There were a million questions in my nearly broken mind. The first needed answered immediately.

“Is your village in danger right now?”

“Yes!”

Before I began running out to do what I could, I needed more information.

“Let me rephrase. If I stand here and ask questions for the next five minutes, is anyone going to die?”

He seemed to radiate a very interesting mix of righteous indignation and incredible amounts of guilt and self-hatred.

“...no.”

“Tell me the story of how your village is in danger.”

He looked sharply at me and I saw something new, something that was so pure and strong that it nearly toppled me even as I currently was. Hope from the hopeless. Those eyes looked at me like I was a god come to right all the wrongs of the world. The purity in them was almost too much to look at.

Then it morphed into a pure and utter hatred.

“Our old baron died. Nothing too weird about that, old Pete was pushing a hundred. But then came the new baron.”

He spat and his teeth were gritted so hard I thought they would break.

“He came with his own men. A dozen or so. All mean looking bastards. We thought it odd at the time but nothing more. Just a new lord wanting to be guarded well out here on the borderlands. Then they took Jinny.”

I was impressed. I can safely say I’d never see anyone with so much hatred. Ever.

“She came back… hurt.”

The way his eyes darkened and tears of frustration seemed to come up, I knew what he meant.

“The villagers are strong out here, in body and mind. They weren’t going to stand for it. Jinny’s father was going to strangle the new lord himself. They killed them. They killed them all. Let all the men gather out front, then the damn bodyguards… it was a slaughter. A bloody slaughter. They forced me to, to.”

He looked down at his hands and noticeably resisted looking at a shovel to my right. It was dark and stained with something that wasn’t just dirt. I understood.

Someone was forced to clean up the bodies. That person was him.

His next words were spoken with so much hate and despair that I thought a literal dark fire was going to burst out of him.

“The villagers are trapped. Men, women, children. Anyone that tries to leave is maimed or worse. After that, they took nearly all the women and… used them. We hid the children before it was too late. They don’t care about the village, about our food, our well being. We don’t have enough people to survive the winter. We can’t leave. The baron is going to rape our women until they die and let us all starve to death.”

It was at this point I noticed his teeth were actually cracked already, no doubt from the raw atrocities he must be forced to live through every single day. That sense of helplessness was very familiar, as I had felt it not more than a few seconds ago. I still couldn’t remember anything that happened, almost all of the emotions and memories were fully blocked off. But a distinct sense of finding freedom, only to realize that I couldn’t reach it, was one of the things imprinted onto me. If I was fully here, that one ‘memory’ alone would probably be enough to drive me insane. The pure intensity of it was insanely strong.

He seemed to slow there for a second before a new emotion took its place.

Determination.

“I had to do something. I couldn’t, they, I had to kill them all. I had to. I had to do something! And then I remembered the old ruins to the south. They say anyone who goes in dies. I snuck off, evading the patrols, and managed to reach it. I didn’t expect to survive but I had to try! It was… empty. Completely and totally empty. I walked past hallways fit for the largest of giants and shattered stone, for days, nearly running out food. Something led me to a casket. I don’t know what it was. It kept always moving me around without me realizing it in that ancient place. I don’t know whether it wanted to help me or if it just found me amusing but lead me it did.

That casket… it was a casket fit for a king. It took all my meager strength to lift it up and I’m sure that capricious being helped me, whatever it was. There, I only saw a skeleton and clutched in its hand, this jewel.”

He held up the bloody red ruby square.

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“It felt… awful. Evil. I had no idea what to do with this. Then I remembered. I had read about a demon summoning ritual when I was young, before, well, you know.”

He gave me a pointed and nervous look. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The book was burned to ashes long ago but I remembered it. And I remembered that you could use other stuff to help you summon. I tried, gathering my blood for the ritual circle and, well…”

Here he stopped. No doubt remembering from when I had nearly died from being summoned here. He didn’t know even a fraction of the hell he had ended up putting me through. Honestly, mostly I felt, well, nothing. But I could see that I would have been feeling like I’m the side character in this and he was the main protagonist. This guy was- Wait. Had we not even shared names yet?

“What’s your name?”

He blinked, as if coming back to the current moment.

“Selve.”

“Nice to meet you Selve. I’m Derek. Don’t worry about the summoning, I’ll get better. I need to ask you some more questions.”

He nodded. “Alright.”

“Is there magic in this world? And what sorts of magic?”

He looked at me like I was absolutely crazy but it was an important question. I needed to know what I was dealing with in this world.

“Uh, yeah. And all sorts. Elemental, holy, dark, uhh, illusions, mind… there’s a lot.”

I nodded.

“Is there any sort of floating screens, possibly with numbers on them that you can easily call in front of you?”

His mouth dropped open.

“...no?”

“Are there other species beyond humans?”

“Yeah. Ya got the elves and dwarves, uh, the fairies and demons of course, ogres, trolls, all the monsters and animals, the lizardkin, and uh, I’m sure there’s more but those are the ones I know..?”

“How strong is the baron and his men? What magic can I expect?”

He snorted.

“He doesn’t have enough money to hire any magician and no adventurer worth their salt would work for him, thank god. No mages. Just lots of strong men with swords.”

I sat and thought about that for a minute. I was a demon, sure, but I was also a human less than a few hours ago. My brain was currently broken, I had no idea why Selve thought I could take care of literally a dozen trained men by myself, and I had no plan or weapons. Attacking right now would be suicide.

“How much do you know about demons?”

That question seemed to throw Selve for a moment and then he looked at me.

“Well, after the war, a lot I guess. Different types of demon. People say a Warrior can kill one hundred men without breaking a sweat and the seducers can control minds and corrupt kingdoms. Summoning one…”

He actually looked at me in fear here.

“...the demon almost always kills the person. And it’s… a kin crime.”

My eyebrows shot to the top of my head. My separated emotions transformed into pure shock. I knew what that was. That’s a crime where they wipe out your whole bloodline. They kill your parents, children, grandchildren, grandparents, your wife or husband, their siblings, and your nieces or nephews. They might even go further. It didn’t matter who committed the crime, everyone was put to death.

I looked at Selve. He didn’t seem the type to condemn his entire family to death. He probably didn’t have anyone. Still, I’d strongly wager there was no greater crime than what he’d done. Which put something else into perspective for me.

“Selve… are demons kill on sight in your country?”

He had the humility to at least look away in shame. He hadn’t just put me through all of the hell that I had blocked away, nor had he just broken my brain and summoned me to this new world of magic and fantasy as a demon. He had also knowingly summoned a demon where they were seen as an enemy to be put down. Jesus Christ Selve, what the fuck did I ever do to you? Did I kill your dog in another life or something?!

Right. So, how was I going to save this village? Because of course I was. I didn’t need much emotion or thought to know that rape is wrong and anyone who does it should die. You can make a case for murder all day, even torture you might be able to squeeze out the flimsiest of excuses that would break within moments, but rape? No. There was only one response to that.

It did occur to me that I could leave. That helping others here would make me much more noticeable, much more likely to die the second anyone of any strength or power got word of my existence. That I was going to take a target on my back and make it that much larger. But anyone who can prevent an atrocity and doesn’t, deserves to die too. That’s inhuman. No, I’m not a human anymore am I? It’s The Line. What separates a person from a monster.

Strip me away, my heart and mind, my ego and self. Boil me down to only what I felt was wrong or right. That was The Line. And it told me I had to help.

It surprised me how strongly I felt about that. It was beyond righteousness or compassion or empathy, it was the absolute thread of my moral code. The baseline of my existence when everything else broke apart. Death to those who bring atrocities, death to those that could have stopped it and didn’t.

Which brought forward only one question.

Could I stop it? Selve sounded like he only knew rumors about demons and I was currently brain fucked. Was I actually strong enough to take on one hundred men?

I looked down at my hands and squeezed. I didn’t feel like I was that much stronger. I needed a few days to sit down, think, recuperate, test myself, plan, and then execute a coup on a baron and his men.

…And every day spent was another day the people within a stone’s throw away from me were being raped.

My next decision was both stupid and pragmatic.

“Alright, let’s go.”

Selve blinked at me owlishly.

“Go?”

“Take me to the baron.”