Cold but weightless metal wrapped around both of my wrists, the Infinite Chain manifesting as two separate interlocking chrome link bracelets. Intuitively, I knew how to use them—even if it’d be for all of 2% of an hour.
【NOTICE】
You have leveled up to Level 74.
You have been awarded:
2 Skill Slots ┃ 1 new Skill or 1 EP ┃ 60 FP
Do you accept this award?
“Are you listening to me?” Helas asked.
Absolutely.
“No.”
【NOTICE】
Would you like a new Skill or 1 EP?
Always a tough question. [Demeot Eyes] had filled my new Skill slot, so better to take the skill evolution point since they were harder to get.
Helas plucked the demon core from my hands, not questioning the sudden appearance of an item she’d surely seen Mother use before. “We’ll need this for your first quest. We can bribe the temple clerics to help us get in touch with your patron god.”
So that was where she was guiding me.
I didn’t protest, expecting that I’d get a notice for that quest eventually now that I’d completed [A Mother’s Last Request]. I needed to figure out how to strengthen my tether if I wanted to get any practical use out of the Infinite Chain, but it had belonged to my mother and was worth the risk I took to get it.
More important for right now was figuring out how to distribute all my free points so that the next demon I meet regretted it. When I asked Helas for advice, true-to-form, she demanded an explanation for why I had so many free points to distribute, and so as we walked to the nearest temple, I ended up telling her all that had happened.
First, there was waking up tied to a chair with Father standing over me. How he beat me to death and how badly I didn’t want to die. Then, there was unlocking the Hidden Slayer class—a detail that quirked one of her white eyebrows, but not as much as hearing what Mother showed me and how Ezrenad had killed her after she gave me a demon core.
“So your mother told you to find me,” Helas summarized, dawning a soft smile. At the same time, she took a particularly long step to avoid some yellow snow as we headed toward the temple in the slums. “I did train her, but she ended up much stronger than me in the end. I’m honored she recommended me.”
“The system gave me a quest for it,” I told her. “I haven’t gotten a quest yet to summon my patron god, either. Are you sure that’s the first one?”
She smacked the back of my head—I didn’t bother dodging because I learned long ago there was no point.
“Of course, I’m sure, child.” There was also no point in trying to get her to stop calling me child. Only made her like doing it more.
“Fine, you’re sure,” I parroted back to her. “Do all slayers get the same set of quests then?”
Helas held up three fingers. “The first three are the same,” she said, adding a fourth finger and lowering her voice as we passed someone on the road, “but the fourth is specific to your particular slayer class. Unfortunately, I’ve never run into another Hidden Slayer, so I won’t be able to help you much with that. Same went for Adna.”
Adna…I hadn’t heard someone say Mother’s name in years.
I went over Helas’s explanation in my mind, trying to figure out what was nagging me about it. What she was saying was that there was no reason why I wouldn’t have received the quest yet, regardless of the system giving me [A Mother’s Last Request]. That was a quest related to my mother rather than a quest related to my slayer class.
None of that explained why I hadn’t received the quest Helas was hurrying me to complete. I hadn’t received a notice when I encountered Irthrothun, either. That didn’t seem normal to me, and that was what was nagging me the most.
“So your free points,” Helas said, interrupting my thoughts. Somehow, we’d covered several blocks in my silence. “Tell me how you were thinking of distributing them, then I’ll give you my opinion.”
I pulled up my status so that I had something to focus on while I assessed my options.
【STATUS】
Name: Geram Vulros
Patron God: Ket’ha ┃ Class: Hidden Slayer [Transcendental]
Soul: E-Rank (Stage 3) ┃ Cores: 1 ⌃
Level: 74 ┃ Exp: 34,100/74,000
STR: 295┃ AGI: 385┃ STA: 415┃ PER: 510
FP: 21,165 ┃ EP: 6
Skills: 6/8 ⌃
What I needed was a build that’d give me an advantage over any demon I fought, but I didn’t know a lot about the Demeot. They were considered the source of all evil by most, and so they became a taboo topic.
Until seeing my father transform into one, I’d never seen one outside of the renderings in a few books—the most famous of them a manuscript by a Shazian scholar who called himself a Demeotologist. Almost everyone had heard of its opening lines:
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
As the Rashirat were created by the Divine Light through the Shevirat, the Demeot were created by the Divine Light like each of us.
A reminder that if demons were evil, then so were we.
A hard idea to swallow, maybe, but the fact that demons could so easily possess people made it easier to believe. Not just any people, either, but people like my father who were already strong, already rich, already renowned and respected across the continent. He didn’t need more power, and yet he’d reached for it, and Ezrenad had reached right back.
Irthrothun’s voiced desire for more had echoed this sentiment, as irrational as it’d sounded. But maybe that was a sentiment shared by most of the Demeot. Why else would so many of them be choosing to cross over?
“If most demons fight like Irthrothun?” I started to think aloud as I shifted to the side to avoid some snow sliding off the side of a roof. “I think he distributed the free points he had mostly into strength and speed. Basically, in ways that’d enhance the transformation magic he relied on to catch me off-guard. So I should put more into strength, but not too much. Enough that I can take a few hits. The rest should go into agility, stamina, and perception.”
Helas nodded. “They don’t all fight like him, but their society is structured entirely by their strength. If they devour the core of a stronger demon, they absorb their strength. So the more they kill, the stronger they are. How much do you want to put in strength, though?”
The difference between having a thousand points, five thousand points, and ten thousand points was huge. With a thousand in strength, I could jump two stories, maybe fell a small tree with a punch or two. With ten thousand in strength, I could jump twenty stories, demolish entire buildings. Helas surely had double that, and Ezrenad triple.
“At least three thousand,” I said. Enough to jump ten stories. Enough to take Irthrothun’s fist at least. I had to start somewhere.
“What do you think will be most beneficial for you to put the most into between agility, stamina, and perception?”
“Perception,” I said. As we got closer to the temple, more people had taken to the streets, and so I moved closer to her and whispered. “I want to put at least seven thousand into that.”
In the slums, you never knew who was listening and who was buying what they heard. I had every reason to be paranoid now more than ever; Father thought I was dead, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to think otherwise until I was ready. Then it’d be a perfect trap.
Helas lowered her voice as well. “So that’s half of your free points. What’ll you do with the rest?”
The temple’s steep rooftops and stained glass windows peaked above the others in the neighborhood, decorated with wrangled tree limbs and braids of moss along the trim and the eaves.
“I’ll split the rest between agility and stamina,” I decided. “Five thousand each.”
She nodded. “Now’s as good a time as any.”
【NOTICE】
Would you like to distribute 3,000 free points into Strength?
STR: 295 → STR: 3,295
Yes.
The reality of increasing my strength so quickly made my next step heavy. As if I’d gained ten times my own weight. No, more. I almost buckled under the effort of my next step, but my body seemed to adapt at nearly the same rate. My heart pounded in my chest.
“Yeah, thought so,” Helas said with a chuckle, steadying me with her firm grip on my arm. “I’ll hold on to you.”
She could’ve warned me, but she’d wanted the entertainment of it. So hopefully she wouldn’t mind holding on for this whiplash.
【NOTICE】
Would you like to distribute 7,000 free points into Perception?
PER: 510 → PER: 7,510
Yes.
Lightning buzzed through me, setting my senses and my brain on fire. I could feel my clothes moving against my skin, the cold air seeping into the material, the soft breeze against my cheeks. I could sense so many people at once in a single head-splitting realization. I could see in so much detail—and so far—but it was even more disorienting than the gray fog of nothingness that’d greeted me after I’d died.
Before, I could push my perception about five blocks, but this was something different entirely. It was like everything within the slums was happening right next to me. Hundreds of people sleeping, waking up, cooking, eating, working, cleaning. My brain throbbed as it processed all this new information, tried to decide what could be background noise and what was important.
【NOTICE】
Would you like to distribute 5,000 free points into Agility?
AGI: 385 → AGI: 5,385
Yes, I managed with some mental effort, and flinched with the hyper-awareness of what every little bone and muscle and tendon was doing in my body in every moment. My movements felt too big, too heavy, too small, too subtle—all wrong, like I’d forgotten how my body even worked.
I wasn’t even sure if I was using my own feet to walk. Or if I was even walking.
“Sak’hed,” Helas hissed under her breath, “you’re fucking heavy.”
【NOTICE】
Would you like to distribute 5,000 free points into Stamina?
STA: 415 → STA: 5,415
Yes.
Suddenly, I had a hop in my step, my body feeling lighter and more coordinated than ever before. The fire was gone, and in the next second, I felt exactly like I did before I’d distributed the points.
“You really milked that,” Helas accused me.
“You offered.”
She scoffed.
This left me with about two thousand free points, which I would’ve gawked at this time yesterday. Even now, I had to fight the urge to wonder if throwing it into agility or stamina would be beneficial. But after fighting Irthrothun, I wanted to be cautious. Keeping the free points would allow me a significant boost to either—and also strength, if I found myself up against a demon that was physically stronger than him.
“I do need to warn you,” Helas said as we approached the temple. She straightened up, and so I took the opportunity to do the same. “The demon you fought was strong. Commanders are not weak by any means. But he was not fighting at full strength. Had he been summoned by someone with a higher soul quality, then you would’ve been out of luck. Understood?”
I clenched my jaw. “Understood,” I echoed.
In Bolstaor, the temples were scattered around every neighborhood, even in the slums. Each was surrounded by a small crop of trees, lanterns and wishes written on little pieces of paper tied to low hanging branches. A stone pathway guided us under the protection of their boughs to the front steps of the temple.
Stone pillars and an arched entryway welcomed all into a round reception room lined with benches and candles dripping wax down their sides. Fur-robed clerics wandered between people, offering slips of paper and writing utensils to those who wanted to make wishes. For those who couldn’t write, they offered a warm expression and a listening ear as they wrote their wishes for them.
Helas breezed past them all and burst through the wood doors that led to the main temple and inner sanctum. I’d never been inside a temple before, and my jaw slackened at the sight of it all. It was like we’d stepped into a dungeon, into another world completely separate from ours.
“Did entering the temple trigger the quest?” Helas asked. When I shook my head no, she sighed. “I was afraid of that. Something to ask your patron god.”
The crop of woods outside—sparse enough to see through to the temple—continued inside but with taller trees, their canopies lost to a fog that reminded me of the gray nothingness that’d shown me the truth of Mother’s death. A very strong set of transformation spells must’ve been used here to expand the space inside and allow these trees to grow so tall.
A rather young dwarf greeted us from nearby with a merry wave. He had deep brown hair tied into a bun, and he wore fur robes with a golden brooch made of three dangling teardrops that indicated he was a cleric of Sak’hed.
“Helas,” he greeted and smiled with rosy cheeks that contrasted against his fair skin. “What a pleasure it is to see you again.”
“Shit’s bad, Yalgor,” she said. “We need to summon his patron god, and I’ll donate these if you help us.”
She thrust Irthrothun’s demon core at him. And a second one from her satchel.
“T-two…?” Yalgor stammered.
He looked very concerned.