“I don’t know you.”

I shifted to squint at Rhydion, who was staring at Ozyraph. That was his first comment?

I was excruciatingly aware that I was not firing on all cylinders right now, physically or especially mentally. Every muscle ached because every one had just been violently seized up, and despite what I’d told Aster I was pretty sure my ribs on one side were at least bruised and probably cracked. At least I had miraculously not landed on my guitar. Not to mention the hangover-caliber headache that resulted from having all my brainpower diverted to spell combination with the safety limiters clearly disabled.

This was the moment Ozyraph had chosen to make her appearance. I did not for one second believe the timing was a coincidence. Fucking devils.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Rhydion,” she drawled. “Yes, I’m sure it must absolutely astonish you not to be the most important person in the room for once. We both drew the short end of the stick this time, as Lord Seiji’s self-insertion into my affairs was more recent and nearby than any of your…dalliances with Niaphrax. She sends her love, by the way.”

I wasn’t too mentally cooked to recognize the weight of sarcasm with which she pronounced my title, but didn’t care too much about that because what the hell were they talking about?

“You’re looking well, Ozyraph,” I said aloud, putting on the best smirk I could manage in my current state. “Have you lost weight?”

Slowly, I drew my sword, savoring the hungry whisper of the blade escaping its scabbard, and pointed it at the devil’s heart. Deliberately, I let my smirk widen into a grin.

“Would you like to?”

The wench had the infernal gall to roll her eyes at me.

“Let us review, shall we? When last you thrust yourself into my business, Seiji, you employed the expertise of someone far more intelligent than yourself to find and exploit a loophole in my contract, at which point I voluntarily withdrew my claim and departed, rather than sully the good name of my master by failing to adhere scrupulously to agreed-upon terms. Those were intricately extenuating circumstances which are in no way applicable to this situation. So please!”

Ozyraph actually bowed to me, managing to make even that look sarcastic.

“By all means, young man, try to stick that sword in me, here, in my own realm. Let us explore together where that sequence of events will lead.”

I blinked, slowly, hating the bedraggled state of my brain and how many seconds it took me to run over what she’d just said and fail to find any argument. Finally I turned to Rhydion.

“You think I should—?”

“It is probably best if you don’t.”

“Yeah, no fuckin’ kidding,” Harker muttered from somewhere behind us.

“Was she talking about the Devil King’s ‘good name?’” Dhinell added in an incredulous sotto voce. “What utter absurdity.”

“Story of my life,” I grumbled, sheathing my sword again, a bit awkwardly as my strained arms where having trouble with fine motor control. Yeah, it probably was for the best I hadn’t instigated a physical fight, upon reflection. “Every time I meet somebody who desperately needs stabbin’, I’m not allowed to.”

“Anyway,” Ozyraph said loudly, “the Void is not for mud-footed mortals to traipse around in. There is no power here for you to grab, at least none that wouldn’t explode you and a big chunk of your surroundings if you tried, for which reason you are also not permitted to use this plane for purposes of transit. Ergo, everybody out. Now.”

“Someone else preceded us,” Rhydion said in a carefully neutral tone. “Ah, but I suppose the rules are different for your own allies.”

“Well look at you, trying to fish for information like somebody who thinks he’s clever,” Ozyraph purred, putting on a vulpine smile. “You must be terribly curious about dear little Khariss’s status vis a vis my faction. That seems like it would be…valuable intelligence to you—which is to say, not free. If you were of a mind to negotiate, now, that is worth postponing your eviction, provided that you little goslings stay safely next to that altar and refrain from creating a ruckus in my back yard. Yes, boys, I can tell you anything you could possibly want to know about Khariss Gwylhaithe, and plenty it wouldn’t occur to you to ask. Shall we discuss business?”

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” I snapped.

“We are not interested in conducting any commerce with the likes of you,” Rhydion added with more dignity. “Your kind only wants one thing, and it is not up for barter.”

“Yeah, what he said!” I agreed.

“Well, no, I hardly expected either of the actual players in this game to underestimate the value of their souls,” the devil smirked, “but let’s face it, none of these three seem terribly important. What about him?” She pointed at Harker, who raised his bow in response and drew a bead on her. “Is his existence really more valuable than crucial strategic data in your hands?”

“You can’t do that,” Dhinell said shrilly.

“Yeah, now you’re just wasting time,” I added. “We all know you can’t take a soul without the permission of its owner.”

“You would remember that particular detail, wouldn’t you,” Ozyraph replied. “How quickly you forget that there are very rare circumstances in which that rule is in abeyance. Very rare indeed—I believe this is the first time I’ve had a bunch of marks charge headfirst into them. But here you are, so it seems a shame not to take advantage, no?”

“Harker,” Rhydion said evenly, “even passive artifacts like mine may be risky here; triggering one with an active effect will have very unpredictable results. Don’t fire your bow. In case it does not go without saying, we are not bartering your or anyone’s soul to this creature.”

“What a pity,” Ozyraph said with a sigh. “It would be nice to recoup some of what you cost me, Seiji. I suppose I shall have to content myself with the meager satisfaction of booting you out. A pyrrhic victory, since it’s ultimately for your own good.”

“That was her play!” I clapped a hand to my forehead as an epiphany burst within me, and immediately regretted it as my skull was still pounding and my arm horribly sore. Ignoring the pain, I kept right on blurting my thoughts. “She dosed herself with calming drugs and bolted to the broken altar that just dumps people in the Void, knowing we’d follow her, and then made a beeline right back up that hall knowing a devil would catch her and kick her back out into the real world. Best case, we might blow ourselves up because there’s five of us together—hell, that’s exactly what would’ve happened if Rhydion didn’t know the rules in here. Even if we survived long enough for the devils to kick us out, she’s no longer cornered.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s all very fascinating to you, but if we’re not doing business we’re sure as hell not engaging in small talk,” Ozyraph said in a bored tone. “I will be kicking you out, now. This, however, places me on the horns of a dilemma. Using Void magic to allow mortals rapid transit between different parts of the material plane is prohibited in the strictest terms. However, if I simply flip you back into this room on the other side, you’ll just be brought back here as soon as you try to leave. Unfortunately, any of the means by which I could coerce you to just sit in there until you all starve to death fall well outside my mandate. So I shall have to make a…slight compromise, and trust that my master agrees with my judgment.”

She paused, looking expectantly at us. I don’t know why; what the hell was there to be said about that?

“What?” Ozyraph said dryly. “Not even a thank you?”

“Thank you,” said Rhydion.

“Seriously, man?” I exclaimed.

“She is, after all, helping us,” he pointed out. “That she does so reluctantly and is in the first place a vile monstrosity with an insurmountable weight of sin upon her own soul does not fundamentally negate that fact. Courtesy is of moral value chiefly to he who extends it.”

“What a pair of charmers you are,” the devil drawled, reaching behind herself. She pulled out, somehow, the same tablet computer I’d seen her using before. “Well, not that it hasn’t been an absolute delight, but this is farewell. I’ll be setting you down at a slight distance from your point of entry, so as not to catch you in the same trap and force me to do this twice. Believe me when I say I earnestly hope never to see any of you idiots again.”

“Hang on,” I said suspiciously, squinting at the rapid flicking and tapping motions her fingers were making on the surface of the tablet. “Just how many button presses does it take to—”

If anything, the sensation of being yanked across a dimensional barrier was even less comfortable at the hands of a devil than when a passive Void altar did it. Granted, I was in much worse physical shape than on my last trip a few minutes ago, but also I wouldn’t have put it past Ozyraph to make the passage extra rough, just to be an asshole. Whatever the reason, it drove me to my knees, retching and out of breath, my vision swimming with tears.

I pulled my head up immediately, of course, to take in my new situation. It was…sub-optimal for two very important reasons, neither of which was that I was now outdoors in the frigid winter air; Khariss didn’t exactly keep her house toasty anyway. No, the real problems were that, first of all, I was alone—that fucking devil had split up the party, no doubt dumping everybody in a separate, dangerous section of the house to deal with on their own.

And second, I was now out in the front courtyard. Standing amid the weird rubble that had been Khariss’s front steps, now lying in smoothly rounded shapes like hardened lava where her alchemy had melted them away. Before me extended a wide courtyard with a gate opening onto the village beyond, enclosed by tall walls…

And completely full of zombies.

Dozens…no, easily hundreds of them. They were packed in like the crowds at a concert, barely enough room to shamble about. Slow creatures that they were, it took a moment for my presence to be noticed. For whatever reason it seemed they avoided the molten ruins of the steps, so I had a few meters of personal space. No sooner had I forced myself back upright, though, than half-rotten heads began to swivel toward me. Hundreds of luminous green eyes fixed on me.

“Oh, you bitch,” I said wearily.

They raised desiccated arms and began shuffling toward me with murderous intent.

Heal! First things first; I put myself back in fighting shape with a thought, pain and mental fog washing away in a flash of pink light. Second order of business was some breathing room.

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Windburst! Windburst! Windburst! Windburst! Windburst! Windburst!

Conditions weren’t ideal for it; Yoshi’s Force Wave would’ve been a better match for this situation, but…beggars and choosers. The bursts of concentrated air rocked them back, halting their forward momentum and even reversing it in some cases, but I was fighting an uphill battle here against the sheer inertia of the much bigger crowd behind, all of which were trying to press forward to get me. This couldn’t go on, I’d be overwhelmed in moments.

Well, much as I’d have preferred a more controlled testing environment, I did have a bunch of new toys to play with.

“Stun Field!”

Pale blue light rippled out from me in an arc that widened as it dissipated, causing visible crackles of static electricity along the limbs and rotting clothes of the zombies it washed across. More importantly, it stopped them in their tracks. Most of them immediately fell over onto each other, turning their attempted forward press into a domino chain of collapse.

Okay! So that was basically an area-of-effect Shock; useful to have. Shock had enough voltage to stun but not usually kill or seriously burn a human opponent, and I’d observed many times on the way up here that zombies had enough residual neural activity for it to work the same way.

Stun Field! Stun Field! Stun Field! I flashed the undead trying to flank me from both sides and then tried to aim a final shot over the fallen heads of my first victims to stop the ranks behind. That last one didn’t work as well; apparently the range was too limited.

Still, we were making progress. I had enough room to try out more new tricks.

Almost directly in front of me, one zombie hadn’t fully fallen, catching herself against two of her felled comrades in what was almost certainly a total accident. The poor old corpse twitched as she turned sightless green eyes back upon me, emitting a groan and attempting to take an awkward step forward.

I pointed at her.

“Strike!”

Man, you really don’t appreciate what a lightning bolt is like up close, especially if you’ve seen enough modern fantasy or action TV to expect a visible progress of arcing electricity, just slow enough for the eye to follow. That might be more narratively useful, but holy shit is it not as dramatic as the real thing.

A single column of blinding white radiance connected the ground to the sky, passing straight through the unfortunate zombie I’d targeted. It existed for an instant and then was over, leaving behind only the destruction of its passage. The light was blinding; from a few meters away I could feel the wash of terrifying heat. And goddamn, that thunderclap. At that proximity, it set my ears ringing so hard I immediately cast a Heal on myself to fix my vision and hearing.

That zombie was down, smoking and not even twitching. So were the four nearest the impact point. This was no carefully controlled voltage like Shock, my magical taser. This… This was one of nature’s many reminders that it does not give a fuck about us. People do survive lightning strikes… But then again, people also win lotteries, and the odds of that aren’t much better.

Something like adrenaline began to flow through me, but oddly warm, almost gentle. Unbidden and outside my control, my lips parted and curled up in a breathless grin. Ah, yes, I knew what that was, had experienced this sensation a few times.

Power.

“Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike! Heal!”

For a few seconds I amused myself blasting nearby clusters of zombies into charred jerky, then had to cast another self-Heal because there were still consequences for setting off that kind of destructive force this close to myself. Smoke rose from around me; in a few nearby places where the limbs of fallen zombies didn’t obscure it, I could see bits of the rough gravel which covered the courtyard seemed to have been partially melted.

Now, what else did I have to play with?

The zombies were still trying to press forward, of course. Incapable of fear or self-preservation, they were only slowed by having to crawl over their fellows which were still dazed by my Stun Fields or destroyed by Strikes. The danger to me was less urgent, but not gone.

Not yet.

“Arc!”

Ooooooh, new favorite toy! This one fired from my outstretched hand, not the sky, discharging a burst of searing electricity which struck a target, then jumped to another, and another, and so on. With the first shot I wiped out eight zombies trying to clamber over a pile of their own fallen to get to me.

Arc! Arc! Arc!

Over and over I cast it, from each hand in turn, testing my boundaries as much as I was defending myself. I didn’t seem able to exert any fine control over this one. The direction in which the arc jumped was seemingly random, as was the number of targets it flashed through before flickering out, ranging from six or seven to almost twice that. Nor could I adjust the power; this hit much harder than Shock. Though it didn’t have the searing destructive force of a full lightning strike, it was clearly a killing spell.

A multi-killing spell. Just what the doctor ordered for dealing with a horde of zombies.

Now…could we do better?

“Storm!”

In the air above, maybe three meters off the ground, a wisp of gray cloud formed. The way it unfurled outward was actually extremely pretty, spinning itself out in fractal patterns to extend whimsical little puffs of fluffy cloud in curling patterns over an area some fifteen or twenty square meters wide.

It took maybe a full second to fully form, and then all at once, from every part of it, discharged a torrent of lightning bolts into the ground and everything in its way, then dissipated.

No more cute, puffy clouds. Just smoldering corpses marking the space below where they’d been.

My grin was so wide it literally hurt, and I didn’t care. My face probably would have looked scary enough to be off-putting, had any of my friends been here to see. Didn’t care about that either.

“Storm! Storm! STORM!”

There was randomness to this one, too; the clouds unfurled themselves in unpredictable, almost artistic patterns, and then discharged a torrent of white-hot electric death straight down, reducing flesh to charcoal and gravel to black glass.

“Current!”

Okay, this one might be objectively less potent, but it quickly took its place as my favorite.

Lightning arced from my fingertips, flowing continuously in a stream wherever I aimed it. Naturally arcing electricity is not a precise weapon; it would jump and spark toward any path of least resistance—which meant bodies, in this case—twisting like a rebellious living thing where it couldn’t. Twisting in every direction except back at me, that is. Oh, but the features of this one I could control; I could produce a feeble flicker even weaker than Shock, which would barely so much as sting an enemy, or a full torrent of searing energy that hit like a Strike and just kept coming. There was no end to it! So long as I focused, I could keep the flow up indefinitely.

“CURRENT!”

Oh my god it got even better. I could use it from both hands simultaneously! Wait, could I cast other spells at the same time, if they didn’t produce their effect directly from my hands?

“Strike! Storm! Strike! Strike! STORM! Spark! Shock! Strike! Storm, Storm, STORM!”

And all the while, I waved my hands wildly back and forth, raking two continuous Currents of destruction across the crowd of zombies and the entire courtyard, even as I conjured more electric death from the skies above to rain down on them.

Never in my life had I felt so…liberated. So free, so satisfied. Reaching out, decreeing death and carnage wherever I pointed. I could hear myself laughing like a lunatic above the thunder and explosions.

“UNNNNLIMITED POWEEEEEERRRRR!”

Okay, you know what, I’m the fuckin’ Dark Lord, I can be as cheesy as I want. Let me have my moment.

When I finally let the Currents drop, there was silence so incongruous it rang like an unholy choir. Smoke filled the air, along with the stink of charred meat and burning chemicals. There were no functioning zombies left in this courtyard, and relatively few still functionally intact. Black lines of pitted akorthist marked the walls where I had raked Currents of lightning across them.

This was it. This was what I’d been searching for and longing for ever since I landed on this shithole planet. What I needed, if I was going to swagger around calling myself something as ostentatious as Dark Lord. No more limiting myself to spells of either horrible torture or minor nuisance. No more flinging fucking slimes at people.

This was the real shit. The power I needed—the power to wipe an army off the face of Ephemera like crumbs from my lapel.

This. Changed. Everything.

No more Dark Lord Nice Guy.

Bless that fucking goblin! No credit to Khariss or the Void; I’d have worked out all these spell combinations eventually anyway without their help. But Gizmit and that scroll of Spark had just changed the entire game. Would it be sexual harassment if I swept her up and gave her a big ol’ smooch on the mouth? …yeah, as her boss that probably wasn’t cool. Also she’d stab me. I’d just give her a raise, she’d probably appreciate that more anyway.

Oh, and I still hadn’t even tried everything!

I pointed dramatically at the nearest smoldering corpse.

“Resuscitate!”

Nothing.

Well, no surprise there; it was obvious from the name what that spell generally did, but just as obviously, terms and conditions would apply. It stood to reason being killed, zombified, and lightning-fried in that order put you well out of warranty.

“Boooooooooossssss!”

Just when I thought I’d achieved peak Everything’s Comin’ Up Seiji, somehow the fates deigned to give me more good news. Biribo was letting out a long wail of relief even as he came zooming around the corner of the manor.

“Biribo!”

He didn’t even stop, just cannoning right into my shoulder hard enough to rock me back a step. I didn’t care; I grabbed him with both hands and pressed him into my coat in the closest thing to a hug I could manage for somebody so tiny.

“Oh thank fucking god, I thought you were gone.”

“Me? You thought I was gone?! One minute we’re there in that room with that Void altar, then suddenly everybody’s disappeared! Nobody nearby and I could sense you clear out here in the front! What the fuck happened, boss? And what is all this? Since when do you have these spells?!”

“Wait, hang on.” I pulled him away and held him up in front of my face, frowning. “You—immediately sensed me out here? No lost time at all?”

“No, it was instant. Shit gets weird if you fuck around with the Void, boss, I thought you’d learned that lesson already in Kzidnak. I told you not to go down there!”

“Yeah, maybe next time tell me fuckin’ why! C’mon, you know I had to play along with Rhydion; what was I gonna say to him, huh? So, wait, does time stop moving inside the Void?”

“You were inside the—”

“Okay, hold up.” I released him to hover in the air. “Clearly we need to go over this and try to figure out exactly what went down, but right now we haven’t got time for that or a proper reunion. Sorry, buddy, but we gotta work. That fucking devil spread us out all over this damn place and there’s no telling what’s happening to the others right now. I need your senses. We need to find Aster, and the rest of the team, and Khariss, in that order of importance.”

“You got it, boss!” He did a loop-the-loop in the air in front of me before turning to zoom off in the direction he’d come. “Let’s get you back inside and back in business! Follow me!”

I set off after him at a dead run. Already I was resolved to introduce Khariss to all my shiny new toys. If anything had happened to Aster, though, Ozyraph had just jumped her spooky ass to the top of my list.

It was a long list, but damn me if I wasn’t gonna get to everyone on it.