Apotho shot up from the sheets. The large, silken bed was filled to the brim with those of his subjects who caught his eye. Whether that be slaves, apprentices, soldiers or demons, it hardly mattered to the warlock. What he desired, he took. Such was his right as supreme authority of this Leaf.

To many of the demons in the bed, Apotho felt a strong connection. Not an emotional one, to get attached to such low-grade tools would have been beyond useless. It was the connection between a demonic servant and their summoner. The resources he had extracted from this Paradise Leaf. A paradise for him, that was, and those that found his liking. To everyone else, it had shifted swiftly to a Demon Leaf over these past one and a half years.

There were other connections. Many pacts he had made, sealed in blood. Guarantees to those former inhabitants of the Leaf that saw the strength of his reign, opportunists that had heard of his name, and old subjects who threw their lot in with him again. Apotho did not have many of the last bunch. Those that did exist were invaluable.

Among the pacts, a select few were so powerful that he could sense those that they belonged to at all times. Whereas the meek Impreh class demons he used as messengers could only be sensed if he concentrated on them, those powerful few that he had unspecific contracts with, those remarkable individuals that he knew had their goals aligned with his, he had a steady connection at most times.

One of them suddenly cutting off, that was enough to pull him out of his slumber.

“Hmmm,” Jolene whispered and stretched with cat-like grace. She was the one who always remained by his side, the one whose favour neither waxed nor waned. The Empress of Blood’s green eyes glowed like emerald embers in the darkness. She placed a hand on his chest. The slender fingers looked so weak compared to the strong definition of his chest muscles. A complete lie, just another thing that was not so in the Omniverse. “Come back to bed, Master,” she purred, caressing his skin with a care that approached love.

“Turlesh is dead.”

Apotho didn’t even flinch, as Jolene’s fingers tore into his pectoral. The blood that should have poured past his broken skin was instead drunk by the thick, dull claws that extended from sickly greenish black, pulsing flesh. The Unreavs demon let go of her Master, before she could fully tear him open. A gem, embedded in Apotho’s sternum, pulsed green and the wound closed.

Crawling forwards was a thing of nightmares. Red, shifting veins of blood crawled over black, smooth skin. Her curves were untouched, alluring, yet the boils of flesh at her back robbed her of any kind of lustful appeal. The growths burst with a wet squelch into six wings, membranes of a blood spanning between exposed bones. A long, whip-like tail extended, its end a cruel double-hook, like one belonging in a butcher’s shop.

The bed was in a state of panic. Every last one of Apothos’s pleasure slaves awoke in a sense of dread and scurried away from the Empress of Blood, just as her neck broke, then extended in a grotesque fashion. The shape of her legs and arms warped into something bulky and then she galloped towards the window. The shriek of rage she let out caused the weakest ones amongst the concubines to bleed from their eyes and ears.

Apotho uncaringly walked past all of them. The mess they made of his bed was theirs to clean up. He stopped in the hole of his wonderful panorama window, clicking his tongue in annoyance at the difficulty it would be to repair this. A short-lived thought, a decadent enjoyment that he could indulge in once he had secured the situation as best he could.

Eyes tracked Jolene on her descent. Twenty stories high they were, high enough that the wind blowed into Apotho’s living floor. It was the mark of an uncertain Warlock, to put their workshops below where they lived. Those that had certainty in their crafts and their subjects submission sat atop their mage towers. As floor upon floor of Blackstone was added from below, Apotho would only see further over his domain.

At the foot of the tower, sprawling out in every direction, was a city of tens of thousands. The population expanded rapidly, made to grow by enacting the necessary rituals to allow crossbreeding with the demons and abducting the children of the worlds they scoured. Sapients were impressionable, as long as one picked them up young enough. Blackstone laid the fundament to every building. Mana rich particles, ground into a paste and baked in infernal fire. District for district, the city would be erected around his tower, so that all would always see who lay at the heart of it.

Down to that city, to his gathering of resources, Jolene descended. The other three Deathhounds followed her, climbing through the dense network of Omniverse veins that nourished the very air in this Leaf with a rich flow of mana.

They would wreak havoc down there. The Empress of Blood would drown her sorrow in a massacre. Hundreds would die, perhaps even thousands. It would put a notable dent in Apotho’s productivity, a dent that would be unacceptable for anyone else to cause. Economical procedures were exponential in these early stages. To disrupt the plan now would diminish them greatly as time progressed.

Yet, when it came to his most valuable assets, buying her a tiny bit of relief through the death of thousands was a bargain.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Apotho approached a mountain of corpses. Each step he took created a pitter-patter from the rivers of blood that soaked the streets, slowly draining into the basic canalisation system they had dug out. Terlash and Purlesk were pulling the tasty guts out of the people at the bottom of the pile. A myriad of lesser demons kept their distance from the two Tharnatos class inhabitants of the Hellroots, picking away at what corpses there were. Whether Skinwalkers methodically peeled the epidermis off a child, Rotmaggots saw to the swift decay by burrowing through with their legions of bodies, or Demonscythes spun hair into deadly threads, every demon turned the fallen sapients into an extension of their being. Fights broke out over who got to devour the sternums, the tastiest treat for all growing demons.

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There was many a theory Apotho had, for why demons were such apt predators of those that lived above them. The answer that it was pure resentment, mutating them into forms capable of torturing those that lived off their eternal service, he found unsatisfying. More likely, the Master of the Roots estimated, was that demons had been equipped with a way to take the energy from regular mortals from the start. After all, what happened if the creatures, whose existence was based on their war against the Parasytes, were driven back? Would the mortals, with their lack of experience, take over?

No. The Progenitor’s work was pragmatic. Flawed, in the final analysis, yet pragmatic. Demons had been spawned in a time where drastic measures were required to keep the germinating Omniverse alive. Thus, when the Parasytes pushed up the tree, the demons would be empowered by the sacrifice of the mortals. Best they were eaten by their defenders before their power was drawn back into nothing by the Parasytes, after all.

To that end, the nightmarish scene unfolding in front of Apotho was simply the logical path history should take. When a Warlock summoned a demon and allowed it to feast to its heart's content, he created a stronger defender of the roots of the Omniverse. Was that not the ultimate act of benevolence? It reached far further into the future than any Church erected and every sanctimonious god’s lessons ever could.

The leader of the pack of now three Deathhounds, Kurlesh, was curled up atop the mountain. His head served as the rest for Jolene’s elbow. A position he was content in. By raw physical power, the submissive dog was not far removed from his Empress. The difference the individual Art of a person who had crossed the 100th level could make, however, was too much to be measured in strength alone.

“Your little pet creature,” Jolene squeezed out, staring down at her Master. “It killed my beloved Turlesh, did he not?”

“He must have devoured him after he was otherwise weakened,” Apotho explained and around him the demons started screeching. A cacophony of hatred broke out, while he nonchalantly advanced up the corpses. “Turlesh got careless, even though he knew what the slime was capable of.”

“SPARK EATER! SPARK EATER! SPARK EATER!“ The demons screamed. Three repetitions, then a pause, for each of them.

“We must right this immediately.” Jolene grabbed the corpse right next to her feet, raising it effortlessly by the skull. Bone dented, brain and gore scattered. Unexplainably, it was only the blood that touched the Unreavs-class demon’s skin. The crimson was absorbed under her skin near instantaneously. “Gather your resources, Apotho, and crush this affront to my house.”

“We will do no such thing,” the warlock responded and the gazes of the demons around snapped to him. The bloodlust that had claimed this segment of the city became directed at him. “You are being illogical, Jolene.”

“Illogical?” the Empress of Blood tilted her head, eyes opened to the point of mania. “I have put in motion schemes beyond your comprehension, mortal, what do you know of logic?”

Apotho stretched out his hand to the right. Emerald fire flickered in the air, fuelling a connection and then the manifestation of a dark grey staff. The metal was dull, despite how smooth the surface was. Atop the staff was a crystal as crimson as the blood that ran towards the gutters, caged by a weave of metal runes. Loudly, the sharpened tip shattered the cobblestone of the street.

“Do not forget what you have forged,” he warned her.

Tension filled the air, the three Deathhounds were the first to move, closely followed by their Empress. All other demons backed away, and were dismissed by a mere wave of Jolene’s hand. She descended the pile of corpses like it was a staircase of the finest make. Soon, she stood before her summoner, their eyes on one height. The Deathhounds prowled in circles around them.

The red drained from Jolene’s sclera, retreated towards the iris, until it turned the emerald of satiated hellfire. “Of course, Master,” she sighed, between wanton lust and grief. She lowered herself to one knee and took his hand, kissing the ring finger. “I forget who I am dealing with.”

Apotho placed the hand on her cheek and made her gaze up at him. “I can still see the fury in your eyes.”

“Turlesh was mine,” the redhead hissed. “My adorable enforcer. Few have shed as much blood in my name. This cannot be left without revenge, Master.”

“We both know how Fate Tracking works.” Apotho took his hand off Jolene’s face. He snapped his fingers and the various demons hurried back out from between the houses. Many more closely followed. A storm of eldritch creatures descended on the mountain of corpses. Crunching and cracking made civilized conversation impossible.

Apotho turned around and Jolene swiftly chased him. The most gorgeous lady walked at his side, dressed now in a fine satin dress as red as her auburn hair. She hooked into his arm. While his feet left imprints of blood on the pavement, her naked soles always remained clean of the massacre.

“Were we to send another one of our hounds to chase after the creature, or even all of them, they would have to follow the same route. You know as well as I that they must have gathered powerful allies to have taken out one of them. Allies that, if given time, will fortify a position along the path.” The staff clacked repeatedly on the simple cobblestone, then on the concrete slabs. The closer one got to the looming tower of the warlock, the more monolithic and expansive the structures became. “It would be a suicide race.”

“We cannot leave this slight unanswered,” Jolene insisted again, her teeth swelling and sharpening – then returning in an instant to what they had been before, just before their size would have distorted her gorgeous face. “Is your weakness still sheltering your pet?!”

“My weakness?” Apotho whispered. “You have not been shattered by the judgement of the gods, do not dare to call what is impossible to pass a weakness.”

Jolene took a deep breath. “I misspoke again, Master.”

“Yes, you did,” the warlock chastised her. “A frustration that you will help me vent soon enough, one way or another.”

The eyes of the Empress wandered to her Master’s groin. The dark robe hid the state of his manhood, but she hoped it was this path he aimed to vent. A slaughter she could always enact on her own, but lust was a treat she only rarely got to taste. Most men could not keep their fluids on the inside for more than ten seconds when making love to her.

“I forgive you, Jolene, because this state of affairs should have rattled you. You are forgiven for calling it my pet and for ordering me, as long as you do not affront again.”

“Most gracious, Master… then, what is our plan now?” The main gate of the tower opened wide, pushed by two gargantuan demons of headless, humanoid bodies. Where skin and muscles should have been, those creatures instead consisted of interweaving, distorted maws. The gnashing teeth looked like shifting stitches.

“We continue as outlined,” Apotho stated. “In the end, their lives will be in my hands, one way or another. Let us not lose sight of the highest goal.”

“Apotheosis,” Jolene hummed.

And the gates of the tower slammed shut again behind them.