By the time I pulled myself together, my armor was actually in decent condition, with very few traces of my sweaty, messy state left. It was all thanks to the automatic cleaning enchantment Yules had thrown in. Already, I was immensely thankful for that feature.

Even if it wasn’t quite powerful enough to remove all of Lagyel’s sand on its own.

I cast a couple cleaning spells on myself anyway. The process felt almost effortless. The mana expenditure was nothing to me at all, and the runes were pretty much conjuring themselves on top of my skin!

Though I was still a little disgruntled that bits of me had changed without explicit permission on my part, at least the mutations were a net benefit. To be honest, if I had known that a few demonic features could improve my spellcasting, I would have gone for them willingly.

I didn’t let myself get lost in mana experiments. Instead, I followed my conviction and left the station’s sphere of influence to check on Mia.

I honestly expected to find her waiting for me. After all, it had taken me a long time time to wrangle my emotions and pain into the semblance of something manageable.

So when I stepped outside and saw no one, her absence was… worrying.

I hadn’t anticipated the shot of dread that surged through me. I absolutely loathed the helplessness that set in the next moment.

Even if Mia was in trouble, there was nothing I could do.

It wasn’t like I could bust through the station’s protective bubble. The whole reason you could trust in the station so completely was the barrier’s absolute impenetrability to any intruders.

The only reliable way to remove this protection was to destroy the anchor that bound the demonic invasion in place. In most cases, this was the teleportation obelisk, though I had heard the choice of anchor was entirely down to the commander making the claim. They could designate an alternative right up to the moment of conjuring the Abyss.

Regardless, I didn’t think the legion would let me ‘liberate’ an entire city just to check on a friend.

I stood there, staring at the Absorption Station, panic buzzing in my ears and making it difficult to think. I had just decided to go and find Bronwynn when the station’s barrier rippled, then parted to let Mia emerge.

Both of us froze in place, eying each other up.

While Mia’s changes weren’t as extreme as mine at first sight, they were definitely noticeable. All the features that made her stand out in the first place were enhanced, almost exaggerated.

Her hands, already clawed, were now fully covered in thick, fluffy fur. The same fur covered her arms, to the elbow. She had rolled up her sleeves to show this off. Likewise, her legs now boasted fur up to the knee, and they ended in paws rather than feet. Even the structure of her knee was altered to account for this, allowing her to maintain her balance.

It was her face that had gone through the most startling change, though.

The lines of it had shifted in a way I couldn’t quite define, giving her a more dangerous and feral look. Her irises shone like molten gold against black sclera, and her hair was now a mix of actual hair and the fur of some large, predatory cat. Finally, her cat ears had grown larger and more prominent, though they still twitched in the familiar way that betrayed her anxiety.

Neither of us was sure how to break the awkward silence that stretched between us, because neither of us knew how to ask the other if they were still in possession of their faculties.

There was nothing for it but to take the plunge.

“You look much cuter than before. All fluffy and cuddly,” I teased, pitching my voice in a way that would hopefully tell her I was joking.

In all seriousness, she looked lethal, like a primal predator stalking its prey with sure, steady steps. Danger whispered through every slight motion she made, betraying a level of grace that no human or even demon could ever hope to imitate.

After all, nothing can ‘stalk menacingly’ better than a large, humanoid, mana-enhanced cat.

This new, even deadlier Mia grinned at me, showing off rows of very sharp, very pointy teeth.

“Are you really turning blue?”

I flushed. I’d been hoping the color wasn’t very noticeable, but I suppose I shouldn’t have tried to delude myself .

I wasn’t about to just take the taunt lying down, however.

I flexed my hand the way I had practiced. With the tensing of muscle and a twist of mana, my new claws burst from my fingertips.

“Among other things. Can’t say that my skin is my favorite change, but it’s worth it for the rest.”

She regarded my claws with obvious interest. In fact, she even took a few steps closer to inspect them properly. I didn’t bother to squish the pride surging through me in that moment.

At least, not until said pride threatened to overwhelm me. My emotions were still volatile, after all. If I didn’t concentrate on keeping them contained, they could make me say and do some truly stupid things.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

That did make me wonder, though…

“How far did you go?” I asked. “With the ascension meter, I mean?”

“All the way, of course.”

Mia was still busy admiring my claws, so the faux casualness of her voice threw me off until I actually processed her words.

All the way. Literally from zero to a hundred.

This time, when I took her in, my gaze was more full of caution than admiration.

“I have to say, if that’s the case, you’re doing surprisingly well,” I conceded.

The cat lady’s eyes snapped up to mine. Their glow redoubled.

“Am I? Am I really?” she whisper-growled.

For the first time, I saw the swell of emotion behind her mask.

Hunger, rage, vindictiveness, madness, and several feelings I really didn’t want to try and make sense of… They all stared back at me, making my own façade falter. I was sure she could see through my mask, too.

But I didn’t look away. Neither did she.

We looked each other in the eye, fully aware of how messed up we both were at that moment, and incapable of doing anything about it.

Well, maybe there was one thing we could do.

“Would you like to spend the rest of the day with me?” I offered, like we weren’t practically glued together all the time anyway. “We could go look around the shops they’ve got here, actually check out some casual demonic wares, look for some food to eat…”

I trailed off, my demonically potent anxiety fighting to take over. The relief I felt when she finally nodded was even more intense. Inordinately so.

I wasn’t exactly declaring my love for all to hear, after all. It was just an outing between friends. But rejection still would have stung, especially with our newly heightened emotions added to the mix.

“Sounds like a date,” I quipped anyway, just to tease her.

I enjoyed the flush on her cheeks far more than I should have.

—

We soon learned that demons did, in fact, have a whole entertainment industry. They might not have had the internet, but they managed just fine.

There were shops upon shops selling books written by authors from conquered worlds, or even by demons themselves. One of the most popular authors was an actual Grand Duke of the Abyss, one Alexandria Filmontrea, the Demoness of Woe. As far as I could tell, the demons were unhealthily obsessed with her.

She did have quite the range of novels, though. That much I had to admit. Everything from thrillers to murder mysteries to romance stories was there for us to peruse, and peruse we did.

‘Tablets’ were another type of shop geared solely towards entertainment. They sold actual, crystalline slabs about two times larger than a book in height and width. These tablets contained all sorts of recorded ‘plays.’

Now, they called them ‘plays’, but they were movies.

Not only had demons managed to recreate movies, but they provided a way to watch them conveniently, wherever you found yourself. The tablet could be charged with mana and boasted a very healthy battery life. To download new plays, you just had to press the tablet against a massive enchanted mana crystal hanging at the center of the store.

Mia was endless fascinated by the tablets and the plays they contained, since no such thing had existed on her homeworld. We spent hours just browsing and picking out stuff that would be interesting to watch. Then I paid for a pair of tablets and a good number of plays to go with them.

Mia tried to protest, but when I argued that I actually had souls left over, and that it was a treat for both of us managing to keep our sanity, she dropped the subject.

The final items we went on the hunt for were sweets, and by all that is holy and unholy, we found them.

A benefit of roaming the cosmos and pillaging various worlds was that the Abyss turned into something of a melting pot for the civilizations it devoured. Not every single culture’s traces were preserved, but food seemed to be something demons were willing to embrace universally.

In other words, the sheer variety of sweet stuff on display was dazzling.

There was plenty of chocolate, as well as every imaginable combo of chocolate mixed with something else. I tried a particularly delightful blend which featured a nutty kind of fruit nestled in dark chocolate. It reminded me of strawberries and blueberries simultaneously, and it was both comfortingly familiar and refreshingly new.

As much as I wanted to, I didn’t buy a full bag of those chocolates. It wasn’t even because I was broke. It was because the sheer number of different sweets we tried thoroughly dissuaded me from taking any home with us.

Sweet bagels, baked goodies of every kind, chips fried with sweet oils and sauces, cakes in every imaginable shape and intensity of sweetness… the shopkeepers were sure to remember us, if only for the huge amounts of food we managed to stuff down our throats.

Neither Mia nor I cared. Our personal challenge was to put ourselves into a food coma. We failed over and over, but we were determined to keep trying until we succeeded.

Alas, by the time deep evening rolled around and we were forced to retreat, we still hadn’t pulled off our noble goal. We were comfortably full, though. And, well, several hundred souls poorer.

I had noticed some time ago that food was generally cheap among demons, but that rule only applied if you didn’t try to put the sweets industry out of business with only your best friend by your side.

We stumbled more than walked into the dorm, and then basically crawled up the stairs to our room on the second floor. We were giggling uncontrollably when we burst through our door, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember why.

I didn’t need to know.

All that mattered was the reassuring warmth that spread through my chest, and the comforting presence of Mia as she draped herself over me and passed out. I was tempted to wake her up and get her into her own bed, but I quickly decided it wasn’t worth it. She looked far more exhausted than I felt, and since she strongly disliked showing weakness, I could only imagine her actual state.

I, on the other hand, didn’t feel tired at all.

Whether because of all the changes I had gone through or the amount of sugar in my bloodstream, I was wide awake and fully aware.

Moving gingerly so I wouldn’t wake up the cat girl, I raised my hand and willed my grimoire to it.

The book was lying next to my pack, just a few feet away. As I watched, it faded into mana, then rematerialized in my grasp. I grinned like a kid. What else was I supposed to do, now that I knew I owned a teleporting book?

I could likely do the same with all my other bound items. The trick would work wonders if it applied to my sword, but I could test that later. The last thing I wanted to do with a cat on my lap was end up awkwardly holding a sword.

What I could test was my new understanding of the grimoire. I reached out with my mind once more. Without so much as a whisper or me lifting a finger, the book flipped open, and the pages turned until they landed on the text I was looking for.

Wind Blade.

The signature spell of every air mana lover on Berlis, and quite a few other worlds besides. Fire Ball was great, don’t get me wrong, but I wanted to start with something more subtle and precise before leaping straight to ‘I didn’t ask how big the room was or how close my allies are! I cast fireball!’

As I scanned through the text, its arcane knowledge was far more transparent to me than ever before. The instruction simply made sense. Every twist and turn of mana required came to me so naturally, it was almost disappointing. The runes, too, formed on the surface of my skin with remarkable ease.

They formed so easily, in fact, that I was struck by a moment of inspiration.

Unspooling the mana from my skin, I used my body as a springboard, then sent the runes spiraling around my hand. They wavered and shimmered in the air, floating in the exact same way I saw demons use them.

The grin that stretched across my lips could only be described as feral.