David and his minions went on a rampage. David walked into the forest, killing anything and everything he could find. He headed east, then north, then east of the stream again.
He faced all types of creatures: herds of werebeasts, warlocks, stagfiends, imps, colossal hobgoblins, scouts and squads from the Marked Legion.
He found another Abyssal Priest, a level 20. The priest fled once David’s group almost immediately eviscerated his flesh golems. The priest turned and accelerated away from the clearing with a speed that immediately put distance between them.
That had been annoying.
He’d chased it for a while, the priest maintaining a frustratingly efficient lead. Then it channeled power into a ring that twisted space around it like a drain and vanished.
He had found a changed part of terrain to the north. The trees formed a wide ring around a basin of fractured grey stone. In the center, a monument rose—a spire of polished black rock in a clearing of shattered stone. Cracks in its surface bled a steady light that pooled on the ground. The earth was a web of fine, glowing fissures. On the stone around the base, creatures roamed. He saw the silver flash of a scale, the jerk of a spined limb, the drift of something floating above the stone. Creatures of layered, metallic feathers and shapes of condensed shadow, scales, flesh and fire, hunted in the spire’s shadow. Their movements were slow, casual. The aura coming off them pressed against his skin like a physical weight.
Rhea saw their levels. They were beyond anything they could handle. She pulled back. They retreated without argument. Bringing her along had been a great idea. He might not have seen their levels until it was too late otherwise.
They continued east, using the advantage of invisibility to eviscerate every creature, pack, and herd they encountered. Now David sat on top of a dead cluster of the Marked Legion—goblins, orcs, wargs, and two horned brutes with split jaws. Blood soaked the leaves beneath him. Cinder stood at his side, towering, devout, vicious, her massive bone greatsword resting across one shoulder.
Rhea was some distance away. He couldn’t see her. She was too far. He sensed his minions instead, a low-grade awareness like knowing where your own limbs were. She slept while Fenrir and the hob took watch, killing anything that strayed too close to the veil. David stayed in the forest alone, hunting with Cinder. He had never stopped hunting. The idea seemed like a waste of good violence.
David finished consuming the soul of a bound warlock. He’d been dragging the bodies from fight to fight, building a pile. It was impractical and cumbersome, but it served a much greater purpose. Each needed to be bound before a soul could be consumed, and he’d only managed twenty five. The body twitched once and went still. He unwrapped the heretic shackle from the corpse and turned it over in his hands. It deflated, going from a person to a sack of wet flour. He thought about the classes.
The mind knight had been level 27. The swift-footed slayer had been level 25. Both had classes. That suggested there would be a class somewhere between his current level and 25—a milestone, a gift from the System with an implied price tag.
The ogre had said its first batch of humans hadn’t survived their classing. That implied the process of receiving a class was dangerous. How, David wasn’t sure. Maybe it changed the soul. Maybe it changed the body. Maybe it was a trial. A trial so lethal that death came easily. That was why David had been avoiding leveling. Instead, he gathered wounded and dying creatures, drained their energy, and consumed their souls in one go. He was stockpiling, grinding his stats and skills in preparation.
When groups appeared, he started wounding the ones he could wound. He killed the ones he couldn’t leave standing. He disabled the rest. He cut off legs, sliced tendons, burned off arms. Every fight became a sequence he controlled—battlefield triage if the only treatment was amputation and the goal was to end the patient.
It was killing. Hunting. Leveling. Consuming souls. Without sleep. Without food. Never tiring. Endless battle. The forest was a twenty-four-hour buffet where everything was trying to eat you back.
Draining their energy boosted his demonic energy stat, a little top-up every time, like charging a battery with screams. Consuming their souls boosted his base constitution and strength, a fractional, permanent upgrade, brick by brick.
Getting a class would be dangerous. Maybe it would be a trial. Maybe a quest. Trials demanded survival; quests could fail. That might explain why none of the ogre’s humans survived. The System seemed to want him to level one battle at a time. One level per fight.
When the class came, he would be overprepared. His strength was higher. His constitution thicker. His demonic energy pool deeper. He intended to walk in with the stats of someone ten levels higher and dare it to try.
[Name: David Carter
Level 17
Demonic Realm: Floor 1/???
Difficulty: Impossible
Time left until forced ejection: 4y 357d 3h 29m 23s.
Primary Class: Locked
Sub-class: Locked
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Aspects: Oracle of the ?Unknown?
Strength: 35
Dexterity: 7
Constitution: 80
Mana: 61
Demonic Energy: 584
Skills: Battle Sense Lvl 4, Calm Mind Lvl 1, Energy Affinity Lvl 6, Demonic Energy Lvl 4, Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 9, Portal Magic Lvl 2, Infernal Thrall Lvl 2, Touch of the ?Unknown? Lvl 0, DeathBorn Lvl 3, Soul-Manipulator Lvl 6,
Free points: 0]
“Watch my back,” David said.
Cinder moved a step out, scanning the trees, blade ready, her eyes banked to a faint dark sheen. His demon had grown, too.
David, out of sheer habit, checked his fanatical thrall’s total progress.
[You have created an undead deathless revenant, a demon and hybrid of races, a feat the dungeon system refuses to reward you for. Force the system to acknowledge your achievement.
Lvl 13/100]
David's eyes had been opened. He was no longer holding back. He was no longer playing it safe. He was no longer ignoring his magic or his skills. He had been practicing his skills in between and during battle. Every single skill. Now he practiced his portals.
In preparation he spent several seconds conjuring balls of fire and shaping them into walls of flame to surround the place he would open the portal, a cage of fire and death. Cinder stood ready, her bone greatsword raised, her limbs full of energy, ready to cave in the skull of anything awry that came through. Usually, David would have Fenrir make them invisible and have creatures nearby as distractions, but now he was familiar with this size of portal he was planning. He pushed and manipulated demonic energy and used his portal magic to open a portal two feet wide. He maintained the connection, creating a demonic and eldritch landscape on the other side of the portal.
A creature came through.
It was a convergence of chitin and exposed sinew, a thing of dreadful purpose. Its body was a low, armored carapace the color of a deep, venous bruise, slick with a thin, glistening film. Six legs, not spindly but powerful and piston-like, each ending in a three-clawed foot of black bone capable of anchoring or rending, supported its weight. From the front of the carapace, a muscular neck extended, culminating not in a head, but in a vertical, sphincter-like maw lined with rows of inwardly curved, needle-sharp teeth that spiraled into a deep gullet. Above this mouth, three stalked eyes, each a pulsing orb of sickly yellow light, swiveled independently on flexible tendrils. From its back, two sets of limbs unfolded: a pair of longer, bladed forelimbs, articulated like praying mantis arms but ending in serrated bone scythes, and a cluster of shorter, whip-like tendrils that lashed the air with a sound like cracking knuckles. Every part of it suggested a unified, horrifying function: to grasp, to hold, to devour.
He trapped it in a cage of demonic fire and Black Death fire intertwined, a cage of fire and death. Then he studied the creature.
He stabbed the creature in its navel, where he sensed its vitals were, and before it dissipated into whistling smoke, David did some demonic magic. He reached out with his demonic energy and surrounded the creature, applying pressure from all sides. He was trying to use selective reinforcement, to stop it from dispersing. He felt like he was on to something, maintaining the creature's form with his energy. It seized and snarled, a wet, guttural vibration from its spiraling throat, the scythe-arms slashing at the empty air as if it wanted to attack or eat him. Then his concentration slipped and it burst into a whirl of acrid, purple-black smoke. He was trying to mimic Rhea's telekinesis and Cinder's reinforcement to press the creature in. It didn’t work, but it was something.
He thought he wanted to enthrall one next and see what happened. That was interesting. But it could be used offensively maybe, or maybe he could use it for souls and bodies and resources. He wondered what would happen if he opened a portal ten or twenty feet large. Obviously nothing good. But still, it was an idea worth exploring. And it was already showing reward.
[Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 9 → Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 10]
[Skill Upgrade Available. Please Select Upgrade Perk.]
Oh? Wow, looks like the system had a change of heart. The omnipresent system, uncharacteristically, had decided to throw him a bone.
David came back from hunting with Cinder to find Rhea entirely invisible with Fenrir and the hob. She had been sleeping when he left. Now she was wide awake.
He saw the remains of her meal, cooked stagfiend meat roasted in a hidden fire, and a backpack full of extra canteens and water bottles in her impromptu camp. They were on the other side of the stream deep in the forest to what David practically called the east, as the mountain beneath the sun was far to the distant north, and the Marked Legion were to the south.
Now, Rhea was currently practicing, using her telekinetic skill to move herself around quickly by holding on to a javelin, and judging by scuffed earth, it looked like she had been trying to use it to fly too.
He felt further indignation and jealousy at the coolness of the other survivors skills.
I want to do that, he thought. The desire was a cold, hard fact in his mind. Not the javelin part. The moving part. The getting-out-of-the-way-quickly part. It was a superior piece of survival magic, and he didn't have it.
It should be mine, his mind supplied, without heat. It was a logistical observation. He could use it better. He had more need. She was experimenting with flight; he would have already used it to flank the ogre.
David watched. It must be nice to have a skill that doesn’t try to bite your hand off, he thought. The thought was flat, an observation of a tactical disparity. He watched the javelin anchor her tugs, the controlled yet awkward launches. Why not tug your own body? Tug your actual self instead of other objects and people. The answer was probably a simple rule. Maybe she couldn’t.
He would for the umpteenth time, try to figure out how the skill worked, and how demonic energy could create a corrupted version of its effect, but he had other more important things to do.
“Skill upgrade.”
Blue panels appeared in his vision.
[Demonic Energy Mastery has reached Level 10. Please select your skill upgrade perk:
1. Demonic Energy Mastery — Demon Blood
Compress and double the efficiency of your demonic energy. Total energy pool doubled. Magic field range increased by 50%. Control improved by 50%.
Warning: Energy regeneration reduced by 50%.
2. Demonic Energy Mastery — Hellfire Surge
Infuse your demonic energy with the innate quality of hellfire. All energy-based skills gain the hellfire aspect, increasing damage and destructive power inherently by 5 times its base.
Warning: Without a demon’s body, all channelled hellfire damages the wielder to a degree.
3. Demonic Energy Mastery — Demon Body
Demonic restructuring alters your body to better channel demonic energy. +30% to all physical stats. Improved energy pathways. Adaptation to demonic energy accelerated.
Warning: Minor psychological side-effect increase. Risk of energy rampage increase.]
