Demonic Devourer: First, I Eat the Babies [LitRPG]

Anomalous Fragment 001-CALLEN

“Run the data back,” Specialist Alexander Callen says, snapping his fingers.

The air hisses at him.

“Hurry,” he snaps, glaring at the wall. He flicks an index finger, and the entire wall shudders as he Realigns its insides. He’s been told it’s quite a painful process.

Not that the demon held within can voice its displeasure. Once he acts, it will be subdued until Alexander gives it another order.

“Show me,” he commands, and this time, the wall begins to shift.

This demon is new. It will take weeks to break it in. Three months at most. At the end, it will listen like the rest.

A quiet hum starts as the demon’s broken body projects information into the air, a hundred thousand disparate points connected by nodes of varying thickness. They’re the specialist’s design.

Alexander steps into the thick web of data, absorbing it into his mind as he does. Once there, the memories will start to degrade over time, as they do with all human beings.

The demon, however, will be unchanged for as long as Alexander wills it. It is a perfect storage device.

Project 0, EV3. When Callen closes his eyes, he can almost see the scene he left in his wake, perceive the pain and murderous anger painted clearly on the experiment’s face.

“It shouldn’t have a face,” he mutters to himself. “Not like this.”

The experiment could’ve been used as an infiltration unit, true, but it clearly was not performing its tasks in there.

He thinks back to its expression just before he departed the fragment. The pain for comrades that it should not have made is regrettable, but the anger? That, he muses, is what he was searching for.

A sudden surge in the ambient mana is the only warning he has before another person enters his personal fragment. Hidden behind twelve layers of the Aqus continent’s finest protection and an additional three different types of demonic corruption, no mere mortal should be able to break in here.

Which is precisely why Callen is not worried. Either this is a demon—unlikely, but easy to deal with—or one of the few people he trusts.

“Clearwater,” he greets the half-elf. “You almost disrupted my data recollection. Do not do that again.”

She flashes her vestigial fangs at him in a smile. “I will. Nice to see you, too, Alexander. I told you to call me Sapphire.”

“Yes, yes," he says, waving her off. Alexander steps out of the cloud of information, focusing the entirety of his attention on his deadly leader. “The Crowned Islands experiment is failing.”

“It is not,” Sapphire disagrees amenably. “Her power is still lacking, yes, but she was a newborn when we left her. Through her trials, she has developed quite a repertoire. Even as a Category 0, she can utilize special skills. She has a domain. We are succeeding.”

“Succeeding in power, perhaps, but not purpose,” he says. “Breaking category standards is the starting point, not the entirety. Project 0 was supposed to use everything it can to increase in strength. It was supposed to be a killing machine. One that devoured entire continents. Instead, it walks with a disgraced Halcyon and two of the last survivors from the Hex fallout were.”

“One of those survivors is a Jade.”

“I know,” Alexander says, irritated. “I would not dare kill an experiment. Marie has nothing to worry about.”

“You are concerned that Evelyn is not serving her purpose as a test subject,” Sapphire tells him as if that’s an entirely natural direction for the conversation to take, dragging her hand through the air.

The air is torn to shreds everywhere her fingernails go, the motion of her hand creating patches of void within the fragment itself.

“Reality bleed,” Alexander reminds her with a sigh. “Professionals have standards.”

Sapphire looks at him, then her hand. “Oh. Fortituous that I am no professional, then.”

She closes her fist, and the patches in reality close.

“Its development—“

“Is stunted for a number of reasons, but it is no failure,” Sapphire says. “Connections multiply the strife. Double, triple the threads to pull on. Ever since fate”—she puts so much weight on the word that it’s clear she was involved—“was so kind to push so many volatile parties together, I have not been forced to intervene to induce conflict. She has managed it on her own.”

She snaps, and a display of her own appears, showing a long list of names. 264 of them, Alexander counts in an instant.

264 deaths. Still unsatisfactory, but… less so.

“I understand your struggle,” Sapphire says softly. “If you so desire, I can grant you access to the program once more. You will be quite excited to learn that she has a target that she will stop at nothing to destroy.”

“It is a demon, yes?” Alexander asks. “I will rejoin the experiment. I have some ideas for what we can do.”

Sapphire just smiles.

 

Anomalous Fragment 004-WHITESTAR (alias 092-CALLEN)

Though I have no access to magic that extends past the threshold of my body—which, by the way, is incredibly irritating, especially since this is the second time someone’s done this to me in as many days—my attributes are active, as are my resistances and my traits.

Three lumbering giants crush their way towards me, annihilating the coffins they were stored in. Their strides are forceful enough to break the steel in front of them, sending shards flying towards me. I dodge them easily.

I assess the situation as well as I can in the limited time I have before I’m forced to engage.

Weapons: four mundane knives on my body, the Soulshard Rifle with five charges remaining on the other side of the room where Callen threw it, and the currently-useless Titan Caller stitched into my back.

Enemies: Appraise is offline, so I have to rely on my more mundane senses. I have some level of magic sense left, thanks to one of my magic attributes, so I can feel the pressure they output. It’s not evenly balanced. Their extremities and faces exude a reasonably fierce amount of magic, but their torsos are almost silent. I assume their attacks will come from the limbs. They’re deceptively fast, too—though their steps seem slow, each successful stride takes them over twenty feet in any direction, annihilating whatever’s in there path.

Environment: there are lab desks decked with magical technology scattered throughout the room, but the bulk of them are stuck to the sides. They’re clearly not usable as cover, and I doubt they will have any shutdown mechanisms, especially not ones that work once the giants are out of their coffins. I know enough about this area to understand that I need to keep as many of them intact as possible, lest I lose my only way out of here.

Distances: fifty feet to either wall. Forty-five to the nearest lab station. A hundred feet to the closest white-outlined silhouette of a giant. One hundred seventy-five to the farthest. One hundred sixty feet to my rifle. Time until I have to take a fight: five seconds.

I can work with this.

The giants are fast, but in short bursts, I can be faster. In the time that the closest one covers thirty feet, I make it forty-five, using my enhanced agility to get behind one of the terminals.

It’s covered in arcane text, and my amalgam is damaged right now, so I can’t read more than half of it. From the parts I can read, though, I glean that this terminal regulates temperature in this section of the fragment. Useful in a lab setting. Useless now. I know what teleportation and dimensional travel runes look like, though, and this has none of them, so I’m pretty confident I can destroy it. Sixty percent sure.

…maybe fifty. I reach into the metal, my vastly enhanced grip from my 73 Body (Strength) enabling me to crush pieces of the shaped steel. I’m careful to avoid the parts that I can’t read, just in case those turn out to be important.

Test one: observe how the giants react to external stimuli.

The thought comes to mind, unbidden. It describes what I’m about to do, but it’s not exactly the way I would’ve put it. For a heartbeat, I fear that I’ve picked up another passenger, but then I recognize the slight otherness of the thought as one that originated from the amalgam. There are still thought processes from the damaged soul structure floating around in my head, it seems.

There’s a chair attached to the terminal, and it’s bolted to the ground. With about thirty feet left between me and the first giant, I tear the cushioned steel from the floor, ripping bolts and warping steel with my raw strength, and I throw the chair.

It’s almost half the size of my body, but to the void-colored white-outlined giant, it may as well be a toy. My aim isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough. The steel smacks the giant in the shin as it takes a step, and a hollow ring sounds out from the impact.

The sound is distorted, as if it’s echoing inside the void giant’s body. It may very well be, given that the chair splinters into three pieces after.

It’s not all for naught, though. The giant was halfway through a step when I caught it, and now it stumbles, catching its balance by sprouting a new set of flailing arms midair. Before it can set its foot down, crushing me, I dash away, ripping out a chunk of rune-engraved steel and wires as I do.

Test two: observe the effects of applying runic stimuli to a giant.

Again, that analytical line of thinking. I can guess what kind of soul that came from. Even if I don’t tend to like researchers, I am glad for the help organizing my thoughts.

Now, though, the second giant is about to reach me. Despite its size and apparent lumbering speed, it’s surprisingly dexterous, adjusting its footfalls to match my hasty dodges.

No time for caution. I throw the mess of runes and wiring at the second giant as the first one recovers and the third approaches. It sparks as it flies, and I see the runes activate. Nothing dramatic happens midair, though I do sense a warm breeze emanate from the far end of the room.

My stolen runes shatter against the giant’s leg harmlessly. Unlike the first, I don’t catch this one midair, so its balance isn’t shaken.

And it punches, striking out downwards far faster than a being that large has any right to be. I avoid it at the last second, kicking away with both feet as its fist—which is the size of my entire body—smashes the floor. Metal whines under the force of the strike. Steel dents.

Steel breaks.

I don’t know exactly how thick the floor and walls are in this lab, but I can get a general idea. Not thick enough.

Shrapnel grazes me alongside the familiar stomach-dropping sensation of direct exposure to the void. It draws blood, which I only have enough control over to keep from exploding out of my body, and the ground ripples.

The aftershocks are much easier to dodge than the punch, but no less destructive. While the giant I’ve mentally labeled as number 2 withdraws its fist, I spring forward, using a rippling wave of shattering steel as a launchpad.

Test three: observe the effects of my weapon on a giant.

I withdraw two knives, one for each hand, and my old friend Knifefighting springs to life. A lessened version of it, thanks to the Silence, but I suppose it’s confined enough to my body that I can still make use of it.

With it, I gain an innate sense for my own spiraling path through the air alongside the most likely action from my enemies.

As I spin, I slash out towards the outstretched wrist of giant two, putting as much force as I can into the blow.

Hitting it isn’t like hitting a human being. It feels as if I’ve just tried to slash a marble statue open. No wonder the chair broke on impact.

Before I can assess the damage, I pivot in midair, shifting my weight so I can jump off the strangely tough skin, and I narrowly avoid the third giant’s leaping strike. Its fist buries itself into the ground as well, breaking through all the way to void once more.

Each strike’s creating five-to-ten-foot craters, all of which lead straight into the nothingness that exists outside fragments. I wonder if I can use that.

More importantly, I really need to avoid getting hit by those attacks.

With my Mind (Speed) and Body (Strength) high, I’m able to artificially replicate extremely high dexterity, slowing down my subjective time so I can attempt to lodge both knives into the third giant’s arm. Giants two and three have intersecting arms right now, and the position is awkward for them. I need to capitalize on this.

Once again, it’s like trying to stab a statue. Still, I get just enough purchase to alter my trajectory, sending me pirouetting high upside down towards the ceiling. As I fly upwards, I look down, gauging the wounds I’ve made.

Surprisingly, I’ve drawn blood. It’s white, not red, but it’s blood all the same, dribbling down from the wounds I’ve made. I have to admit that the sight is heartening.

It’s not enough. These daggers are cold steel, enough to end any human’s life, even one with a higher Category than me, so long as it hits the right place.

But these aren’t human. These aren’t any species I’m familiar with.

My pirouette ends as I see an opportunity and take it, throwing both of my arms around giant three’s bowed head like I’m trying to hug its neck. I arrest my momentum midair, throwing myself into the giant’s flesh, and I hold on. It’s smoother than I thought it would be. Keeping a grip is a challenge.

There’s less magic concentrated in this part of its body, I sense. I try stabbing it again, but the flesh is no softer here than it was elsewhere. I barely make it half an inch in before my knives go no further.

That’s when I see giant one running towards us, ready to barrel straight through the intertwined giants and me.

I’m physically outmatched here. Though I have a slight edge in agility, they’re almost as fast as me. They’re far stronger than I am—they’ve proved that by punching holes through what appears to be several feet of solid steel without a hitch. My weapons don’t hit them.

But I don’t give up so easily. I’m making it out of this fragment, and I’ve never let anything like impossible odds stop me.

The Relentless flame burns dully, downsized by the Silence domain still set over us, but I draw out every bit of it I can, staring the incoming giant down.

Think, Evelyn. I was born fighting, and back then, I didn’t have anything like my domain or my special skills or my myriad of lethal magics to fight. All I had was my head and viciousness. This is the same as that, just… a little bit scaled up.

I draw on Mind (Speed) once more.

Fact: these monsters are either unaffected by the void or have a resistance, because my Voidtouched attribute is doing nothing to get past their innate defenses.

Fact: the defenses are innate. Multiple vectors of attack have revealed the same result, whether I attacked a part of the body that glimmers with magic power or one that’s completely dull.

Conjecture: the magic is fueling their attacks. I’ve only seen the punch attack so far, but I know for a fact that they are empowering them. That power is not void, because while they’ve opened pathways to the nothingness around the fragment proper, the edges of the steel are not tinged with the purplish-black effect that I’ve come to associate with that aspect of my power.

Their skin is as hard as steel past the outermost layer, but I’ve seen them punch straight through that material like it’s nothing.

I hope this works.

As I watch giant one dive towards us, winding up a punch, I leap, throwing myself up and over giant three’s bowed head. Giant two isn’t in a position to react, blocked as it is by the one I’m currently riding.

It’s a tough maneuver, but since when have I shied away from those?

Now that I’m in the air, there’s not much I can do to influence my trajectory. All I can do is believe that my plan will work.

It’s been a while since I relied on a tactic over simply overwhelming power. It’s been a while since I’ve faced something without the crutch of my special skills.

And it’s exhilarating.

I land on the backside of giant three right as giant one lands its punch right where I’m at.

Or rather, where I was.

Giant three punches its brother straight through the head.