Bryce

I honestly hadn’t expected it to work.

Summoning magic is both incredibly difficult and obscenely dangerous. Demon summoning, though? That takes an entirely different breed of stupid to even attempt and yet Ava managed it.

She was a traitorous backstabbing bitch and I couldn’t imagine a way in which this would end well for her, but I was actually impressed that she pulled it off.

The demon herself wasn’t very impressive. She could have pretty easily passed as a short elf, if not for the jet-black eyes and near transparent pale skin.

She was wearing a tasteful black cocktail dress that ended just above her knees with a pair of practical heels. Her dirty-blonde hair was short and slicked back with some sort of grease. She had clearly dressed for a night out and didn’t look happy to be here.

Which made sense, because summoning magic was intrusive. Throw in a binding circle and it was basically the otherworldly equivalent to kidnapping. Most extra-planar beings didn’t appreciate it.

“Hello? I asked you a pretty simple question. Who the fuck are you guys?”

Ava stared back dumbly. Apparently, she had been just as surprised as me that her spell had worked.

The demon snapped her fingers a few times impatiently, which seemed to bring Ava back to her senses.

“Oh mighty Lilith,” Ava entoned. “You grace me with your presence. I have provided you with this powerful elven mage as a sacrifice so that you would destroy my enemies.”

Yeah, alright, I saw it now. Ava was a fucking idiot. This was clearly a low-level demon and nowhere near the arch-devil that she had been trying to summon.

I shook my head in disappointment and continued to work at the binders on my ankles while I watched this train wreck unfold.

“Oh… uh… yeah, I’m not Lilith.” The demon sighed as she squatted low to inspect the runes that made up the spell formations surrounding her.

I groaned internally as I resisted the urge to chide Ava. If she gave the demon a chance to inspect the runes, then she would probably find a flaw in the spell. Any flaws in the binding circle would let the demon escape and kill everybody in the room.

“I don’t understand. I crafted this spell specifically to summon Lilith. We need the power of an arch-devil in order to protect us against the corporations.” Ava sounded desperate, which wasn’t a good way to start any negotiation.

“Lilith isn’t an arch-devil, she’s not even a devil. Mother of demons and all that.” The demon wasn’t even looking at Ava as she lectured. “Oh! There it is! Your target rune here is all wrong. See, you put ‘Devil of the house of Lilith’, which is wrong. You’re also missing, like half of her commonly known titles. You’d need those if you wanted to force her to appear, otherwise it’s more of a quiet request.”

Oh, great. The demon was giving Ava a lesson on demon summoning. Thankfully, I was able to cut through my ankle restraints while the pair were talking.

“If you’re not Lilith, then who are you? Would you be able to protect us against the corporations?” Ava sounded cautiously optimistic, which given the circumstances, was incredibly naïve. There was no way one demon would even register on the corporate radar. That was assuming she would cooperate at all.

Cooperation was probably a bit of a stretch for somebody who was just summoned against their will.

“Oh, you can just call me Thea.” Thea stood up again and started looking around the room curiously with a smile. “I could probably knock out some random mortal corporation pretty easily. I’m just not sure what’s in it for me.”

“I already offered you Bryce, didn’t I?” Ava kicked me hard in the side and I coughed through the dirty cloth that was being used as a gag. “She’s at least arch-mage level, and don’t you demons like elf souls?”

I glared at her and silently seethed as I mentally added a pair of broken ribs to the growing list of injuries.

“Oh! Hey there!” The demon waved down at me with a cheerful smile. I just stared back in disbelief. She was acting really cavalier about this whole thing. “Yeah, there’s no way that’s going to work.”

“What do you mean that won’t work? She’s powerful and getting her like this wasn’t easy! Do you have any idea how difficult it was to restrain her? There’s no way that she wouldn’t appeal to a demon!” Ava sounded like a spoiled child. Meanwhile, I was feeling embarrassed that I had ever considered her my apprentice.

“That’s kind of the problem, y’know? Stripping a soul gets way harder the more powerful they are and even though you somehow stopped her from accessing her magic, it’s all still there. There’s no way I could even touch her soul.” Thea almost sounded genuinely apologetic.

“What about my mana? I’m a powerful mage. I could give you a tenth of my maximum. You’ll probably need it if you’re going to fight the corps, anyway.”

“Hmm… Well, you seem skilled, for an apprentice mage. If these formations are anything to go by, you have a lot of potential. Could have probably gotten pretty far, too. Could have been a great investment on my part.”

“Thank you. Do we have a deal, then?” If the look of pride on Ava’s face was any sign, then she had clearly missed the demon’s meaning. The girl had no sense of danger.

“I mean, you did mess up the summoning circle a bit, but that’s alright.” She took a step towards Ava, approaching the inner edge of the spell formation.

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I crawled away. This demon had no intention of making a deal and if a summoned demon wouldn’t deal, that only left one thing. There was no way that I was going to be between the two of them when the fighting started.

“The binding circle, though, that was done perfectly. I can honestly say that it probably would even have had decent odds of holding Lilith.” Thea was smiling as she spoke. It wasn’t a friendly smile. It was the smile of a predator who had cornered their prey.

“Of course it was. A binding circle is the first and ultimate line of defense during summoning rituals. The safety of the caster should always be first and foremost.” Ava must have finally realized that something was wrong. I could see her reaching into her jacket pocket as she backed away from the demon.

“And it was perfect, that is. To. Hold. Lilith. Not her household.”

I saw a flash of movement and heard bones break as the demon grabbed Ava by the neck, lifting the taller woman into the air.

Holy shit, she moved fast. Much faster than I thought was possible. I had severely underestimated this demon’s power level.

The two dolls that had been waiting silently in the back of the room finally moved.

Thea threw Ava’s corpse against the wall and dropped into a fighting stance. She raised a blood covered hand and motioned the dolls to approach.

I gave up all pretense of stealth and forced myself to stand so that I could limp my broken body across the room towards Ava’s crumpled corpse.

The two dolls moved with mechanical efficiency towards the demon. Simultaneously, they both pulled enchanted blades from the sheaths attached to their hips. The swords hummed with power as they ignited with a silver-blue light.

“Oh shit! Wait! Wait! Wait! Timeout! Nobody said anything about soul-blades, and I’m not about to die for some petty vengeance.”

I reached Ava’s body and rolled it over onto its back. She had been wearing a cheesy red robe that I had to move aside in order to reach her standard issue EVI corp branded jacket. I dug through her pockets, searching for the device that she had been reaching for before the demon had decided the room would look better painted red.

If I could find it, I might just turn this situation around and maybe get out of this misguided coup alive.

“Now look, I know I killed your friend and all, but there’s really no reason we can’t just put the evil soul-melting swords away and have a nice civil chat about boundaries and kidnapping innocent devils.”

Thea was slowly backing away as she tried to keep distance between herself and the blades. She was unarmed and even with the speed she showed against Ava mere moments ago, I didn’t like her odds against two military dolls with soul-blades. If I could get the dolls on my side, then just maybe there was a way for me to get out of this situation alive.

I finally found the small hand-held device in Ava’s pocket and quickly removed my gag before speaking into it.

“Executive order: stand down.” The two guards ignored my command and continued moving towards the demon.

I cursed under my breath before switching to Plan B. If I couldn't get the dolls on my side, then maybe I could try the demon.

“Override omega. Authorization code: executive class two, Bryce Virra. Confirmation: bravo-victor-two-seventeen.”

There were two loud pops before the guards collapsed silently into heaps.

Thea lightly kicked the blades away before looking over to where I sat propped up against the wall, breathing heavily.

“Did you just kill them?” she asked. “That wasn’t like any spell I’ve seen before. Besides, you’re clearly still cut off from your magic.”

“It wasn’t a spell.” I stood weakly before moving over to the nearest corpse. “They aren’t people, not fully anyway.”

I nearly blacked out as I bent over to pull the dark cloak from one of the dolls to reveal a bald head and a truly excessive number of connection ports protruding from it.

“We call them dolls. They’re a mixture of computer hardware and cloned bioware.” I had to explain between ragged breaths. It took far more effort than I would have liked. “It's distasteful, but they have their uses and they aren’t sentient. Which means there’s no company liability if we lose a few.”

Standing was getting to be a bit much for me, so I limped to the wall before carefully sliding back to the ground.

“I’m Bryce, by the way. I suppose I should thank you for saving me.”

“Yeah, sure, I’m Thea.” The demon knelt down to get a closer look at the dolls. “Well, there was definitely a soul, or at least a fragment of one. Has anybody bothered to ask these ‘dolls’ about the whole sentience thing?”

That surprised me. If the dolls had a soul, even a fragment of one, then that was enough to make a case for sentience. If they were sentient, that would call into question galactic slavery laws.

In reality, it would probably just result in a small fine for Omni-tech’s parent company and they’d recall this model. Then they’d mark it for a few minor revisions before they released the next one. It’d be a minor scandal, but probably would barely put a dent into the company’s quarterly reports.

At a certain point, things like that just became a cost of doing business.

“I doubt they bothered to ask,” I said. “Well, not officially, anyway. It’s usually better to just take the fine and fix it in the next batch or if nobody catches them, then they’ll just increment the version number and re-release it with the same hardware.”

“Well, it’s no skin off my back I suppose.” Thea stood and stretched before looking towards me with a half-smile and a raised eyebrow. “Now what?”

“That’s really up to you.” I gave her a half-hearted grin. “I’m in no condition to fight back if you wanted to kill me and there’s nothing stopping you from just heading back to wherever it is you came from.”

“You say that, but I could think of a few things. Oh, I won’t kill you, so you can relax about that nonsense. I killed your friend here because she forced a summon and tried to keep me against my will. I have a general rule of killing people who do that. Besides, you did technically save me from those ‘dolls’ with the soul-blades.”

I laughed at that as I felt tension leave my body. But that only served to remind me of the sorry state that I was in, as my laughter quickly turned into a coughing fit.

My hand came away from my mouth bloody and I couldn’t help but grimace.

“You probably could have dealt with the dolls yourself given enough time. Blades or not, you’re damn fast.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the assist.” Thea paused long enough to give me a full toothed grin and a cheesy thumbs up. “That brings me back to my previous point though. I don’t know enough magic to get back to Hades on my own and I’m not sure I would want to go back, even if I could.”

I furrowed my brow at that. Why wouldn’t she want to get home? She just killed a woman in cold blood for bringing her here. People rarely do that and then want to stick around.

"Why don't you want to go back?" I figured I may as well just ask her directly.

“Oh, this and that really,” she helpfully replied.

She couldn’t have been more obviously hiding something, but I had to look past that, at least for the moment.

I would usually never consider a pact with a demon, even if I hadn't just watched this one kill Ava in cold blood after a casual conversation. You can’t trust demons; that was rule number one when dealing with them. But if I didn't do something then I was definitely going to die and I could only think of one way out of this.

“There’s significantly less ambient mana on the mortal plane, and from what I’ve read, mana decay is an extremely painful way to die,” I said. “If you’re wanting to stick around, you’re going to need a pact and I’m your best bet.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”