I opened my eyes, and I found myself surrounded by layers of thick fog. Dense clusters drifted slowly past me, decorating the endless distance in shades of gray nothingness.
In front of me, the fog gathered and condensed until a form appeared. Wavy blonde hair like mine but longer. Blue eyes like mine but softer. A face like my mother’s but—
The fog shifted around her, swirling like smoke and growing darker in color as a familiar scene materialized around me. A misty image of the same reception room where Father had led us after dinner, saying the doctor was on the way.
The form beside me that looked like Mother took my hand. She was shorter than me, and her touch was barely there and cold, but it was unmistakably her. “I’m so happy we can finally talk, but we don’t have much time, as there’s not much left of me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you real? Is this real?”
Mother squinted one eye, wincing. “Yes?”
“That doesn’t…answer any of my questions…”
Five hazy forms walked past us out of the fog, heading for the middle of the reception room. Versions of Boyet and Lando in front, Father following with a hand on the small of Mother’s back, and an eight-year-old me trailing behind them.
I remembered being in awe at the grandeur of Vulros Manor. The decorative moldings embellished with gold, glossy dark wood floors, oversized stained-glass windows, and chandeliers of crystal lit by candlelight. I couldn’t believe that the reception room was as big as the countryside cottage where I lived with Mother.
The fog billowed in front of us, setting the scene just as I saw it in my nightmares. The grand fireplace, a gold-framed mirror above the mantel. Father led Mother to an armchair facing the flames of the fire and had her take a seat. I only remembered one rune drawn in black sand around her chair, but there were three here.
“This isn’t my memory,” I said, watching the younger me stand beside Mother’s armchair. “Is it yours?”
“No,” Mother said from beside me, a thin smile pressed to her lips. “It’s complicated, and not important right now. You’ve finally unlocked the final condition to become a Slayer. That’s why you’re here and why I need to talk to you.”
The foggy form of Father kissed Mother’s hair as she studied his face, watched his back as he took a spot behind the chair and outside the circle.
“What is this then?” I asked. “I don’t want to watch him kill you again.”
“You didn’t listen to me back then, either.” Mother laughed and squeezed my hand. “There’s more here to see than that.”
“Like what?”
Father glanced at Boyet, and my oldest brother activated the outermost rune. The anti-magic spell I remembered. He looked at Lando next, and he followed by activating the second rune. A shield spell—one that would trap Mother and me within the circle. Not only had these two been complicit, they’d helped him without protest.
I was right that Lando needed to die. I’d kill Boyet for this, too.
A look of fear crossed Mother’s face, widening her eyes and darkening her features. I couldn’t read her expression back then, but I could now. Betrayal. Mother turned to me, cupping my head in her hands, and I remembered her warmth and the pleading tremble in her voice.
Back then, she’d told me to go to my room. I hadn’t understood why.
“Did you know what he was planning to do?” I asked.
She sighed. “Not until it was too late.”
Father activated the final rune with the forbidden spell to summon a demon: manio demeot. Why had he needed Mother trapped and powerless to do that? Was this how he became possessed?
The fog mirror above the fireplace flashed. What was once a gray clouded surface was now a vast black landscape veined with fire beneath a midnight purple sky. Just like in my nightmares, a clawed hand reached out from the darkness and pierced through the mirror into the reception room.
Was this what had really happened?
“This demon is a Grand Cross,” Mother said. “A Grand Cross in the demonic orders usually has a Transcendental core.”
After the demon’s hand came the wrist, an arm studded with a row of spikes, a shoulder with a horned exoskeleton that wrapped across their chest. Huge horns twisted out of the sides of their head. Muscle and sinew stretched across an eyeless skeleton face as they opened their mouth to shriek.
“It all happened so fast,” she said, her free hand gripping my arm.
The demon rushed from the mirror and grabbed both our necks. Only one broke.
Mine.
I massaged my throat, forced my lungs to breathe past the horror that seized the edges of my sanity.
I died that night. Boyet, Lando, and Father had seen me die that night and had done nothing to stop it.
“How was I alive after this?” I asked, throat dry.
“You’ll see soon. But this is why you couldn’t remember everything,” Mother said as the version of her created by the fog let out a pained noise. “The memory was in your Soul but not in your Form.”
The fog showed the demon dropping my lifeless body beside the armchair and wrapping their other hand around her neck. She dangled in the air, her feet kicking the air helplessly as she struggled to free herself from the demon’s chokehold.
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This wasn’t how I remembered her dying.
I hurried forward to get a closer look. Mother followed next to me, still holding my hand tightly in hers and my arm closely to her.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you,” she said. “Not as a mother nor as a Slayer.”
Without magic, Mother wouldn’t have been able to summon any weapons. She would’ve had to rely entirely on her skills. Even as a Slayer, what could she have had to save me in this situation?
“Demons like this are why Slayers exist,” she continued. “They’re not meant to cross over into the Plane of Formation. People are not meant to summon them here and contracting with one leaves us vulnerable to possession.”
Mother died in front of me for the second time, fighting for breath until she went still. The demon’s protective exoskeleton cracked in the middle of its chest. A glowing violet orb emerged from their rotting innards and disappeared into her body.
“Slayers, however,” she said quietly, “cannot be possessed. And this demon was sloppy because they ruined the runes that kept them protected from me, the Endless Slayer.”
Mother’s eyes flew open, glowing with power as she mumbled a spell I couldn’t hear. A chakram appeared in her hand, which she pushed into the demon’s open chest. The demon dropped her and fell backward with her weapon lodged inside them.
She landed on her feet and kneeled next to my dead body. As she gathered me in her arms and shielded from the rest of the family, she used a spell I’d never heard before. Over and over again, she chanted the same two words under her breath, until the demon core that’d entered her body appeared again and sunk into my eight-year-old self.
“This is how you survived,” she answered finally. “The first condition to unlock the Slayer class is for a Slayer to transfer a demon core into your Form. Forms with a core can only be killed if their core is destroyed, so once I transferred one into you, you gained the same regenerative abilities as other Cored Beings.”
The version of me that the fog had formed awakened in Mother’s arms. I remembered this—her smiling face through blurry vision, a shadow falling over us, a dark expression on Father’s face from behind her shoulder.
Rage filled me. He’d just watched his wife choked to death by a demon he’d summoned, and he was angry that she’d lived and saved his son?
“That’s not your father,” she said. “It is, in a way, as his soul is still there somewhere. Your father was possessed by one of the Rashirat. He’s called Ezrenad, and he’s the demonic counterpart of your father’s beloved patron god.”
Unlike my flawed memory, he hadn’t started with choking her. His right arm transformed, red scales shredding the sleeve of his expensive outfit as it grew much too large for his human frame. His claws tore into Mother’s back and wrenched out a demon core from deep within her. It cracked and disintegrated in its grasp.
“If he’d been possessed by a weaker demon,” Mother said, “then it couldn’t have been kept hidden from me. Slayers are awarded a skill so that we can detect demons. But no skill is perfect. Ezrenad hid well, and so he caught me by surprise.”
I turned away from the scene as Father proceeded to kill the other version of her in the fog just as I remembered. Since I couldn’t stand to watch it again, I studied her face in case I never got to see her like this again.
Her gaze lowered and clenched her jaw. “He let his true self show here. Because I was a Slayer and had killed his one and only Grand Cross, his right-hand and most loyal denizen. If only I’d known, I would’ve protected us better. I would’ve surprised him instead. I had the skills, the power, the experience.”
“I’ll kill Ezrenad,” I said. “I’ll become a Slayer and kill him for you.”
〖NOTICE〗
You have accepted a Class change to Slayer [Transcendental].
You have been awarded:
1,000,000 EXP ┃ 10,000 FP ┃ 4 EP ┃ 1 Skill Slot
Do you accept this award?
Yes.
The fog started to disperse back into its layers of dense gray nothing. As if it hadn’t just shown me a demon snapping my neck. As if it hadn’t just shown me my mother dying not once but twice. As if nothing had happened here at all.
Mother released my arm and stepped in front of me to grasp my shoulders instead.
“Our time here seems to be coming to an end,” she said. “If you’re determined to be a Slayer, then you’ll have to get much stronger. Find my mentor. Her name is Helas Trazigar, and she made me a Slayer and then taught me everything I know. Tell her everything.”
〖QUEST NOTICE〗
You have received a new quest: A Mother’s Last Request [Rare]
You must seek the Slayer called Helas Trazigar and convince her to train you as a Slayer. To guarantee a [Rare] item reward, complete this quest within the hour.
Due to the nature of this quest, all experience points and free points earned after your class change to Slayer will be awarded after completion of this quest.
Do you accept this quest?
Of course, even with its inconvenient restrictions.
“Will I see you again?” I asked. My questions about Helas would have to wait. I could feel the pull of consciousness trying to separate me from my mother. I didn’t want to leave her yet.
She offered me a big smile. “I’ll be here when you need me.”
That was vague. Too vague.
“But where are we—”
[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/927317918113488906/1132796729100607618/smaller_divider.png]
I woke up on the floor of my dorm room, hands and feet still bound to the chair I’d been sitting on, the side of my head stuck to a drying pool of my own blood.
My head throbbed from Father’s bludgeoning, and my heart hammered in my chest like a caged thing begging for escape. A groan escaped me somehow as I felt my face reconstructing itself. Cartilage, muscle, ligament, flesh.
“G-geram?”
Who’s saying my name?
【NOTICE】
Please wait while your Demon Core [1%] regenerates your Form…
This may take a while. You may consider further tethering your Demon Core.
I forced my lungs to breathe past the pain and activated [Cold-Blooded Nature]. Hopefully I hadn’t managed to use up all my time for the day by being dead. Or I’d been dead long enough that the day had reset.
【NOTICE】
You have activated Cold-Blooded Nature [Uncommon].
Your senses have sharpened to maintain complete clarity in any situation, giving you control over your mind and body and making you immune to experiences of pain, paralysis, mind control, and brainwashing for one hour a day.
Relief flooded through me, the feeling so good that I closed whatever I had of my eyes. I soaked it in while I waited for the demon core Mother gave me to finish regenerating my body.
How nice that Father had only seen it fit to beat my face in and not decimate my entire body.
“Geram! A-are you really…d-dead…?”
【NOTICE】
A newly qualified Slayer indicates that not all is well or right on your world. A newly qualified Slayer who has been killed by a demon not once—but twice—indicates a world in extreme distress.
This makes you the Hidden Slayer.
For being killed by a demon before qualifying, you have been awarded:
500,000 EXP ┃ 5,000 FP ┃ 2 EP
New Skill: Demeot Eyes [Common]
This passive skill gives you the vision of a demon, allowing you to identify the core quality of a demon.
Due to the nature of A Mother’s Last Request [Rare], all experience points and free points earned after your class change to Slayer will be awarded after completion of this quest.
Do you accept this award?
Yes, I do.