Like I said before, everything went to shit after that. After The Krymmeno was burned to the ground (actually, it kind of exploded; it had almost nothing to do with me,) and everyone I cared about died, I took one of the fake identities I had occasion to use as an order member, stole a 2010 Honda Civic, and drove. Eventually, I ended up in a medium-sized college town in the Southern US. I had a little bit of cash, but I used it up after a couple of weeks, so now I live in a shitty townhouse apartment with an evil cat named Numpy, and I work for barely over minimum wage at a magic shop that sells fake grave dirt to stinky teenagers going through a rebellious phase. Glamorous right? Well, it gets worse; I didn’t take Quinn’s words to heart and used the archdemon’s powers a few times too many, and now I hear his voice in my head every second of every day not to mention I never know if any emotions I have are my own or planted in me. I’ve only found one thing that can quiet it: Vicodin. That’s right, I went from defender of humanity to a goddamn junkie. I guess that’s a lie; booze works too, but in my experience, showing up to work drunk is a lot more conspicuous than showing up on Vicodin. You might be wondering, why do I think I’m going to die soon? Who would even bother killing a store clerk drug addict? Well, my recent troubles started a few days ago. My job pays for my food and my apartment, but it leaves basically nothing left over. I’m not very materialistic and never have been, but painkillers are expensive. How do I pay for them? I cheat card sharks out of their money; the city I live in has a university with a well-earned reputation for being filled with yuppies. All of the boys wear the same cargo shorts and collared shirts, and all of the girls wear the same gym shorts and oversized t-shirts, and about 3 in 4 of the students have never worked a day in their lives subsisting on their parents’ credit cards. Because of this, there’s a big underground gambling scene where drunk twenty year olds gamble thousands of dollars away to our version of the mafia. Comparing this group of assholes to the mafia is like comparing a chihuahua to a rottweiler; they’re ostensibly the same species, but one is much more dangerous than the other. They’re basically 10 muscular guys that operate in the basement of a bar; they do make a lot of money though. I was older than the college kids that usually went there, but I look young especially after shaving, so I blend in well enough. I had been attending these “parties” for a couple of years being careful only to win a few hundred bucks each week when I was invited to the big boy table with large buy-ins. After that I’d win thousands of dollars one week then purposefully lose the next week or two making sure that I always stayed ahead. I wasn’t trying to stack cash or anything; I just wanted enough money to disappear if anyone ever found me and pay for my ever-growing habit.
Things were different this time. Usually, I try to attend the gambling nights sober both to ensure I can properly cheat and to prevent me from doing something stupid, but I had had a very bad day. The demon was screaming in my head even louder than usual, so I took a few extra pills. If you’re fortunate enough to not know how pain killers affect you, let me explain. A warm feeling slowly overtakes your whole body starting from your heart and working its way out as every ache and pain you have (including the emotional ones) fade away or are at least dulled, and for me the greatest effect of all: silence. The drugs don’t completely stop the demon’s voice, but it’s different. The best analogy I can think of is they remove the monster’s megaphone. He still talks, but it fades into the background, so I only really notice its more… urgent declarations. They do have some downsides though: they occasionally make you dizzy, they can make you irrationally angry for no reason, they can prevent you from pooping, and they lower your inhibitions. That last one is particularly perilous when in the company of dangerous people.
Vicodin was the first bad decision of the night, but it wasn’t the last. At the high stakes table, the drinks are free, in fact they’re encouraged: the more a player drinks, the more they’ll spend or at least that’s the idea. I had a couple… maybe three Long Island iced teas. If you’ve never heard of that, it’s 15 different liquors poured together with a splash of coke. They’re super alcoholic, but they don’t taste like it. For some reason, when you mix a lot of liquors together, they cancel out each other’s taste. I decided to have three of them for some reason, and then I cheated. You might be wondering how I could cheat; I shoot fireballs or make tornados, but that doesn’t exactly help with poker. I did have a few other tricks though: first of all, I used the democculus with my eyes closed. With its power, I could see through my eyelids and see what cards the other players had. Was it smart to give the demon a little bit more of my soul to steal money from a bunch of wanna-be gangsters? Probably not but I didn’t have much left to lose. Secondly, the pentagram tattoos can do more than just create images of sigils. They can create any illusion I can imagine though the amount of pneuma and concentration required ramps up significantly with the complexity of the image. That being said, cards are quite simple; the surface of a card is two-dimensional; changing the suit or face value of a card isn’t too much of a stretch though doing it for more than two, maybe, three cards at a time is beyond my capability.
It was the biggest hand of the night: the pot was up to $5500, the largest I had ever seen it. I was only one card away from a straight: I had an 8 of clubs, a 7 of hearts, a 6 of hearts, a 5 of diamonds…. And a 2 of spades. If you know anything about poker, you know that 2 is useless, but I would have an amazing hand if I had a 4 instead, so I cast an illusion to make the 2 of spades into a 4 of spades. Unfortunately, in my state, I missed that another player had the same card in his hand. I took the pot, but before I could make a quick exit, someone pointed out that my hand was impossible. I ignored him and kept walking, a bad decision. To get from the basement to the bar above it, there are stairs which lead to what is marked as a utility closet, but there is also another set of stairs that lead to the kitchen. This second set of stairs is restricted to everyone but “employees,” namely the muscle heads that run the games. As I ascended the stairs, no one tried to follow me; I knew I had fucked up bad, but at least I was getting out of there with the money. I could change my appearance or find another illegal gambling ring in another city. I left the bar and began walking toward my car when three large men stepped into my way. They were all wearing cheap suits and worked for the ring; I had seen them before. I don’t know their names, but I called a red haired guy with the sides of his head shaved Dickhead, another guy with shaggy blonde hair Asshole, and the guy with a pipe who was about 6’7’’ and never skimped on seconds Big Fuck.
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“You took something that didn’t belong to you, didn’t you?” Dickhead said.
“Fuck off,” I replied nonchalantly.
“Ooh someone things he’s a badass,” Asshole nearly shouted. “What do you say we teach him how pathetic he is?”
“Mmrghh,” Big Fuck said. Maybe he got hit in the head one too many times, but judging from his size, he was just always stupid.
Asshole rushed toward me with fist reared back. Normally, a regular mortal has basically no chance against a spellsword. In fact even twenty trained mortals with automatic weapons couldn’t kill the weakest spellsword under typical conditions. Even a modest shield charm can block a continuous steam of bullets for several minutes, and at full speed, a competent spellsword can move his entire body before a mortal can pull a trigger. These were not typical conditions: I was about half sloshed, and I hadn’t used combat magic in years, so I couldn’t react fast enough, and the punch landed right on my eye. I fell to the ground, and Dickhead began kicking me in the sides with steel-toed-boots. Ok, I don’t know what kind of shoes he was wearing, but they certainly felt like steel-toed-boots. Every kick forced more and more air to be expelled from my lungs even after I thought they were completely empty.
“You like that, you fucking thief?” Dickhead shouted over me as he kicked me particularly hard. “I don’t think you’ve learned your lesson yet.”
Big Fuck towered over me and brought the pipe down right on me knee; I felt it snap. They all begin cackling like hyenas when Dickhead kicked me right in the face. Hard. Everything went white and then black as I briefly lost consciousness.
{Ugh, fuck you,} I replied. {What do I care if I die?}
{It’s too late now, they’ve already won. I can’t cast a spell right now; I can’t even open my eyes.}
{I’ll NEVER give you control of my body! NEVER!} I spat with as much venom as I could muster in my sorry state.
I seriously considered just dying, but the demon wasn’t wrong; it’s much scarier to die when you know for a fact that hell exists, and I was sure as fuck that’s where I was headed. I imagined the dam inside me that kept the archdemon at bay. In my current drugged and drunk state, the dam was crumbling and small, but the tide of the demon’s power had similarly lowered. I could have destroyed the dam all together, but then the creature would have complete control of me, and for all I knew, it could have slaughtered the whole city. Instead, I imagined lowering the dam: that is allowing just a tiny trickle of the demon’s pneuma into my soul. It worked. I felt the power racing through my body, and I opened my eyes with the democculus. I jumped onto my feet with my knee healing before my eyes. I could see the gangsters’ souls through their bodies, and they were ugly, barely human looking – a common occurrence amongst pieces of shit.
Dickhead and Asshole jumped back when they saw me get up, but Big Fuck didn’t flinch. He swung his pipe right at my head. I caught it with one hand; like Kaine, I always wore a pair of gloves to cover the pentagram tattoos on them. Mine were black leather and fingerless. Douchey? Maybe, but I thought they looked cool. They also had the benefit of enchantment: with a small amount of pneuma, they could become hard as steel. I held onto the pipe, and created five orange sigils, one for each finger. The metal melted in my hand; the glove protected my hand, but my fingers blistered and burned, healing just as fast as they were injured. I then punched Big Fuck in the stomach sending him flying ten feet through the air. I looked at Asshole who was wide eyed and backing away from me, and I ran full speed toward him; to him, it probably seemed as if I vanished and reappeared right in front of him, punching him in the face. I felt his jaw break against the hardened glove over my knuckles. He hit the ground and didn’t get back up. Dickhead was the only one left.
“Listen man, I’m sorry… You don’t have to do this!” he shouted in a shaking voice. He had pissed himself and was sprinting backward as fast as he could without taking his eyes off me. I walked toward him slowly, my red eyes generating their own light.
“You picked the wrong person to fuck with,” I almost whispered, but I’m sure he heard me. He backed into a wall, looked back behind him, and when he turned his eyes back toward me, I was right in front of him. I grabbed his skull with both hands and began to apply pressure.
“Aghhhh, please don’t kill me; don’t kill me. I’m sorry!” He was crying at this point. I pressed harder and harder and felt his skull about to crack when I stopped. What the fuck was I doing?? This isn’t me; I don’t kill people… ok sometimes I kill people but only when they’re trying to kill me. This guy may have been an asshole, but he was no threat to me whatsoever.
“No!” I shouted and let him go. I closed my eyes and imagined the dam growing and cutting off every drop of the demon’s power. I fell onto all fours but quickly jumped to my feet and ran. I circled the block a few times in case anyone was watching me. When I finally got to my car about twenty minutes later, I threw up on the ground next to it; I was still too impaired to drive home, so I curled up in my back seat and passed out.