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Chapter 149: Negotiations
🕑 Added 2023-11-25 00:41:08 +0000 UTCThe demon lord turned and walked to one of the walls, one made almost entirely of what appeared to be glass. “I want to put your mind at ease if I can. I know it’s you who’s been wasting my hearts and just demolishing my troops lately. Don’t worry about that at all. I can always make more, and I can assure you that after making the first million or so, I lost most of any personal connection I might feel for them. I’m honestly just glad you’ve made it here. Really.”
Matt felt reassured. He really had felt bad about killing all those demons, and given that the appraisal had called the demon lord “the father” of those he had killed, he had felt even worse. He breathed a sigh of relief and tried to look as thankful as he felt.
“Oh, that’s really decent of you. Thank you so…”
“Matt, what in the fuck are you doing?” Lucy screamed. Matt stopped, his foot already extended to take a friendly step closer to the demon lord. It was a skill. It must be. He pulled his foot back and gripped his shovel a little tighter.
The demon lord frowned. “It’s not often someone breaks out of that one, believe me. It looks like the High Counselor’s little guardian traps didn’t work this time. A pity.” He reached up and unclasped his cloak, casting it over a small fainting couch that lined the wall near him. “Unfortunately, that particular trick of mine only really works once. I don’t suppose you want to tell me any details of where you ended up after Earth? Or how you obtained that shovel? It’s quite the reward if you tell me.”
Matt gripped his shovel even tighter and stayed silent.
“Oh well. I’ll have to make do with the rewards for simply killing you, I suppose. Would you like the first…”
Matt had had enough. He reached down with the point of his shovel and launched a small decorative side-table at the demon lord, hoping it would cover him visually as he followed it to deliver a sword-shovel-strike. Given the circumstances, he didn’t have an opportunity to charge anything up and he wouldn’t have been able to anyway, so making the first move and seizing the initiative in the fight seemed like the next best thing.
The table flew through the air, then stopped as it hit another force field, this one revealing itself to contour to the demon lord’s exact shape and hovering a few inches off the surface of his skin. That was alright, Matt thought, considering that his shovel was the natural counter to all barriers. Just as he expected, it cut through the force field as if it weren’t even there, and the blade of the shovel impacted, hard, on the side of the demon lord’s head.
And then stopped, not doing any apparent damage at all. Worse, it was stuck.
“You might be interested to know that, at least in theory, there are several skills which counter force fields like mine. Not my field in particular, of course. But when one optimizes their build, one simply doesn’t rely on a single kind of defense.” He put his hand up to where the shovel still sat on his skull, wiping away a single drop of blood from the impact. “Odd. I would have thought it was my defensive skills that would have stopped this. But surprisingly, it’s something else. It’s been a long time since Black Hole Skin has seen any use. Refreshing to remember it’s there, really.”
The demon lord’s arm shot out, knocking Matt back before he could dislodge his shovel from the demon lord’s impossibly dense skin. Disarmed and flying through the air, he watched as the demon lord disappeared from his position, reappeared near him, and slammed up him. And again. He was being juggled, so fast and so accurately, he couldn’t get his feet on the ground. He was taking dozens of hits, each artfully designed to hurt him without actually killing him. And the whole time he fought, the demon lord was talking.
“Without that shovel, I’m afraid you are going to have a hard time doing anything to me at all. The advantages the system offers are quite extreme if you play ball. Not for the common folk, of course, but for the few winners, it can be very equitable. The counselor and I have had quite the gains, over the years. Although, he tends to invest in things, rather than himself. I suppose it doesn’t matter, considering he knows I’m as committed to the long game as he is.” He flipped in the air, dropping his foot into Matt’s stomach and knocking him down through a few floors worth of stone ceilings.
Matt was bleeding now, not just from his face, but from everywhere the demon lord had touched. The armor was mitigating some damage, but there was just too much of it for it to get all of it, and every so often, the demon lord would throw a hit that seemed to ignore his armor entirely.
“Matt! You have to get out of there!”
Lucy was right. If things went on like this much longer, he’d lose the ability to fight at all. Taking the risk of sacrificing one of his hands, he thrust his fist out at the demon lord. Hitting his opponent wasn’t hard. The demon lord hadn’t varied his rhythm the entire time. As his fist impacted with the force field, he learned something new about it. At least sometimes, it could repulse a blow. Hit with the full counter-force of his own punch, Matt slammed into the ground.
It was more damage. But it did take the demon lord a second longer to adjust. Not enough time to run, maybe, but enough for him to do a desperate thing while still lying on his back on the floor. With few options, he hit him with Pocket Sand.
“Ugh!” the demon lord stuttered, spitting. “I can’t believe that got through my shield. It must not have registered as a threat at all. Don’t be embarrassed, really.” He spit again. “Unfortunately, most of the senses you might target with that kind of attack are just for show on me, these days.”
With a final stomp, the demon lord embedded Matt into the ground, knocking the air out of him and breaking his ribs. All of them, as near as Matt could tell. Still, he tried to scramble to his feet, only to find his legs didn’t have any strength.
“All right, now be a good boy. The fun part is over. It’s time for me to negotiate. Did you know you can negotiate with the system? Well, at least if you are important enough to it, and play by the rules. You chose some other route, I guess. I’ve never seen it so hot and bothered by anything.”
With Matt still recovering on the floor, the demon lord went silent for a while, his hands twitching and his eyes darting back and forth slightly as he read his own system screens.
“Hm. Alright,” he said. “Not much, but I suppose it will have to do. Time to end this.”
The nails on his right hand grew out, suddenly looking impossibly sharp, and he took a step towards Matt.
“Wait!” Matt said, coughing up a little blood in the process. “Before… you do that. Let me ask you something.”
“Oh, he finally wants to talk now?” The demon lord looked amused. At that moment, Matt’s shovel’s soul-bound aspect finally teleported it back to him, a function he had never had need of before. “Oh, how interesting. Not that it does you much good right now. I really will enjoy owning that particular object. Well, okay. One question.”
“It’s about the balance.” Matt said. “You’re balanced with the humans right now. The system lets you… improve your hearts. How is that balanced?”
The demon lord laughed. “Oh, is that all? The balance is nice, and it’s something the system likes, since it makes things predictable for it. But it was certainly never meant to be permanent on any given world. Things stagnate, given enough time. As an invader, you should know that.”
He walked over to Matt, kicking him in the ribs again, without much real force. “But certainly, it’s willing to compromise on that balance sometimes if it perceives some problem, or simply feels balance is not in its best interest. My hearts will devastate the humans, yes. But the system will ask me to allow a few to survive, and I will. It will eventually give them power to match mine, and the balance will be restored. It seems expensive for the system to have decided to do all this for one mere annoyance like you, but that’s the system’s business. It’s certainly not against any rules.”
Something appeared to occur to the demon lord, who suddenly made a small hand motion near his eye line.
“Oh, you sneaky little thing! I didn’t even check before. You stole two of my hearts, didn’t you?”
Matt coughed. He had, and it didn’t seem like there was much use denying it now. The demon lord clapped its hands and laughed. “I can’t believe it. What did you think you could even do with those?”
“Kill you.”
“Oh, you poor thing.” The demon lord basically pranced over to Matt’s side. “You can’t activate them, you know. And even if you could, they couldn’t get through my force field. It very much does register those as a threat to my person. Even I’m not invincible.”
The demon lord looked around his tower, seeming to spend most of his attention on the various rubble he had made in the process of beating Matt into submission.
“You know, this isn’t my only home. And your friends have already made quite a mess of the exterior.” His eyes flicked downward slightly as he appeared to make a decision. “I really shouldn’t do this, but I do have plenty of cities. And I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to test the new hearts. Setting them off at once should be interesting to see, especially once the shockwaves reach the other hearts in the basement.”
“You can’t do that. Please.” Matt pleaded, fear in his eyes.
“Oh, I can.” The demon lord said, looking enormously pleased with himself. “And I will. I’m sorry, Matt. It looks like this is it for our little conversation.”
With that, he raised his hand and clicked. Nothing happened.
“Odd. That’s one of the two you stole, I’m sure of it. What did you do with it?”
Matt said nothing.
“It should be going off somewhere, at least. Oh, well. I suppose that kind of thing might be why the system was worried about you in the first place.”
Off to the side, Lucy sat, wordlessly, her eyes glued to the demon lord, filled with tension and worry.
“No matter. I doubt you somehow got rid of both of them, whatever you are planning. Let’s try that second heart, shall we?”
The demon lord snapped his fingers again, activating the second heart. This time, rather than confusion, a smile lit over his face a moment after the snap. This one, it seemed, had worked.
“Well, it should just be a moment now, Matt,” the demon lord said. “Those hearts have a bit of a warm-up time. I’d say it’s been nice, but overall, you’ve turned out to be quite the boring thing. Sad. I had such high hopes for today.”
He sat down by Matt, who was still struggling with the pain in his ribs. “At least my shield ignores these. Otherwise, I couldn’t even watch you burn.”
The demon lifted his right hand, his fingers fully extended. As Matt watched, he pulled in his thumb, then his forefinger. It was a countdown. He pulled in the next finger, and then the next, finally leaving only his pinky up. And then, with great satisfaction, he lowered even that, his face contorted with some kind of insane joy.
And then, suddenly, the demon lord’s face contorted into something else entirely as he began to scream in pain and terror.
Comments
Quaternion
I’m betting he got the demon lord to blow up his own troops or something like that. Maybe get penalized from the system?
Pagemaster
He ground up the heart didn't he and the demon lord just swallowed the ashes? Lol.
Thouit
Rude
Lyncher98
Tftc
Darune Albane
... CLIFFY
Ambrose
Thanks so much for the chapter, can’t wait for the next one.
Ambrose
So! Many! Cliffhangers!
