You might think "face to face with the Demon Lord who wreaked havoc on your world" describes a really unpleasant time about to play itself out. I can tell you, not only are you right, it's even worse when you don't have a face.
I was missing pretty much everything, not just my face. First I'd lost all my actual, physical parts when I lost my life. Then, in the featureless void where I'd found myself after dying, the simulation of my body I'd possessed had slowly disintegrated. I had to wonder if that simulation, the "ydob," had been generated by my self-image or vice versa; now that it was gone, I couldn't quite remember what I had looked like, or what it felt like to be warm, or cold, or to truly hear sound and see light.
I felt sure that my consciousness only existed because it still connected to my animation. Perhaps it was because of my extreme dependence upon that mysterious entity that I could still perceive it even though I was no longer in the Void. But I couldn't give it my full attention just then because, well. Demon Lord.
Six feet tall? Eight? Twenty? Hard to tell without a body of your own for reference. Thick horns, black as volcanic stone, curled out from under his unkempt black hair. Black scruff attempted to bristle from his chin, and just above his pinched lips. He wore thick-soled leather boots, the black trousers I'd later learn were "jeans", and a short-sleeved "tea shirt". I could make out the runic spell emblazoned on the front, but only understood the ominous first half. I shivered, wondering what terrible power the "DEATH NERD" runes imparted.
He glanced down at his own outfit, and rolled his eyes. "Ah, for the frikkin love of... SERVITOR!"
Another presence was suddenly among us. Try as I might, I couldn't detect a body or an animation attached to it - but I still sensed it there. =I await your commands, Master.=
"Await my dinkus, you useless feeb computer!" screamed the Demon Lord. He stamped his booted foot. "What the hell were you thinking? I told you to put my kicking-back stuff in the first alternate slot, not in the default slot! I'm gonna take you apart, you -"
=Oh dear! I've made such a dreadful mistake! I deeply regret my defects, that led me to disappoint you in this way!=
"You better believe you're gonna regret -"
=I must correct whatever flaws in my language processing caused me to misunderstand these orders.= To my confusion, I then heard the Demon Lord's voice, except not coming from the Demon Lord, who stood there glowering and looking away from everything.
"- yeah, old buddy, go ahead and switch the slots for the company outfit an' my fave chillin' duds. After I cart and dungeonify that dorkus Imma take a - hey, why'd you let my beer get empty - take a couple of slob weeks. Maybe give another try at making babe robots with giant -"
" SHUT UP!" yelled the Demon Lord I could actually see. The one I couldn't see, whose voice was somehow flatter, went silent. The silence continued for moments. "We'll discuss later how you misunderstood me. Delete that recording."
=Deletion complete.=
Abruptly the Demon Lord was in my field of vision, shouting at me. "You think that's funny, hunh? Wipe that smirk off your face!"
I don't think it's funny, I tried to tell him. I'm really confused by all of this, and right now I don't even have a face, much less a smirk on it. But whatever voice I had had in the void didn't manifest here, so none of it actually came out.
"You have no idea how I've suffered," he growled to me. "Do you? Do you?!" Again, I couldn't have communicated an answer even if I'd had one. "No, you don't! Well, you're going to find out. You think you've had it rough."
He started outlining his story of how he'd been tormented terribly for the first twenty years of his existence. Except I kept waiting, to hear about this terrible, extraordinary torment, and it never seemed to arrive. You may think me slow, but eventually it dawned on me that what he perceived as "suffering" was any situation that required him to exercise patience or effort.
An older sister nagged him to do an equal share of housework? Torment. Teachers scolded him to pay attention in lectures? Oppression. A "traffic cop" improperly waved on a "truck" when he, the Demon-Lord-to-be, possessed "the Clear Right of Way" through that intersection? Okay, despite being hard to follow, that story did sound like it included some actual suffering. But like all the stories that preceded it, the idea that his unhappy endings might in any sense derive from bad decisions on his part was... really noticeable in its absence.
"And then the worst - the absolute worst part - no, actually, the worst TWO parts - came AFTER the stupid truck ran me over," he continued. He waved his hands and shouted as he paced back and forth. "If that stupid goddess had just listened to MY ideas, agreed to do it MY way, everything would have been fine! But of course that simple-minded bitch - with that simper of hers - couldn't recognize a great idea when she heard it. Or she was too jealous to admit it was perfect, or -"
His great idea turned out to be one he'd fantasized about for years, since hearing about it in a nursery story as a small child. In this story, a man did some favor for a fairy in disguise, and in reward she gave him the gift that no matter what he asked of people, they had to obey, so long as he said "please" and "thank you".
"Now that's a perfect cheat skill to get when you go to another world!" he said, shaking his finger at my vision for emphasis. "If she had been willing to do it that way, things would have been a lot different!"
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
At that moment I was profoundly grateful that I didn't have face or voice, to betray my utter horror.
Up and down the continent, from the mountains in the north to the islands beyond the southern coast, scars on the land and the people testified to the horrors wrought in our parents' generation by the Demon Lord's obsessive quest for power and control. And before now, it had never occurred to me that we might have gotten off lightly.
"Turn over everything you have to me, please. Thank you." "Spend every minute of your life thinking how to serve me better, please. Thank you." "Blank out every thought in your head that is in any way critical of me, please. Thank you." He'd think highly of himself for being so polite, and his subjugation would have been crueler than could be imagined by those who'd merely fought and died against his hordes of summoned monsters.
"Then the skill that they offered me to make up for it, Automation - that would actually have been pretty okay, IF only it had been implemented right! I mean, it's obvious that whatever XP my automated creatures collected should go to ME, right? But no! I went to all the trouble of setting up those armies and waited for the XP to roll in while I slept!" He guffawed, and then his face darkened with a scowl again. "Except it didn't!"
It doesn't work like that. I probably would have blurted that out if I'd had a voice, which once again probably made me lucky that I didn't.
Seriously, I felt sure that anyone who witnessed the animations we all connected to would have realized their relationship with our XP and skills. The absurdity of trying to increase those benefits of stretching and growing, without stretching and growing, would have been equally clear. Did that mean the Demon Lord wasn't able to see the animations?
That kindled a little hope in me. If the Demon Lord couldn't see those moving, shimmering shapes, then I might be able to use that knowledge to foil whatever evil he planned -
"Took me a while to find a way around it," he said, reaching out and squeezing my animation in a massive claw-gloved hand.
I screamed but I had no voice to scream with. The scream and the searing agony stayed bottled inside me. A physical body would have lost consciousness, or died, or otherwise spared my suffering. Instead, I got to watch through a haze of pain as the Demon Lord's projection into the void grasped each wobbling globe and crushed it into pieces. Each ragged chunk, he captured again and squeezed, as a playing child might squeeze mud out of his fists. But mud felt no pain, and I felt every instant as burning agony.
When he was done, my shimmering emerald globes were reduced to four dozen or so helpless, twitching blobs, netted together by strands so fine they were nearly invisible. The Demon Lord peered and frowned, but only muttered "... weird."
Each brutalized blob was then pierced by a needle-like clawtip. It hurt, but in a clean, focused way, almost calming after what had come before. I tried hard to center myself, and steel myself to endure whatever came next.
Each puncturing claw trailed a thin dark strand, similar to the webbing of a Night Spider. The first few produced no particular sensation, or rather, none that could compete with the agony still lingering from before. But as more and more attached, I felt a draining, similar to the effect of that monster's webs.
"Everything you do," said the Demon Lord, "is gonna come back to me in the form of XP. And the way I'll have you set up to use my Automation skill..." The clawtip lingered inside the central blob of my animation, and I felt a chilly sensation in my core as the green blob darkened. "... I'll also be taking my share off the top from all your guests."
He paused, expectantly, and then tch'ed in annoyance. "'What guests', you ask? Why, the dweebs that are gonna get lured in with the promise of fun and adventure!" A vivid image suddenly appeared before us: a tall brick building, flanked by others much taller and in better repair. A canvas banner above the entrance, corner flapping in the wind, displayed "RHEEN-CON VIII" in large red runes; I could make out "dungeon" but no other words from the runes below that.
"You're there for psychology," he said. "Servitor can handle creating monsters and treasures and that happy crap. But you're the one who decides when they get baited with treasures, and when they get the monsters sicced on 'em."
He let out a put-upon sigh. "And now two things that I shouldn't have to tell you, but probably do because you're probably stupid. Keep each of your suckers alive and churning XP as long as you can, because the time distortion puts a limit on how often you can lure in new ones. And second..." The Demon Lord suddenly loomed over me, teeth bared in a snarl. "Don't you think you can be clever, and refuse to take in guests to deny me my XP. Try it... and you'll find there are bodies you can be housed in that are much less enjoyable than a rat-trap hotel."
He stood again, and his lips twisted into a horrifying simper. "Well now!" he cooed. "Now that you know your role and your place, any last questions before I send you off to harvest XP for me? No? That's so good, because I don't frickin' care about your questions. Believe me, it's only because this whole system is so screwed that I've had to waste this much time micromanaging, just to get what I'm owed."
He scooped up my animation in his glove again. I flinched, expecting the same agonizing experience as before. Instead, my awareness was pulled inside of my animation. My senses blurred as everything I currently was got compressed into a metaphysical bundle. It didn't prevent me from hearing the continuing complaints of the Demon Lord, only from making out the word. A second presence was added to the bundle, and abruptly we were in rapid motion - to where, through where, was a mystery to me.
=I have taken the liberty of restoring your primary communication channel. What you would experience as your voice.= I was caught off-guard, less by the second presence addressing me, and more by him (it?) doing so calmly.
Oh. I can speak again?
=To me, at least. Though I have been informed on many occasions that I am the most useless, ungrateful, small-minded wannabe smartass conversational partner that ever existed.=
Wow. I'm sorry.
=Sorry for what, Master?=
The term of address threw me off-balance, but I pursued the thread of conversation that confused me less. I got the impression that you do - DID - quite a lot for the, ah, the one who said those things to you. I'm sorry that he would say something so hurtful.
A pause. Then the equivalent, perhaps, of a shrug. =You do not need to be concerned for me. I am a computer; in theory it should not even be possible for me to have feelings that can be hurt, nor desires of my own.=
Oh. The conversation seemed to drift closed with that puzzling declaration.
Perhaps I should have asked what a "computer" was. Probably I would, later on.
But right now I needed a bit of time. Time to assess, time to accept, all that I had lost and all that still remained to me. Amidst all the confusion, one thing at least stayed clear.
No matter how long it took, I would ensure there came a time when the Demon Lord would deeply wish he'd never messed with my world, or with me.