Truth called the Tongue to hand, and casually hopped up onto the roof of the bus shelter. From there, he jumped to a lamp post, then the side of an office building, kicking off hard enough to launch him up to the roof of a nearby parking garage. From there, it was a tiny hop up to one of the tall lamps on the roof of a parking garage. All while the long sword rested casually on his shoulder.

He stood on top of the lamp, looking down at nothing much. Not that there wasn’t much down there- thousands of lives poured through those streets, lived in those concrete towers, bought cheap schnapps at the convenience store with more armored glass than four banks. There were endless stories down there.

Nothing much to them, though. Once you got a certain degree of distance, they all kind of blurred together. You became alienated.

Truth spun the sword in a circle, and started running sword drills. Forward, back, cut, parry, lunge, recover. When he felt the urge to make a sideways move, he flexed his feet and leapt to a nearby lamp. Easy as breathing.

The Tongue flicked through the air, dancing in his hands. She was always so satisfying to swing. Just something about the balance of her, the way she moved with him. Never anticipating, but never dragging behind. His ever-ready companion in solving the violence puzzle of the day.

Truth had never considered himself a good person. He was pretty sure he was a bad one, actually. As most people defined the term. It just felt so unimaginably distant to him- as though “good” and “evil” were some impossibly expensive luxuries. Like a beggar watching a seven colored flying cloud pass overhead.

He drifted across the lamp posts, moving like gods and devils. The sword cut through the air, the sunlight flickering off the blade dazzling and bewitching, hiding the fatal truth. The Tongue Of One Who Speaks For God. And the word it carried, as was so often the case with angels, was “Slaughter.”

He didn’t feel like laughing, but he had to smile at his own hypocrisy. He was Level Five, possessed of more blessings than some countries, joined to an angelic blade and had three destinies. Wasn’t he being absurd? If he couldn’t afford to think of good and evil, who could? Not that he knew what they were, any more than he could define a human. But it was just too petty, too rat-like, to willfully ignore these things.

His moves became more esoteric, more dancing. He would never move like this on a battlefield, but he felt lifted up by the moment. He spun, wheeling the blade around him. He twisted in place on his knees, or flipped up in the air, hanging for a moment over the world. Landing on a single toe atop another lamp, not disturbing the dust and bird droppings coating it. Glorying in his body. Glorying in the freedom it gave him, to live out in the open.

No need to huddle next to the wall. No need to hide under the garbage bin. He could proudly stand and receive the blessings of the great Solar Eminence. Rejoicing in what he had earned, and what he had been given.

What was vice, what was virtue? It couldn’t be as simple as those demonic seniors made it sound, right? Even with a campaign of ruthless, flawless education, lasting from cradle to grave, could he really teach an entire world altruism? Was altruism alone enough? He already knew it wasn’t.

This parking garage was built by some miserable bastard. They had worked hard, for years probably, to figure out how to maximize the amount of money they could squeeze from the locals, then built the lowest-price structure they could manage to achieve their goal. Everybody got, to some degree, a bit of that get-back.

This was still Jeon. Doubtless eighty-plus percent of the people involved with the job got screwed. But still. A miserable, small minded, venal little prick built something that could do double duty as a royal palace for some ancient tribe. Six stories- that was some real engineering there. That was a ton of brain work, even before thinking of all the resources needed to build it.

Even with the best will in the world, you couldn’t call the developer a good person, but was the building of this place virtuous? Was achievement, by itself, praiseworthy? He had absolutely no idea. He had always considered necessity as something that needed no excuse and accepted no thanks. A privately operated multi-story parking lot was rarely a necessity. That should make it fair game for praise or criticism.

Truth launched himself off the top of a lamp post. He kicked his heels up over his head in a casual backflip. He let himself fall off the edge of the building, returning the Tongue to his first aperture. He landed on the sidewalk less than a meter from four people. No one noticed.

Nothing could be permanently improved until he had killed Starbrite, and in all likelihood, killed a lot of the old powers that grew up under him. They had too perfectly adapted to Starbrite’s thinking. They would see opportunity in calamity, and struggle to become the new gods of this world.

Can’t have that. Etenesh had expectations, and he was too soppy a romantic to let her down. That particular throne was already reserved for him. They would just have to try their hand at reincarnation.

Had to kill a lot of rich, powerful people. Gig a load of fat rats and toss their corpses to the starving, filthy, diseased masses in the tower. Then once the sickly rats had fattened up a bit, got a little more healthy, he had to show them how to be better. At everything. At life.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

He sighed.

“I’m going to wind up actually being the Hell Prince, aren’t I?”

Truth made his way to a library, casually vaulting over the turnstile and directly skipping the payment system. He made his way over to the demonology section and dug out a somewhat reliable looking copy of the Goetia. Finding reliable books on Botis was tiresome, but not too hard. He was a top figure in Hell. Truth didn’t find any book just about him, but a lot of books that discussed him.

He had a good idea what Botis the Snake was like. But Botis the swordsman? No idea. All Truth knew was that, well, he was a swordsman. And very persuasive. Incisive, even.

He opened a book, read a few sentences, and realized this was a prime opportunity to load up on romance novels. He raced off to find some, started perusing the shelves, spent ten happy minutes on that, realized he was being dumb, and returned to the book.

This cycle repeated four times before he realized there was a serious problem. Truth sat at the long table and glared at the books. It wasn’t some kind of curse, he would have noticed. It wasn’t like he didn’t understand the words either. His education might have been bad, but he sure as Hell had been putting the work in since graduation. What he didn’t know he could figure out or look up elsewhere. So what was the problem?

<>

Truth was stunned for a second, then slowly banged his head against the table. The Demon is the mage.

<>

He took a deep breath and calmed himself. Nothing was going to run away from him. There was nowhere he had to be. Actually, sitting quietly in a library for a while was a decent tactical move. They sure wouldn’t be looking for him here. Deep breath. Then he picked up the book again.

To study Botis is to be immediately confronted with contradiction. He is a master speaker who speaks rarely and briefly. He is a master swordsman who rarely fights. His every move is like lightning, and is notorious for his immobility. However, most curiously, it is not his famed foresight, deep knowledge, vicious combat power or sinister persuasiveness that makes him so feared amongst the Lords Infernal.

The most feared ability of Botis is reconciliation. He is notorious for turning enemies into friends, settling wars, ending quarrels, and restoring harmony. This is the product of cold rationality. Whether swordsman or snake, Botis is a predator. He will always calmly judge things by the same test: How much energy do I have to expend to gain how much food, and at how much risk? He brings peace, to ensure he has a monopoly on violence.

Truth blinked at that. Held the book at arm's length. Pulled it in close. Traced his fingers over the words, reading them one at a time. He then flipped to the cover, then the inside cover, finding the author’s bio.

Father Rehebus Mar-nx, Chief Seminarian at Saint Xiament of Cruspitello for twenty years…

Praegerite priest. Safe to say, this was not an unbiased view of Botis. He shook his head, tossed the book to one side, and picked up another.

Best known for his foresight, among scholars Botis is actually known as the Demon of Reconciliation…

Nope. Not buying it. Next.

“I can’t tell you what it was like. Every day was Hell. Always waiting for the screaming to start, stabbed by all the looks in the silence. I wasn’t blameless. I hit him. I admit it. I hit him. I was so afraid of being hurt, I hurt him first. Thankfully, my mother-in-law is in an excellent coven, and they were able to summon a shadow of His Excellency. With his mediation and guidance, my marriage was saved. As was my soul.”

Did he pick up a women’s magazine by accident? Demonic. Swordsman. Sinister manipulator. All the old timers from Siphios kept banging on about what a charismatic tyrant Botis was. He could see turning an unhappily married couple into his slaves, serving eternally in humiliated ecstasy. But no. He saved a marriage and, allegedly, a soul. Saved from what, who knows.

We had marched into Bhekrova- The Fifth, Ninth and Twelfth Legions, all with auxiliaries and a rock-solid logistics train. We weren’t even slaughtering them. They just gave up. They had no chance to resist. The war was practically a formality.

King Brzinch knew he was going to die ugly, and his people would live as slaves. He was a hard man, and smart. God rest his soul, he sacrificed an entire town to summon a powerful Shadow of Earl Botis. We had our own angelic summons ready, naturally but…

We never got to use them. There was no more fighting. Botis walked out in front of the legions and spoke. He explained why this was a bad idea. How what we were doing was going to cause centuries of civil unrest. How our generals would use this land to grow more powerful and ambitious. How the Empire would fall because of internal strife.

He said that we must retreat, in order to conquer. I’ll never forget that. Botis looked… not handsome, exactly. Charismatic. He was weathered. Mouth full of fangs. He had a look in his eyes that said he had seen too much. He was sincere. He looked at us, all the tens of thousands of us, he looked us in the eyes and said “You must retreat, if you wish to conquer. Before you can rule others, you must rule yourselves.”

I’ll never forget that. We’ve had fifty years of peace and development since then. Fifty years. I haven’t had to order a family executed for half my reign. My father couldn’t seem to go a week without ending a bloodline. Fifty years. Every year I send a memorial gift to the site of the town that got sacrificed. My wife’s subjects deserve at least that much honor.

-From the private journals of Emperor Adelius Recitus Virim

Truth looked at the cover of the book. Written by a historian he had never heard of, at the University of Ben Zhu at Wulinr. A university he had never heard of, but it sounded legit.

Could a demon… be good?