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Chapter 148: Great Host
🕑 Added 2023-11-23 00:41:53 +0000 UTCWhen Matt had been falling into the hole he created, it looked like he was descending into pitch-black darkness. Now that he was at the bottom of the hole, it was a different story. It was still dark, despite the best efforts of the light streaming in from above. But it was dark in the way you’d expect the demon lord’s basement to be in a video game, a sort of candle-holders-lining-the-walls dimness as opposed to anything that actually kept him from seeing.
As he displaced the small amount of rubble that had made the trip with him, Matt found himself in a long, stone hallway lined with wooden doors. Near where he was, the hallway terminated in another rock wall, apparently signaling the end of how far the subterranean structure had reached under the city. The sides were lined with wooden doors, and on the non-dead-end side, the hallway simply curved away from him, blocking his view of where it might lead.
“Well, I guess that’s one way to get in.” Lucy was standing by Matt, regarding one of the side door curiously. “Do you think we should search these rooms?”
Matt leaned to the side a little and took a couple of steps forward down the hall. “No, probably not. We aren’t here to loot, and I’m not sure if I even want to know the details of what this guy has going on down here. I think we just pick a direction that looks like it goes somewhere and follow it. We don’t know where we’re going. Might as well get distance.”
Matt began briskly travelling down the hall, shovel at the ready. For the first time in a long time, he wished he had sharpened the point of it rather than just one of the sides. Swinging a weapon in a narrow passage was hard, and as it stood, the shovel was mediocre at best when poking and stabbing.
As they traveled along, his stress levels were at all-time highs. If he ran into trouble, such as if the doors that lined this passageway suddenly opened and disgorged a dozen angry demons, that would probably be it for him. His build was mostly around maneuverability and trickery at this point. Here, he couldn’t move, except forward. He couldn’t dig. His new charge attack was much, much worse at keeping him alive when he was being attacked from both sides. Changing direction to trick your opponent didn’t matter much if there were only two ways to go, forward and backward. The environment was a counter to everything that Matt was.
So he sweated. He didn’t need to sweat, really, but he could feel his underclothes getting soaked with it, some remnant of his old, normal body and its old, normal, biological needs. He didn’t know the amount of heat it would take to make him actually need to sweat at this point, but he suspected it was high enough that he’d probably be screwed in that situation, sweating or not. This, what was happening to him now, was just old-fashioned human fear. It was a matter of time until things went wrong, and he knew it.
And then things just went… ok. One reason why was that the basement was, in the end, not all that large. The force field had only gone out so far, and even moving semi-cautiously, Matt managed to clear the hallway in a fairly decent time. The second reason was that the basement really was deserted, probably less because of the attack and more that average demons just weren’t allowed down here. There were no guards or warriors at all, including in the large, circular room he finally came to when the open side of the hallway reached its end.
The curvature of the hallway made more sense when Matt realized that it was just one of several, all curving away from the central room in a rough tessellation, like bent rays of light coming off a child’s drawing of the sun. Matt quickly put aside his interest in the design choices, however, when he realized the focus of the room was storage. There were box after box of weird weapons, animal-shaped helmets, and all sorts of oddities he supposed the demon lord either had designed down here or stored for future use.
He walked by a table of various odds and ends when one object caught his eye. It was a small rod, something he was pretty sure he had seen before, and something he certainly didn’t expect to see here. Picking it up, he willed some intent to it and pointed it down at the ground in case things went wrong.
Ding!
Rock Building Block (Gneiss)
This is a rock that has been carefully shaped as a building brick. It is made of the metamorphic form of granite, is reasonably hard, and as durable as you’d expect it to be.
Matt tucked what he had now confirmed to be a rod of identification into his belt. He didn’t know for sure that it would come in handy, but you never really knew with those things, and knowledge really was power when you found yourself in an unusual place in an unusual world. Defying his expectations, it came in handy almost immediately when he came into view of a stack of milk-crate sized boxes, each packed to the brim with another very familiar looking object.
They were tiny demon hearts. He immediately used his new rod of identify on them, and found that they were even worse than he feared.
Perfected Heart of the Demon Lord
Where previous versions of this weapon were unstable double-edged swords that took a great deal of time and energy to move, an enormous effort was spent to remove those weaknesses in this version.
The first improvement is stability. While each perfected demon heart packs as much destructive power as their larger, less stable cousins, their activation is now heavily tied to user will, rather than having destructive force exerted on them. A demon heart can be willed into action or accidentally set off with the sheer amount of energy released by another demon heart, but otherwise can survive being crushed, cut, bashed, pulverized, burned, melted, or dissolved without premature detonation.
Each heart is individually numbered, and can be assigned to a single demon soldier. They cannot be activated with the intent of hurting the demon lord or his property, but can otherwise be used by the soldier at will. The demon lord, of course, retains full redundant control over every heart and, so long as the hearts remain on Ra’Zor, can activate them from any point in the world at will.
Matt relayed the message to Lucy.
“Shit, Matt. That’s another option down. We can’t blow these up ourselves at all, and I doubt he’s kept any of the older kind on-hand with these available.”
“It’s worse than that.” Matt did some quick mental projections of what these new bombs meant, tactically. “Think about it. Before, they needed an army to move these. Now, the demon lord could send out dozens of small squads. They could knock down every human settlement in a week. The system instance shredded the balance.”
“What can we do? You could destroy them, it sounds like.”
“It wouldn’t do any good. Look how many there are. He can clearly mass-produce these.”
Matt racked his brain for solutions, and watched as Lucy did the same. They both came to a conclusion at roughly the same time, looked at each other, and got to work. But they only got in about thirty seconds of effort when Matt found himself suddenly jerked upwards through a dozen levels of spire floors.
—
In his parlor, the demon lord was almost always in a good mood. He had built the room especially for himself, doing a pretty good job on the first iteration. Since then, he had plenty of time to refine and rework it, not just keeping up with his slowly evolving tastes but also better tailoring the experience of rest and enjoyment for an ever-better fit. He had just the right amount of light, just the right kind of chairs, and had finally worked out exactly the pattern of flooring he enjoyed best. There was a mistake that he would need it to repair sometime later, but that was a small, easily accommodated price to pay.
Of all the powers he had acquired over the years, and there were many, his favorite by far for day-to-day use was Placid Mind. By this point, he was functionally immortal, or at least so long-lived that he himself couldn’t estimate how many millennia he’d last. At first, this had been unbearable. He’d suffered from impatience and anger, often making bad choices out of boredom or rage that he’d later come to regret. Now, he was the master of his mood and his own emotions. Anything good, he let flow through him. Any negative feeling triggered by anything less than a real threat to his goals, he suppressed. If necessary, he could wait an entire century for his guest to arrive, all the while as calm and relaxed as it was possible for anyone to be.
Luckily, waiting wasn’t necessary here. He reached and moved a small decorative table gently out of the way, clearing some delightful space in the center of the room, just in time for a remarkably well-equipped human to come hurtling through the floor. The new addition slamming into the ceiling before finally settling face-down on the ground again.
“Well, hello!” the demon lord offered a greeting. “I’m glad you could make it. I hope you forgive me for saving you some time. I’m afraid your stealthy approach was much less effective than you had hoped, and I thought it would be in both our interests to hurry things up a tad.”
Matt stood up and reached for the appraisal rod on his belt, already dreading what it would tell him about the surprisingly humanoid, only slightly bluish being in front of him. But as he realized the demon lord was not quite hostile at the moment, he paused just before actually drawing it.
“Oh, you’d like to appraise me? Go right ahead.” The demon lord used one of his pointed nails to pull his long hair back over his ear. “I don’t mind one bit.”
Cautiously, Matt leveled the appraisal rod at his new opponent and willed it to work. Immediately spent of charges, the rod crumbled to dust in his hand.
The Demon Lord of Ra’Zor
You stand before the Demon Lord, giver of 1,000 cuts, dominator of invaded worlds, father of the Ra’Zorian demons and terror of the masses. He is powerful beyond measure. He is prepared beyond reason. He is simply this world’s deadliest threat, and has remained supreme for generations.
If there is a skill that you fear he possesses, he likely has it. If there is a weapon to exploit your weakness, he is armed with it, or something better. Before him, plans are but meaningless fantasies held by the weak before they meet their end.
He absolutely adores tea, and his given name is David.
“David?” Matt asked, shocked out of his fear. “Like, the Earth name?”
The demon lord looked momentarily shocked himself, then smiled and clapped his hands in glee. “Oh, you are from Earth? Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I won’t bother you with questions about it. I’m sure it’s changed quite a bit since my time. But I’m just incredibly pleased to meet someone from my old home.” He gestured towards a chair a few feet from Matt’s side. “Could I convince you to sit? It would be so much easier to talk.”
Matt looked at the chair uneasily, then shook his head. Somehow, he was being lulled into this thing’s conversational rhythms, either because of a skill or some other reason. He couldn’t let that happen.
“Well, your choice. I just wanted to be a great host.”
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