Sai and I walk out of the village the same way we came, before the people she’d rescued had a chance to get up. She doesn’t care to hear their gripes, I guess. Maybe she expects they’ll have the same kinds of stupid ideas about sparing their assailant as Josh does. I have to wonder what Sai expects to do next, though. Josh hadn’t told us where the hag went, and we didn’t really pick up on any physical clues to her whereabouts either.
“So… we just gonna wander aimlessly, looking for some asshole throwing hexes around at people?” I ask, curious if she has something up her sleeve that I don’t get about the underworld yet. She seems to do that a lot. I’m still reeling over the fact that she just straight up shot me, and that it was actually the biggest non-issue because we’re just stronger than guns.
“Nah, I got ways.” She turns around back to the village’s entrance and pulls something from her pocket dimension. A camera. A very old camera. It’s more like a box with a lens in it and a number of mechanical knobs underneath the viewfinder on the back. She starts to fiddle with the settings on it, clicking knobs, and flipping switches. I stand to her side and watch her move things around closely, but it makes no sense to me at all.
The switches are all labeled with some kind of runic language I can’t make heads or tails of. I suppose it makes sense that there would still be language barriers in the underworld, given it’s populated entirely by overworld natives, doubtlessly from all over the world, but I’m still surprised that Sai is able to make sense of it. She doesn’t really seem the type to bother to learn another language. That, and this doesn’t look like any kind of human language I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t jar anything in my memory, anyway, with its jagged lines and exact swooping curves that wouldn’t make much sense to have developed that way naturally as a method for communication.
“What language is that?” I frown, wondering if my memory is just failing me, or if I wasn’t very well-versed in other cultures in life. But that wouldn’t make sense, since I apparently had intimate knowledge of various folklores’ monsters in my memory. That sort of hints that I was open-minded.
“It’s not. We call it Script. It’s a magic language. You give it the right formula and you get a consistent effect on the underworld itself.” Sai explains, too distracted by whatever she’s setting up on the device to get snarky about my ignorance. “These characters can interact in specific… esoteric ways with the fabric of… everything. I dunno, I don’t make the things, I just use ‘em.”
“Magic runes.” I snort. A few ideas spring from memory at the description. “Of course that’s a thing. But manipulating the fabric of the universe directly? Like a true name sort of deal?”
“I’ve heard some enchanters use that term before, yeah.” Sai nods, still too distracted by her device to make eye contact, but still satisfying my curiosity. “Human nonsense, I’m guessing. If it makes it make sense to you, though, sure, why not?”
Human nonsense? Is that what Sai thinks about mythology that comes from the overworld? I guess she’s not wrong, if it really does just kind of slip into the overworld in feverish dreams that are constantly misinterpreted. Maybe there is a little bit of justified indignance because there’s another world where people kind of know about you, but get everything wrong.
“Alright, I’ll bite. What is this thing?” I finally ask, tired of watching her toggle little modules on the device. She’s slowed down by now, and seems to just be making little tiny tweaks as she experimentally peeks into the viewfinder. “I know you’re not just going to start taking travel photos here.”
“It’s a little complicated. And it’s only step one. The guy who made it calls it a temporal lens. Short of it is, it lets you look into the past at a given location.” Sai explained. I stared down at the device wide-eyed. This little thing could just remotely see some place without having been there at the time? Magic was crazy. “I need to see this hag’s face before I can do the next part.”
“I guess I should probably ask if we’re trying to kill this thing, what exactly is a hag, anyway?” I already have an idea of what a hag could be, but that’s from memories of the overworld, and I’ve just finished making an observation about how flawed the overworld’s interpretation of demons generally is. “As far as I remember, they’re something like haggard old witches that live in swamps, fully immersing themselves in nature, using dark magic to lure in children to eat or something.” Maybe I was mixing up some of my memories there, but I wasn’t exactly digging deep for accuracy at the moment.
“Dark magic nature mages, you got right. They’re ugly bastards too for sure, but I seriously doubt ‘be old’ is a requirement. And we eat people, kid, everyone eats people. Get over it already.” Sai rolls her eyes. “Not like you’d be able to tell if a demon died a child, anyway.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. I had to wonder how old my victims had been, but figured it was probably best if I didn’t overthink it. “So I’m about right then?”
“Pretty much. Guess humans can’t be totally wrong all the time. Not sure where the swamp bit comes from, though.” She shrugs as she holds the device out in front of her. “Pretty sure that’s her. Give me just a second to line this up. If I miss, we’ll have to find some other way to get her face. This thing takes a long time to refresh itself.”
I go quiet and let her do her work, backing away from my master as she drops down to one knee and aims the ‘camera’ lens carefully onto the path leading to the village.
I feel something strange in the air, an intangible force being pulled toward the magic camera, as the temporal lens seems to move slightly on its own in Sai’s hands, and then in a blindingly bright flash saturates an enormous conal area in front of it in sizzling hot light.
A primal fear shoots through me, and before I know what’s happening, I’m surrounded several meters out by a familiar and comforting blackness, panting loudly as I try to make sense of the devastating light that had momentarily swallowed an enormous area in front of me. I can’t move. My limbs feel frozen, like moving will disrupt the sphere of safety I reflexively threw up around myself.
It takes me a moment to convince myself that it had just been a flash; that it was gone now. I slowly relax my shoulders and let out a slow, shaking breath, but I can’t bring myself to lower my field of darkness.
“You baby.” Sai chuckles, letting go of the temporal lens, which simply floats in the air where she’d brought it to make the blinding flash, unsupported by the demon now that it was active. “I wasn’t even pointing it near you.” She walks right into the odd scene in front of the device. A sepia landscape overlayed on top of the normal world around it, color drained away into what looks like an old-fashioned photograph. A cutaway from reality in another time. And near the center is a figure that makes me want to look away from it. Sai was right about hags being ugly.
I frown at Sai’s taunt, though. It snaps me out of my stupor and I finally lower my shadows back into myself, huffing out loudly once I know Sai can see me. “That would have killed me if you were, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably.” Sai shrugs, walking up close to the frozen image of the hag in 3D space. It’s a hunchbacked old woman, face twisted and covered in warts that must have left her in constant pain. She’s draped in tattered robes that thoroughly covered her crooked, hunched body, and she leans heavily on a gnarled walking stick. Despite this tortured creature’s body, she seems to have an unsettling, gentle smile on her face. It makes her seem like a doddering old lady, body bent unforgivingly by a long life, but leaving a warm soul despite her physical misery.
I know better than to fall for such a ruse after seeing the aftermath of what she did in Joshua’s village, though. This is a monster.
“That’s the bitch.” Sai nods. “Certainly don’t want to think about her face much longer, but while it’s fresh in my mind…” she pulls another magical item from nothing, a slip of paper this time. I’d expect something magical to look like some kind of ornate, rolled up scroll made of papyrus, but this was more like a wrinkled up forgotten old thermal paper receipt you would find in the pocket of a winter coat when you took it out again in the middle of fall. It didn’t look ornate or even cared-for. It was doubtless just something someone had slipped her way at some point.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
And yet, Sai speaks a word that my ears can’t make sense of, and the slip of paper vanishes in a puff of blue flame. The flame lingers and hovers over Sai’s hand, and she smiles at it. “And we have our guide.” she declares, turning back to the temporal lens and grabbing hold of it. The image of the hag flickers out of existence, and the color returns to the land around it as Sai moves the device, the smaller details of the past making me slightly dizzy as it fades back into its current state. The device itself vanishes into her personal world, and now we’re just left with an ethereal floating pyre.
“Okay… so it just… what, goes toward her?” I ask, simultaneously thankful and intrigued that the flame doesn’t seem to emit any light.
Sai holds up the flame a little bit and nods to it “Something like that. It’ll nudge us the right way.” she spins around slightly until she seems satisfied by something and then begins walking. “She’s got a few weeks head start on us, but I doubt she’s just fleeing. A hag’s magic benefits from establishing a lair, so she’s probably set up somewhere in these woods. Somewhere that’s hard to stumble onto.”
“And then what?” I ask, wondering if she had some kind of anti-evil-spellcaster device lined up in her pocket dimension somewhere, or if she just planned to stab her.
“I dunno.” Sai shrugs. Okay, I guess the plan is just to stab her then. “Mages are unpredictable. Especially generalists. You never know what kind of trick they have up their sleeve. You kind of have to improvise around them. Hags are specifically nature mages, but they have a wide domain to their magic.” She turns to look at me, her disinterested expression showing blue eyes. “Not gonna lie, kid, you’re probably gonna die.”
I feel a lump in my throat. “E-Excuse me?” I mutter meekly.
“You think it’s hard for most spellcasters to make a simple light out of nothing? She’ll poof you with a thought.” Sai scoffs. “You’re not going to want to reveal your nature to her. Or just don’t let her see you at all. Maybe if you’re lucky, she’s never seen a darkling before, but if you start turning the lights out, she’ll figure it out quick enough.”
Well, that wasn’t terrifying. I guess being a darkling doesn’t sound like much of a choice to stay in forever, anyway, given its glaring weakness, but I still don’t like that me dying feels like such a foregone conclusion. I do kind of hope that I’ll change again before then so I have a better chance against this enemy.
I wonder if I might be able to influence my next transformation if I start acting certain ways now, though. “Well, maybe it won’t be an issue. Maybe I’ll be something else by the time we get there.”
Sai shrugs “Maybe. Depends how far we’re going. It’ll take a little longer each consecutive time you transform until you die, though. You transformed for the first time after about a day. It might still be another week, or even longer until you change again. If you wanna be sure you change by then, you might wanna just off yourself now.”
“What kind of fucking world did I die into where ‘maybe you should kill yourself’ is practical advice?” I whine, following close to my master as we make toward the nearby woods. It’s certainly not advice I’m going to take. I still shiver a little when I think about killing other people again, despite the murders I’d been forced to commit on what could easily have been children for all I know. I definitely feel like I could do it again. I expect I’ll do it again frequently. I don’t think I have it in me to tear my own throat out, though. For now, I focus on the path ahead.
—
It doesn’t take long before we’re surrounded by trees. Even the forests in this world feel wrong. They’re too orderly. Too organized. The trees don’t feel like they’ve been placed naturally, more like they’re deliberately put into patterns that are trying to resemble randomness, the nature of a forest totally misunderstood by its creator. It’s unsettling in that way where you can’t be certain why it feels off, but sometimes, rows of trees just line up in disconcerting ways when you see them from the right angle.
But it’s still a forest. Densely packed foliage that could hide anything away around any corner. It’s like the nature version of the distorted cities we’d left behind. And I have no doubt that there would be demons that hid in its depths, waiting for hapless prey to fall into traps. I’m glad to have Sai with me, whose experience surely has her prepared for anything that would try to get the drop on us.
But I know I won’t always have Sai. I would rather learn the ropes from her and get away from her, honestly. The kind of power she has over me, the control that she’s already demonstrated that she’ll exercise over me, I don’t want to live with that hanging over me forever. Sai means safety, but it doesn’t mean freedom. I might not exactly be ready for freedom in such a dangerous world, but I certainly strive for it.
“Should I be keeping an eye out?” I ask, after we’ve been walking through an especially dense section of the woods for a few minutes.
“I mean, yeah, always keep an eye out.” Sai scoffs, not taking a moment to stop as she follows the mysterious flame’s lead. “Especially in a place like this. Anything could happen with sight lines like this. But I’m gonna catch stuff before you do. Beast senses.”
I nod slowly. Right. Sai might not have the same super senses that I have in drake form, but she’s still more keen than a darkling. I have to wonder something, though. “You know, I’ve noticed there seems to be a lot of structure to the types of demons there are, but there’s so many of them. Just how many different kinds are there?”
“Thousands? Millions? I dunno. I’ve certainly not seen everything there is to see, I know that much.” Sai shrugs “Every demon you meet is a different threat. Knowing someone’s type helps, sometimes a lot, but you can’t put everyone of the same kind in one box. Some are more clever than others, or they might have some kind of enchantment, or…”
“Or access to a mansion full of magic items.” I nod, getting her point. Demons are individuals, not just a product of their kind alone. I suppose I should expect as much.
“Or that, yeah.” Sai shrugs, turning slightly to navigate around a copse of trees. “Nekomata normally only have a pocket dimension about the size of a small locker. Mine is only as massive as it is because of Aegis’s blessings. I’m a lot stronger than a typical Nekomata who isn’t a reaper.”
“So that’s how Aegis makes you stronger?”
“That, and like any reaper, it increases my GFM.” She clarifies. “I can hit harder, take bigger hits, it’s turning up a number that you can’t otherwise change. That’s the strength of being a reaper.”
There was that term again. Gravitational Force Multiplier. Such a clinical term for such an abstract concept. “They may as well have called it a power level.” I joked, a small smile growing on my face. This world is ridiculous.
“Hah! Yeah, heard some other newbies call it that before. From an animation, right?”
“Huh… you know, I didn’t think about it, but since you’re 4000 years old, you probably came from a way different world than I did. What year did you die up there?”
“Hmm… 19-something, I think?” she mumbles. She doesn’t sound very interested in the topic. “Was a bit after the turn of the century.”
“Wow, so like… 1920s or something?” I stammer a little at that. 4000 years here and only about a hundred on Earth?
“I dunno, kid, it was a long time ago. I don’t even remember exactly how old I am in this life, I’m just ballparking.” She shrugs. I guess after that long, accuracy to the year must stop mattering as much. I wonder just how old demons typically get. Was Sai an outlier at her age? She must be, given how normalized death is in this world.
“We pick up on what’s going on up there, though. It all trickles down eventually. Don’t think I’m gonna get surprised by shit you say about the internet or whatever. We’re at like, 2020 now, right?”
“Yeah.” I nod, figuring that she probably wouldn’t care if I nitpicked any further than the decade “It’s kinda surreal talking to someone who was actually there for what was just history class to me, though.”
“Like it matters. That life is over.” Sai declares with a bored sigh. “And the history barely matters. Maybe there’s some lessons to glean here and there, but it’s a completely different place with completely different people.”
“More reasonable people.” I jab at demons in general, the irony that I am one now not lost on me. “At least, some might say. There were some real whack-jobs up there too.”
“Well, there’s two different whack-jobs closing in on us right now.” She speaks casually, making a quick hand motion behind us and then toward our left flank.
I immediately stiffen up and calmly pull my knife from the hem of my cloak “Trouble? Are they trying to flank us?”
“No, I don’t think they’re together. One’s definitely on the hunt, but the other seems more careful. We got a little time to plan. You want the beast or the humanoid? I got no info past that.”
I guess we’re splitting responsibilities on taking care of ambushers now that I’ve been baptized in violence. I weigh my options carefully. On one hand, the humanoid will probably have more than brute strength on their side. They’ll have something less predictable than raw physical power. On the other hand, I know firsthand that a beast’s senses are so powerful that my ability to render them blind might not even actually do anything meaningfully debilitating to them. I’ll have to take a risk.
“Humanoid.” I nod to Sai and she signals to our left for me before turning around and manifesting the nightmare lance, the chain spear she used when I first met her. A favorite for her, I’m guessing. I think it means she’s taking this seriously.
This is going to be a real fight, not like the pushovers that tried to ambush me in the city. I swallow hard and break away, shadowstepping in Sai’s indicated direction and keeping my eyes peeled for my target.