In a violent flash and sucking air pressure, I appeared under the broken sky of a doomed world surrounded by cloaked figures singing in an unknown language. I stared at the sun happy to see the light for the first time in a century or torment in hell. A tremendous dark tentacled monster half swallowing it. Comets bled the sky purple, harboring monsters from the great installation of annihilation overhead.
My throat tore when I spoke, making my voice harsher than it needed to be. "This world is doomed. Who went for the scholar's Mate."
That was the only chess move I knew and only because someone named a famous invader strategy after it. My name for it was to overtake it.
I chuckled as the cultists watched me with fearful eyes. "Star vores."
I looked around but no one was laughing. "Come on that was funny."
The opening to stop the tactic was when the invasion began. Saving this world wasn't going to be an uphill battle, it was more like free climbing up a cliff covered in grease.
I caught a glimpse of pointy ears at the edge of my vision.
Elf!!!
She lowered her hood, revealing her face and the dark bags under her eyes. She looked miserable, sad, and fragile. I wanted to sweep her up in a hug and tell her everything was going to be alright.
Damn it, I was going to help them. I was the fool covered in grease daring to free climb a sheer cliff.
How did these cultists know my weakness? Did they summon demons and question them? What did they ask, who was hell's most terrifying killing machine?
My gaze focused on an elf with hair spun from gold, and my eyes caught the way her robes hugged her body. The width of her hips made me want to stomp my foot and howl at the surely previously devoured moon. She bit her lip, looking adorable without trying. She pulled at her robe, and her massive breasts made such a snug robe fit even tighter.
The humans around her appeared drab in comparison. Even the blonde hiding behind the other with a tiara on her head paled in comparison. The obvious princess, possibly important to the human king of this doomed world, was unimportant unless her family had some good stuff squirreled away.
Few resources were spent on my summoning. I wasn't even in hell when I was summoned I had just stepped outside the realm's reach.
By the pitiful demon summoning their treasury, was either empty or still full if they tossed a human princess near a small warband instead of far behind their lines. It must have had some political implication but I didn't get it.
The world was still doomed. It might have a year left before the sun was completely devoured.
They would have needed to summon me a year ago to have a chance. The longer I stood in the circle and took in the situation, the worse it appeared. What if the princess wasn't an act to throw things at the wall to see what stuck?
She could have been a last-ditch effort to raise morale against a tiny horde of demons. The soldiers might fight harder if they knew they were guarding a princess. More likely it would galvanize the demons to fight harder for the chance to rape her. It was like waving a pile of meat with a treasure chest full of gold at its center in front of a dragon.
I felt my eyes fall back on the elf. Why did this attraction curse me?
My attraction wasn't from the elf's supernatural beauty, love at first sight, or a magical bond. What I felt was purer and far more mysterious.
I had an elf fetish.
It was admittedly only one fetish among a crowd, but fortunately, princesses weren't one of them.
The blonde elf spoke something while quickly paging through a book. Then she spoke something echoey and her next words made more sense.
She screamed at me. "Can you understand me now?"
"If I couldn't, would yelling help?" I raised a hand over my brow to block out the doomed sun. Soon enough it would get cold.
I looked over the stacked bricks to a sea of demons surrounding what I assumed was a castle. They were ugly, disorganized, and many. There weren't many people besides the cultists.
My spirit sense flashed to get a better picture of the situation.
This was a final throw before being overwhelmed.
What was stopping the demons from firing arrows or magic?
It was a star vores strategy feature: Throw weak, self-replicating demons at weaker human civilians and rack up enough points to summon something world-ending. Take out the sun and every soul killed off by the cold goes straight to hell and counts as a sacrifice.
The demon lord in charge of this campaign was either an experienced conqueror or a newbie who got lucky. At this stage, it almost didn't matter.
"How did you just escape the circle?"
I looked back. Then I lifted a foot to see white chalk on my boot. With a drawn-out sigh, I wiped my boot that wasn't on my foot when I escaped hell into the void. I distinctly remember being bare-ass naked.
I glanced at the lovely elf, one of her ears was scared, but that only gave her elvish ears an even more exotic appeal.
Learning her name was a must but asking was a show of weakness.
"We summoned you to help us defeat that army. Are you an arch-demon?" The human princess asked.
I smirked. "I was about five minutes before you summoned me. Tough break I'm only human now." I made a show of looking at the circle. "A good thing too this circle wouldn't contain an arch demon."
I scoffed at the idea. A female imp's claws had already sabotaged them, inverting the circle. They caught a lucky break; they would have been summoned to hell if I hadn't just stepped out of hell.
The imp was hiding in the closet on the floor below, waiting for the demons to break through the gate.
From the shadow emerald chains burst binding her for later. I stumbled and blinked owlishly. My grace didn't have much stamina. I could use my chains twice more before I had to rest.
All of the summoners fell to their knees at my news. It was a tough crowd. "What can we do? We used all our magic summoning him?"
"I don't want to die." A cute brown-haired girl screamed as she hugged her knees.
I hated to admit it but I was weak.
"What level are you? Maybe the system will honor that you were a demon lord before?"
"I left the system, it's a trap to limit growth," I said.
I didn't correct her on her terminology, it wouldn't make a difference. Arch demons had a source of a prime sin. I had seven sources from prime sins before I gave them up to escape.
The elf girl screamed something, but the translation spell failed to translate.
I patted her back as she screamed into her hands. "I tell you what, I'll give it a try, maybe I'll manage to kill them, maybe I won't. Are you sure there isn't a way out of here? Didn't you think to make a fallback point?" I asked.
"They have this place surrounded. The only other way left is through the catacombs under the fort where the lich was sealed." The troubled elf said.
The world's trappings were more challenging to escape than I let on.
World Quest
Stop the Demon Invasion
Reward: Plot of Land in the Pleroma.
How could I trust the Archon of the world who fed on misery to keep its word? It hid behind a system promising things an Archon couldn't possibly give. But these systems followed rules that once stated an Archon's power wouldn't let them break. So, if it promised a plot of land in the higher light dimension, the system must believe it could do it. Or maybe I was reading the texts wrong.
What if it offered land once I reached the Pleroma? The world system could do that; it just created a land mass and used a quest reward beacon to plot the delivery destination.
One hundred years in hell taught me something, after all.
The planet was staring down checkmate. The archon was throwing rewards out and seeing what stuck.
I knew a thing or two about demon invasions. There was a point limit to what forces demon lords could send over. Imps and melee soldiers were cheap. After having their way with a female, they could cause rapid pregnancy and spawn many demons.
It spawned more demons for free, increased points, and killed the woman preventing the local population from breeding more soldiers.
"How many people have the demons been able to sacrifice?" I looked up at the monster devouring the sun.
There was a power disparity between the eldritch abomination eating a celestial object and the minions on the ground. I needed to know what these people knew about demonic tactics.
"Who are you and what can you do?" A gruff voice asked him.
First it was presumptuous to ask questions of me like that. I had all the power of an arch demon without the transformation. If I had transformed and bound myself to hell, I would have been a demon with few peers. But I could let it slide; it was stressful for these people.
I saw a seven-foot-tall man wrapped in heavy armor glaring down at him. Names covered his armor, possibly a memorial to the fallen.
"My name is John Smith, and I am good at killing."
The man grunted and glared at the elf. "You said this would work, and now we have a peasant here dressed for a harvest dance in stained pants."
I glanced down to see that indeed I was wearing my favorite pink pants. They were stretchy and stained from far too long in the wash. After walking hell naked for a century, they felt very comfortable.
The newness of the situation aside, I needed to put in the work. What did I have at my disposal? Well, I had grace, which was to say, a small spark of divine power that had spent a century buried under demonic power. Despite giving all my sources to Amelia, the name I gave to an underworld dragon egg I found, I still had the three powers I gained as an avatar of sin.
I clenched and unclenched my hand. I was still very human, with all the limits that came with it, but I had methods to deal with powerful demons. Then there was my time in the void, where I did nothing but use my grace to defend myself from annihilation. Five minutes might as well have been five years.
What I needed to do was obvious. If a bit unorthodox. I needed to fuel my grace with an energy source.
Tantric energy was good enough so first I needed to read fish for a reaction. "So, since the situation is fucked, who wants to have an orgy?" I asked.
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