“Don’t fear!” she cried as she rounded the corner. “Though I may look like an evil fiend, I’m actually here to—oh.”
The person who had screamed was a corpse now—one that had been ripped into two pieces at the midsection.
Two demons sat crouched over each half of the human, both of them eating. Each of them was vaguely humanoid, hulks with long arms that walked on their legs and knuckles. They had plates of black armor fused into their skin, and six beady black eyes set into their skull above their elongated, blood-soaked snouts.
{Carnage Demon — Level 5}
{Carnage Demon — Level 6}
Both of them looked up at her. She froze as she slid to a stop in the doorway.
This hardly feels level appropriate, thought Ashtoreth. Where are all the imps? I could really go for some imps.
On the other side of the demons, behind the human’s corpse, she saw a spear lying on the ground. They’d chosen a weapon before they’d been killed.
Then she thought: maybe I can use guile to get out of this one.
She was an archfiend, after all. And this was Hell.
“Well well!” she said, beaming and placing her fists on her hips. “What do we have here?”
She tilted her head toward the corpse lying in a pool of blood at her feet. “You two have actually done something right, eh? Try not to spend too much time celebrating before you get back to—”
One of the carnage demons let out an otherworldly howl, its jaws unhinging and opening wide enough to fix themselves around Ashtoreth’s head.
Ashtoreth’s face fell. “Rude.”
She conjured a plume of hellfire before her to distract the carnage demons. A bright burst of violet fire filled the room, as much hellfire as she could create at once. She dove through it, lunging for the spear.
It wasn’t enough. One of the carnage demons reared back from the flames, but the closest one ignored them. It slammed into her side just as she landed near the spear, sending her skidding across the stone floor, its weight on top of her.
Its claws scratched at her chest, neck, and face. She heard her satchel of hearts tear as she rolled to turn her vitals away from the beast, felt the handful of organs spill away onto the floor.
The demon atop her snapped at her head, but she jerked her neck toward it at the last moment. Its jaws closed, but it bit down on the end of one of her horns. It reared back, letting out a pained cry as a trail of blood ran from its mouth.
The other demon’s jaws clamped down on her elbow with terrifying force, and would have broken it had she not conjured a powerful blast of hellfire that she sent directly into its face.
The demon let out a muffled snarl, and for a moment it tried to simply power through the flames pouring over its eyes and filling its mouth. Then it leapt back—just in time for Ashtoreth to turn her palm on the other demon as it came forward again.
The carnage demon faltered. With both of them out of the way she rolled to one side, grabbing the spear by the dead human’s body and then springing to her feet, spinning and launching an arc of fire out before her as she did so.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
But just as she finished the arc, she ran out of mana, her stream of hellfire dying.
The demons had shrank back from her, deterred by the hellfire. There were some flames clinging to their bodies, and they were distracted for now… but her hellfire had really just pissed them off more than anything, and the wound in her elbow would make killing them with the spear more difficult.
Ashtoreth reached out, trying to grasp one of the hearts that had spilled across the floor… and found she couldn’t. [Consume Heart] only let her rip hearts out of bodies, not telekinetically control all hearts.
But she did feel… there!
She tore a heart out of the recently-dead human corpse, squishing it in her hand and absorbing its power….
{You gain a [Devoured Flesh] buff: +2 DEX, +2 STR, +3 VIT, +3 MAG, +2 PSY, +2 DEF}
Oh, she thought, momentarily distracted. Human hearts felt… really good.
Then she began healing her elbow with her [Blood] and fell into a fighting stance, bloody palms slickening the haft of the spear as she faced down the two demons. In the same moment, she spent an enormous portion of mana on another one of her abilities, [Command Infernal]—and her voice changed, shifted, became a cacophony of many voices layered over one another, all of them her own but with a slight alteration—and all of them filled with murderous rage.
“Kill!” she commanded.
The lower-level demon froze, its mind momentarily overtaken with a single-minded desire to obey—it turned and lunched for its fellow, latching its massive jaws around the other demon’s neck.
The demon struggled under the attack of its ally, falling to its side as it clawing at its attacker’s face—and Ashtoreth took her opportunity to lunge forward and drive her spear into one of its eyes, first burying the point in, then bearing down on it with all her strength and forcing it deep into her enemy’s skull.
{You gain and absorb 1 [Carnage Demon Core]; Tier 1}
She yanked the spear free and backed away over the human’s corpse just as the other demon turned on her, the spell of domination broken. It lunged, but she’d given herself enough distance to aim a well-timed spear-thrust into its open maw, driving the point of her weapon into its throat and keeping the demon at bay.
Her enemy mewled as it struggled, torn between using its forelegs to claw at the haft of the spear and push itself away from the driving point.
But there was no getting away: Ashtoreth had skewered it good. She gritted her teeth and slowly worked the spear deeper down the demon’s throat, then spoke, pausing in her speech every time she got slid another few inches.
“When an archfiend—gah—speaks—you—listen!”
{You gain and absorb 1 [Carnage Demon Core]; Tier 1}
{Congratulations, you’ve absorbed enough power to advance your racial path!}
“That,” she said, exerting herself to yank her spear free of the demon it was deeply embedded in. “Hardly felt level-appropriate.” It took her a few seconds, but she got the weapon free.
She picked up one of the hearts she’d dropped and consumed it with a squish. The fact that she couldn’t grasp loose hearts was bad news, but not the worst: she just needed a better heart carrier.
She tore the hearts out of the carnage demons, their corpses flopping a bit as the organs were ripped free. Then she spared another glance toward the demon corpses before she turned her attention to her advancement. Really, though—a level 6 this fast? Tough tutorial.
“How are the humans surviving any of this?” she wondered aloud. Then she looked down at the bloodshot eyes of the dead human’s upper half.
“Well not you, obviously,” she said. She frowned down at the human, then looked at the spear in her hand.
It was poor luck, that was for sure: beggers couldn’t be choosers, but it would have been nicer if they’d chosen a greatsword.
Still, she had something to look forward to. She queried the system, excited to get her first-ever ability upgrade and occasionally licking her fingers.
{Racial Advancement}