.
Your wings stretch out behind you as you lift your horn, your Triumphant Trumpet, to your absence of lips. Your feathers soak in the light of the sun as the clarion call echoes out, pushing through the air in a single, continuous burst.
Your lesser self had attempted to tease out more of your own potential, but you have decided otherwise already. This transgression against your authority, the attempt of these inconsequential humans to place themselves onto the heavens rather than yourself, must be punished in the most fitting way you can and as you blow the horn, you can feel the strings of possibility forming and tap into the exactly same one as the last and first time you used this power.
Your influence spreads, sound traveling through open air and the ears of humanity just as easily as it does through solid stone and metal. Within moments, a sizeable part of this damnable edifice to self-overestimation is simply... crumbling.
Small objects are affected faster and easier, simply turning into fading ashes ahead of time. Then come the larger ones, a cascading effect working its way through everything in reach, everything crumbling down to nothing eventually, buildings, furniture, clothes, islands.
All that were within the area fall, bereft of their flying islands; although some of the stone and earth remain, the majority of it was worked by mortal hands and therefore removed from existence along with the rest. Even the statue of your lesser self, just barely catching a glimpse of your true glory, is receiving this treatment, the largest structure of them all lasting the longest for all that it is right underneath the epicentre of your wrath.
As for the now remaining ring of heretically floating islands... They do not float any longer, for the controls of the city have been eradicated along with all the rest. This... shuts down the technology keeping them afloat.
The entire lot is sent screaming to the ground, to be crushed and drowned both. A fitting fate for defying your authority over all that is better than them. All that remain are flying vessels still in the air, moving independently and self-sufficiently.
Not for much longer. You have called your flying servant made of metal and warped influence, tearing into and sinking them as surely as the rest of this place.
The flight to the one airship still in the air by this point takes a short time, but your wings let you make short work of the distance- once you have turned back, that is, your work done. Fun fact about yourself in your weird angel form: You're still a giant dick in it.
Doesn't really matter. Once you have once more infiltrated the former flagship, it doesn't take you long to rejoin your lovely sister, Sarah currently in the middle of setting up a course that would have the zeppelin dive into the sea in a good while despite the controls normally meant to stop this kind of thing.
"Well, that went well," you say as you come inside, stretching in the simple set of clothes you're wearing. "Good riddance to that little theocracy. Time to get back?"
"Time to get back," she confirms, turning around to give you a quick hug. "Guess we need to talk to those twins again, make sure everything's in order?"
"Things are in order now."
"Or rather, things were unordered on purpose," Rosalind Lutece notes aloud.
"All the same, the desired effect has been achieved," Robert shrugs. The twins are standing to the side of the airship's controls, near the door through which you just came yourself.
Their clothes are a bit ruffled, you think.
"Good to hear, means this wasn't a complete waste of relative time," you remark as you go over to join Sarah in mirroring their stance. "I trust you're satisfied with how things played out?"
Robert nods. "The end result was acceptable, yes."
"And this thought experiment can finally end," his sister adds, clearly having been fed up with it. Whatever it was. "For all that the cycle had to be closed up manually."
"The false Irishman was most standoffish," the male twin agrees with a weary sigh. "A wonder he wasn't killed."
"Would be killed?"
"Is dead?"
"Not an issue, I'm taking from this," you interrupt them, Sarah nodding along. "Well, it was a pleasure working with you, for what it's worth. Unless there's anything left you need any help with?"
And so the city in the sky became the city sunken in the sea, Columbia disappearing into the Atlantic Ocean. Found several years later, it was briefly mistaken for the mythological city of Atlantis before it was identified for the futuristic and wondrous place that had split up from the rest of the world so long before.
But what became of the people that made it out, few as they were?
Cornelius Slate and those men and women loyal to his cause, rather than that of Zachary Hale Comstock, had a difficult task ahead of them in fitting back into normal society, the rest of the United States of America left bereft of a large number of extremist Christians and the public sentiment turning against the 'traitor city' led by Comstock and all it had stood for. However, their temporary mobility afforded by the transports stolen to bring them down safely before lack of maintenance would render them useless allowed some flexibility.
A quick talk with a lawyer Slate located in New York led the small-scale exodus to settle down in Texas, lax legislation and gun laws making the state the ideal place for them to settle down, the old soldier prioritizing the safety and families of the soldiers that put themselves under his command.
Once there, it did not take long for a private military company to organize itself under the name of Slateworks Incorporated, the cunning use of his name both an appeal to American sensibilities and an attempt to let his old acquaintance Booker DeWitt find Cornelius, a goal that soon found success after about a year of increasing amounts of infamy built up by the well-disciplined and utterly deadly ex-soldiers keeping the few among them pumped full of vigors a secret under all circumstances, but freely using them when the situation called for it.
Meanwhile, Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth Comstock, her last name still unknown to them, had successfully made their way to the city of Paris under the guidance of the enigmatic woman both of them knew only under the name of Carmilla. Securely hiding the vehicle they made the journey over the Atlantic with, it didn't take long for the strangely empowered three to settle into a new daily life.
Initially disillusioned by the (surprisingly?) normal capital of France, rather than the metropolis of arts and creativity she had thought it up to be, Elizabeth soon found her peace in getting to know who her companions were- and who she was, herself.
Booker DeWitt would forever find himself protective of his young charge, driven to see to her safety by both half-formed memories and some residual instinct he never could clearly define. The two, driven by Carmilla, whom they in turn drove to stay in existence by sharing their strength with her, became more and more comfortable with each other, a far cry from the uneasy relationship they'd shared initially.
There were still bills to pay, however, and they could not live out of hotels and the like forever without an income of their own. While finding jobs and the like or sending Booker out to risk his life in doing his usual thing were options to this end, Elizabeth, surprising even herself with her boldness, came up with an idea; she'd memorized a great deal of technical information in her time in the tower and was slowly, but surely gaining more and more power over her curious ability to peer and even cross over into different places, times and even dimensions, giving them a unique opportunity.
Carmilla would never admit she'd been working toward pushing for that same conclusion at the time.
Together, the three of them could come up with 'inventions' and use them to more than secure their own livelihoods, doing some actual good in the world along the way. Booker was uncomfortable with the idea at first, but quickly agreed when it became clear it was what Elizabeth truly wanted to do with her life.
The three relocated to New York, where Booker, although a drunkard, gambler and more, knew the right people to approach to get certain things done, and even knew the common language for once- though he never once did manage to find his old place, a series of nose bleeds caused by some minor health issues stopping him from doing so.
The three established a corporation in short order, Carmilla's skills and experience borrowed from her creator (hallowed may be his name) and Elizabeth's drive and determination soon seeing them earn a pretty penny quickly enough. Booker, on the other hand, felt quite useless and consequently fell into a short period of depression, though Carmilla recognized the signs and made sure to push him out of it fairly quickly.
Mostly by engaging the help of Elizabeth, naturally. The young woman thriving in her new environment, doing so much more than she'd ever dreamt of, did everything she could to spread her joy for life to the older man despite his best efforts, and not even his self-loathing and hard-fought 'confession' for the things he'd done in his time as a soldier kept her from growing closer to him.
A series of events involving business rivals, a bit of thwarted industrial espionage and subsequent short shadow war during which Booker killed a good few dozen people and burned down two city blocks later, Elizabeth proposed to him with the excuse that someone needed to keep the old oaf in check.
Said oaf told her off at first for wanting to be with 'someone like him', but Elizabeth had grown into a confident young woman and the frequent 'girl talk' with Carmilla did not help things; she would not be stopped once she set her eyes on something she wanted, and she wanted Booker DeWitt for her own.
Roses, breakfast in bed (as the three were still living together for several reasons) and frankly expressed interest wore Booker's resistance down over time, not to mention they certainly distracted him from the guilt still plaguing him both for things he could remember and those he could not, and before long Elizabeth Smith, as the papers Carmilla had given her one early day out of the blue had named her, became Elizabeth DeWitt.
The marriage was a quiet and personal affair, and although contemporary gender roles might disagree with the way Elizabeth was the breadwinner between the two of them while Booker was happy to look after and defend her from all danger he could find, it wasn't like either of them had any inclination to care about that fact.
If anything, Booker was perfectly happy to shoot anyone that gave them trouble, a running joke between the couple from even before they were newlyweds.
It was around this time that certain military contractors, as the polite term went, were hired to secure the safety of certain business interests, or, as Slate put it, 'be a private army for the best damn boss a man could wish for', but that was just an aside, really. Besides, the old soldier was looking to settle down at some point anyway, surrounded by the children of the families he saved.
When old age took him years after this point, it did so with a content smile on his lips.
Back to the present, it took little time for Elizabeth to become pregnant and eventually give birth to a beautiful baby boy that would grow up to idolize his 'Auntie Carmilla', who taught him early on how to behave and do anything he wanted to, once a certain amount of discipline took inside the child of her friends, and it was with a second child (a girl this time) on the way that Elizabeth decided that ceasing to work as a CEO due to pregnancy was for other, lesser women.
Booker worried. Carmilla laughed. The world of business was wearing a boot on its neck and not allowed an opinion.
Truly, the hours were a bit long, but Elizabeth could always cheat with just a little bit of time travel, and so life was good. Even if her kids, it would seem, had inherited some few qualities rather strongly- little Jonas was just over the moon with the actual gun Elizabeth's silly, silly husband had gotten him for his birthday (his shots had a tendency to never miss their target) and Eleanor was just incredibly precocious with her ability to know the future ahead of time at times, not to mention the third child they would be having now that both of them were old enough to let her stay-at-home dear take care of it with Carmilla's help.
Her silly, so very manly husband, no matter what he said about the topic. He certainly did live up to his role in bed, the young woman would say... And yes, she was rather young for her age, having not aged a single day since she turned twenty. Nor had he aged, for that matter, for she would never just let him do so.
And don't even let her get started on the ridiculousness that Carmilla turned out to be!
Father Wales felt that it was perhaps in poor sport to consider preaching a race or the like, a competitive affair that bet one man's belief against another, but he could not help but feel his heart soar as he spread the good word to the believers.
"AND THE ARCHANGEL HAS CHOSEN EACH OF US- YOU, ME, ALL OF US, MY DEAR DEAR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, TO EXPERIENCE MERCY! WHETHER WE BE WRETCHED, OR PIOUS, OR RIGHTEOUS, OR NONE OF THESE AND IN MIDDLE OF THEM ALL, WE ALL HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO BE BROUGHT INTO THIS VERY SLICE OF PARADISE WHERE WE ALL HAVE OUR PART TO PLAY YET!"
The flock was strong today, many of the lost and confused faithful recently added to their great number eagerly coming to listen to the sermons in his humble church ('his', really, he just built it for as much as one could build anything in this place) to find direction now after their death.
"KNOW THAT ALTHOUGH YOUR JOINING WAS NOT EASY, THOUGH YOU MAY FEEL DOUBT AND ARE UNSURE; MERCY HAS BEEN GRANTED UPON YOU, AND WE ALL, YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, ARE WITH YOU!"
It was too bad the leader of these people, a Father Comstock, had been unable to see the truth of things. He had to be locked away by the archangel's servants to find his own peace while Father Wales cared for his flock.
He sometimes went to see him in the drearier parts of paradise, where those with a special mission, or fate, were prepared to meet it, but he was inconsolable about the devil's snare he had fallen into while alive.
No matter. He would see in time, or he would not. Either way their God was Merciful, and that, at least, brought comfort to all that would accept Him.
Robert Lutece watched the flow of events with a bittersweet emotion welling up at the bottom of his throat, a mix of relief and emptiness left behind by their passing.
He did not say anything, for words had already lost their meaning. What had happened, had happened, for all the regrets and attempts to change them uselessly. What would happen, would happen, and no amount of their interference would be worth the trouble anymore.
The two that had come to help set things right were already gone, moved back to whence they'd come by the fascinating creature that'd contacted them in the first place. It was just him and his sister now, in this moment between time.
"I do hope this proves I was right all along," Rosalind said, sharing the view. "Conducting an experiment knowing one has failed is quite pointless still."
"And yet repeating it for long enough has led to a new solution, proving that conducting an experiment knowing one can fail means one knows they can also succeed." It was as simple as that. Sometimes, persistence paid off.
"Have it your way then." Were they not the same person, one could have assumed the words to be a dismissal, but Robert knew his opposite meant exactly what she said. So would he if their roles were reversed. "We do not have anything left to do in this place, then. You know, I do remember you forcing me to cooperate with your thought experiment, but now that it is done, it is high time I made use of my part of our agreement."
Ah yes, that. Perhaps threatening to leave his sister had been a step far, but Robert had needed to secure her cooperation if he wanted to have any chance of succeeding in righting what their initial interference had wronged.
He looked at Rosalind confusedly nevertheless. He didn't recall her making any conditions or-
"You may never leave me now, staying by my side forever," she explained, reappearing from where she was standing to move right in front of him. "In good health or bad, in riches and poverty or whatever other conditionals one may want to mention."
"Oh you cannot be serious."
"Oh, but I am," she smiled. "Neither of us expected this to happen, but I find myself... happy about it still. I hereby anoint you my husband, may whoever disagree speak up now or forever stay silent. And if you recall, you agreed to stay with me after all, so you may not."
Robert wondered, for a brief moment, whether this was all one terrible, horrible mistake. Then Rosalind kissed him and all such thoughts had to be cast aside, for they were both perfect mirrors of each other; ever since they had begun... developing their relationship, this made it so that at any one point in time, they were both active in bed and active elsewhere.
Though it was not always a bed they did the deed within. Rosalind, it had turned out, was quite... creative, in terms of these things.
Now, however, both of their attention was fully turned upon one another. One thing he had to give Gabriel; now that they were done with poor Elizabeth's case, they already had a new way to spend the time with each other. A most pleasurable one.
The transition back toward Thule is through the same weird not-spacetime you traversed on the way in, the Lutece twins helping you along and bringing you toward your exceedingly eldritch friend who in turn takes your physical body the rest of the way. Honestly, you do vaguely feel that you could've probably done the same yourself once you were at that point, but with Sarah on your tail it's better to be sure either way.
"HEllo aGaIN friEnd, i TrUSt YOUr VISit wenT wEll? i cERTainLY No LoNGER HaVe A hEaDACHE, at lEaST." Said 'buddy' of yours greets you as you slowly phase back to where you came from, your new oversized pet in tow- Songbird, undead and improved, is poking into a neighboring tunnel once you fully arrive back inside the underground chamber you went into to have that talk.
"Yeah, grabbed a couple of nifty things and some souls," you confirm. "Nothing particularly interesting, but some nice stuff all the same. And yes, the source of the problem seems to have been solved, so that should be fine, too."
"gooD! NOw BefORE you go bACk TO whAT yoU WerE DoInG, WE/i promiSeD a RewArD, DidN't i/we? YOU'VE defInitely hElped Me/Us Out a lot, so aNYthINg LESs WOUld be dISCoUrTEoUS," the thought-entity you're 'conversing' with says. "I LearneD tHAT fRom mY LitTlE FrienDS."
Before you can react, what feels like a wide range of pure information rams into your mind, a vast universe of compressed thoughts and half-formed ideas flooding through it.
Damn it man, you can take it, but it's still really surprising, okay?!
The idea of a vampire was completely unknown to you when you reconstituted yourself right inside your grave, purging cheap and probably spiked corpse preservatives pumped into your lifeless body out of it while you took control of your own corpse, settling back into the very same meatsuit you wore during your mortal life and transforming it to better suit your new state of being, but even so you somehow drew upon the... template, of sorts, of what a vampire is supposed to be like in the grander, meta-set of reality you are moving within.
Or, in other words, when you managed to just completely ignore whatever the laws of reality dictate and become an eldritch monstrosity, you subconsciously went through ideas available and decided that, since you're apparently undead now, a vampire would be the best thing to be- keeping your appearance and even improve upon it, unfathomable powers, the works.
Everything else was just an instinctive exercise of a flailing being in the middle of resurrecting itself. And so, as you take in the knowledge and nudges your acquaintance of a similar persuasion as yourself is pushing into your direction, you go back and... correct, a few of the things you could have done better when you were recreating yourself.
In the end, there is no such thing as perfection... But at the very least, you know you've improved a few fundamental aspects of yourself. It feels as though you were walking crooked until now, or with something in one eye that would not get out; there was something that did not sit quite right, but now it does, leaving behind a sense of relief.
Similarly, a little fact is pointed out to you, one that seems obvious now when it seemed so strange beforehand. The fruits of the tree inside your inner world, nourished by the things that could have been, the possibilities for the future you took away and replaced with your own. They feed back into you in turn, granting you greater power when eaten, but... That is not quite all the fruits do, now is it?
They are made of what could have been, and so they supply you with what you could be. The implication is obvious: Why would they only concern themselves with your powers as such, the various supernatural abilities you have that don't require chanting or similar, when they truthfully could do so much more?
Things click into place, and you know it to be done. Huh. That sure was easy.
"Gabe? You okay?" Sarah asks, drawing you out of your momentary trance; for a moment, you see her the way your unworldly companion does, a warped soul held inside its body, propped up by a sliver of your power lodged securely inside of it.
Then you blink, the moment over. "Yeah, I'm just peachy. Just working through a little knowledge download."
"thAT cONCluDeS oUR bUSinESS, unLESS you HAD aNYtHing ELsE YOu'D LiKE to taLk ABOUt," the group of randomly chosen demon individuals says- you can summon 'real' demons now, you can already feel the headache that will be the nomenclature- in unison, various shapes splitting up and recombining in a way that, you think, indicates a slow shift of interest just in case you do want anything else. "ANd remEMBEr, i/we OWE YoU oNe FOr tHIs Just to gET rid OF tHE HEadAchE."
The way back out of the cultist caves and toward your bone carriage, a sight for sore eyes after all the airships and the like you just finished dealing with, doesn't take overlong now that your business in the area is finished, your undead Songbird puppet flying free of the mountains after just some minor logistical difficulties in getting it out on the go.
Still, you manage, as you always do. "Oh yeah, before I forget," you say as you open the carriage's door, letting Sarah come inside first, "one power I got in particular you should probably know about."
"Out with it, you know I have to know now," she smiles as she climbs through.
"Another animal transformation, and you know how fun those can be," you explain as you follow through. "Into a snake this time. You know how they can vibrate their tongues and tend to have a hemipenis?"
"All I know is that you can pick and choose what traits you take on when you transform," a giggle sounds out from within the carriage, Sarah's panties hitting your head. "Come on already!"
You close the door with a sense of finality, and the vehicle gets moving in short order.
It takes less than a moment for you to shed your clothes, Sarah already completely bare and waiting for you deeper within the carriage, sitting on one of the seat you all but ruined the last time you got frisky in here, just before arriving at the place you're now departing from. "It's a long couple hours to go before we're back," you grin at your sister, kicking off the last of your clothing. "You ready to spend them... productively?"
"I damn well can't wait," she says, licking her luscious lips. "Let's try out those new tricks of yours right away."
Your response is to go to your knees, lifting Sarah right out of her seat and letting her soft thighs rest on your shoulders, smooth skin feeling pleasant against your own. Looking up to where she looks down, both hands going to grasp your head, you smile as you flick out a now very much split tongue, the fleshy organ still of its usual size and thickness otherwise.
"Oooh..." Your sweet little Sarah coos when you get up, your lips nipping at the little pleasure button right on top of her honeypot of a pussy, though you're far from being done- a few licks across her slit, the tender flesh deforming under her attention, then you're pushing inside, the significant length of your tongue being a vampire endows you with letting you sensuously lick all over her lovetunnel and really taste how she's like down in her little secret spot. "Ooooh...!"
Fun fact, snakes can let their tongues vibrate quite a bit, the animals using them to orientate themselves a lot, and this ability is one you have taken over with your upscaled physique. So as you slowly, almost languidly, push and pull at Sarah's insides, you slowly, but with increasing intensity, vibrate like a motherfucker.
"Mmmh!" The one biting their lips while shouting is your sister, of course, her legs clamping down around your face. It seems she likes it, after all, coming within seconds especially as you reach around one thigh to gently squeeze at her clit.
It takes her a little while to finish the lengthened orgasm time you put her through, grinding her sex against your own lips like a perverted version of making out with each other, but soon enough she's pulling your face away a little bit.
It doesn't stop you from continuing, but you look up anyway. "Nng?"
"This is great, but you did promise something else, too..." Your little Sarah 'reminds' you, using vampiric nerves to say the words despite the pleasure coursing through her still.
"Of course." What else can you do, than to indulge her? So you raise your arms, letting your sweet sister hop down from her perch and land in them with a meaty impact, your hands closing around her butt. "A shame, though. I love tasting you," you whisper to her.
"Well I hate not giving you anything back, so fill me up already," Sarah begs, breathing hard into the crook of your neck. You're holding her up as it is, so... You sit back right where she sat earlier, using just a slim bit of your transformation powers to do as you told her earlier.
"Well, if it's that important to you..." Now positioned just right, you drag her butt backwards (from her perspective) to set your tip right at the place you were lapping at just moments ago- and her back entrance, too, your two fully-grown penises both finding their mark.
Your honey-voiced lover bites her lips and moans as she slowly sinks down onto them with relish. "Ummh... This feels really different compared to normally," she murmurs.
You don't respond, too busy covering the mounds of her breasts with kisses and nibbling on the sweet, hard nubs adorning them. You never could leave those sensitive nerve bundles alone.
Of course, you're feeling the same thing your so very much grown-up sister is, your twin pricks pushing into both the velvet wetness of her pussy and the tight wrangling fit of her asshole, gliding deeper and deeper into her from both sides for once.
"So... Much!" You can feel yourself, the sensation of both of your cocks kept apart only by a thin wall inside Sarah as they press deeper into her a bit strange, but not bad as such. Though you really could do with more Sarah in the equation. "Feeling so, full!"
"Glad you like it," you whisper for your sister's benefit. "These two certainly like you."
Sarah nods. She looks at you. And then she spreads her legs as wide as she can in your position, getting both of your manhoods as deep into herself as she can take them, just closing her eyes and leaning back.
You stay like that for a few moments, your horny sister tensing up and relaxing rhythmically as she gets used to this, before you can proceed. And you do, naturally, by massing her butt with both hands and lifting it up.
Both of you find and accord almost immediately. Sarah's fingers dig into your shoulders as she bounces on your lap, her sweet gasps ringing out just as surely as the clapping of her cheeks against your lap, and for a long moment it seems as though she intends to just keep you in place like this for the next couple hours, deliciously taking your cocks all for herself.
Then she comes, no amount of undead body control enough to keep her going. She crumples onto you, so you just stay still, your dual rods still stuck inside of her, and stroke her back a little as you wait for her to get over it.
Only, she won't have it. "More, please, ram 'em in me and mess me up."
How could anyone resist that?
In short order, you have her upper body resting against your seat, kneeling behind her and penetrating both her front and back once again, enjoying the sounds she's making as you fill her up. What she seems to want is a hard, rough fuck, and so you just rest a hand at a shoulder and the other at her waist... and fuck her hard.
Every thrust gives off a squishing sound, your balls smacking against your blonde sweetie heavily, and she moans and screams in response to you tenderizing her insides in the most tender way possible. "Yes! Harder! Breed me again, all of me!"
Your sister is tight, almost painfully so, her asshole wrapping around you like a tight glove even as her fluids drip onto the ground, excavated by the repeated drilling of her pussy. She feels hot and tight and wonderful, and you bend over her to fuck her like an animal, much to her obvious approval.
"You're so big inside of me, do you like it? Do you like ruining your poor Little Sarah?"
"I love it," you growl, stretching to nibble on her shoulder. "In fact, I love it so much I'm going to fill you up even more!"
You hold Sarah in place by biting her gently, her aura protecting her immaculate pale skin from your razor sharp teeth, and rapidly thrust the last bit of your cocks inside her in a mild frenzy, driving yourself the last bit toward coming inside your sweet, naughty, sexy little sister.
You pump her full in heavy, lazy pushes once you get to your peak, just enjoying her body against yours as you do your body fluids thing, groping her breasts hanging underneath her, but but before long you're back to kissing her neck as you speed up again. "Time for round two, unless we're counting where we left off," you chuckle jovially.
"That'd be round one hundred and sixty-five, and I demand we get to two hundred before we're back," Sarah replies, a hand blindly feeling for you behind her.
You take it into your own, the two of you far enough from any obstructions you can just lay your other hand over her second one as you resume ataking her doggystyle. "Wouldn't have it any other way, sweetie. Now take it for me."
You don't get anything else done until the end of the journey back, but that's still some very well-spent time, in your own very humble opinion. It isn't every day that Sarah can't help herself falling asleep in your arms.
Properly settling into the Demon Lord's Castle once you finally do arrive in it, having cut a new way through the wilderness of the demon kingdom as you went back and forth in the span of, well, less than a day technically going by local time, doesn't take long, pretty much everyone else only able to conclude you and Sarah just went on a quick trip toward the north-eastern territories for some reason, the way you're moving around notwithstanding.
Once that's taken care of, by which you mean Sarah is in her room sleeping, since she genuinely fell unconscious toward the end of the Gabriel Double Donger Deluxe experience, as you've decided to call it, you take a moment to think over your powers and the new stuff you've figured out, as well as the things you will need to make use of them- not everything is as straightforward as the earliest powers you recall having gained way back when, after all.
Demonology? You're not about to summon anything supernatural while your sister is out like a light, you need a good second opinion on this stuff. Magic relating to directly interacting with minds? It seems really fiddly and probably shouldn't be attempted on anyone you want to keep around- you have a bunch of prisoners, but you'd hate to waste any of them, as your recent exploits haven't actually replenished your stocks of them.
Illusions? Solid maybe, that one seems relatively safe to test. But the one thing you shall focus on for the moment above all else, especially with consideration toward the future, is alchemy.
From what you understand on the topic, it's basically chemistry, just instead of giving a shit about how it should work, you're pumping the stuff you're mixing together under various conditions full of magic to get a result out of it that doesn't really quite match what it should be.
To get everything from magical potions with effects completely out of the ordinary, various substances with useful magical properties (from forcing certain chemical reactions, ironically, to, well, exploding at will) to just turning various kinds of metal into other kinds of metal, for example. Transmutating materials and that kind of thing.
Now, you aren't exactly an expert, but wasn't a big thing for 'alchemy', historically speaking, turning lead to gold? Because you could do that, now. More interestingly, magical materials are included in that, as well, though you aren't quite sure how you'd go about that as of yet.
So, to start with, and to get to experimenting? You'll need some tools... And, using the knowledge and mild general reality warping imbued into objects that is at the heart of your 'proper' alchemy, you already know how to create those.
That is, once you get the raw materials, which pretty much amounts to some basic chemistry tools- a couple of beakers, a source of heat, various bits of miscellaneous glassware; really you could just rob any old high school for this stuff, back on Earth Bet.
Now to see if you can't find something equivalent around these parts... In fact, you turn toward the nearest servant, a butler awaiting instructions silently. "I need someone to go get me Lana, a bunch of glass and some other equipment, details to follow once I've had time to talk to her," you order.
In return, you receive a bow, and off he is. Now then, time to get everything together you'll need to make a decent enough beginner workshop for creating potions, for a start. The requirements and needs for various branches of the new 'science' you're beginning to uncover are completely differing, of course, but you'll cross that bridge when you get to it.
For now, time to get to work already.
It takes a good while, but thankfully it would seem mages, some of which do make themselves useful as the scientists of this dimension, do tend to have a few useful knicknacks lying around that actually do serve the ends you need met, and so having your apparent new little helper requisition what you need from local wares is an easy enough way to get most of everything you need.
Lana, of course, is almost distressingly eager to help you, seeing this entire exercise as a prime opportunity to observe your own branch of magic in action. In the end, all you really need is a bunch of small, simple devices to start with- to cool or heat things up, mix different fluids, some that let you apply different states of gravity or artificially manipulate density, a couple of mild dimensional displacers and energy ex- and detractors... Simple lab equipment, really, just ignoring any technological requirements and using a bunch of magical means toward a magical end.
It did feel a little weird how you're essentially doing all of this by fingering the stuff in question and applying the specific, small-scale effects required, but hey, if it works, it just works. No need to get up in arms about it or anything.
Of course, doing all of this took a decent while, by which you mean the rest of the day, but you refuse to waste any effort on messing around with this power before you can do so efficiently. All of this stuff is kind of necessary to really get to producing.
While you certainly could keep going without a break, being exceedingly used to long periods of both intense and boring work, you do believe it is about time for you to delve into the back of your own head and take a look at what has changed since the last time you took a bit to look around inside of there.
Things do keep happening on occasion, even if you don't pay attention, after all, and that itching sensation you've come to associate with new areas being created or unlocked or whatever you want to call it has been popping up recently, so you figure you may as well.
Once you come inside, your throne room as pleasantly empty of actual life as ever with only the statues for company, however, you are soon accosted by none other than the Dollmaker, the deceptively fit old man dragging himself by his crooked cane to come open the doors. "Master, Young Master, dere you are! It's terrible!" His wizened voice calls out.
"What is it and how much effort do you expect me to expend?" You really aren't looking forward to having to deal with any of this stuff beyond taking a quick look around.
"It's mah brother, Young Master, he finally showed up, he did." Somehow, you fail to see why that is your problem. "With da last batch of new places, see, an' he's already creeping everyun' else out!"
You sigh. "Fine, just... let's first look at the other places, then go deal with him."
And here you were hoping for a quiet day of work.
First off, the sky. Because you have control over the sky inside your inner world now, which makes it count, you guess. It does, apparently, give you more influence over this place's time relative to everywhere else, which is good, and you're already thinking about how you could sculpt some of these clouds to be aesthetically pleasing just as a side project.
The various animals you can add to remove at a whim are nice, too, if not much of an addition.
However, there is one exception. On the very highest reaches of your soul palace, the few peaks that consistently show themselves and stick out as being physically present without someone there to make them do so, you can find a certain bird-like being made of mostly metal.
"... Are you sure this thing isn't a guardian?" You ask the Dollmaker, the two of you having gone up to see it in person.
"Aye, m'lord Master sir, dis one is jus' part o' the scenery, fer now," the old man confirms. "Me an' tha Timekeeper made dis one jus' in case it comes in handy down tha line."
Hey, you aren't complaining.
Next off, your brief reprieve from having to deal with that brother of the Dollmaker's shrinking rapidly, is the Treasury, a place most certainly deserving of the capitalized name. A series of rooms almost labyrinthine in their extent and filled to the brim with all kinds of treasures.
Literally, you wouldn't even have considered most of this stuff in terms of valuables, and yet here you are, feeling most enriched by all the things you can now intrinsically call your own.
"Ye know, dis place is quite interestin'," your tottering companions says, looking in from the entrance (you aren't letting him come in, this stuff is yours). "In here, the things ya value the most are turned inta riches, and ya can in turn protect dem things with dis place."
"If you want to actually say something, say it, no need to keep beating around the bush all day," you absently chide him as you let a hand glide through a pile of gold pieces. You recognize the faces on them.
"Well yah, riddle me dis, what do ya value 'bove all else, eh?"
"My lovers, my family," you state without a second thought, absolutely certain and forthright with this one.
"Den there ya have it," the Dollmaker grins. "Reason there's so much gold in 'ere is how rich y'are in love. Sappy old chap, ain't'cha?"
"Duh, I'm hoping to be the sappiest, most romantic and loving husband and father possible one day," you casually disclose the goal you've set for yourself in unlife. "Sorry if you're disappointed, but this place isn't exactly saying anything new."
The wrinkled elderly man grins, the heads attached to the contraption sitting at his back jiggling as though in laughter. You can't have that now, can you?
"Now show me to your brother, time we got it over with." Hah, that takes the wind right out of his sails.
As it turns out, that 'brother' of the Dollmaker's lives deep within the earth of your realm, not too far from the semi-industrialized area the himself calls his home but dug in deep and deeper still, with several tunnels of varying sizes leading the way to his place.
Which, as it turns out, is called the Pit. As he wastes no time telling you, having awaited you near the surface.
"Hehehe..." The voice of the pastily pale creature, its skin visibly turning black all around its body and head hidden by the horned veil it is wearing, is deep and somehow piercing, for all that you can't help but imagine him licking his lips as he speaks. "There you are, master. It's a pleasure."
"An' dere he goes, huh." The Dollmaker is not impressed. "Dis is why yer're nevah invited to dem family gatherins."
"We're all just figments of the master's mind anyway, there are no 'gatherings'," the Pit Lord scoffs at his brother. "Now please give me a few of the more useless sacks of flesh, would you, master? I just can't wait to introduce them to my... sword."
He reaches a hand into his loincloth as you all walk, slowly and with relish pulling out a long, hard object- a sword made from bone, quickly revealing itself to be a spine in particular. "See, your majesty, all it takes is a little... love, and attention, and before you know it all their worries and useless thoughts are gonna be gone and replaced with a more... proper mindset."
"What 'e means is dat he brings 'em down 'ere and turns 'em inta mindless monsters, is all," the Dollmaker grumps. "Lotsa freaky shit down 'ere ta do it with."
"What he means is that my habitat is carefully controlled and gardened to help with my purpose, hehehe..." The Pit lord strokes a glowing fungus that visibly reacts to his touch, erecting to jut out from the wall it is growing on. "My little lovelies down here just want to... share the love."
"Ya prob'ly dun wanna know dem details," the Dollmaker stage-whispers at you.
"Alright, I want both of you to work on a batch of souls to begin with, to give me an idea of what to expect," you say, already thinking back and going through your memory of the souls within your possession. Perfect recall is once again helping you out massively- just being able to individually remember each and every person you ever ate makes this a lot easier. "Let's say fifty for each of you, just make them useful fighters somehow. Oh, and another fifty to work on together, try and combine your specialties if at all possible."
"Feh," the Dollmaker makes at the mention of cooperation, but otherwise he's glossing over it, it seems. "How 'bout tha schedule?"
"Just work at your own pace, both of you. This is just to test the waters and see what you can really do."
"Most certainly, oh yes," the Pit Lord creeps at you. Off to the side you can glimpse a small side cave, filled with various pods formed of more glowing biomatter of some sort, lots of shapes swimming through and protruding from it all over. "You shall have the most wonderful new servants yet, hehehehehe..."
"Yes, yes, anyway," you say, just having mentally consigned a hundred and fifty former people to horrible and painful mutilation far past what a living person could suffer due to simple issues of dying fairly quickly, "both of you go ahead and have a little fun. In the meantime, I'll go and pay a little visit to the Warden, see if I can't make sense of a little something."
As it would turn out, the Pit does have an entrance tunnel right next to the Dungeons, and so you're quick to go and meet the guardian of the perhaps no longer deepest and darkest part of your inner world.
"Prisoner... isss... thisss way..." The voice of the many-armed, thoroughly veiled creature is almost a balm on your soul after having interacted with the Pit Lord. Almost.
All the same, the one serial killer's soul you picked up while gorging yourself on the human army gathered before your damn fortress is currently still sitting in his isolation cell, complete darkness and lack of anything at all the only things keeping him company. It would seem he has gone almost a little mad, having spent a subjective amount of time in there you don't bother figuring out, but he cannot, in fact, hurt himself, so all he has left to do is sit in the middle of the room and whisper to himself over and over again, promising everything from brutally raping your corpse to doing anything, even being a 'good boy', if someone lets him out.
He seems to be energetic still. Just a little loopy, with how he's switching between subjects at a rapid pace.
However, that is not why you have come to see him through the one-way wall the Warden has shown you to. Indeed, with a bit of concentration and squinting your eyes just so, you have found you can actually read the writing on his forehead, the actual reason for him having been separated from all your other souls.
'Property of Bhar'resh Ignos Stratus, if found please return'. Knowing what you now do about how demons work, the name is both a name and an address, supernaturally speaking, a way to get into contact with a certain demon. The one in question, it would seem, has somehow staked a claim on this true evil soul, and so left behind a way to actually have it returned by anyone that can read what it says- in other words, anyone that can do so in the first place.
Huh. You weren't exactly expecting this to be what amounts to an owner's nametag, but there you go.
You are... Just going to leave that be, for the moment. While delving deeper into the whole demon thing is tempting, you have a few things to finish up on, and indeed end up spending the whole night doing.
Specifically, the setup you need to properly delve into the whole 'alchemy' thing. Creating potions and such is a thing quite possible with Thulian magic, as you well know by this point, but the locals' version is more a magical variety of chemistry compared to the way you work, simply seeking to achieve a particular attribute in the substances you're working with and then using those as the real stepping stones to 'bind' the desired reality warping into.
Just as an example, of course. There's more yet your alchemy can do, this is just the most immediate use coming to mind comparable with these kinds things.
So yes, your full variety of alchemy equipment takes a good while to assemble, though it seems Okita, at least, is pleased at watching you steadily transform an increasing amount of tools, some of which you make yourself by bending and adjusting bits of metal and other substances into the proper shapes, into finely tuned magical instruments each with a specific purpose.
Though the poking at them she does afterward is not appreciated. She has a hard time controlling her own strength sometimes and you'd hate for half your work to be broken while you aren't looking.
All in all, though, things are fairly calm and quiet for once, letting you just do your thing in one smooth go. It's pretty great, really.
Once you're done putting together your very own laboratory, you first of all go visit Rose and Sarah, the two lovely ladies in charge of organizing this kingdom you took over. Or, to be more precise, you go to make a small, little inquiry toward them.
The question: "How likely is it the war is going to flare up within the next few days?"
"Unlikely," the answer primly comes from Rose. "There's a lot of chaos after the last loss against the Border Fortress proving beyond doubt that retaking it will be a major difficulty in our enemies' war effort, and certain operations conducted behind enemy lines mean their people are in disarray."
"Having hundreds of trained operatives on call is awesome," Sarah says, raising a hand to receive a high five from the princess, a smacking sound ringing out when she complies. Looks like she's already socialized her.
"Good, good. I was thinking on ging on a big hunt for any particularly impressive monsters around, so-" You're cut off when Rose opens a drawer to the side of her desk, pulling out a stack of parchment bound into a book the width of which is about the length of your forearm.
If she wasn't a demon with some serious strength to her, she wouldn't even be able to pick it up, let alone dragging it through the air with one hand as she is.
"Here's a list with all notable recorded monsters and their habitats, it's notoriously unreliable and probably not up to date, but you can use it as a primer," she says as she holds it out for you. "Just make sure to return it either here or at the library when you're done."
"... Well that's convenient," you shrug as you receive the heavy tome.
Alchemy is really turning out to be... interesting. In order to produce a potion that lets its consumer heal a variety of wounds, a healing potion in other words, what you need is a particular fluid that you can work through. In order to get this fluid, you are mostly looking toward plants first and foremost, going with what you'd guess to be the most likely approach toward success.
And you find it, too, a series of tests and comparisons of prototype potions slowly but surely bringing you closer toward the correct substance. In the end, it turns out to be as simple and as complicated both as it possibly can.
Potatoes work the best. More specifically, starch. Lots of starch, with some sugar and diluted with water a little, can heal wounds and even regenerate fingers, as a clinical trial conducted on your souls within your palace proves.
Well, at least it didn't take all too long to figure out.
Once you are done thoroughly verifying your findings and noting the details on your results for later use (just in case you need notes for some reason, you mainly just want to gather a whole load of notes and similar to make your work look more professional for no purpose beyond doing so) and awake in the land of the living once more, you once again go out to find yourself an unused room somewhere in the expansive basement under the Demon Lord's Castle.
This time around, though, you aren't using your abominable magic to create a horrible undead crime against nature, for once. No, instead you're having a bunch of the servants bring you a series of implements you will need for your purpose, and indeed a worthy purpose it shall be, seeing as you are summoning up a real demon this time.
With Sarah and Okita on hand just in case shit goes sideways, of course. No point in foregoing a few basic, reliable safety precautions, after all.
So you're setting things up really quickly, the basic requirements for using your newly acquired ability to access literal capital-h Hell not actually all that complicated as long as you aren't trying to bring through anything too powerful. All you need is a little chalk, ink or similar to draw a complete, uninterrupted circle, then set up a few burning candles at five equidistant spots around it.
If you were to draw lines between them, you'd get a pentagram, but you don't bother with that. This much, in itself, is enough for what you're planning to start out with.
"That's all?" Sarah echoes the sentiment you're repressing. "It looks kind of... basic."
"We're not trying for anything advanced, so it better had," you say. "This will be more than enough to summon a really weak, simple demon. As I understand it, we'll be seeing what amounts to vermin or the very weakest of demons, could be humanoid or some kind of animal, nobody even cares to differentiate. This circle is meant to summon those kinds, nothing more and nothing less."
Okita nods from where she's sitting in the corner. Looks like she agrees.
Anyway, with everyone aware and ready, you get right to things, sharing one last nod with Sarah before you turn toward the ritual site. Showtime.
"I call upon the weakest of the vermin," you intone, channeling your magic just like you would when using any other spell, "to heed my words and come to me!"
The circle darkens in response, a strange persistent sound as though from nails scrabbling over stone ringing out from it. You wait for the span of a mortal heartbeat, two, and then, on the third one, elongated claws reach out of the suddenly pitch-black ground, grasping for the circle and the candles only to settle on the small amount of still visible space illuminated by the candlelight to hold onto and pull.
Within moments, a hunched, twisted figure has jumped up and into reality from wherever it came from, horned and clothed in little but a loincloth. Emaciated and either with the skull of some other creature sat over its face or its own skull growing out and covering a fleshy upper face, the long and strangely well-kept hair is the most feminine attribute on it despite the bare breasts.
"Skrrk?" The imp makes, about half your own size in height if it were to actually get up and stretch to its full size.
"See, told you," you say to the others with you as you eye the wretched little thing. "Now then, you-"
"Skee!" All of a sudden, the imp launches itself at you, only to be foiled by the circle you drew earlier, outstretched blackened claws pushed flat against an invisible barrier.
"And here we see the reason for the ritual claptrap," you continue without breaking stride. "Stronger demons could just smack right through this, but upon first being summoned, they're generally disproportionally heavily affected by completely immaterial boundaries like this. More advanced rituals also require more ritual claptrap surrounding the summoning in question, but this is the basics of what shall henceforth be referred to as demonology."
"And all of that aside, of course you randomly summoning something that could be nearly anything turns out to be a female imp," Sarah opines as she and Okita come to join you in observing the feral demon exploring its current prison. "... It's really just an animal, though."
Okita nods, carefully looking over the claws and the nipples pierced with small studs of some sort of metal you don't immediately recognize.
"Demons also, apparently, grow stronger by consuming or corrupting souls or something of the sort, with large individual differences in how they work," you explain what your automatically acquired knowledge of these otherworldly entities gives you. "This one's the bottom of the barrel, but it should still be about as strong as an adult Thulian demon or however we're making the distinction, physically speaking. No idea exactly how intelligent it is, though."
"Skreeh," the creature makes, helpfully.
"Return," you command, not liking the way Okita is eyeing this creature. She's a handful as it is, you won't let her get a pet until and unless she can prove she's capable of taking care of one in a way that doesn't involve large-scale collateral damage.
The imp is dragged back down to hell by a solid wave of darkness, swallowing the surprised creature up and leaving the ritual circle as it was before, only the candles having gone out from one moment to the next indicating anything unusual having gone on.
"Now then, next let us go ahead and summon ourselves a lawyer," you happily announce, walking over to get at the various paraphernalia you had brought in beforehand. Some empty parchment, several ink wells, things that would allow you to focus the ritual toward a lawyer... or a scribe, though hopefully the words you'll use will do the rest.
You're also putting another circle around the first one, using the same ink you're using for the summoning, with the various items and a few more candles strategically placed where required.
"I call upon the honey-tongued and vicious, to speak and represent," you chant once you're done, "to any that would barter and haggle and use sharpened words as weapons. Heed me now and appear, that you may find a bargain worthy!"
"... Is it just me, or are the chants getting worse the more powerful you become?" You shush Sarah, watching the ritual site for any signs of activity.
The sound of a door opening and closing comes out of thin air, followed by the unmistakable cadence of high heels stepping on hard ground repeatedly. Without any other change to be sensed, a woman appears inside the doubled ritual circle, largely the exact same as any other office worker n her suit, if with a very large and round pair of glasses perched on her nose.
Except, of course, for the pair of horns and wings set at her waist. Oh, and the spider web pattern on one of her pants' legs- a tad bit out of the usual dress code, but hey, you aren't exactly complaining.
"Greetings," she says, giving you a brief nod and ignoring everyone else in the room, contrary to the last being you summoned. "Might an attorney, advisor or general law practitioner have been requested?"
"Something to that end, yes," you drawl, watching the way her wings twitch just a little. "To be precise, I am looking to hire on the services of an expert on this general topic with an eye toward further deals to be made with various demons, both in person and via proxy. Would you be interested?"
"On retainer, then? Too bad you aren't in a desperate situation already, but needs must," she notes. "You would not believe how many desperate practitioners do not think to make arrangements ahead of time once they start summoning denizens of hell."
You know the look she is giving you, and can just about imagine what she would've liked to extract from you as a price for her services if she could- or perhaps you should expect things to be taken up a notch compared to how things went while you were younger.
Not trying to turn you into a sex slave then, and instead looking forward to stealing your soul to then use as a sex slave. You know the score now. "Well, if everyone got everything they wanted, the world would be a lot different," you say with a shrug. "Now then, what I want is clear. What would you like in exchange?"
"Oh, a few potential avenues could be explored in this regard..." The demon morphs before your eyes, horns straightening and bending upward as they darken; her skin changes color, along with her eyes, growing a deep green and black, while her outfit warps along with her massively growing breasts.
She gives you a winning smile, however, Sarah interferes before she can say anything further. "We have a bunch of souls to trade and a contract already drawn up, read it and weep."
Electricity dances in the air as the two women glare at each other for the fraction of a second, then the demon lawyer smiles and stretches out a hand, receiving the parchment used for this purpose. "Of course, though let me warn you I will need a few articles added to this contract before it can be considered... acceptable."
You exchange a glance with Okita. Both of you instinctively come to the same conclusion- this will be trouble...
The contract, such as it is, starts out being ten pages of Sarah trying to make sure no potential summoned demon can take advantage of you- a topic she seems to have been taking rather seriously, in fact, and the main motivation behind her taking part in this whole affair.
The fact that, as she telepathically grumbles at you, she's also a 'gold-digging skank not allowed into The Harem nor to be a casual lay' is only a bonus, apparently. You play with the thought of protesting the description of 'harem', as it isn't like you're trying to monopolize everyone's attention nor keeping them in a secluded building attended to only by eunuchs, but it doesn't seem worth the effort when Sarah is getting heated like this.
Seriously, she hasn't stopped smiling once since she started talking to your new apparent lawyer.
What started out as a 'simple' document detailing, in the roughest terms, the terms and obligations of what you need is quickly turning into a nightmare of legalese and complicated case structures that would see any mortal lawman break down screaming to try and comprehend. Luckily enough for you, you are anything but, and your perfect memory helps you make sense of what is going on as conditions and demands are exchanged at lightning speed.
To cut to the heart of the matter, your newly summoned lawyer will be obligated to provide you with legal counsel specifically aimed toward your very own best interest, which in turn is a term detailed in five pages of excruciating detail in a separate document pertaining to all these definitions to make clear what is meant with what exactly, whenever summoned. This means that, while you don't have to summon her to do so, you are entitled to making use of, as she calls it, 'business practice hailing from before the time a thing such as humanity existed'.
How accurate that one is you don't know and won't get into, but the shapeshifting woman sure can talk with the best of them when it comes down to it.
Furthermore, and more importantly, she will be obligated to advise you when dealing with any other demons, again in your best interest, and personally ensure that any arrangements made, particularly in writing, follow this same directive.
The whole thing is a lifetime deal, by the way, set to be going on for as long as you exist. Whether she's caught up to the fact that you don't have a set lifespan or any such crap you aren't sure, but the knowing smiles she's giving you leave it up in the air.
Also, as you are her client, again a term thoroughly defined in the additional documentation, she is giving you access to a set of names known to her left at her discretion, but required to fulfill certain subsets of requirements you refuse to actually read over.
That saves you nearly fifty pages of reading, mind you.
In exchange for this thorough and wide-reaching set of services provided to you, all you have to do is provide the demonic businesswoman with one true soul, to be rendered immediately after signing (the word 'immediate' has a new meaning after you saw the technical documentation Sarah wrote on it) and then avoid being killed for any length of time.
You did make sure that the pact remains in effect even if you do die, you just aren't allowed to stay dead. You do not care how much this reveals of your capabilities, you refuse to pay another true soul if someone manages to murder you once or twice.
Of course, you do have to ensure that several parts of this contract both Sarah and her opponent are writing and rewriting a dozen times over are corrected or struck out as is prudent. For one, Sarah is ferociously ensuring that none of the attempts to sneak in any 'physical companionship' on the demon's end (you knew she wanted to jump your pants) are allowed into the final agreement, whereas several tries to make the demon go fuck off and die are removed from the other end.
All couched into polite legalese, of course, but it's plainly obvious to you.
Then there's a few tries to indirectly sneak in regular offerings, something you're also watching out for (again, screw paying anything more than absolutely necessary) and if you end up throwing off your shirt to pose a little in the background while Sarah is negotiating, well, it's all in good fun anyway. Still, in the end, you get to go ahead and set down your signature, once Sarah has read the completed contract thrice just to be absolutely sure, obviously having made heavy use of her power all throughout the negotiations, right next to some swirling symbols you're fairly sure are the equivalent to one for demons.
They're reasonably close to the warping symbols you saw etched onto that one true soul's forehead, anyway.
"Perfect," the demonic woman says once the ink (created by an ink fairy just for this occasion, of course) is on the paper. "Once the payment has been made, you shall simply have to call my name thrice to receive my attention and use it with a simple circle to summon me in person, as outlined in Section 38-a Subsection Alpha Three. It is Kalinerva Eristralezz, or the shortened form is at any rate."
"On to that same payment, then," you say, knowing full well this demoness has been waiting for confirmation that you can actually tell true souls from the rest and reliably supply them all along. This whole show and dance was essentially just a way to confirm exactly how much of a goldmine you are for her.
Settling on one of the true souls you don't really need anymore, one of the Thulian soldiers you ate your way through and subsequently discovered the status of, and breathe it out, the silvery mist not getting a chance to coagulate and instead being sucked into a small device your new lawyer has produced out of a suit pocket.
It kind of resembles a coin, except with a bunch of mechanical bits and pieces ticking away inside. As soon as the soul is stored within, one side turns completely black, seeming to satisfy the demonic woman. "Very good. Now then, for brevity's sake, please feel free to refer to me as Kali."
She's back to her horned and winged business woman persona, rather than the one with the giant tits, so you're going to assume she's being professional at the moment. "Gabriel, and nice to meet you," you return. "I don't suppose you need any details on what I'm doing outside of your task whenever I call upon you, so if there would be anything else?"
"Just this," she says, holding up a hand to grasp a sudden flame bursting into being, soon revealing a book bound in leather. "This is a collection of all relevant names as requested in the contract, fulfilling that part of my side of the obligations. Do with it what you will."
The next few moments are like the summoning in reverse; the sound of a door being shut again is heard, followed by Kali simply... disappearing. From one moment to the next, she is gone, having taken the parchment and ink with her and leaving nothing but the dampened steps of high heels slowly fading out.
"I don't like her," Sarah grumps, but you just pat her head- she's had a lot of sex recently, she's just being grumpy for the sake of it now. She'll get over it.
Of course then Okita also steps up, silently pushing her head in your direction to demand her share of head pats, but that's simply par for the course by this point.
"She'll do her job, that's all we really need," you say as you keep up the constant ministrations. "Also, can you make sure to check up with Rose later, see if there's anything big that needs to be taken care of at some point? I'm planning on that whole monster hunt, but if something's important enough or on the way already anyway..."
"Got it," your sister agrees. "I'll also take a look through this thing, make sure there's no obvious traps or misdirections. I know how you get when you have a new toy."
You absolutely resemble that remark, but you still disagree. You're completely sensible, just a little excited sometimes when you get to play with something new.
Emily's powers as a vampire seem to be centered around fire, or at least the pretty much unique ones she got when you turned her distinct from any of your own do, not unlike the other powers that seem to be passed on to further vampires in every case of your spawn turning people going forward. While her parahuman origins mean she still can spew flame in the form of that para-napalm of hers, the increased control and effect of this power are by far beyond anything she was capable of in the past, and that's just the start.
Now, one useful thing about the way demon society works and the generally sparsely populated kingdom it presents is that there's a lot of space completely without any sapient life, aside from any monsters that may or may not be lurking around. The qualifications for sapience notwithstanding, however, there's more than enough woodland that nobody would really care about if someone were to, say, burn it to the ground.
If anything, doing so is actually just going to let it regrow even stronger a week down the line. Ecology being what it is on Thule.
Either way, there you are, having accompanied your currently latest spawn to test out her powers some. And, indeed, she's making a point of them actually being pretty intense.
"I've really been practicing with this, you know?" Emily asks as you eye the rough like of trees partially turned into charcoal, her fire breath having gone from covering the area in front of herself in sticky flames burning unusually hotly to a flexible, long-range set of artillery she just needs to open her mouth for.
Seriously, the fire almost has a physical force to it when she pushes it outward by this point, and it's both finely controlled and the heat about enough to boil a human being's insides to perfection within moments. It's honestly surprising just how much of an advantage she is getting out of the whole thing.
"It really shows," you nod at her earlier assertion. "How much control do you have?"
"It's kinda limited, actually," the girl you recruited off the street once upon a time admits. "It's much easier to let the fire go wild in a direction than to try and direct it more closely. I can smother it selectively, but that's got a whole host of its own issues, too."
"I see. And about the transformation?" In response to your question, Emily tenses up, balling her fists a little as she suppresses the itching sensation you know all too well, being quite typical for some of your own transformations back before you really wore them in.
Her hair begins to flicker with a thin sheen of red, at first. Then her clothes. Then her skin. Then a wave of heat emanates from from where the girl is standing, her flesh and blood transitioning into naught of pure heat and fire in the approximate shape of how she usually looks.
"Some people just want to see the world burn," she grins, her voice not at all human or, indeed, reminiscent of her normal one. All flickering fire and burning air, rather than anything else, and just by standing still Emily is producing a small racket in general. "Hard to keep shape like this, though."
"I mean, hey, don't force yourself on my account," you shrug. In short order Emily is reduced to a small inferno licking at the nearby trees, a thorough conflagration soon emitting from your location.
"Yes, yes, this is much better," the fire whispers to you. "It feels nice to just burn through everything around. Plants are a bit wet, though."
"Mhm, and you can just regenerate by absorbing any of the fire nearby?" You ask, drawing comparisons to some of your own rather more advanced powers.
"Yes."
"That's good. Though, uh, you probably should try and keep this in check, or at least go after any of the nearby monsters while you're at it," you caution half-heartedly. "Just to make sure none of them escape and become a problem later on."
"Just goblins and forest critters," the merrily burning forest fire says. You're pretty sure Emily isn't actually that big of a part of it- most of it is just the fire she's made of spreading naturally beyond herself. "Half an hour and I can reduce them all to ashes."
"Well, have fun in that case," you shrug. "If you need any help with anything, I'll be right here."
And in the meantime... Well, demons have these funny little marshmallow equivalents commonly eaten around campfires. It's about high time you tried some of the stuff, and you just so happened to bring a small sack filled with it...
Once you're back at the castle, Emily having had her fun and yourself having had a taste of these funny little snacks (they aren't quite the same as marshmallows, but surprisingly close, just a little tougher to chew and with a weird aftertaste), you soon rejoin Sarah who by this point has completed a quick round of meeting and working with Rose to ensure the realm is running more or less as it is supposed to be.
It's always kind of a matter of just how badly things are going wrong at any given time and judging what needs to be fixed versus what will take care of itself at this level of control, and nobody knows this better than Rose, the young woman having been in this position for... a while now.
Simply put, the overall situation is under control at the moment, as a quick telepathic conference with both of the confirmed. No incoming armies, thanks to certain sabotage operations, no nascent rebellions, no hidden plots (that anyone can ascertain) going on that need thwarting.
Well, kind of on that last point. Sarah, it seems, has already successfully taken care of a certain hero that seems to have been just a little too close to Aisha in functionality, but the guy's work remains in places. Of course it's already being taken care of, but that doesn't make it easy to root out a dozen little conspiracies and seemingly innocuous arrangements meant to weaken your position step by step.
Seriously, he had to have been going at it since shortly after you were summoned judging by what was going on without anyone the wiser by the time you managed to stumble onto things.
Simply put, while you're gallivanting around the countryside and running after whatever horrible monsters you can find, it would be nice if you could take care of a few odds and ends out there, cutting down on work for the already very much strained network of Rose's agents. Which, really, isn't much- just making sure a few people know that they are not, in fact, working on secret orders from you nor do they stand to make any kind of profit by doing as someone told them.
Grunt work, but you don't mind a few small detours along your way. And if it frees up capacities for more important stuff, then sure, why not?
That still does leave you having to figure out the route you will be taking, of course, but now you have a few general ideas for destinations to chain together in a rough circuit around the countryside. It honestly wouldn't even be a possibility to just up and leave to hunt monsters if it weren't for the mobility your powers afford you in the form of your bone carriage, but as it is, you may as well.
Now if only this list of notable monsters Rose got you wasn't handwritten by a couple dozen people that had to have learned to write with both hands tied behind their backs...
Your experiments with healing potions do, of course, continue in the waking world just fine, once you've identified an alternative source of starch and sugar- as it turns out, potatoes are actually a thing even in this dimension, for one.
Now, sourcing a series of more or less significant wounds isn't difficult; even without you just mutilating a couple of prisoners to work on them, demons have a tendency to just patch up and ignore wounds that should by all rights kill or cripple any living being, making this part of the testing process pretty simple.
Now then, the basics are already established, but you're sure there have to be ways to let your potions heal even worse than lost fingers and various miscellaneous wounds. So, what do you have to do?
As it turns out after just a few hours of trial and error with your little potion brewery, adding a few herbs you work through methodically doesn't do much... But it does let you influence the taste of the completed potion, leading to a brief period of searching for the closest to a strawberry this dimension has to offer and subsequent improvement in potion quality by a couple hundred percent, subjectively speaking.
More importantly for the actual function, however, is the fact you've figured out you needed to add a little more sugar relative to the starch, and not let the solution mix all the way during production, instead letting it sit as it is to, contrary to what you'd expect, slowly turn into a homogeneous fluid without any further interference.
The new version can regrow entire hands in one go, though exactly how the stuff works remains unknown for the time being.
Actually making use of your potion equipment, you quickly throw together a basic batch of healing potions, not even bothering with your new, superior recipe; what you want is just some of the basic stuff to have on hand and combine with stimpacks as required where the little superscience curatives fail to have any further effect.
The process of making the stuff is simple, for all that it takes a while, and the simple fact of creating your own magical healing potions is enough to have you suppress a couple of silly giggles on the way. Still, there you are, some potentially life-saving small bottles of colored liquid- in red, of course, thanks to the additives you mixed in for the sake of taste.
Securely storing the stuff inside your shadow, to be fished out whenever you may need it, you turn toward the next part of your daily dose of activity.
Time to see about what else you can do with demons beyond summoning them to wherever you are.
If there is one thing to be said about your magic, it is that it makes everything better in so many ways the belie any attempt to enumerate them whenever it is applicable to what you're doing... And as it just so happens, you've discovered a way to let it apply to just about whatever t is you're doing.
One of the mysterious schools of magic you have gained access to in your latest brief stint as a caterpillar over in Columbia is one revolving around the general theme of illusions, whether by causing targeted individuals to pretty much hallucinate what you want them to see, feel, hear or whatever or by actually creating illusions in reality, mirages and sounds that shouldn't exist where they do.
You don't have much of an investment into it as of yet, of course, owed to its nature of being, well, new in your arsenal, but even so you have already found great joy in abusing one particular trick it allows you to perform. That is, using reality itself as a music player.
It's genuinely as simple as chanting a short spell and you can have any music you know play in the background while you work. You've never been much of a music lover or anything, but it does help with performing monotonous or simple tasks, bringing a bit of pep into them.
You never really considered adding a way to play music into your rather more regular inventions, mostly because you'd have to actually program it into them somehow to begin with and you refuse to bother with that amount of work, but having this sound-based illusion thing going on in the background is remarkably easy and simple, and even immensely useful in terms of shutting down advanced electronics, you'd reckon.
When you just want the music, you can define the target parameters so it comes from an empty spot in the air, resulting in the sound just coming out as normal, but you can also target a general area to have the sound behave rather unlike how it should normally, giving a very much constant volume over the entire area it is applied to and radiating from it as it then would normally.
And, incidentally, scramble advanced devices. Depending on the situation at hand, it may be just as good as your freezing spell to shut them down, and could serve as a time-limited, but useful and even thematic way to deny electronics to your enemies.
Too bad actually increasing the range of its core effect is a bitch and a half to do, which is why you gave up on it rather quickly. Still a great way combine the useful with the pleasant, as it were.
But back to what you're doing- with your preparations in order, everything you wanted to get done squared away just fine, you go ahead and call upon the latest addition to the core competences of your team, as you like to call it. "Kalinerva Eristralezz, Kalinerva Eristralezz, Kalinerva Eristralezz!"
You can almost feel the attention of your demonic advocate fall upon the little ritual room you used for your previous exploits, though it seems she doesn't or can't do anything more than that. Well, it's your first time doing something like this, so you'll just go on ahead and verbalize your intent.
"I am planning to summon a demon whose name was written on a particular soul I acquired relatively recently, and wished to ask if you knew of one Bhar'resh Ignos Stratus or, failing this, had any advice on dealing with them," you announce.
You can feel the demonic lawyer do something, a vague and indescribable sense of agreement and urging creeping up on you. Good enough for your purposes, really.
It takes you a couple of minutes to resummon Kali, the required ritual being fairly straightforward and simple with the use of her name, and soon enough the obviously inhuman woman clad in her business suit is standing before you.
"Greetings, contractor Gabriel," she begins with a polite nod. "Let us get straight to business. The demon you are intending to call upon is unknown to me in person, but the name indicates a powerful specimen of a canine species- a barghest, to be exact. Several of their kinds tend to follow a rigid naming scheme."
That already tells you more than you knew on the topic previously. "I see," you tell her. "I don't suppose you have any particular suggestions for what to do with this situation at hand?"
"Simply summon them first, then we shall see," the hellish lawyer smiles. "Their kind tend to be upholding of ritual and customs, so even if it is a particularly powerful one, it is unlikely for it to use force to get what it wants unless it sees no other way to do so. A bargain is likely to succeed."
The summoning for this new demon, one of unknown power and abilities beyond the basics of what you can get about barghests in general from Kali, is deceptively simple and easy; all you'd really need, in theory, is the name and a single, simple circle to make it happen, no further shenanigans required.
Of course you do add a third circle around the two you already had on hand, drawn in blood this time around, and put in a few more candles in strategic spots to make the whole thing as binding as you can without drawing upon additional resources. A bit of incense on top, and voila, there you are, a perfectly usable ritual site that hopefully will hold against the creature of hell of indeterminate strength you are intending to call upon.
It does help you're reasonably confident you can, at worst, defeat whatever comes out with the help of Okita, Sarah and Emily, the three other vampires in this dimension having been relocated to your summoning room just in case you need to kill whatever you're calling in with fire.
Or, you know, immense amounts of violence. Whichever it ends up being.
Speaking of the powers a barghest is expected to possess, though, you do get a rough idea of traditional things to expect when dealing with them. They generally are large, black dogs, but can shapeshift into various animals, particularly woodland critters and people, though they cannot possess a human or human-like head, for some reason. Furthermore, they're capable of bringing bad luck particularly with the end result of causing death in targeted persons, manipulate nature and the elements to some extent and, of course, they're just very physically strong and dangerous monster dogs with magical teeth and claws.
Also, human levels of intellect, naturally. You kind of expected that much.
"I call upon thee, Bhar'resh Ignos Stratus," you chant once the time has come to try and see what happens, "so hear thy name in this place and heed my summons!"
At first, nothing much happens. A second ticks by as you wait for the demon to respond. A second moment passes, and you have just enough time to realize that all sound from outside the summoning chamber has ceased when the changes set it.
The light dims. The scent of old, rotting plant matter drifts into your nostrils. A new source of light, inconceivable and far-off like a moon on the night sky, begins to shine down on you and your gathered vampires, and for just a moment you feel as though you're standing in an old, ancient forest, the smell of rot and now, blood, cloyingly thick in the air.
It is the site of slaughter, over and over again. It is madness, it is feral nature, and it is so very large.
The demon has arrived, the skull-headed hound bathed in light from above and covered in blood from below.
Or maybe it's just a trick of the light, a visual illusion cast some some red glow. Either way, there you are.
"Bhar'resh Ignos Stratus has arrived," it speaks, voice the hissing of serpents and growling of wolves. "Why has it been called?"
Kali clears her throat, seemingly completely undaunted by the circumstances. "Greetings. I am the advocate of your summoner," she explains her position. "My client has found a soul that bears your sigil, and thus sought to contact you to barter for its safe return into your keeping."
"The smell of blood is thick on that one," the barghest demon hisses. "Many souls pass through this one's maws."
"I'd sure hope so, with how many mortals I go through on a regular basis," you joke, knowing that it's on you to prove you have something this demon wants. Breathing the human soul in question out, the shifting symbols engraved on his forehead become clear for all to see, now visibly glowing with a black shine in response to the proximity to their apparent creator.
"This one agrees, this is this one's property," the wolf? Hound? Wolfhound? Canine demon thingy confirms in a guttural muttering. It is just then that it fully steps forth into reality, the mildly hallucinated surroundings fading out just a little bit, being pushed down to lurk just under the surface now.
"Fuck you! I ain't no one's-" You shut the soul up with a casual mental command.
Some people just never learn, even after death.
"Yes, this one was greatly amusing to play with," Bhar'resh Ignos Stratus, to use the full name just in case, reminisces, skull-covered head twisting just a little bit. "Bartered for another life in exchange for its soul. Never thought on the price."
"Good, that means we got everything right," Kali says, bringing you back on topic. Probably a good idea, too- you aren't exactly awestruck by this thing's power, but if you were to fight it, you'd definitely need to use one of your big transformations to stand a chance, you think. "Now as for the price of returning this wretched little thing to its proper owner..."
The hound demon snorts in what you choose to interpret as mild laughter. "Make your offer, little devil. This one knows your kind."
And just like that, the haggling has begun.
Negotiations are, well, not as long as you would've expected, but then it isn't like what you want is anything particularly out there. Really, a true soul, and one of particular interest to the demon you're selling to, in exchange for a fairly powerful demon's essence, that being its soul not forming a body for itself and instead being left in its raw, more malleable state, is a cinch!
Of course the kind of demon you're talking about essentially enslaving and binding to an object indefinitely is the kind that you wouldn't normally ever really be able to access, at all, simply due to its power and age, but hey, if this guy wants this soul, you are getting something nice out of it.
In the end, an unruly subordinate is getting turned into something more useful until such a time you set it free through either releasing it or whatever you use the essence on being broken, the soul that turns out to have been a part of a minor soul laundering operation (like money laundering, just done infernally and with the goal of turning morally extreme people into more worthwhile true souls) is bought back and everyone leaves happy with what they get, your part of the deal sealed into another of those coinlike devices and the soul of a canine demon presented in the form of a fist-sized, dark red marble.
"Use it however that one wishes," Bhar'resh whispers as it produces the solidified essence, rolling it over toward you with a paw. "Perhaps a century or two will teach it obedience."
Hey, it turns out you and the giant dog demon have a lot in common. Who'd've thought? Either way here you are, a sealed demon of significant power in hand.
Turns out it's as easy as that, now that you have a demonic attorney to ensure that you get what you want. Note to self, always have her do any legal work that pops up, as per the original contract; it's just too useful to have someone around that does this kind of thing in your stead.
You hired her, may as well get to use her, is all.
Lost: Soul #2345
Gained: Greater Barghest Essence
Not all potions are as easy to intuit as the healing ones, of course, much as you would like to just randomly throw some ingredients together and receive something usable after a boiling them.
At the moment you're mainly just experimenting with various combinations, carefully working your way through batches of slightly modified recipes until you can make sense of what results you get- it isn't terribly helpful to have something that can turn the tongues or skin of drinkers various colors or cause an intense itch, for example, whereas a few minor strength increases lasting for a couple of seconds at least shows promise for the future.
Though, note to self, investigate the possibility for the idea of prank articles and party gags in the area of alchemy at some point. Might actually be a huge hit at teenage orgies or something.
Anyway, filtering out the nonsense takes a good while before you come to the conclusion that refined sugar, once again, seems to be the key to this mixture, whereas the rest of the potential recipe you're after here remains beyond you for the moment. Next time you'll just make Yoshi go through the souls you volunteered for these experiments and compare their symptoms to the mixtures they drank.
The petty harassment of making him talk to people shall serve to uplift your mood excellently.
"Hey Okita, what kinds of monsters did you defeat back when you were a hero, actually?" The question itself is perfectly innocent, asked almost on a whim and mostly with thoughts toward the upcoming plans for that little monster hunt of yours. Its effects... Well.
Okita's first reaction is to stop what she is doing (including breathing) as she tilts her head, obviously thinking deeply. Without a word, she runs off using her powers to move faster than a human eye would be able to follow- on the walls, that is.
Her hereditary power line is just complete bullshit, by the way. You know for a fact that she doesn't have any of the powers that should let her do it; she's just physically running on the wall without any supernatural assistance beyond her physical capabilities.
When you see her next, not having seen any particular reason to hurry after her, Okita has arranged for several sheets of parchment and is busily writing down a lengthy, lengthy list.
"Oh, I guess that makes sense," you say as you approach, the former heroine's room being just secluded enough from the rest of the castle's inhabited quarters that it's unlikely either of you will be bothered anytime soon. "So you're writing them all down?"
"Mhm," the first summoned person other than yourself or Sarah you ever saw nods, a serious look on her face. "Just realized I could forget them. Power means I have to know this."
Wait, you know what she's referring to. Her hero power, the one that makes her more and more powerful against specific enemy types the more of them she's defeated in the past. "Does that mean you just kept count in your head before I turned you?"
"Mm," she nods again. "Good memory."
... More and more, you are coming to the conclusion Okita was some kind of superhuman all the way back to her birth world. You glance over that list of hers- the exact number of all reptilian monsters she's ever killed, with a breakdown by species next to it, and the same for all mammals and avians and any other category she can think of.
There are literally thousands of entries. "Just how many did you kill after being summoned?"
Okita counts off on the fingers of her hands for a moment, the fountain pen she's using to write stuck between a forefinger and thumb. "Twenty thousand one hundred and eighteen by last count," she proudly exclaims (you can tell by the small bounce she's making with her upper body). "More with demons and humans. And bugs."
Okay, time to change the topic really quickly. "What kinds of monsters would you say are the most difficult to fight with all your experience?"
"Flyers," she says without a second thought. "Stupid and slow. Jumping is hard and they dodge."
Translation: Fighting against flying monsters is less fun because they're out of her reach and just jumping up at them doesn't succeed often enough. And with that in mind...
"Did you know I've got a power that lets me float in the air and even change direction by jumping off of nothing?" You begin your sales pitch. "It's actually pretty neat and I've been trying to include it in my combat style more often."
Immediately Okita's full attention is on you, one hand going for the giant sword she always keeps on her (the original one she had made of adamantite). "Show."
This strategy talk session will be just a little more in-depth than you would've expected...
Everyone is there gathered on the small selection of chairs, check. The sweets fairies are staying off to the side without causing mischief, check. Time for action.
"Hello, dear summoned heroes!" You burst onto the scene, gesturing grandly to sell the act. "I have brought you here today to present to you my newest diabolical plan!"
Everyone is stunned into silence, perfect. You wait a couple of seconds, one, two aaand...
"Bwahahahahahaaah!" Matsui Michi, the Spear Heroine, bursts out in laughter, pointing at you. "What's with that mask! And that getup! Hahahaha!"
Her feet are kicking wildly as she howls with laughter. You'll call that mission success. "Tada wanted me to try dressing up like some weird anime villain and I went along with it," you shrug as you throw the mask off to the side, instead letting your wide, black cape swish out behind you. Matsui is giving the shortest heroine in the room a thumbs up, Tada herself in turn just looking smug.
Meanwhile, Nakatani is just looking confused and Yamamoto is quietly chuckling, whereas Arakawa is silently glowering in your direction. Alright, enough with the comedic posing.
"But seriously, I actually did call all of you here for a reason," you continue in a more normal tone of voice. "Simply put, I'm planning on going out to take care of a few errands around the kingdom now that the war is going back into a slow phase and hunting a few monsters while I'm at it, so I wanted to invite all of you to get out of the castle and come along if you want."
"Will there be sweets?" Nakatani asks, clearly keeping her head in the game.
"I'll be producing as many sweets fairies as necessary," you state and, with a mental signal, cause a minor flood of the things to come out and swarm all over the heroes.
The tall, unassuming girl is the first to immediately capitulate. "Okay. If we don't have to fight people, then... Okay."
And she's already snatched an armful of the soft little things to hold them against her chest. She's clearly satisfied as it is.
"Sure, nobody can complain if we're fighting monsters," Yamamoto shrugs, clearly having put his thoughts in order by this point. "Also, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to test that laser rifle out."
It's not a laser anymore and you will make sure everyone knows as much by the time the trip is done.
Tada, of course, silently nods at you, causing Matsui to in turn jump up and down on her seat. "Yeah, yeah, the weapons trio is back in action! Wohoo!"
That just leaves Arakawa, who is sitting there with crossed arms. Everyone looks or at least glances her way, causing her to in turn look away from everyone. "... I bet I'll defeat more monsters than you," she finally waspishly states.
"Oh, you won't have to contend with me all that much, I'm just out for any really unique or strong ones," you chuckle at just how obstinate the girl can be. "But if you want to make it a race, I'm sure Emily and Okita won't mind."
With participation cleared up and most preparations just about done, all that remains for you now is to determine where, exactly, you will be going to hunt... Or rather, what exactly, given the territorial nature of most stronger monsters. Naturally, this also affects what kind of fight you have to look forward to, though you're fairly confident most of the things on your list of targets should be quite murderable with the means at your disposal.
Now then, you are currently mostly fine in terms of undead in action, as a quick look through the eyes of said undead confirms, but that doesn't mean you want to aim for the really big and powerful monsters any less, as compared to the ones described as notable in the big book Rose gave you due to their numbers, reproductive capability, special abilities that make them hard to deal with in the particular circumstances they are most often encountered within or similar.
Reason one, if you do want to make or replace a couple of undead, having a large, powerful monster's corpse on hand is obviously preferable. Number two, their souls- you can overlay with them or summon them as the situation demands, but both of those abilities have a limited capacity for the number of souls you can channel at any time time, meaning individually powerful ones just work intrinsically better for them.
With that in mind, you've made a careful selection of the monsters available to you within a short travel distance while you went on to run a couple errands; your default state these day,s it seems. Ah well, if it helps Sarah, you're all for it, and getting things set up to let you run Last Embrace through a nice little upgrade in the near future certainly is the furthest from wasted effort you could get.
"Alright everyone, come right on in!" You say as you lead everyone into the bone carriage, the best equivalent to a garage you've inadvertently turned one of the more easily accessible underground parts of the castle into now quiet after the mild buzz of activity as the servants went through your favored vehicle, cleaning and restocking it with everything you may need. "Don't mind the ominous look, I just made it out of bone because it was the easiest to work with."
"Wow, not even pretending it was some tasteless magical carriage left behind by some previous demon lord, huh?" Tada drily retorts as she follows your lead, the rest of the heroes slowly filtering aboard behind her.
"What can I say, I'm a man of many talents," you drawl, closing up behind them and your vampires, Okita and Emily already looking forward to fighting something again. "Now then, off we go to-"
"-the desert regions south of the capital," Sarah completes, your sister having sneaked aboard ahead of everyone else.
You blink, shrug, and move right along. "Exactly. They have these giant scorpions that grow magical crystals and ores all over their bodies as natural weapons, it'll be great."
"Uhh... How big are we talking exactly?" Matsui asks, both hands already creeping toward Tada. "Me and bugs are a No Bueno combination."
"They're about human size in height when you don't count the tail, so considering the body builds and material weights involved, they should weigh a couple tons each," you say as you input the target direction into the bone carriage telepathically, wasting no time in getting everything moving.
"Nuoooh! Micchaaaan, save me from the evil giant spider bug monsters!"
"They're scorpions not spiders, now get off me!"
And just like that, the travel time chaos begins.
The journey south is fairly quiet, you guess, relative to exactly how much you expected to have to deal with; the carriage you're riding continues to eat through the distance between you and your destination, even as the colorful bunch inside of it wastes some time.
As it happens, everyone seems to be all up for watching anime again, having heard of your ability to play some of it on a summonable screen from the ones that watched it with you last time you did decide to go for it, and so a good chunk of your undead's passengers are gathered viewing what appears to be some big franchise back in their world: Pokemon, a story about one idiot or another chasing after some tameable monsters and playing with their balls.
You do not care this description brings resentment upon you, you shall stand by it.
Incidentally, Yoshi's analysis and conversion of memories relating to the anime (he's gotten up to the third season of this one in particular so far) is, while certainly spirited and made with lots of care and attention to detail, not quite perfect, as Okita points out shortly; apparently, she has perfectly memorized the entire first season by watching it a couple dozen times while doing homework.
The whole affair is at least some kind of awkward as everyone gets to know this little tidbit and also see Yoshi again, the soul quickly summoned at Okita's demand to let her personally show him every single mistake he made in the re-rendering process in spite of his repeated insistence that he isn't trying to be perfect in the first place, the basis of what he had to work off of and his calls for artistic freedom applying to this side project of his.
Okita doesn't care.
One thing leads to another and you soon find yourself comparing the heroes' home dimension to Earth bet based on what observations you can make; it honestly seems like it's kind of a clone of Earth Aleph with a couple of differences mixed in. For one, it seems it isn't anything unusual to see a few more varying hair colors in it, as Arakawa insists she's a natural redhead at your teasing, and there's some kind of climate change thing going on due to environmental pollution, y'know, those problems people have when they aren't too preoccupied with a global death spiral caused by invincible monsters wiping out a new city every couple of months to make more problems for themselves.
Cape culture on Earth Bet, then, seems to be almost entirely beyond an Earth that doesn't have any known parahumans running around, meaning that governmental systems aren't kind of breaking down around people's ears over there. Oh, and Japan isn't a third world country over there, too.
Of course the matter of naming conventions also does come up, leading to you explaining how parallel dimensions are common knowledge on Bet and Aleph both. A few ideas for a name for this fourth Earth you have found indirectly this time (counting Earth Fallout, which is its own topic) are bandied about as well, of course, though you don't exactly expect it to become a prevalent topic anytime soon.
Anyway, regardless of the (numerous) protestations against the name of Planet Okitata you provisionally decide to use at Emily's suggestion (the girl herself is just quietly looking smug about it, so the joke's certainly alright with you), you're quickly moving across the landscape, the bone carriage simply mowing through the majority of obstacles, from trees to goblins and the odd bugbear, only stopping here and there to let you take a quick round trip through a couple of towns and cities on the route you've chosen.
Once there, you mainly just have a quick talk with particular people, sometimes smashing their faces in (a perfectly acceptable thing to do in demon society) and get back to the carriage, rarely taking longer than, what, twenty minutes in total? It's really just some side business to take care of on the way.
And what a way it is, too. The demon kingdom does offer a wide variety of sights and more or less natural spectacles for anyone that dares to come find them, going from wood- and grassland to a thin border between marshlands and the rest of the place, all the way to the increasingly dry regions you're steadily moving toward, all filled with all sorts of magical landscapes and monsters in their natural habitat.
Heck, you've seen more rainbows in the last five hours than you have in your whole life before, you think. Unlife included, for that matter.
Still, eventually things come to a head, by which you mean the wheels and spine-limbs of the carriage are treading upon sand instead of ground, heavily indicating you're getting close to your objective. Only question now is exactly how you shall proceed to actually find and drain the souls of those giant crystal scorpions, you suppose. After all, while you shouldn't have any particular trouble with finding them, you do still have three other vampires and a good handful of heroes to keep entertained and throw against them, too.
"Okay everyone, the scorpions live in this general area in front of us," you say to the assembled group once everyone has disembarked, gesturing toward the rocky and sand-filled terrain in front of you, "so feel free to go out and you probably can't miss them."
"... Are we really doing this at night?" Yamamoto asks, the so-called Archer Hero carefully handling the ion rifle you gave him to combine with his power.
"Hey, better than in the day. It's getting insanely hot out here once the sun's shining a little," you mention. "Oh, also, return to this exact place once you're done, I'll have the carriage stay here and guard it. If there's any trouble, just throw someone a thought and make sure you keep track of each other, okay?"
"Yes, dad," Emily grouches, and her voice serves as the signal to pretty much have everyone get going. You do take a quick look around, of course, just to ensure everything is going alright.
For one, things do certainly seem quite fine for Matsui. "The weapons trio is back in action together!" With an arm around each of her friends, Tada's neck and Nakatani's waist respectively, she immediately begins to drag them off.
"C'mon, you don't have to pull that hard," the tallest of the three says, but you can see her heart isn't really in it.
Which then in turn just leaves... "Hey, uh, anyone want to come with me to test this thing out?" Yamamoto asks, his new weapon obviously the one thing in his mind.
Arakawa is glaring in your direction. "Just you wait!"
And lastly, Sarah, Emily and Okita are gathering around you. This is a little...
Nakatani Kazue watched, bemused, as her friends exaggerated their usual routine half to keep her head in the game and half out of happiness she was getting out of her funk, as she liked to call it- certainly better than other things she could have called this persistent hesitance to do much of anything in her life.
Today was the first day she would be taking up her sword again after... that time, and she wasn't really sure she should, but there was no time to doubt herself. So what if she'd been cut down a few... dozen... times, back in the fight against the Old Demon Lord? Yeah, dying sucked, it was painful and scary and each time was a risk because it wasn't guaranteed Eiko-sensei would be able to bring her back, but there she was, still alive, after they'd won.
Now she only had to make herself believe it. Easier said than done, but she refused to keep on moping forever.
"Okay, based on what we know, they should be living under the sand and only come out when they sense prey, so we'd best-" Mizuki-chan's planning was interrupted by Michi-chan bumping into her, catching the shortest girl present in a hug.
"Oh, who cares about any of that boring stuff, I can finally cwuggle my cwute Micchaaan!"
Nakatani sighed as she watched her friends roll across the sand, already perfectly aware of how this would end.
"Get off me! Not out in the open!"
"So inside I caaan? Yaaay!"
"Not if you keep this up, you focken skank!" Aah, Mizuki-chan's accent was coming out. It'd been a long time since she'd heard it.
"Aaah~, so rough~!"
Nakatani knelt down, feeling the ground. Yep, it was already coming.
In a smooth motion, the Sword Heroine stepped forth, one hand drawing the blade that'd given her her title, and kicked both of her best friends to the side with considerable force, once more earning herself the much more important title of Tsukkomi Queen as they flew in different directions and left her to retreat with a backwards somersault, greeting the monster surfacing at the exact place both Mizuki-chan and Michi-chan had been moments prior with a thrust right into the joint of its right claw, just barely piercing through and taking the extremity off with a quick twist.
The torque of her strike let her fling herself out of the way of the retaliatory tail strike as the thing screeched aloud.
Taking a stance in the loose sand, Nakatani let her head twitch just a little, getting her hair out of the way. "Come."
The creature let out a long hiss and did just that, foolishly rushing at her and attempting to get its tail into the right position. She, however, simply stepped right toward it, the tip of her sword pushed upward with both hands to divert a bright glow, an obvious magical attack coming from the monster's crystalline extensions, and just like that she was perfectly positioned in turn.
"OoooooOOORAAAAAH!" Nakatani put all of her being behind her two-handed downward slash, activating everything her power gave her and cleaving straight through the hard, rocky shell of the fiend before her. Its head was split in two- as were the crystals on its back. And said back, and the rest of its body, together with the tail.
Almost quietly, the heavy halves of the creature fell apart. And by this point, her friends had managed to return from the dunes Nakatani had kicked them into, too.
"NACCHAAAAN!" Of course, Michi-chan was her usual overbearing self, but for once Nakatani couldn't allow her to climb up on her like a monkey, so she greeted her with a palm to the face instead.
"Good job," Mizuki-chan said, resting her naginata across one shoulder. The Sword Hero knew that if she'd needed it at any time, her short friend would've immediately stepped in, no matter how far away, and the quiet moment of understanding between them said as much.
That said, the fight wasn't over yet. "Eyes open, both of you, there's more of them coming," Nakatani said, already feeling the familiar rush of battle coming on. Now that she'd gotten an idea, she could feel the vibrations of the ground easily just by standing still, thanks to her power. "Whoever kills the least doesn't get any sweets tonight, their share goes to the other two."
Michi-chan's grin was big enough to swallow half a sand dune... again, a few grains of sand were still stuck to her face. "Aaalrighty nighty! We're back in business baby!"
She really didn't have to exaggerate it like that.
Okita Yumi was Okita Yumi. More importantly, she was the Okita.
It felt weird to fight together with the others again after so long (relative time), but she could deal. Now if only there was a way to draw out the thingies so she could bring them to the Gabriel and make them be turned into Cuties.
Stupid desert. She didn't mind the sand, but there was nothing there to fight. Until there was.
"Why do I have to babysit the two of you, this is so stupid..." The sword dancer one was talking, but it was pointless talk. Almost as pointless was the shooty one's attempt to talk to her in turn.
"Come on, it isn't that bad, and Yumi-san is a very reliable vanguard."
"Reliably getting herself killed you mean, you remember how..."
Okita stopped listening. There was no point in engaging pointless chatter, the only thing that came out of it were more pointless words.
Just like back in Japan, when she kept on ignoring all the useless things all the people were saying, whether at school or at home. All she needed to do for that was to be present and sometimes nod or stuff. Simple, but boring.
Aah, why wasn't there anything? She didn't even mind what monsters came out, Okita just wanted to fight something already. Being near so many pointless things was boring her at an accelerated rate.
Right, idea. Turning around, Okita grabbed the sword dance-y one and eyed the path before here. Where should she...
"Hey, what're you doing? Let go of m-eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Okita threw her around where she'd estimate the best place for an ambush to be and crouched down, using her powers to follow along as quickly as she could.
"Hey, wait, what're you-" The shoot-y one was still slow on the uptake.
It was alright. the dance-y one could just dodge the ground, or if she couldn't for some reason it was all sand and wouldn't hurt her too much through the aura.
And just like that, the Okita discovered the most optimal way of finding the hard cuties. By throwing her teammate ahead as bait and making the other one shoot the monster that came out, or else cutting it apart herself. She was truly a master tactician.
"Are you sure it's alright to just send them off like that?" Emily asks, her head tilting a little as the fiery girl readies the custom flamethrower you made for her.
"Oh, don't worry, it'll be fine," you wave her off. "Okita's surprisingly serious when it comes to taking care of others. Also, another one incoming."
You step back as yet another crystal scorpion attempts to ambush you, only to be met with a direct swathe of freshly salivated napalm right out of Emily's weapon.
Turns out, fire doesn't really need to directly burn you when it can burn hot enough to boil you through whatever thick natural armor you have going, as this specimen quickly finds out; normally, they're fairly heat resistant as a matter of course, but there's a reason they burrow under the sand during the day rather than let the sun keep on beating down on them for hours on end.
So the two of you wait a bit for the writhing little bugger's struggles to die down as it slumps on the sand. These things really have just about no damn survival instinct; if something shows up, they try to kill it no matter what, regardless of just how badly they get mauled or, in this case, killed, in return.
"That's number eight," you comment idly, eyeing the tons of heavy rocks grown into an exoskeleton hiding the soft flesh underneath. "You know, we really should figure out a way to actually eat these things, get some soul collection underway."
"It's just too fun to just spray 'em with my spit," Emily shamelessly excuses herself. "How's Sarah doing?"
"Oh, you know," you shrug, "playing desert fox."
Elsewhere, the fox of the desert was on the prowl. Because let's face it, a small, red-furred fox like herself just phasing through and killing these giant, threatening monsters was way too hilarious.
Also, she'd figured out a trick to let her be selectively tangible and scoop out their brains with her paws. It took a very hefty amount of aura, but it was also a certain kill against most things.
Progress.
Well, nothing in for it. The next time you're close enough to one of the little beasties lurking underground, guided by your sense for blood both in living beings and otherwise, Emily doesn't immediately plaster it with napalm once it pops up.
Instead, you go in, getting a feel for its blood and meeting the rush of its initial attack with your own, hitting the glowing tail with your balled claws and forcing it back. Not about to give in just like this, regardless of the way it is rearing back, the partially crystalline monster tries to get one of its claws around you, an ominous glow coming from the crystals on it, and for a moment you consider whether to dodge or just rip it all and continue manually.
Then you pop its eyeballs out of their sockets, the weirdly resistant material they're made of keeping the round little things intact anyway. Ignoring the monster writhing in pain, you then proceed to physically jam your claws into the newly made openings, tearing them open and pushing your face into the hole that is all that's left of its face.
You get a decent bite in, and just like that you're draining all the blood you can out of the creature, a few last struggles and desperate tail strikes prevented by Emily who is providing you a little backup.
By lobbing fire at it and almost burning you, of course, but what else was to be expected?
Still, a little bit of experimentation shows that while you can crave the scorpions open with your claws, most of their shell is just a bit too touch and thick for you to do it easily and comfortably in the middle of a fight, and even using hemokinesis to try and burst it open from within just doesn't quite work- you can't really build up enough pressure with the amount of blood you can access at any one point of their bodies.
In other words, these overgrown lobsters are just kind of a pain to eat raw and preparing them life takes a bigger pot than you have available. It's just kind of a pain. But hey, at the very least you're still making good time, even if each little fight is kind of a struggle.
A small one to be sure, given just how physically powerful you are, but still. At least their souls shall hopefully do some good work, being deposited inside your inner world's detached space for animal souls and similar one by one.
You do share a couple with Emily, of course, letting her get a taste despite her lack of that same power. And Sarah, whom you almost literally spoonfeed a bunch, too.
Taste testing by all three of you comes to the agreement that they're pretty out there in terms of aroma, blue blood almost giving you the impression of little soda bubbles bursting inside your mouth when you eat them. Nevertheless, this is more or less mission completed, you'd say.
It takes a little bit, gathering the results of your hunt back at the carriage, despite the relative ease with which you have killed dozens of the things; the crystal scorpions can walk themselves back just fine, once you reanimate them temporarily, but you can't really do so with many of them at once, thanks to the upper limit to the undead you can personally control.
Add to that the fact they tend to live fairly spaced out and you have the reason for why you're taking up several hours to finish everything off, though at least Sarah and Emily seem to be having fun. Now, as for the others...
Well, the weapons trio asks you for help to bring back their own victims, having stumbled upon somewhat of a central node for the scorpions that had several of them surface for all that it didn't help them survive for jack shit. Many of the ones they killed bear obvious wounds caused by their equipment, though very few have been killed with a spear, from your own observations.
Asking about it brings the matter to a close easily enough, though. "Mou, Tacchan cheated with her reach and Nacchan is way too fast! Now I have to make sweets with the little fairies for them all day!"
As for the other group that went hunting separate from your own... Well, Arakawa is currently cowering behind you, having finally escaped Okita's clutches once she was satisfied with her own haul. "P-please, I won't ever complain again, just don't leave me alone with her!"
She is covered in sand from head to toe. The tale kind of does tell itself, though at least Okita is basically running around gathering up the corpses she produced and bringing them back by hand.
Did you ever mention the cute little walking disaster with tits the size of watermelons is bullshit? Because she is, very much so.
"Gimme."
"Okita, you can only ever have one bound to you like this."
"Gimme."
"Really? Because we could totally get you an upgraded model, at the very least, or something with a little more punch to it."
"Giimmmeee..."
"Alright, alright," you sigh, getting ready to bind one of the relatively undamaged crystal scorpions to Okita herself, seeing as you're kind of getting a bunch of the local demons gathered at your location to hand out reanimated giant monster corpses anyway.
The whole business is pretty quick, thanks to the speed at which a determined demon can move around and a few of the suckers magically inclined enough to have mastered a spell that lets them just surf through the oceans of sand making up a decent chunk of this entire territory and even share the effect with others, making for a surprisingly quick and large turnout once you've sent word that you're handing out what amounts to free pets that don't need maintenance of any sort and even produce magical crystals over time.
All in all, the whole hunt and related work is over before you know it, and the night isn't even over by the end of it.
Excerpt from soul list: True Soul Power: Charged Strike: Can 'save up' damage dice over the span of up to two turns, discharging them on hit on the third and delivering full damage. The charging turns can be used for any other actions that do not involve attacking.
The journey back to the capital is a relatively quiet matter, with most of the time spent just sitting together watching the next season of Dragon Balls (the 'OG' version, as Yoshi labelled it) and talking about whatever comes to mind, interspersed with you taking a few moments here and there to really rev up your inner world's refinement functionality to draw upon one of the very first souls you have ever eaten with.
As it happens, you don't really have any shortage of psychopaths and much, much worse lying around thanks to your feeding habits, and so it doesn't take particularly long to get one of the nazis that tried (emphasis on tried, rather than succeeded) to shoot up Kate's place before she and her girls joined up with you to the status of a true soul, just like that.
You're also going to have to have a talk with the Japanese parts of your party about anime's strange propensity for completely idiotic main characters. You haven't seen much of One Piece so far, but really, Luffy? Really?
Ugh, you need to go get a drink or something. Luckily, you're well-stocked on blood bags- not the alive ones, mind you, just actual literal bags of blood packaged to serve as mobile meals for vampires.
It's still a bit like eating some slightly soggy takeout, but hey, it's filling enough, and certainly better than your bane in the form of yuckblood.
Nobody got to eat fresh food in Rapture before you cleaned the place up. Nobody.
The kind of room you need for the next big bullet point on your to-do list wasn't exactly easy to find inside the castle, the whole place built with many purposes in mind but few of them like yours, but with just a bit of elbow grease and magical items meant for daily living you have managed to set yourself up with a nice little heated massage room, a large window letting those inside view a courtyard filled with richly blooming trees.
They always bloom, by the way, regardless of the current climate.
The air filled with aromatic scents and oils, courtesy of a few of the maids you asked to organize this stuff for your little surprise, wafts all around as the door opens, Sarah and Rose walking straight in. The demon princess' eyes widen as she takes in the ambiance and warm color scheme, a light vapor rising up from where you used several warmth stones and a little bit of water to get the air just moist enough.
"Come on in, you two," you smile at them dressed in nothing but a pair of white pants. "In case you were wondering, I just thought you're both working so hard to keep everything running, you've more than earned yourself a little break, so I threw this together."
"This is..." Rose seems to be so astonished she can't quite put her thoughts into words.
"There's a reason Gabe is so irresistible," Sarah grins as she closes the door- you taught her better than to waste any warmth. "One moment he's busy doing his thing and you don't want to distract him, then he turns around and does something so nice to you you're thrown for a complete loop."
"Relationships are built on reciprocity," you state the obvious before you gesture toward the pair of soft massage tables covered with equally soft towels (all quickly made and prepared for this by you) standing in the middle of the room. "If you'd please disrobe and lie down, we can hop right to it."
Naturally, no such foolishness as messing around with towels or the like shall be allowed in your massage parlor- everyone involved in this situation has already been more than naked around each other, so it isn't like just going bare is any big problem as you guide your massage subjects into position.
... Massage subjects? How is it even called, really? Anyway, despite your thoughts on the matter, it seems Rose is still a little shy, even as she settles down on her stomach. "It's still... I'm a little self-conscious next to you, Sarah."
"Hey, can't blame you," your sister retorts, lounging on her own pile of fluffiness and, for lack of a better word, showing off. "If I wasn't into Gabe so much, I'd be looking at myself in the mirror all day."
"Don't underestimate yourself, though," you say, stepping between them and giving Rose's shoulders a few little rubs. Now you aren't really an expert on this, but you know enough about anatomy and how to touch people for the best results to immediately identify the hardness you're feeling as an... issue. "You're really beautiful yourself, Rose, and anyone saying otherwise gets to shut up and if it's yourself. Now, just one moment."
Demon-sized workloads mean demon-sized knots, it would seem.
So, first things first, you get a good grip on her shoulders, one with each hand, and dig your thumbs into and under them, pressing with enough force to easily pierce through a grown man's skull. "Ahhn~," the demon princess at your mercy makes almost immediately, the tenseness you're feeling letting up almost imperceptibly. "What are you-"
This is not good enough. You repeat and keep on going, working your fingers into her hardened flesh with about as much force as you can muster without accidentally breaking anything, and Rose's breath begins to grow shallow. "Ooohh... This is good..."
"Of course, I'm doing it, after all." Say what one may, but being able to literally peer into someone's bloodflow to more easily identify massage needs does make this a lot easier. Of course, her shoulders aren't the only thing that needs some work. "Tell me if any of this hurts, okay?"
Her neck, obviously showing the literal days she works inside the office, is where you first go, rhythmically pressing in and massaging away the tension that has set in far too deeply, then you follow her spine downward and thoroughly work the muscles to both sides of it. Most of the pressure you're inflicting on sore musculature comes through your thumbs, though you do also make use of the rest of your fingers as the situation allows; they're just suited the best for this kind of thing.
Step by step you loosen up the knots under the pale, soft skin your hands are gliding all over. It takes a good half an hour, really, but at the end Rose is nothing but a blissful puddle, having started outright moaning in pleasure at the signals her nerves are sending to her brain now. "This feels... so good..."
"And we aren't even done yet," you playfully note, patting her healthy, round buttcheeks. Actually, come to think of it, do those horns require specialized care, too? Probably... Maybe you'll get some horn polish or whatever and take care of those, too, later.
"... Do I have to move...?" Rose's tentative question is met with a small smile by you, while Sarah just snorts and opens her until now closed eyes- and moves around to lie on her side, now fully taking in the scene completely shamelessly. One of her hands is already wandering downward toward her spread legs; you're fairly sure you can guess how she'll kill some time while waiting for her turn.
"Not at all, just relax a little more," you soothe the poor little princess. stepping out of the pants you just dropped to the floor. "Just stay like that and enjoy."
She does, unperturbed by you swiftly climbing up behind her, and even as your already hard cock slides down beneath her, you guiding it toward her already lightly moist pussy to spread it open in a long, smooth motion.
"There you are, isn't this better?" You ask, immediately getting back to massaging her neck and shoulders again.
"Yeees," she sighs in response, easily welcoming your prick and letting her arms hang over the sides of the massage table. "Can't remember how long it's been since I felt this good..."
Your response is to grab a little more of the scented oil you're using, spreading it on your hands and rubbing and massaging it all over her back again. You're hardly even thrusting or anything, just performing long, almost languid strokes as you inflict enough force to break a human being several times over, but only managing to relax and knead through Rose.
Her every breath is a happy sigh now, and several small, short orgasms later she's relaxed enough you can just fuck her ass instead easily enough, penetrating it with no issue at all, the angle allowing you to better reach her neck with the one hand you have roving her body. And before you know it, she's gone and fallen sleep right under you.
Quietly, you get up, moving over to your poor, neglected sister. "Enjoyed the show?"
"I did," she grins at you, laying back and spreading her legs for you. "But I've also been so lonely here all on my own..."
"And vampires don't build up tension, I know," you say before kissing her, looking her deep in the eyes as you join her. "Doesn't mean you don't get any massage sex, though."
"Oh, I wouldn't have it any other way."
Now then... the topic of Divination is one you have scarcely begun to cover, but it certainly is one of the more interesting types of magic you have access to thanks to your little feeding frenzy in Columbia. While fairly basic at the moment, just like most kinds you only just got, it's already more impressive than now your ice magic started out with.
Three initial spells, which is... good, probably. One to let you find a specified object or person- pretty much just the same as your compass soul, but potentially much more if you were to invest time and effort into it. One lets you gather information on both past and present of things you have in front of you, psychometry basically, while the last one, well, it's...
It's got some pretty far-reaching implications. For starters, though, there is one hero in particular that you still do have some business with, at some point at the very least.
May as well test it out, then. "When and where is the best time and place to make an attempt to capture or convert the Sage Heroine to my side?"
The question you have asked is a chant in itself- that's just how the spell works. And, closing your eyes in concentration, you can already feel the answer forthcoming.
'Storm the academy gates'. That doesn't tell you much in itself, but hey, it's what you you have to work with. And thankfully, you do also have a slowly reawakening Rose right there, after she slowly started to come out of her sleepy haze once you and Sarah woke her up.
"Hey Rose, is there any part of the human kingdom that anyone referring to 'the academy' might mean?"
"Uhmm, the Royal Research Institute is often called that," the pale girl says, slowly stretching and marvelling at the feeling of her body. "A lot of mages going into higher education stay there, as well as new ones that want to make a name for themselves. It's right inside the enemy capital, though, so there isn't much we know beyond the generalities."
"Well, that does explain the result I got," you shrug. "Guess she'll show up when I go there to attack or else be there already at the time I'm going there."
"... I would suggest against trying to attack it," the princess says. "The capital itself is as well defended as any place can be, not to mention the academy itself, so-"
"Oh, don't worry, I was mainly just interested in how this spell handles a complicated question like this," you interrupt her. "I can't use it very often, but hey, this much is already pretty good to know. Next off... Find me an injured tarrasque!"
"There is no such thing as an injured one," Rose says, smiling for all that she's fed up with your wild ideas. "They're either healthy or about to be. Their regeneration allows them to recover from nearly anything that doesn't simply kill them within minutes."
"How about looking into finding orichalcum, then?" You ask as you shake off the straight line drawn in your mind's eye at one of the mountain-sized monsters that is currently wounded in some way. "It's the only notable magical metal I don't have any samples to work off of yet."
Rose just sighs, but before she can answer, a grinning Sarah comes right in, holding a tray filled with the little fruit cocktails you made earlier (you even went and made those little umbrellas) followed by a pair of maids pushing along a tray of refreshments. "I'm back, I miss anything?"
Luckily, you do get a response from the spell you use to point toward orichalcum, one of the rarest magical metals in this world and, allegedly, made my mortal hands... somehow.
Issue is, nobody seems to know how, exactly, and so finding any of the stuff remains a challenge. And even with your mild magical omniscience, the direction you're pointed at is quite... interesting, to say the least.
"So this is... pretty surely underground, toward the far west," you say, parsing the information you're receiving. "You think there's any notable places in that direction?"
"Nothing known to us, at any rate," Rose says, already back at work. "There have been reports of underground ruins rarely found here and there, however, or it may be a secret human encampment."
"If you really need any, it's probably worth a look." Sarah, too, is going through documents and handling them at an inhumane rate. "That said, if not, it'll probably show up at some point of looting human cities, the stuff has to be somewhere if there's a historical record of it."
"Before that, however, would you mind using your magic to confirm a few things? Here is a list of human targets, confirming their locations or deaths would be a great help."
Wordlessly, you grab the parchment, eyeing the literal hundreds of names on it. "Alright, but don't make this a habit," you grumble. "Find me Johannes Lindner!"
Suffice to say, getting everything pointed at takes a good bit. Just for this, you will make your compass soul suffer later... But right now, you want to help your adorable little Sarah and brave little Rose personally.
There you are again, racing through the dark toward your inescapable destiny. That is, it's a bit cloudy outside your carriage and your destiny is 'grabbing all the loot', but it's the thought that counts, isn't it?
It is, by the way.
And yes, getting glimpses into the future has brought with it some mild apprehension within you, seeing how you're basically defining the future ahead of time, but hey, all thoughts of the Simurgh aside, you can totally change things or just force prophecies into happening in a way advantageous for you, so it'll totally be alright.
Probably.
Anyway, the journey does take a couple of hours you mainly use to mess around with your magic, the less than subtle reality manipulation you pull off all the time serving as an interesting concept to study and implement. It is just as slow and hard to change as usual, but the very fact you can work it at all is already more than enough for you.
Incidentally, you get the feeling Sarah is more satisfied than usual from the quiet mental link you still keep open with her; all the sex and the constant adventuring together must've really calmed her down, for once.
It's pretty nice. A calm and happy Sarah means you're doing something right.
So, repeating the use of your spell to find things once you've managed to make it avoid direct obstacles through your constant insistence that it can totally do that, you soon get to correct course a little, confirming that there's some way to get closer to whatever underground place you're coming toward has to have some way of getting to it, or at least closer toward it, nearby.
Once you've spent a good few hours on the move, but hey, you aren't wasting any valuable lifetime here; no longer is every second a precious moment you won't ever get back as you rapidly race toward your biological death. Instead, you can simply live your unlife however you damn well please now.
How the poor mortals all around manage to do it is beyond you.
So then, there you are, grabbing a big snack in the form of a wineskin filled with blood (gotta adjust to the surroundings and all) and eyeing the big, fat hole your spell is pointing you toward. Well, only one way to go from here, you suppose- time to go spelunking in some caves.
The terrain you're descending deeper downward on is generally full of rocky hills, though certainly nowhere near as mountainous as certain underground lairs you're a little more familiar with you could point toward. All around you you can see roots and whatever animals are around inside the soil on occasion, your bloodsight making it a lot easier to find them ahead of time.
You... don't really like nature. Sure, a tree or two are fine, maybe the occasional park where the green is kept at arm's length, but you decidedly dislike it when bugs decide to crawl all over you, to say nothing of the fact that pollen are basically plant sperm and they just shoot it in the air all the time when they get horny.
Plants, you are convinced, are some of the few living beings that have a more intense sex drive than yourself. And you do not appreciate getting their gaseous spunk all over and inside your respiratory tract.
But hey, you can deal. It isn't like you haven't ignored far, far worse than a couple of issues you can just not think about too deeply.
Anyway, your constant inner monologue aside, you are slowly but surely moving deeper under the earth, pushing past crevices and squeezing through a couple of tight spots as you come upon them. Soon enough, most of the surface stuff is left behind you, loose soil and the occasional rock being replaced by... lots of rocks and loose soil.
Look, you're just going into some natural caves, from the looks of them. It's nothing super amazing, and you spend most of the trip in shadow form moving along nigh invisibly anyway.
And slowly but surely, you are actually starting to find just a couple of more interesting sights; there's quite a few mushrooms growing down here, as you quickly discover, and you're willing to bet they aren't exactly normal, nonmagical kinds.
The fact that a few of them are glowing and moving around in a way visible to the naked eye should make that much obvious.
The network of caves and tunnels you entered soon diverge into several paths, branching off at various points into the impenetrable dark of this little underground realm. It is, surprisingly, quite comfy down here, despite the occasional earthworms the size of your arm you see moving here and there.
You briefly consider if living underground might just come naturally to vampires; considering your own propensity to seek refuge under the earth when in need of it; at first, when you woke up, the sewers, and later immediately taking over Coil's underground bond villain lair, the little hidey hole you found and later enlarged on Earth Fallout before you had a proper house built...
Then again, it's more that vampires are naturally suited to live in societies, you suppose, the whole hiding underground thing you're still happy with right now might just be some atavistic reflex due to the generally great coverage against sunlight, if nothing else. Go out during the night, but have a safe location to retreat to during the day, preferably as far underground or otherwise protected as usual.
It sometimes still catches you off guard just how deeply these vampire instincts have been and still are affecting you, considering how, well, you basically subconsciously made up what being a vampire means while you were dead.
Ah well, no matter. What does matter a little more, however, is the fact that you are currently finding yourself at an impasse, quite literally; in one of the particularly tight passages your spell of finding is leading you through, you have managed to bump into a dead end.
The path simply ends, literally. Bunch of rocks and earth in the way as it narrows down to nothing. Nevertheless, the invisible guiding light you have followed this far points you right toward- or rather, through it.
You swear, if you have to find some way to get heavy construction equipment down here to open up this path...
Okay, no, no need to overreact or anything. You have something for this- literally.
Step one, you back up a bit; you'll need a little space for everything that's about to happen. Step two, you transform into the full splendour of your vampire form, becoming three-dimensional and, more importantly, capable of using speech again. Step three, once you've ensured nothing down here you may have overlooked is out to attack you out of the blue, is casting the one handy spell just meant for situations like these.
"That which I have brought to unlife, heed my call, feel your chains, and come to your master, for a task awaits!" There is a reason you don't ever use this when anyone else is around, but disregarding the solid cringe the chant delivers to your gut, one of the two worm-like undead you created and sent out with the rest of them soon 'digs' out of the ground before you, immediately setting upon the barricade in your path with the fury of a creature that is too large to turn around in these confines and also lacks any sort of limbs.
Not exactly an issue for this thing, seeing as it doesn't have feelings, but if you were in its place, you'd be plenty pissed off.
The well-designed mouthpiece at the front end of the giant worm makes short work of the tight space up front, followed by the blockage as it just chews through solid stone with ease, the protruding jaws crushing and digging just as they're meant to.
Turns out that, when given a sufficient amount of base force, the same design can work for cutting through stone and armor, flesh and bones just fine. Who woulda thought.
It does help, of course, that the abomination you made out of dead flesh has some base control over the movement of earth and stone, letting it more smoothly shift it around and dig to create a more or less stable tunnel for you to follow it through, soon letting you leave the blocked section behind you as you move onward.
Refreshing your guiding spell every now and then, too, of course, because hey, this whole underground business is starting to become pretty maze-like. Dozens of different ways to go, criss-crossing all over the place as you lead onward, the segmented body of the undead you just spontaneously called up from where it was before following after you as you lead the way.
Honestly, you're pretty sure whatever it is you're moving toward has been long abandoned for some reason. You don't see any marks or signs of intelligent life, merely ever-increasing sizes of caves and crevices filled with all manner of weird underground biology.
Most of the beings down here scurry out of your way, the few that don't are summarily snatched out of the air and crushed under your claws or else kicked to the side and left for the biteworm following you to snatch up and finish off. It's a pretty slow walk, ever toward the North you're pretty sure, your subconscious sense for these kinds of things not exactly the very best.
Eventually, however, you arrive- or you're pretty sure you do, anyway. The area around you has been getting wider and bigger, as though to remark that you are slowly approaching something greater to see than the area you are coming from, until you finally see it: A shimmer of light, from the end of the tunnel you are taking at the moment.
Cautiously, you draw near the exit- and you have to say, the sight before you does actually far exceed your expectations.
You're standing at the bottom of a deep, deep ravine, rough stone walls stretching upward to both sides and a slow, lazy river is right before you, its water splashing along sedately. Up front, near the opposite shore from where you're entering, you can see a couple dozen buildings, while a tall, smooth fortress wall stands further in the distance.
You can see a bridge, and what have to be hundreds of buildings, arranged in rings along the outer wall; more walls and more rings being visible from afar on a higher level. Each of these ring sections has to be a hundred meters tall at least, each, and the city has a lot of them stacked on top of each other.
There is very little sunlight falling all the way down here, but it glistens off a few parts of the picture from where you stand; those have to be windows, and the bridge is smooth enough to reflect light, most likely. The entire area is also... quiet.
You can't hear anything. Just who or what exactly erected this city here, deep down below what you can only assume to be the Border Mountain Range, and for what reason did they leave it empty?
Either way, your spell is clear when you make sure- the fastest path toward orichalcum leads deeper into this place either way.
Seeing as it is unlikely that you will require your biteworm's aid going forward, you simply have it dig a narrow tunnel into the ground before it even enters the main ravine, hopefully keeping it hidden and secure until such a time you decide to call it up again. With that out of the way, you renew your finding spell again ("Find me orichalcum!"), confirming the way for a good bit as you move onward as a shadow.
Not bothering with such boring things as taking the main entrance, you directly bypass the bridge you saw in the distance by scaling the wall, your weightless form finding no difficulty in simply slithering up along its surface thanks to your powers working in concert. Once beyond the city wall, you quickly discover that whatever beings lived here once upon a time, they clearly were shorter than the humanoid standard you are used to, with doorways and windows and such mostly ending just a little under your neck wherever you look.
Sarah seems to think this is obviously an ancient abandoned dwarven city. Considering dwarves have never been confirmed to have ever existed in any dimension you've visited including this one, you would normally caution her to take the slightest hints as confirmations of her flights of fancy, but, well... She is right in that pretty much everything so far has been like out of some generic fantasy novel.
Also, she's your little Sarah, so you naturally want to confirm that whatever she suggests is correct.
The entire place remains as cold and quiet as ever, however. Not a single sound is to be heard, aside from the occasional monster cry echoing all the way from whatever mountaintop you're under right now; the few windows you look through are long since completely covered in dust, for all their crystalline splendour.
Because you're pretty sure no glass could ever shine like this after gathering a layer of dirt the size of a finger. Just your opinion, though.
Following the path laid out by your magic, you quickly find a main street of sorts winding perpendicularly around the city, with several staircases and even some old, simple elevators from the looks of them, lots of chains and counterweights letting them quickly move between the different ring elevations. You are mildly interested in investigating the level of technology available at whatever time this place was built, but you also do have priorities.
So you leave it be for the moment, instead following the path laid out for you. Up two rings, then off you go through empty streets, noting things around you are oddly clean compared to the time this settlement must have been standing empty, and then you take a fortified tunnel leading out of the city and deeper under the earth once more.
There are mining carts and rails as you pass by, both of considerable sizes, and it looks like these dwarves (provisional descriptor) had an entire network of the latter connecting different areas down here; quite a surprise, given the size of this underground territory this hints at and the fact nobody seems to have found any of it as of yet.
Then again, it could be someone did and they're just keeping it a secret for one reason or another. Or else these subterranean cities have remained secret due to their locations, right in the middle of the Border Mountain Range where nobody ever goes if they can help it.
Trying to dig a path through has been attempted in the past, by both sides of this lovely little war you're in the middle of, but it is not just up above that enormous and enormously dangerous monsters lurk; a painful lesson or two was enough to have most just consider the entire area off limits. You've heard a part of the human side of the border is still infested by basilisks from one incident in particular, in fact.
They're still rare even there, but the mere possibility of encountering one is enough to have rendered the entire region uninhabitable.
Not that it matters right now beyond the fact you haven't encountered... anything, really. Which is very much strange, and not exactly worrying (you're confident you can get around most issues that present themselves) but certainly has you watchful and take care even in your shadow form.
It's also the reason you aren't touching any of these mining carts despite the wide, four-lane tunnels made to let lots of traffic between the city you just left and whatever your next destination is pass through easily. You really don't want to risk alerting whatever creatures might be lurking around when you could instead ambush them, in case you manage to find them on the way.
That said, for all your caution, things are mostly fine and quiet still all the way through, until you finally arrive in the next place. And what a place it is.
Where the city you just saw was, well, a city, a place for people to live and do their daily business and the like, you have a sneaking suspicion you may have just stumbled upon what may just be the equivalent to the local industrial district.
Metallic constructions cover the enormous cavern, held up only by pillars of stone and metal twisted together, a constant flow of magma (Or is this lava already?) further back warming the entire space up quite a bit while still allowing the warmed up underwater stream you can also spy to flow unhindered.
Said water was... probably also used for cooling things or to produce steam, from what you can see from your position, a certain amount flowing through pipes and being deposited back in the flow further in.
Or, it used to be, anyway.
Oh, and the big construction right there hanging over the hole leading deeper? The dug-out hole? The one that is visibly glowing red? You've never seen any of this tech before, but going by what circumstantial evidence and identifiable parts you can see, you're pretty sure that thing is some kind of drill.
And your spell is pointing right at it, while you see movement in the factory districts nearby it. Joy.
As you come closer toward the area you saw something move, you soon begin to hear a steady, heavy sound even through the limitations of your shadow state; it is not unlike some heavy industrial equipment, you'd say, but still doesn't quite fit your current surroundings.
For one, if it is factory activity, it is far too little of it to justify the expansive area all around you. And what's more, holding still and listening intently, you can make out one more detail that tells you all you need to know.
The sources of these sounds? They seem to be moving.
Within moments you are moving yourself, covertly hushing along walls and rooftops to approach this mystery noisemaker. Your search leads you a bit out of the more civilized bounds of the former factory or metallurgy district, off into the rocky space around it filled with steam from there the lava and the stream of water come too close to each other.
It is there that you see the source of the shrieking of metal moving and repeatedly crashing to the ground. Between short spires of rocks walking along a well-trodden path you see, well...
A big hulking metal dude.
Watching the glowing lines between heavy armor plates and the slightly stiff movements, it quickly becomes obvious just how artificial this thing is, but given it is taking an obvious guard role in the way it is patrolling, you still aren't exactly keen on going in and introducing yourself.
You watch a little longer, but it quickly becomes obvious what path this walking device is taking- only one path that has been beaten into the rock after who the fuck knows how long of endless repetition.
You are going to call it a golem for now, at Sarah's insistence. Looks like these dwarves of yours had a few more trick up their sleeves, after all.
This one isn't the only one, of course. Based on the sounds of tons of metal stomping around, there's at least two dozen around, probably more.
A quick dash along the shadows lands you on a good overview position on an adjacent roof, and overlaying Yoshi lets you tell a little more about how this thing works before you move on- you just have to set the UI up a little, seeing as the little guy just keeps on resetting it back to his own preferences every time you unequip him.
Yes, he is currently inside your head, as you are in his. You're only even calling him that because you know exactly how much it pisses him off for you to do it.
Anyway, golem. Hypothetical golems. Big, heavy and magically reinforced, made out of steel and mithril with a cover made of adamantium around the cores giving them life and determining their programming.
Runes are mostly for decoration and more of cultural significance, but still do channel magical energy, somehow. They can move surprisingly quickly when they have to, and each hit of their fists is capable of hitting with the full force of a freight train at full speed.
Just on a much smaller impact surface.
Incidentally, the big gem on its chest is not, in fact, one of the cores powering this thing. Instead, it is a powerful explosive meant to explode if someone gets smart and tries to go for it or else can be ejected as a surprise kaboom if required.
Lastly, although it's still more or less functional, this thing hasn't seen any regular maintenance (or indeed any maintenance at all) for a rough estimate of around eight to ten million years, going by the analysis power's results.
Hence it is 'only' hitting like a freight train. Fun times all around, you'd say.
With that cleared up, though, you still aren't any closer to your goal of finding your damn orichalcum, the stuff still lying around somewhere inside of the giant drill of compensating for something. Hence, you waste no more time and actually do dart off as a shadow once more, quickly approaching the giant piece of mining equipment taken as far over the top as anyone could ask for.
Time to try and figure out the way to go, then. At least you have more than copious ways to access the thing, what with all the cables and support beams there to help keep it in place and, when active, move around.
The insides of the giant drill of compensating for something (you have given it this name and it shall bear it with pride, dammit) are labyrinthine and complex, with dozens of ways to go, glass floors and ceilings and more pipes than anyone could ever need.
However, thanks to your magical guidance, you can simply navigate it in a straightforward manner... even if crawling through a heated ventilation shaft isn't exactly your idea of having fun.
Still, you're making some good progress, quickly and quietly moving toward the upper reaches of the oversized drill. There, it seems, you are going to find what you came for.
Because you actually judged perhaps a bit too hasty earlier; this thing isn't just a drill, it's a fully equipped and mostly automated refinery directly boring into and processing entire ore veins one at a time, you can tell that much now that you're getting a closer look at its insides and making some estimations on the overall ore yield of this thing. Considering the size and capabilities you can plainly see in here, well...
It's kind of a surprise to see only as much of the cavern outside has been excavated as you could confirm earlier.
Still, you have a good way to go yet, and so you get right to it, occasionally confirming there aren't any security measures you have to watch out for when you detransform to renew your guidance spell. Higher and higher you climb the windowless and probably somehow mobile construction, coming ever closer toward your target.
When you finally find it, it is a room behind a locked door, reminding you a lot of some kind of office with a big heavy central desk, some bookcases and a seemingly completely ordinary wall made of reinforced adamantium your spell is telling you to go through.
So, uh, this... Might require a bit more digging for once.
Okay, first things first- time to look in all the usual places. The desk has a few drawers, and a quick check reveals they both have a false bottom, revealing a couple of sacks full of coins you don't recognize (you'll just take them out and grab them before you leave) and a simple black book without a title or anything of the sort.
You'll take a look through it in a moment. One thing to note already is the size of these everyday objects, as unsurprisingly, everything is still sized for someone maybe half your size, from the chair behind the desk, the desk itself to the book and even the bookcases off to one side of the room.
Which you take a look at next, having not found any secret switches or buttons under the desk or near it. A quick look also hasn't revealed any suspiciously protruding parts of the walls, floor or ceiling, so it is, in the end, your next stop.
First off, you don't actually bother looking at all the book- way too many of them, tightly squeezed as they are. Instead, you simply attempt to pull them out in groups of three, going through every single row one by one. And would you look at that, after just a few minutes of this, you have unearthed the secret switch book just fine.
Heh. It's a classic, really. That said, though you have found a book that cannot be pulled out and instead seems to require a tilting motion to trigger a mechanism of some kind, you don't trigger it quite yet- first, the book, unless there's some secret switch at the door instead...?
No, there isn't. Too bad.
Anyway, taking a seat on the desk itself, bare of anything as its surface is, you begin by opening the book, as one should when attempting to read one. Luckily, although you do not recognize the symbols written inside directly, you can still plainly read what they mean all the same, the weird translation magic you got stuck with when you came to this dimension for the first time seemingly not limited toward the human and demon languages, respectively.
So... What is this thing saying? Well, it seems to be a personal diary of sorts, of some dwarf whose name you can't really figure out the pronunciation of but you think begins with an 'M', in his lifetime the chief operator of the 'mountain breaker drill'. You like your own name for it better, but to each their own, you suppose.
Most of it is just a quick list of the drill's output and observations about several parts of its crew, with references where to find the details about everything just in case noted in the margins. Much more interesting, however, is the more personal part of the diary, where this henceforth unnamed dwarf wrote down his personal thoughts on several... interesting subjects.
'The divine wardings are already applied and the drill is fully functional, letting us amass the materials required for the plan. Sometimes I wonder at the necessity of our fight, but it is for the sake of future generations that we do... everything we do.'
'Finding the required materials has become harder as of late. Several of the crew have started to ask if it might be the Goddess' wrath causing this, but I had the supervisors give them a few good whacks and a free round of ale at the taverns. Ore veins running out is one of our least worries at this time.'
'Feh, stupid bosses have been pulling my beard over the situation, too. I told them what I always told them, we're doing what we can but if there's nothing to take, we just hafta keep digging until there is. Feckless milkdrinkers would know this if they remembered how ta work with their own hands.'
'Heard it got worse near the surface again. Tree-huggers have been getting closer to the real cities and we're running out of space to evacuate to. Everything rests on us now.'
'It may be too late. The Deicide Drive needed a precise amount of adamant and the stuff is just too rare, despite the predictions for this spot. Relocating the Mountain Breaker won't make it in time unless a miracle happens, and I never been a man to pray for those.'
'Damn longears did it now. They broke the wards and let the Light of the Goddess shine in on us. Looks like things ain't gonna get better, after all.'
'I can hear the vibrations in the air, now. Everyone touched by the light is about to be a beardless goner. No way to avoid it, either, so I'm putting my diary in its usual place and locking the Mountain Breaker up. May as well do my job to the bitter end, heh?
... Damn Goddesses. Made us just to use us as pawns. It was worth the try. If anyone ever reads this, some far-off catspaw of a higher power, know you are not alone. The plans for the Double D will have been destroyed, but... Ah, screw it.'
This is the last entry. It is also quite... interesting.
So, it seems the dwarves went and somehow tried to rebel against the apparent Goddesses in control of this world... Going so far as to instate specific magical precautions against being found out by them in particular, hinting toward some kind of perhaps limited omniscience, only to eventually be attacked by some kind of other race, which you shall term 'elves' for now and lose this protection.
The end result of some kind of device meant to let them attack the deities more than one civilization seems to have been revering being built, then, was being directly killed off by some kind of divine power before they could ever complete it, completely and thoroughly wiping out their entire species wherever it was found. Harsh, but hey, perfectly understandable. If someone points a weapon at you, that means they better be prepared for the consequences.
More importantly for you in particular, this location you've stumbled upon seems to have been the place they were working on this 'Deicide Drive'. According to the words of the dwarf that wrote this diary, you don't expect whatever device it is to still be around, of course, but that still makes this location perhaps one of the most advanced industrial bases of a race that went and engineered a way to directly attack a capital G God from how you understand it in some way.
Or at least the threat was serious enough the Goddess of Light went and eradicated them in return.
What you're trying to say is, this whole place- the giant drill and mobile processing center, the surroundings factories and machines and probably even the clearly carefully chosen natural terrain in the form of access to both water and lava- is a damn treasure trove of knowledge and technology of a particular kind, perhaps somewhat limited insofar as it mostly concerns itself with local resources and the like but still valuable beyond compare.
You want as many blueprints and possible sources of inspiration as possible, and you want them right away. Heck, perhaps building your own Mountain Breaker Drill over on Earth Fallout could lead you to a much easier time in gathering resources, even, in addition to recycling all of the crap leftover when civilization collapsed... Oh, or you could try your hand at turning it into a weapon!
You have robots, and you'd have a giant drill. Combine these with the Lutece Particles you would put in there, and it wouldn't really matter whether what you're aiming at are mineral deposits or whatever you want to be nuked from orbit (not quite) at the time.
Let Sarah make jokes about you being a boy after new toys, it would totally be worth it. Now then, things in this room in particular have been preserved extraordinarily well, so let's take a closer look at some of these books seemingly sorted alphabetically...
It takes you a good bit of reading, as well as more contemplation of creating some kind of chair minion with your semblance so you can actually sit somewhere better than this desk made of blank metal than might be healthy, but eventually you find what you're looking for amidst endless tables and incredibly small and dense handwriting.
Specifically, it would seem that someone actually wrote a damn manual, or rather series of manuals, for the operation and maintenance of the Mountain Breaker Drill, along with lots of technical documentation to ensure that if any one part breaks, replacements can be prepared up to spec rather than having someone slap something together that will inevitably fail and cause even more damage down the line.
You approve, by the way. This is how it should be. It's kind of horrible to have to work with faulty or insufficiently understood equipment that you can't really have repaired appropriately.
Back on topic, it seems the big drill you're standing inside of is rather simple in principle, now that you can read over the schematics meticulously outlined step by step. There's also a few more detailed instructions for several of the work stations within, but those are of secondary interest to you for the moment.
First off, the drill. It works by, and you kind of had to read twice to really make sense of it, plasma projected onto the ground that is being worked on, essentially cutting into the ground by melting it through extreme temperatures and extracting it in large chunks that are then further processed as they're brought into the drill's main body step by step. Of particular note is the apparent tendency for adamantium to resist the cutting mechanism itself, which is why there's a few other modes to either extract any of the ore whole or else use a complicated set of mechanical solutions to rip it out of wherever it is sitting.
Looks like even the dwarves decided that was simpler and easier than trying to extract it any other way. The plasma, by the way, is created through obviously magical means, but it isn't like you couldn't easily replicate that feat through using a couple fusion cores and some of the weapons technology you originally adapted from Earth Fallout.
Now, as for the processing... Ores are extracted, stone set aside separately and mostly expelled in blocks for other uses, while the ore is handled through several work stations, experienced smiths and metalworkers processing enormous amounts of material on an hourly basis. Seriously, there have to have been hundreds of workers in this thing back when it was still active.
Considering a lot of the metal being pulled through was either magical or destined to become magical, they kind of needed people that could deal with that, making automating everything impossible at the time. That said, the majority of those tasks that can be taken care of by machines already are, and if you were to just use this kind of thing on more mundane materials and not expecting to deal with Thulian natural resources, just putting in a few simplified manufactories could replace the crew easily enough.
Everything is carefully regulated, all with the purpose of gaining immense amounts of raw materials across the board. The dwarves just found a big chunk of raw resources and basically decided to dig out the artificial cavern you're in right now to make use of the plentiful deposits of valuable ores.
The really valuable stuff, of course, was happening further and further up the drill, with adamantium being refined (inasmuch as that stuff can be worked by anyone, though the dwarves seemed to have it down to a science) and, indeed, orichalcum being refined- both of these ores were apparently of utmost importance to the effort of building the Deicide Driver, meaning that they were strictly controlled by the chief supervisor in whose office you are sitting.
There are records of how much of what was required for the project, or at least there should have been; when you open the book titled after it, all you find are completely blank pages. Everything that so much as hints at anything beyond the name of the thing is completely erased, most likely at the hands of the goddesses.
And hey, you don't have any personal problems with either of them and indeed weren't really sure they existed beyond the imaginations of the people on this world, but as it turns out, there's some overwhelming evidence for their existence right here, after all. Good on them.
Also, it turn out that in order to actually work adamantite, the dwarves used to use the lava flowing inside this cavern after they specifically dug out an opening through which it cam come through to do it. Apparently, it needs the sustained heat most easily available this way to even begin to permanently deform and be brought into the shape of ingots for later storage. It was also a convenient way to 'wash off' any impurities, of course, which played into how the dwarves did things.
Alternatively they also had a plasma chamber through which they could do the same but faster at the expense of a lot of magical energy; you think you saw it from outside, even, the red glow visible along the drill being kind of a giveaway.
And as for the orichalcum... It wasn't actually any secret how to make it, just extremely expensive in terms of materials, it seems. Considering it required adamantium itself, mithril, gold, silver and several minerals and compounds- specific types of steel, tungsten, titanium, some trace amounts of aluminum among others, you're pretty sure- and personal efforts by several experienced workers specifically trained to make it...
Simply put, there's a damn good reason orichalcum is so rare, and almost impossible to create more of; if someone does, it's mostly a stroke of blind luck that they managed to get the right materials together without really knowing what exactly they're doing.
Considering the end result, though, it certainly can be said to be worth it. Speaking of- if you were a betting man, you'd have a lot of cash riding on the possibility of the finished orichalcum being stored with the adamantite, all in one location.
You go back to eyeing the one book you know to be the switch.
Well, right now only one thing remains to be done in this place. Time to go claim the treasure that's rightfully yours by any metric of imagination- you are going to take this stuff by virtue of being the first and only person to find it for a couple million years, which really should wipe away all other claims on it.
And even if the dwarves were still around to disagree, right of conquest is a thing.
So, being quite satisfied with the schematics you just stole claimed for the prosperity of Caintopia or however you're going to call the finished product, you go ahead and pull out the one book that wouldn't quite move the way the others did earlier. Incidentally, it is titled something along the lines of 'Plains of Adamant', which really does stand out as being way, way fancier than the dry titles literally all the other books around it bear.
With a low rumbling sound, you can hear the reinforced wall slide aside, giving way to a new tunnel made entirely of metal. You can't help yourself but sigh; you really would've hoped this would just be a secret room for you to plunder and leave, but alas, no such luck.
A short journey later, however, you find yourself staring at the thing greeting you in the wide space now afforded to the valuables held not far from yourself, several doors securing them separately and guarded by, perhaps, the penultimate guardian for things like this.
It is huge, it is gleaming, it is made entirely out of adamantium and it has two spots that begin to glow almost as soon as you draw near completely silently and in shadow form.
"INTRUDER DETECTED," an artificial voice comes from somewhere, blaring like a siren in a language you can make out is completely unrelated to any others you have heard in this dimension. "HERMETIC SEALS ACTIVATING."
You can hear a series of clanks and the hissing of escaping air, several additional doors and seals snapping into place to keep you from your treasure. "IDENTIFY YOURSELF. LOCKDOWN TO BE ENFORCED UNTIL FURTHER INSTRUCTION."
Well, it looks like the security system is demanding you identify yourself, after all. Suppose you may as well, then. Not moving from where you were pressed against the ground as a shadow, you slowly push yourself up off the ground, returning to your normal form once more.
"Hello there," you say, wondering exactly how far the dwarves got on the way of the creation of artificial intelligence.
"INTRUDER IDENTIFIED. ELF DETECTED." Turns out, not particularly far at all. At least you were right in labeling whatever race the dwarves were fighting as elves, according to your automatic translation bullshit. "ELIMINATING."
"Wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm sure we can talk this out," you say, hands raised. "I am not an elf, pretty sure they're extinct by this point anyway. The creators of this place-"
You turn into your shadow again as an enormous fist smashes into the ground right where you just were, the reality reaffirming nature of the adamantium it is made of making it a little harder to stay like you are due to the immense itching sensation it causes in you. This is not good, to say the least.
As such, you reposition yourself up along the ceiling once you've dragged yourself out from under the weight you're under, mildly inconvenienced by it as you are even in your shadow form, and try again. "Look, I was simply trying to explore the ruins of this place and-"
You dart away again as the golem easily five times your height simply jumps toward you, one clawed arm stretched out to smash into and deform the ceiling, the whole thing landing again with a crash soon after.
"I claim everything here as salvage!" Nope, still no luck. You have no idea how this thing can easily keep track of you wherever you go even as a shadow, but the pinpoint of light in its head stays directed at you, and only at you. And, as you soon find out, the golem actually seems to be moving fast enough to be a threat to you if you stay corporeal in any one place for any length of time.
Also, its bodyslam against the wall that was behind you just now has everything in the large room shake.
As it seems rather fruitless to continue arguing at what amounts to a mindless automaton, you unfurl your claws and jump at its back before it can turn around, letting you try to wedge your razor-sharp digits between the segmented armor plates on its shoulders.
You catch on easily enough, but while you did completely expect to be unable to pierce or slice into anything, it also seems like it doesn't matter how much you try to pull it apart with all your not inconsiderable might even with Last Embrace's piledrivers helping, powerlessly clanking against the adamantium.
And before you can think of anything else you could try, it is already moving again, the supernaturally fast brick shithouse made of the hardest and most inconvenient magical metamaterial they could find intent on crushing you as hard as it can.
A quick mist transformation sees you escape the attempt to squash you flat as a pancake against the wall, and the obvious need for some way to meaningfully hurt it has you roll your eyes.
Time to become the biggest cat ever, then.
Snarling, you drop on all fours, your proportions twisting wildly out of control as your clothes merge into your skin. Instead a simple cape made of interlinked metal plates and kept in place with several chains around your front pushes out again in turn, your entire form growing darker as space twists and twitches around you.
And additional pair of glowing eyes sets in among your face now covered in heavy plates of armor, and your thick, muscled limbs leave trails in the ground thanks to the enormous claws the size of a man's arm you now sport on all fours.
Your long tail whips through the air behind you, and you open your maw to hiss at the golem, the pulsing red glow of your insides visible along your neck.
You are now a giant cat mixed with a giant reptile, and you eye the opponent that has failed to perish at your claws with disdain.
Seeing as you require more space for your first maneuver in this form you are simply starting to warp space around you, making the room tall and wide enough enough to fit your needs now that you are in control of it. The stupid golem attempts to strike you, but you merely redirect its attacks as smugness mixes into the contempt you feel, letting heavy blows fail to connect to anything but thin air.
You get up, a little lazily because this is hardly worth your effort, and pounce, pushing space around to let you hit the back of your foe and savage it with a bite to the shoulder, clawing its back and doing your best to throw it to the ground. However, it stays standing, whirling around only to find you can now also attack from above and try to eat its head all the while brutally ramming your front paw into the first bite wound.
Frustratingly, the arm stays attached, though it is very heavily dented now and a few of the armor plates look to be out of place. How dare this piece of junk not fall apart at the first sign of your wrath?!
You growl, displeased.
So displeased you are, in fact, that you overlay an old favorite soul of yours when it comes to destroying whatever is in front of you, making the rapier hero lend you his power even as the golem does something to turn the segmented, sharpened armor panels on its limbs into four blades soon protruding from its arms like some sort of transformer.
Growling at it annoyed as you are by its lack of reverence for you, you jump to the side to avoid its attempt to skewer your side, only for it to rotate its entire upper body by ninety degrees and stab at you with all of its shifting blades at once. You hurriedly redirect two of them, the weapons far enough apart to require your full concentration to work on both, and receive the other arm's worth of punishment in full.
It is not a pleasant feeling to have the sharp objects scrape along your face and try to pierce through your throat, even with your aura protecting you from the worst, and so it is with vindictive pleasure that you return the favor, using the heroic power at your disposal to let your next paw strike actually pierce through adamantium.
That one has the golem lose the hand it just dared to raise against you. Then comes your bite, taking a chunk of its torso, and just like that you're upon it, biting and clawing to keep it in place as you dismantle it in your noblest of forms.
Even with the power you are abusing for this, the material is taking a bit longer to pierce through, but its effect is simply not enough to stop the magnitude of your attack. Not enough reality affirmation, to put it simply, to stop you from inflicting the just punishment this automaton's actions deserve.
By the time you snort and push it to the side with one paw, the golem is very well taken apart, scattered in little pieces that flew here and there. Finally, the proper state of the world is restored.
As you give off a happy growl at your inevitable, but still hard-fought victory, you turn toward the doors meant to keep you from your prize. Naturally, none of them shall bar your way for long.
A quick application of your overlaid hero's power and your paws, you have clawed the heavy adamantium doors down, idly wondering exactly how much of the stuff the dwarves used in the construction of this little treasure vault when they were also trying to store up a significant amount for their big project at the time.
The mystery is solved when you see the storage rooms. As it turns out, the quantity of metal available to them was significantly higher than you would have thought.
Gold, silver and bronze are a given, but you see much more than them carefully stacked in the form of ingots- filling a large room each, and you mean large rooms when you say this. Comfortably housing enough space to put an entire building inside, you see adamantium, dark iron, mithril, miscellaneous materials you don't bother looking after respectively and, indeed, orichalcum, if you're reading the inscription labelling the place it is kept right.
Tons of each of them, and much more. This is a legitimate motherload of treasure, even beyond the possible utility of the blueprints you snatched up earlier.
You need a moment to process all this. And to keep yourself from building a small comfortable nest out of the mithril.
Sarah? I've got a little situation here, do you have time now?
The contact between Sarah and Gabriel had been interrupted just before things had gotten to the good part, though it couldn't have been helped at the time, seeing as the younger of the two siblings had suddenly found herself busy with some minor administrative matters- a couple hundred demons had gotten it in their head to head off toward the North and defeat humanity by themselves (a regular occurrence, according to Rose), and they'd both ended up going out in person and telling them if they couldn't even defeat a couple of women, they were too weak to do anything up there, too.
Sexism wasn't really a thing among demons in this dimension; whether male or female, most demons were just as brutally strong and boisterous either way, and it showed in their culture. All the same, a quick fight while Sarah abused her semblance and vampiric strength to keep them occupied and Rose bombarded them with lightning and magically propelled metal sand to the eyes from afar was all it took to dissuade the small rambunctious crowd from making any more trouble.
Leading Sarah back to the present. Sure, always. Just tell me everything.
Her brother, taking things perhaps a tad bit too literal as he sometimes did, began flooding her mind with thoughts and images; the abandoned city filled with flecks of the setting sun and dust, where Sarah had insisted it had to have been dwarves (she wasn't a fantasy fan, but c'mon). The journey continuing deeper under the earth, discovering the industrial construction district containing industry so far beyond the scope of anything to be seen in this dimension even she was awed for a moment, despite having seen things ostensibly on the same level or at least their results.
Sneaking past the golems, ancient guardians still active and patrolling after longer than most civilizations lasted. Hopping inside the giant drill, finding the chief executive's office and figuring out the secret switch as well as the schematics for the whole industrial giant before proceeding onward toward material storage... Where the last of the remaining custodians lay in wait, then defeating it in the form of some gigantic panther lizard thing and overwhelming strength.
Gabe, Sarah thought at her brother as he proceeded to show off the treasure he finally managed to find, containing riches beyond imagination, I am gone for an hour at most and you've confirmed the existence of a mythical civilization that has never been confirmed to exist before, made your way past millenia old automatic guardians that are still active and have found enough valuables to buy both nations up here on the surface, if you got anyone to sell them to you. How?
Oh, you know, I just followed my divination and my gut feelings, her frustratingly smooth brother replied. Only issue is I have absolutely no idea how to get all of this material out of here now that I've found it. Orichalcum is so rare I was expecting maybe enough for what I need and some extra if I'm lucky, not a small mountain of the stuff.
Just... You have those worm undead, right? The ones that can dig? Sarah was resisting the urge to sigh and give voice to her opinion on her brother's escapades... Barely, but she was.
Yep.
Have them dig a decent tunnel, mark it and just send a bunch of demons in there after you're back, she thought at her brother. Simple as that.
I don't know, there might be a couple of actually strong monsters around. I'd hate to lose out on any of this stuff because they all got themselves eaten midway...
Sure, but they're, you know, demons. They'll probably be fine, Sarah waved him off.
Putting Sarah's plan into action (because it is Sarah's plan and therefore obviously great) is a great deal easier thanks to the form you're already in anyway; though the golems patrolling the outer area are no pushovers by any manner, being a giant cat while retaining all of your powers does let you deal with them rather easily once you really go all out and ambush them from afar, abusing your raw speed and strength to the utmost.
Breaking them does not fill you with the raw satisfaction that getting rid of the big one made almost entirely out of adamantite did, but you still make sure none of them will walk ever again. They've kept this place monster-free and clean long enough for you to find it, but at this point they would just get in the way.
Leaving just a few of them further outward and more likely to repel any monsters wandering into this cavern, you only return to tear the adamantite doors you saw out of their hinges, finally taking on your normal form once again and shaking off the vaguely cat-like state of mind (it isn't that bad, you're mostly your normal self in it still) while you check up on the progress of the biteworm you reactivated out of its mild hibernation earlier to send it to establishing a decently-sized tunnel leading right from your entrance point toward the place you exited from.
And making sure it's easy to find, too. Honestly, the one thing you're worried about the most is whoever is sent on your trail losing their way in the labyrinth of paths down under the mountains somewhere.
Still, with a very decent amount of loot made up of several bars of the two perhaps most valuable and treasured metals in this dimension weighing you down, you finally begin your trek back to the surface. You can hardly wait to mess around with your newly-won orichalcum and figure out how to best use it!
So elated are you, in fact, that you don't even spare the pair of giant monstrous moles you cross paths with a second look as you casually prove that though your claws may be at a disadvantage against adamantite, they certainly have no problem with their skulls.
All in all, it took all night, but your little stint as an archaeologist adventurer was totally worth it, you'd say.