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

Anomalous Fragment 010-WHITESTAR (alias “Imprisonment Area — Grey”)

Azaril Halcyon watches his cousin from the wrong side of a containment cell and sighs.

"Arthur,” he says impassively. “You look sick.”

He doesn’t, of course, but Arthur’s always reacted harshly to having his appearance insulted.

This time, he barely budges. Zil raises an eyebrow.

“I have little time for your games,” Arthur says.

“What are you here for, then?” Zil asks, leaning back in the single steel chair provided to him. “You here to gloat?”

“Of course not,” Arthur snaps. “You were the scion once, Azaril. You know as well as I do that base acts like that are beneath us.”

“And you’ll do it anyway,” Zil replies. “Prick.”

He holds the wave of righteous anger back. Though he prides himself on being a passionate man, even he knows when to stop. As a child, he visited every facility the Halcyons had to offer. This one—Grey—saps his power. He’s a mere mortal within this cell thanks to some magic shit that Zil could never be bothered to learn more about.

“I am offering you a way out,” Arthur says, composing himself. “The experiment will continue despite the pitiful attempts to interfere. The party you infiltrated is gone. Within hours, they will serve a far nobler purpose.”

“So you’re gonna sacrifice ‘em,” Zil says. It’s not a question.

“They are powerful catalysts,” his cousin says, nodding. “Zil, the family still misses you.”

Zil snorts, remembering the sensation of cold steel sliding into his back. “Fat chance.”

“You have a role to play,” Arthur says. “One that would further our clan, but not one that you need to be alive for. All you have to do is take my hand, accept my offer, and you will have everything again.”

“Everything,” Zil says, tapping the bottom of his chin thoughtfully. “And all I need to do is glue myself to a Titan.”

“The process is far more—yes,” Arthur says, cutting himself off when he remembers that Zil isn’t going to entertain his jumble of scientific explanation that’s meant to convince Zil that yes, this is safe. Yes, this doesn’t violate a fundamental law of humanity.

“You know my answer,” Zil says, turning away.

Though he might not have the best grasp on many subjects, he knows enough about the world to know that Titans are a scourge. To try to benefit off one is akin to killing for sport. Dishonorable.

“Sierra Jade. Adrian Stahr. Evelyn Carnelian, also known as Project 0, EV3.” Zil can’t see him, but he can hear his cousin pacing. “They will be dead within hours. All three are already in captivity. There is nobody coming for you. I would advise you reconsider.”

Zil turns in his seat, thinking. If he doesn’t bend the knee, he’s likely dead. He knows how this goes. Every prisoner gets a plea deal of some kind—because there’s still a use for them. If the family actually could do what it wanted with Zil alive or dead, he would have never woken up to see the inside of this cell.

They still have a use for me. Somehow, that grated more than the fact that he’d let himself get captured.

Then again…

“Arthur,” Zil says.

“Yes?” his cousin replies, already halfway through his ritual to abandon this fragment.

“You’ve always been a shit liar.”

The ritual freezes. Arthur turns to face Zil again.

“Guardian of Time, hmm? So you get to make up for that. You get to try again and again and again until someone believes you. Except you can’t turn me back. You can’t try again without letting me out.”

“You dare accuse—“

“I saw Sierra and Adrian disappear, so you’re probably right on the money about that. Evelyn, though… you know they call the Blood Reaper back in the Crowned Islands?”

“You have already failed, Azaril,” Arthur says coolly, regaining his composure. Zil can see the cracks in the facade, but that doesn’t make his words any less painful. “Allison is dead because of you. I congratulate you on failing to protect another party.”

White-hot anger surges through Zil, and he throws the chair at the translucent cell wall. The steel crumples even in here. Even without enhanced strength from his skills, Zil has always been powerful.

“She is coming for you,” Azaril snarls, anger fueling his every word. “She’s beaten you once before, and she’s going to do it again. You think you can beat her? I’ve done my research. You’re just the last in a long, long list of names of people who thought the same. You’re already dead. You just don’t know it yet.”

Arthur doesn’t even look at Zil, and he completes the ritual.

But his hand trembles, ever so slightly.

Azaril smiles, and he waits.

 

???

By the time the pain wears off, Sierra realizes where she is. It’s an uncomfortably familiar sensation, staring into unforgiving darkness as thick, all-encompassing fluid chokes her to the point of near-death.

Panic threatens to overwhelm her, but that sensation’s an old nemesis. She knows how to toss it aside now, learned ways to control her mind that Adrian still hasn’t.

Containment capsules. Though she can’t see outside of it, she knows that this is designed to hold nascent experiments. Back when she was merely a low-level Red Mage in the slums of a city that no longer holds a name, she was captured in one of these.

Then, it held her perfectly. The capsule was created for her, molded around what she could do, and it suppressed her magic just enough to prevent her from breaking free.

This one isn’t like that. Sierra has grown in the time since that life-changing day. Change is one of the few constants in life, and it is one that she has chosen to love.

She closes her eyes against the wet darkness, and she begins to absorb the magic around her.

 

???

By the time half an hour has passed, Adrian has gotten tired of waiting.

There’s only so much time any human can wallow in despair before they start thinking. For some, that leads to a deeper spiral. Adrian knows this. He’s seen it.

For him, though, the sensation is one of shame.

He remembers Jess taking the fall for a botched mission, executed on the spot by a high-ranking noble. He remembers Kenneth, who saw a Titan on the horizon and chose to run towards it. He remembers friend after friend after friend. Death after death after death.

Back then, they talked quite frequently about what they wanted out of life. As members of a black site operation from an organization that controlled many but was known to few, Adrian, Sierra, and the rest hadn’t had homes to return to. They had no apparent goal in life other than sporadic commands from the hidden branch of the Coalition.

They varied on their answers. Jess wanted to see the world. Kenneth wanted to find himself on top of it. Sierra wanted—still wants—to grow and see everyone grow with her.

Adrian never had an answer, but they could all agree on one thing.

By the time they were dead and buried, they promised to leave their mark on the world.

What have I done? Adrian asks himself. I followed. I waited. I was outclassed.

And eventually, he realizes that he can’t die here. Not without a fight.

Half the fight is already won when he makes the decision to act. He’s sure Sierra has already started moving, but if she hasn’t found him already, she won’t for a while. Adrian needs to do this himself. He wants to do it himself.

All this time, he’s been cast in shadow. Sierra’s always been stronger than him. By chance—chance that he strongly suspects wasn’t just random luck—they met the one person in the Crowned Islands with the potential to surpass him in days, even as a Category 0.

What kind of life will he have led if this is where he dies?

Adrian turns his attention inwards. As a Warrior, he’s useless. He hasn’t even reached level 10 yet, thanks to a lack of really good quests for him to advance.

While in the Crowned Islands, he was able to cloak his Hydrokinetic class enough to prevent backlash. When he attacked Rylar, though, he mismanaged his power. If he were stronger or weaker, he could have either ignored the backlash or avoided it entirely. Now, any use of his true class risks damaging his soul; earlier, it was simply impossible to use, but after a night and a day of recovery, he has reached the state of it only being an extremely poor decision.

Adrian hesitates.

I do that a lot, he thinks bitterly. If I didn’t—

He stops himself before he can spiral down the laundry list of regrets he holds.

And he takes control.

“Hydrokinesis,” he says, his words bubbling out soundlessly.

Magic smashes through his soul, harsh and unforgiving, and he feels it begin to eat away at him. Adrian ignores it.

This capsule is meant to protect against attacks from the inside. It’ll be effective against him if he just tries to break out.

So Adrian doesn’t fight it. Instead, he feeds his soul to his magic. Fluid Form, he thinks, and his body melts away. Evelyn has a similar skill, he knows. It’s far more versatile and powerful.

But Evelyn isn’t here. Sierra isn’t here.

Adrian slips out through the fluid filtration system, passing his dispersed body through microscopic gaps so he can pool out on the flood outside of the capsule.

Time is ticking.

He begins to reform, brutally aware of the countdown he’s begun.

There are decent odds he dies here.

Better make it count.

 

Anomalous Fragment 010-WHITESTAR (alias “Imprisonment Area — Grey”)

The first impression I get of the prison fragment is monochrome.

The second impression is a bullet to the face.

What surprises me the most isn’t the odd design of the fragment—it’s anomalous, of course it’ll be weird. It isn’t even the bullet—hells, I’m more surprised that nobody tried an on-teleport ambush before this point.

It’s the fact that even though I don’t perfectly avoid the shot, it doesn’t even penetrate my skin. The steel shell crumples against my flesh, and a second later, I hear metal clink against the floor. I feel the impact like a hefty punch straight to the gut, but I do not bleed.

The guard who shot me is using a non-magical gun.

So this is what a high durability stat offers.

It takes around three and a half seconds to turn him into ammunition for my gun, which is quite a fair bit stronger.

This fragment is weird. I haven’t been in all too many of these places, but they’ve all had quirks. This prison fragment is built entirely of black-and-white material. Even the color of the dead guard’s blood seems to fade away.

And it looks like my skills don’t work everywhere. I use Blood Sense alongside Hemokinesis, using it as a way to map out my surroundings, but there are areas that my blood enters and simply fails. Skill suppression, it appears. How irritating. I’ve dealt with enough of that for three lifetimes already.

I don’t know how much time I have, and I don’t know if any of the people I’m looking for are actually here. The guard I just killed was Category 0, which either means that this place isn’t heavily guarded or it doesn’t need to be. I have a sneaking suspicion that they might be relying on the skill-dampening areas to hold people here.

Whether or not that’s the case, I have to move fast. Every second I waste is one where my allies might be dying.

For the first time, I properly use Blood Clone. It’s similar to Blood Echo—it’s a crimson copy of myself that I control with an extremely limited sensory suite. Unlike the echo, though, the clone costs a ton of mana to cast but not as much to maintain. I order her to search in one direction while I travel in another, both of us manipulating the blood around us to identify anything that looks relevant.

It takes longer than I’d like. Every time there’s a dead spot, I have to slow down to check it with my eyes instead of my magic. The first few I find are empty cells, populated with a single chair, a bed, and not much else. Locate doesn’t work to identify anything within the magic-less cells, so I assume that I won’t be able to use it to find whoever might be hidden here.

As I get deeper in, I start seeing corpses. None of them have decayed, not even a bit, but I can tell that they’re dead, their glassy-eyed expressions seeing nothing.

I hope I won’t find Sierra in one of these.

The structure of this prison confuses me, but with some careful application of blood, I’m able to mark a path for myself. Advancing deeper in reveals more guards, which is a bit irritating. Fortunately for me, applying an Antimemetic Cloak allows me to get past most of them, and a quick combination of a Soulblade to the neck and a Smite is able to one-shot most of them.

I entered this fragment with 264 kills. Within ten minutes, that number is 280. They’re not very powerful, and they don’t grant me much XP, but I do manage to make it to level 54 by the fifteenth kill. More importantly, the usage of some skills that I haven’t had as much of an opportunity to use before is crucial for leveling them up, rounding out my suite of incredibly lethal powers.

Some of the cells I pass have live people in them now. I don’t recognize any of them, and they don’t perceive me. A few of them panic when my Blood Clone passes them, but most don’t react. They look hopeless.

I ignore them.

Eventually, almost the entire area except a narrow hall is full of the anomalous antimagic rooms. It’s unnerving, the way my awareness is almost entirely cut off.

There is a single person guarding the cell ahead of me. Category 1, looks like.

I’m not in the mood to have a long fight. He still hasn’t seen me thanks to Antimemetic Cloak. I don’t think I can kill with a single use of Smite, even with my skills as inflated as they are, and I’d rather not give him the chance to use a special skill, which it looks like Category 1s can just do.

So I shoot him. My Soulshard Rifle has almost fifty charges in it now thanks to the courtesy of just over fifteen kind (and now very dead) souls. I use twenty-five in the blast.

“Gods above,” a familiar voice says from the cell. “What the hells?”

Okay, looking at the small pile of bloody ash on the ground makes me think I might’ve gone just a little overkill.

I send my Blood Clone to wipe it up, leaving no trace of the dead man behind.

“…Evelyn?” Azaril says.

Not my first choice, but better than Adrian. Zil knows the fragments. I’ll take him.

“Hi,” I tell him, walking into view of the cell. He doesn’t respond.

Oh, right. I instinctively turned my skill back on after annihilating the guard here.

I turn it off. “Azaril.”

His eyes flick to me. “A stealth skill. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for people,” I reply, looking around him. The cell wall is a translucent gray glassy material. From the inside, it must be impenetrable.

I shoot it open.

“Handy weapon you have there,” he says, the artificial humor failing to hide the relief in his voice. “You planning to use it somewhere else?”

“Hurry up,” I say, jerking a finger outside. I let the Blood Clone collapse into nothingness, absorbing my blood back into my body. She’s served her purpose. “I don’t know how much time we have left.”

“Right,” Zil says, gingerly stepping over the still-cooling melted glass and exiting through the hole I made. “Just so you know, Arthur was here less than an hour ago.”

“Arthur… oh. The Guardian of Time.”

Zil makes a face. “That’s correct. If he’s gone from the facility, then that means he’s gone to the ritual site. Our time remaining is almost certainly measured in days, if not hours.”

“Let’s get moving, then,” I say. “Have your skills returned?”

“Yeah,” Zil replies. “Once you’re out of the greyest areas, there’s less dampening.”

“Less?” I ask. “I haven’t noticed any decrease in effectiveness.”

Zil shrugs. “Then you’re not paying much attention.”

I don’t bother thinking about it too much. “We’ve got a Titan baby to kill, don’t we?”

“We do.”

“Then lead the way.”

He strides off in the direction opposite the one I came from, and I follow.

Less than thirty seconds in, I hear another, slightly less familiar voice. A woman’s, run ragged by damage to the vocal chords.

“You… seek the Titan?”

I don’t want to bother with listening to a faintly familiar stranger, but Zil stops in his tracks when he passes the cell.

Reluctantly, I do the same.

“The clock is ticking,” I remind him, then look within.

The woman inside the cell looks to be on the verge of death. Bandages wrap half her body, one of her legs is replaced by a magically-reinforced prosthetic. A single eye is all I can see of her face.

“…who are you, again?” I ask.

A tear forms, and she blinks it away.

“My name is Lady Ashley Kane,” she says. “Arthur Halcyon turned his back on me. On my kingdom.”

She reaches a burnt hand out, and I make the connections.

They were working together. Her and Arthur and Rin and Simon and all the rest. She was one of only three that escaped with her life.

“Please,” the woman that failed to kill me says. “Let me kill him.”