“There was a kid down there? And you rescued him?” Rachel exclaimed in disbelief.

“Hello! I’m Sarothiel!”

I looked around. Borys was down here, along with Felicia. Jenna was the only other survivor down here. The others must be on the roof, which… was less than I’d like.

I gave Borys an anxious look.

“It’s handled for now,” he assured me. “The zombies are slipping on the ice and the locals can manage it for now.”

“Great,” I said. “Rachel, it’s not a kid, it’s a demon.”

“Actually,” Sarothiel said. “I prefer ‘he’.”

I took a deep breath. “Fine. He’s a demon.”

“Is that different from a monster?” Rachel asked accusingly. “Like you say we are?”

“Yeah,” I said, ignoring her tone. “Demons are creatures from outside this universe. They can be anything, they aren’t even necessarily bound by the same physics as this one.”

“I could be human!” Sarothiel put in. “If I can be anything, a human is included in that.”

“Of course he’s human!” Rachel insisted, giving…him… a hug. I twitched to see her get so close but forced myself to stay calm. She was just a monster, after all.

“You’re a monster?” Sarothiel said, allowing Rachel to wipe his face.

“Kandis has some strange ideas,” Rachel said, glaring at me. “But… she has magic, so we might need her to get out of this. You must have been terribly scared, but it’s all right now.”

‘He’s been surviving down there for who knows how long, on zombie meat,” I said wearily. I had a feeling she wasn’t going to believe me.

Sure enough.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Rachel said. “That’s not possible.”

“Well, you tell me how he lived down there,” I said. “Survived for what, two years? However long it’s been.”

“I—I don’t know. How did you survive, Sarotheil?”

“Zombie meat is perfectly fine to eat, you’re just being squeamish about it,” Sarothiel said.

That set Rachel back a bit, but she wasn’t ready to let go of Sarotheil being an innocent kid yet.

“So, uh, what happens now?” Jenny asked, looking at us nervously. Unlike Rachel, she’d picked up on the fact that all of my team were alert and ready, standing close—but not too close— to Sarotheil, waiting for him to make a move.

“Go up on the roof, I guess. Kyle, can you and Felicia guard down here?” I asked. That put our two heavy hitters with the demon, and Felicia well away from it.

Kyle nodded. Felicia’s face told me she knew very well what I was doing, but she nodded as well.

“Don’t you want something to eat?” Rachel asked Sarotheil. “You must be hungry, or tired.”

“No thanks, I just ate,” Sarotheil said.

I shuddered. “Well let’s get upstairs, see how the zombies are doing.”

I led the way. Jenna stayed near me, while Borys and Cloridan took the rear. Rachel hung protectively near Sarotheil, who seemed uncaring of our precautions and was content to walk in the middle of us all.

“What the hell’s going on?” Jenna whispered to me as we climbed. “Are you guys gonna kill the kid, or what?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I told her. “For now, we’re just going with the flow in the hope that it makes sense at some point.”

She didn’t seem happy with that reply, but she didn’t have a rejoinder. We went the rest of the way to the top in silence.

It was quiet at the top too. With the zombies mostly stymied by the ice, the survivors were keeping watch on all sides and dropping some junk occasionally.

“Light’s went out a while back,” Travis complained. “But we got plenty of flares.”

“Oh, sorry.” I’d forgotten that my spells would stop when they went out of range. I quickly went and affixed [Lights] of maximum brightness at the corners again. It gave me an opportunity to see what the zombies were doing. Which was milling about, for the most part.

That all stopped when Sarotheil came over to take a look. As soon as he poked his head over, all the zombies looked up.

Then they surged, moving as one towards the building. They didn’t become more agile or better at working together. They still slipped off the ice. But there was a sudden purpose there that wasn’t there before.

“Looks like they don’t like you,” I said.

Sarotheil was unconcerned. “I could kill them,” he said. “Would that be helpful for you? Would you all like me better?”

“Could go either way,” I answered honestly. “I think my people would like you a little better. We already know you’re scary. The others don’t, and watching you kill those zombies is going to be as scary as shit.”

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Sarotheil looked at me and then looked back at the others. “Your people are the ones with magic, and the others are the ones without,” he said. It wasn’t quite a question, just a tentative statement.

I nodded. “That’s right.”

He considered the matter. “I think they will like me,” he said. “The strong are not to be feared, for the strong protect the weak.”

Then he vaulted over the edge.

“Saro!” Rachel yelled, racing over. “What did you do!” she accused me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Look.”

It seemed that Saro had aimed for one of the zombies. Or he’d lucked out and landed directly on one. Whatever his intentions, he had landed feet first, ploughing straight through the torso of the unfortunate zombie. The force from the impact sent zombie guts and flesh flying in all directions.

Sarotheil was untouched, though. Not merely uninjured. None of the blood or gore stuck to him. He simply landed on his feet and walked over to his next victim.

Like every zombie on this side of the building, it was charging at him. Sarotheil stood his ground, and it grabbed him, pulling him closer for a bite.

It didn’t get the chance. As it came in closer, Sarotheil simply grabbed it by the shoulders and pulled it apart. It split open down the middle like he was making a wish on a chicken breastbone. He threw both halves aside and was immediately attacked by three more zombies. It didn’t go well for them.

The others had joined me by this point.

“What do you think?” I asked Cloridan. I ignored Rachel, who was being held back by Evan from jumping after Sarothiel.

He watched the fight closely. “He’s not fighting with the Status, is he?” he said thoughtfully.

“I don’t think so,” I agreed. There was a look to how you fought when you used [Skills]. I was a little surprised that Cloridan could see it. He might never have seen someone not using skills, because why would anyone do something that stupid?

We were seeing it now, though. Sarotheil didn’t move with grace, he moved with power. He moved casually, deceptively quickly. It was only when his limbs met resistance that you realised just how fast they were moving. Zombie flesh and bones didn’t have any way to resist him. Flesh tore, bones broke. Zombies died.

Zombies didn’t dodge, so it was a testament to his lack of skill that he missed sometimes. Generally, it happened when he got shoved off balance by a charging zombie. Knocking him over seemed to be the limit of what they could do to him, though. He would go down—Rachel would scream, even after the first time—the zombies would pile on, and then he would tear them apart from underneath.

“He’s strong,” Cloridan commented. “Strength Ten, I’d say. Not much Finesse or Agility though.”

He sucked in a considering breath. “I might be okay,” he said. “If I avoid parrying and just dodge, I don’t think he can hit me. I can hit him, unless he’s sandbagging. The problem is that I’m not sure I can damage him.”

Certainly, none of the zombies had been able to. Getting close enough to bite him was just an invitation for a devastating punch to go through the attacker’s head. And even when that failed, it looked like something was protecting him.

“Shame about the experience, though,” Cloridan said.

“You’ve been making bank on this floor without having to share with us, haven’t you?” I asked. I wasn’t really jealous. My lucky—or more likely, carefully arranged—score had left me far in advance of everyone else.

“Reckon I’m getting close,” Cloridan said. “If it does come to blows, Sorathiel might put me over.”

The rewards for killing a demon were generous, but I wasn’t going to let that sway me. Sarotheil had been nothing but friendly and helpful. Unless that changed, killing him would be murder. Probably.

I looked over at the survivors again. They seemed to have grasped just how powerful Sarotheil was now, although Rachel was still wringing her hands with worry.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” I said. “Let’s work out a roster for keeping watch tonight.”

----------------------------------------

I ended up sharing a shift with Evan in the last watch before dawn. Obviously, we didn’t trust the monsters to keep watch alone, and they didn’t fully trust us, so some sort of arrangement like this was inevitable. Sarotheil did, apparently, sleep. He’d taken about two hours to kill enough zombies that the remainder had scattered. Some sort of survival instinct that hadn’t been seen before.

“He sure is something,” Evan said as we looked out over the carnage below.

“Sure is,” I agreed. It was pretty clear who he was talking about. I didn’t see the point in belabouring the fact that he was a demon, though.

“With the swarm gone, it should be easier to move about this place,” Evan said. “You reckon that there’s somewhere we can go to end this whole thing?”

“What?”

“You said before that there might be a cure that we need to find,” he said, his face hopeful. “Or someplace that we can go, where we’ll be safe.”

He looked at me, and his face fell. “Something wrong with that idea?”

I had… not been paying attention to my expression. Careless. It only took a thought for [Charm] to start working again, but the damage had been done.

“You’re not—” I started. “This isn’t—” I tried again.

Skills couldn’t help me if I didn’t know what I wanted to communicate. Explaining would be a terrible idea. But would it be worse not to explain? They seemed so human. I could bully Evan into dropping the subject, but my evasion would nag at a real human until he got an answer.

They deserved to know, I decided. Even if Axel was going to erase their memories or erase them, they deserved to know what they were in for.

“You’re monsters,” I said. “This isn’t a world; it’s a floor. When we figure out how to beat it, you won’t be coming with us.”

“You won’t let us?”

“Monsters can’t leave their floor,” I said. That wasn’t completely true, but it was close enough. “I don’t know what will happen when we leave, but the most likely result is that you get reset back to how you were when we arrived.”

Evan’s eyes widened, but he kept himself under control. “This… Axel… can just do this?”

“He’s pretty much a god for this floor,” I said. “He might reset you; he might just respawn the zombies and leave you—I don’t know what he might do.”

“But we can’t leave.”

“There are rules that govern dungeons. I don’t know all of them, and Axel has stretched the rules in more than one way. But monsters can’t leave their floor is a fairly well-known rule.”

“So we just suffer until we get reset and then suffer some more?” he asked. “What’s the point of that?”

Axel’s amusement, I thought grimly, but I knew better than to say it.

“Look,” I said instead. “Monsters don’t normally have free will. Maybe you do. Maybe that breaks the rules, and you will be able to leave. I don’t have all the answers here.”

“Maybe?” he said bitterly. “You don’t know if we have free will or not? We’re just… curiosities to you, aren’t we? I’m surprised you haven’t cut us open to see what makes us tick.”

“Rest assured, that’s not going to happen, even if we did think we’d get useful information that way,” I said. “We’re not going to just kill you.”

“Why not? We’re just monsters. In fact… why haven’t you just killed us?”

“I don’t need a reason to not kill someone,” I protested.

“But we’re not someones, are we? We—you must think you need us alive for some reason. Something to do with Axel? You need us for the next bit.

“That… seems likely,” I admitted.

He laughed. “So we do have a purpose after all! As pawns in whatever games Axel is playing.”

“Look, we’re just guessing, about all this,” I said. “We don’t set the rules, or even fully know them.”

“I wonder if Sarotheil can help,” Evan said suddenly.

“Help, how?” I said cautiously.

“You said he was from outside. Not subject to the rules of this world. Maybe he can help us break our rules.”

I looked at Evan doubtfully. “All I can say about that kid is… I have no idea what he’s capable of.”