The Cloud Ships were, frankly speaking, a marvel of the world that Grim found himself in. They were far more technologically advanced than anything anyone else had. The biggest issue, however, was that Tetra hadn’t thought up the technology herself. He had given her the ideas through their discussions, causing her power to go into overdrive to the point she was nearly driven insane until she managed to build the things he had described.
There was a cost to every power. Even one built around imagination.
“And that, Boss, is why I don’t want you to ever give me ideas again unless I ask for them,” she said, chiding Grim as he stared at her flatly. He had never been outright disciplined before, sot he experience was new to him. “If you give me some outlandish, crazy idea my power latches onto that I can’t make… then I’m fucked. Up shit creek. I will go crazy, then my head will probably explode. I already have a half dozen ideas still kicking around in my head that I need to work through, and I think that’s about my limit.”
Grim nodded, “Fair. I will try and keep the ideas to a minimum,” he agreed. He didn’t want her to die, he still needed her. And her power.
“Not good enough Boss. Sorry, but just watching you do some of the things you do triggers my power. I either need a serious fucking upgrade, to a level that I can handle the concepts you keep throwing at me, or I need near total isolation. Possibly both,” she said, shooting down his quasi apology.
Grim cocked his head to one side, cracking his neck in the process. Tetra swallowed as he levelled his now annoyed gaze on her. “Isolation? I don think that would help. Upgrading your powers though… its going to hurt like god came down and curb stomped you, but we can do it. Now in fact, before we arrive. That may work out in your favor.”
Swallowing dryly, the cat demon nodded. “Do it Boss,” she said, lying down on the short couch that was in his room. Grim reached out to his scientist minion with his energy, seeking to find the cup and gauge how much he could upgrade her abilities. He had to search for a while before finding it, and when he did he was shocked into stillness for a moment.
If most supers had a cup, Tetra had a fucking barrel. A very large barrel.
“Well… it may suck more for you than I initially thought,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear.
She turned to him with wide eyes, “What do you-“, she was cut off as Grim began to expand her abilities while pumping raw energy directly into them.
And Tetra began screaming.
Over the course of nearly two hours Grim twisted, pulled, expanded, condensed, and outright forced energy through Tetra and her soul. At some point her psyche simply gave out, and she fell into a silent partial coma, foam at her mouth. Sitting back, he examined his work before pulling back his energy. Her powers had changed significantly. How, he was unsure yet. He couldn’t fine tune abilities quite yet. But he knew she was far stronger and more able than before.
He sat back, observing the cat demon super. She was alive, if barely, and Grim had no illusions about her getting up any time soon. Tetra was going to be down for the count for quite some time. They were only two days into their weeklong voyage, so she had time yet to recover.
Grim stood, stretching, before he headed out to the bridge. He closed the door to Tetras room behind him. He figured if she survived what he had just done to her, then she didn’t need anyone to babysit her recovery. He would have someone bring her food and water at some point when she woke up.
Whenever that was. He wasn’t concerned. She was tough.
He walked onto the bridge as the crew avoided looking at him. The rooms were not well insulated, ensuring that everyone heard the violent screams and sudden silence from Tetra.
He sat on the bench near the captain’s station, waving a hand in the air to catch the crew’s attention, “Don’t worry about it. She got an upgrade,” he explained. He didn’t care if they feared him, but rewards were what drove loyalty. Grim needed them to understand that. “Everyone is going to go through it at some point. Its painful, but not too many have actually died from it.”
The crew swallowed; the fact people had died was not a completely negating issue. The world they lived in was violent, brutal, and death could be around any corner. But the rewards for successfully going through Grim’s upgrading process? Surviving it?
Nothing short of giving the survivors a new lease on life.
It certainly took it out of him, and without the Shard to draw on it was intensely draining. But Tetra had served him well, and the reward was justified. Once they got to their destination however, he would need to set up yet another Hell Spike to ensure that he once more had a near limitless amount of energy to use. That was the only way to continue upgrading his people.
Grim was ripped from his deep thoughts as an alarm started blaring. The captain spun the wheel rapidly to the side causing the entire Cloud Ship to violently turn, nearly throwing him off his seat.
“What the hell is going on?” Grim yelled, staggering to his feet. He could already hear the sounds of the guns firing at something. He leapt across the deck, nearly sideways as they were still mid turn in the air, and ripped the hatch open, shattering the latch into pieces..
He staggered out onto the deck, and froze. In the air, surrounding them by the hundreds, if not the thousands, were fucking dragons. And they had utterly and completely surrounded the convoy.
The flying lizards were a dozen feet long from snout to tail and a myriad of colors and hues. They danced gracefully in the wind, like fish through water. Every so often he would see a gout of flame as they either rammed, slashed, or burned out a weapons emplacement on the hull of one of the Cloud Ships.
“What the ever-living fuck are dragons doing here?” he gaped.
Dragons were creatures of legends. Massively powerful, nearly divine, beings that controlled and shaped the elemental and prime energies as they saw fit. It was rare to see them gather in any number, as they would often fight for space, territory, and absolute dominance outside of their domains.
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They were also insanely intelligent.
Living for many, many thousands of years unless killed in their youth, dragons were able to accumulate vast stores of knowledge and wealth. This made them incredibly powerful, and also incredibly popular targets. All but the most elderly of dragons, or most powerful of clans, had been hunted to extinction in the Prime Universes.
“What the hell is a dragon?” Stella asked, staggering out onto the deck behind him as the airship righted itself. The guns on the outer shell continued to blaze away, shooting down the flying creatures en mass.
“Something we can’t beat. Not if an elder shows up,” Grim said, deadly serious in his response. “But I don’t think these are dragons. Some kind of drake maybe?”
The imp who had been manning the turret screeched back at the roaring monster, then leapt from the emplacement onto its face. The startled flying lizard swooped away and Grim lost sight of the duo.
“This is not fucking good,” he muttered.
Stella looked at him, unable to hear over the whipping winds, “What Master?”
“There are too many!” he yelled back, getting a nod from her. “I don’t have anything that can fight this.”
Grim grimaced. He really, really, did not want to use a Shedim. He had two remaining. Two. Two immensely powerful true demons that equated to what was essentially a free win in any fight he chose to utilize them in. The issue was if he needed them later… he would be bereft.
“Not yet. I can’t risk using them yet,” he sent back over their connection. He would be willing to lose far more than a couple imps and minions before he risked using something that could save his life later on. Besides, the Cloud Ships were tearing the dragon like creatures to pieces. The massive rounds of the rotary cannons were shredding them. Grim cleared the hesitation from his mind and reached out.
These things had souls.
Grinning, he began soaking up all the energy he could. He pushed his absorption to the max and when he couldn’t contain any more, he began converting them to energy. His energy rapidly refilled to maximum, and Grim found himself with a full inventory of both souls and energy. Exactly what was needed.
Grim began mass summoning spears of Hellfire. First by the singles, then by the dozens. Every time his energy dropped, he converted souls to refill his reservoir… then he absorbed mor souls. After a scant few seconds he had hundreds of the summoned weapons surrounding him. With a scream, his mouth open wide revealing savage fangs in a mouth that couldn’t possibly contain that many teeth, he unleashed a gargantuan barrage of Hellfire Spears.
The weapons sprang away from him, guided by his intent as they slammed into, and then through the aggressive lizards. Each spear went through two, some through three, before exploding on their final target in large crimson eruptions. With a mass cry, having apparently had enough of the strange flying things in their airspace that were killing them by the hundreds, the lizards began a rapid retreat back to where they had come from.
Apparently Hellfire Spears were the tipping point.
Following them, Grim realized they had erupted from a nearby mountain that had entirely been converted into some kind of hive nest for the things. He certainly didn’t want to tangle with anything larger than the ones that had come out. They were already annoying enough; larger ones could be truly dangerous. The swarm they had just gotten through had already done substantial damage to the outside of the Cloud Ships. Grim could see smoke trailing from a few of the vessels, although none had lost altitude. A true nod to the quality of their construction.
“Fuck,” Grim said, causing Stella to stare at him. Turning to her, he realized that she had a large rifle in her hands. There were also several dead flying lizards on the deck. Quirking an eyebrow, he stared at her.
The succubus rolled her eyes, “When you start fighting Master, you have zero situational awareness. Its no wonder when you arrived you had so much trouble. You don’t pay attention to anything.”
Ignoring the jab, at least outwardly, he responded, “Tetra didn’t say anything of these flying things. Neither did Rat. Where is he by the way? I haven’t seen him since we got on board.”
Grim truly hadn’t paid attention to which ships his minions had been assigned to.
“Rat is in the first Cloud Ship Master. He is using his… creepy little friends to scout ahead,” Stella reported back instantly.
He nodded, in thought. “If there are more creatures like this in the sky, or bigger ones, we may have serious problems moving forward. I want you to coordinate repairs. We are going to need every turret and rifleman we can put out,” he ordered. Then he pointed at the three lizard corpses on the deck, “Bring those to my rooms. Its high time we have more than just Rat’s flying rodents to help us in our arial duties.”
Curious, Stella grabbed the creatures by the tails and followed Grim inside. The duo got weird looks from the crew initially, looks that rapidly changed to alarmed ones as the succubus drug the bodies inside behind her.
“Get an update on repairs and keep me posted. The Don and I are going to be busy working on a possible solution for our flying friends,” she ordered the captain, who saluted rapidly.
Grim opened the door as Stella drug the bodies into what amounted to his receiving room and dropped them. “I don’t know how these will help us,” she said, curious. “Don’t you need peoples souls to actually do something with them?”
“I have close to a hundred souls from people and several hundred from the lizards I was able to scoop up. My energy is full as well, I can certainly afford to make something new,” Grim said, not bothering to look at her as he examined the creatures on the floor.
He felt his power, eyed the corpses, then asked for a second opinion.
“Bag, what do you think? Can I create an actual dragon?” he wondered across their link.
“Well… for fucking science then,” Grim said, stretching out his hands. Using raw energy, he melted the green, red, and black winged lizards into a goopy putty. The mass of organic matter rose into the air as he began injecting energy into it. Then, almost as an afterthought, he included the souls of the lizards he had gathered.
The goop began to harden, turning a myriad of metallic colors, not unlike a spilled oil slick. It heated up, turning a bright cherry red, then white, from the intense heat. The pressure rolling off of the object Grim was creating began to push Stella back physically, even her succubus body being unable to withstand the heat.
Grim’s armor protected him, making him immune to every kind of heat and fire but Hellfire itself. After nearly a solid ten minutes of forging, converting souls to energy, and injecting raw lizard souls directly into his newest creation, he cut the flow to a mere trickle.
The oddly shaped item cooled, revealing a jet black egg the size of Grim’s torso. He turned to look at Stella, something present in his eyes she had never seen before.
Wonder.
“This,” he said quickly and quietly, setting the egg down on the ruined remains of the couch. The intense heat having charred everything in the room to a petrified state. “This is a game changer. If what is inside of this egg hatches, and doesn’t fucking kill us all, we will have this world’s first true demon.”
Stella stared at the egg with a mix of fear and fascination. She wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing at this point. But the succubus knew one thing for sure; if Grim was being cautious around it, it was bound to be incredibly dangerous. Because if it phased her Master then it was certainly not something she could handle on her own. If things went wrong, she was going to need help.
Probably a lot of it.