*Triiiiiiinnnnn. Triiiiiiinnnnn. Catcha*

-What was that!? Said a just awoken Mina with surprise all over her face, and some saliva too, and a plate ready to be thrown on each hand.

-That's my girlfriend's way to tell me she needs something done. Aki explained, used his phone to call her. After a short conversation he understood the problem, said he loves her and hooked ended the call.

On the other side.

-Did he just say he loves me? Though her expression wasn't much different from normal, you could see she was confused.

She felt a headache coming. Looking at the time and amount of data that needed to be reprocessed before coming back to her for inspection, she decided to go for a smoothy.

-That one with blueberries and pride essence should do the trick. She mumbled while getting a strange look from her secretary. Not many demons still mumbled to themselves in this era.

It was a sign of instability and of chances for their subordinates to rob them of everything. Though it still makes one seem like a mad demon and question how that person got their job.

Not much different from human society, right?

The elevator was empty save for the imp that pressed the buttons. It was quite ugly, had bubbles of pus all over its face, a long and pointy nose, a curved back, it's yellow skin looked sick…

-You should try some skin products kid. She said before getting out.

He was also the only demon that was younger than Mi in the whole building. She passed him a cristal that would pretty much equal a fifty bucks note in America.

"Am I turning soft?" Aranei was slightly worried about that, but when one of the receptionists sneered at her she popped one of his eyeballs.

He screamed a lot from the pain, but mainly because he was a devil who originally didn't have eyes, so he had to do a surgery.

He could still see even if his other three eyes were torn of mind you, but destroying one of them would make the adaptation process longer and higher it's failing chances.

-One Jack.

The shop was right in front of the company building, so it didn't take much time for her to get her smoothy.

She sat besides the window and looked at the tall structure at the other side of the street. She was going to spend millenia in there. Is all this corporative bullshit really worth it?

After shrugging MI stayed there, taking her sweat time. Fifteen minutes later she had already finished the smoothy and was just looking at her phone while in a different scenario.

*heart beatings sound* (Yeah, that's the sound it makes when he is calling someone with that phone.)

-Yes? Good. You sure didn't kill any of them? Just checking. That's too expensive to use for you to look more cool. Make sure to remember them of that. No, I am ok, just tired. Sure, and you'd be able to cook. It's not too bad an idea though. Isn't coffee made our of poop? If that's so them I will give it a try like you said. Bye.

After a quick talk with her lover, she noticed that actually helped her a little. Her therapist might not just be a charlatan after all. Or maybe she was just faking problems in her own mind for attention.

While they could not simply meet for no reason, she did get a better humor after talking with someone like him on a daily basis. To find someone who actually tries to make it easier for you to live life is certainly rare, but she mostly liked how he seemed to be as awkward as her in their interactions.

It made her think there was another person who could care to cheer her and stand by her side. Those were rare for her. Even more so the ones that actually were honest.

She teleported back to her table and computer and started working again. Even if she wanted to turn into a sobbing mess or forget her responsibilities, she would not do it. She was an adult after all.

…

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

After hanging up for the second time in one hour, Aki actually noticed that he said "I love you, bye" after both calls. He rapidly started stabbing his hand for the poison resistance, which both hurt a lot and distracted him the shame. Besides the grinding too.

-Oi! You ok? Was it one of you floating eyeballs?! Screamed Mina with worry.

Remembering their punishment from being disrespectful before, the beholders all actually started exclaiming that they did nothing and some even pointed fingers to each other. Figuratively, ok course. None of them had fingers.

-It's ok, that was just my instinct from when I was little. I used to hit myself when I felt embarrassed and now I just told my girlfriend that I love her after one week. She must be thinking about how clingy I am and that I am some kind of idiot she should du…

He said while looking down with the dagger still in his hand, but Mina actually kicked him and buried his head in the ground.

-You better? She asked before he even got out.

-Yeah, the anger overshadowing the despair helps. The broken nose not so much. He said even though he didn't hear what she said.

Right now they were doing the not so popular request of patrolling the city surroundings, which was a boring, hard on the nerves, possibly dangerous and actually paid a fixed amount for each monster subjugation proof you bought back.

While it is certainly true that there are many monsters in the wilderness, it is also true that it is a lot more simple to hunt in dungeons for a lot of reasons.

A good examples being that you can find monsters more easily, go back and forth to civilization in the same day if you want, dungeons have a suggested level bracket, most dungeon monsters have valuable body parts…

It is as simple as that. So, obviously, not everyone wishes to try their hand on finding and defeating random monsters. There is no level restriction on areas over the globe.

Monsters of about level one hundred are easily attracted to the surroundings of giant cities like this, and while it is the duty of the city guard to exterminate them, they can't be everywhere, nor is there a convenient magic that can gauge the levels of every creature that reaches a certain distance of the city.

By the way, the reason why the reason why the demons are afraid of Aki and Mina is because one of the Beholder had too big a pride and insulted him.

Now, that would normally no be a problem for him. Ignoring the floating eyeball would be a good punishment for it's pride, but he then started talking about MI, so…

After Aki beat him into a state of near death and turned back time for it's wounds once for each word it said while directed at his lover, the thing was now just floating over looking like a dead fish on water and internally regretting the fact he had know so many insults to the succubi race.

To be fair, he had the chance to stop when Aki silenced all the demons and stood in front of it with a mocking look in his eyes. Even the idiotic fiends understood what he was doing at the moment, but the demon was too prideful.

After the little show and the delay after it, they successfully made a "excursion" against the wildlife of the dungeon city. That didn't help Aki to fill his coffers or level up anything, since most monster were about or below his level.

Their amount wasn't bad though. He had asked Mina to bring five magic bags with somewhat small spaces, but the warrior was quite the carrying mule.

Instead of using the level 124 martial artist/ level 113 great defender, Mina, as proper combat force, she just stood there most of the time. Unless she got really bored. Then he would throw the bags filled with carcasses into his space pocket.

With a squad formed by five of the five basic variations of demons, there was not much to fight against after all.

Now that I said it, it may be a good opportunity to present the I've races been mentioning all this while. But really, how noob are you to not know the basic ones?

Fiends are brutish monsters of Wrath. Their height ranges from 1,90 to 3,20, bulging muscles and dicks. All of them. They take pleasure in others suffering from their hands more than others. Normally stupid, full of muscles and can create their own melee equipment. Very clear that they are berserkers by nature.

Succubus are (do I really need to say?) creatures of lust. They look like humans or other humanoid races most of the time, but they can be easily redu, summarized as bitches that have good shapeshifting, high magical affinity, volatile personalities and excel at spionage.

Hellhounds come from Wrath too, but are more of a representation of the animal and elemental fury. Differently from what you might imagine, they are actually as intelligent as humans in most aspects of growth. There's not much to say, they are big dogs with various ways to inflict destruction.

Pride is mostly represented by the beholders, floating masses of flesh with half of their "mass" being the big eye in the center of them. Tentacles and smaller eyes all over aside, they're extremely smart and have an exceptional memory. That serves to say they are incredible spell casters.

The last one are spiders. Sorry, stalkers. They represent Gluttony for all known and are shy creatures with an appearance of either a big spider or a spider-like humanoid with appendages like blades on its back. Perfects for assassination and some even have an affinity to the arcane.

While you may be asking yourself why your handsome and amazing narrator didn't say anything about Sloth, Greed, Jealousy or any other smaller sin, that is simply because the greedy ones are far too few and mostly "ranked up" or idiots, while sloth and jealousy are basically everywhere, so they don't participate much on anything.

In case you are curious, Djinns are creatures of sloth, and that actually means they seek a laid back type of comfort, abominations, giant masses of "matter", are the representatives of envy and greed is taken by the hoarders, since they also try to keep the lower version of themselves hidden and show off with lots of trophies. Those are named keepers by the way. There's no lower version of abominations, they just keep growing with time.

There is, of course, a fuck ton of other demon types, such as devils, nagas, pathfinders, pest breeders, incubi, behemoths, war cries, armageddons, deep crawlers, so on and so forth.