Hot, rancid breath washed over the back of his neck, the scent of old blood so potent his eyes watered. Every instinct screamed to spin around. He stood still. The real alpha's hot, meaty exhalation, laced with an electric crackle, came from straight ahead.
A sudden, sharp tang of copper and bile flooded his mouth—the phantom taste of his own blood from a jaw that hadn't closed on him. He spat and saw blood. Tasted it. But he knew it was fake.
Sight. Hearing. Taste. Smell. David was calm through each lie. He saw the truth. The real one was the anchored furnace of power.
Rhea’s gaze darted between them, calculating trajectories. Jamie’s eyes were wide, trying to watch all three at once. Their sight told them they were surrounded by three imminent, crushing deaths. Our eyes are full of shit, David thought.
David activated all of his skills in a rapid, internal cascade. Demonic Energy flooded his system, a familiar, vicious current. Demonic Energy Mastery shaped it, a tight leash on a wild thing. Calm Mind locked his focus onto the three giant wolves, muting everything else. Energy Affinity peeled back the world, showing him the truth: two of the monsters were hollow, glittering shells. Battle Sense began painting probabilities over the scene—a two-second window unfurling in his mind. The gremlin in the skill showed him more than just escapes or blocks. It highlighted paths of maximum violence, angles of attack that would cause the most screaming damage. It was a map of future pain, and he was the deliveryman.
The five skills layered together, turning him from a guy facing a building-sized wolf into guy facing one building-sized wolf and two very convincing special effects. He would have to make it work.
With Rhea's javelins, Jamie's terrain control, his sight seeing the truth, his sense predicting the real attacks, they could do it. They could win. It wasn't blind faith but calculation. The math said if they ignored the stage props, they wouldn't all be skewered immediately. The others would have to do exactly as he said.
The illusion moved first. The false warg on the left lunged at Jamie, jaws gaping. Jamie took the bait. "I've got the left one!" he yelled, hands flying up to conjure thick barriers of ice directly in front of the charging image. David saw the hollow shell, the lack of any real energy pathways. "Don't!" he barked, but it was too late. Jamie's ice walls formed, wasting his focus and blocking his own line of sight. The illusionary warg passed through it without a sound, dissipating into a ripple of air just before it would have touched him. Every detail, from the matted fur to the way its breath fogged in the cold air Jamie had left hanging, was flawless.
The warg on the right burst into motion, a building-sized blur of fur and fangs. Rhea tracked it instantly, hurling two twisted metal javelins that pierced its chest—only for the illusion to vanish as her attack shattered against a tree behind it.
The real Alpha had never moved. Seeing the distraction it had created, it targeted not Jamie, but the now-exposed Rhea.
From the center, it lunged. David reacted first, his bonespear biting into the creature’s swinging claw and knocking it off course before it could bisect Rhea. The edge of the redirected blow still slammed into her side, the monster’s wasted momentum carrying through. The impact knocked the wind from her in a sharp, pained gasp as it retreated into nothing.
Sound was the next weapon. As the real Alpha moved, a chorus of snarling roars erupted from the empty air around Rhea, disorienting and loud. She faltered, the debris she held aloft with her telekinesis wavering as her instincts screamed about threats from all sides. David saw the real Alpha's muscles bunch, targeting him in a moment of confusion. "Left, ten feet!" he snapped. Rhea, trusting the command over the deafening fake snarls, pivoted and sent a twisted length of metal siding shrieking through the space David indicated. It slammed into the real Alpha's shoulder, a solid hit that jerked its head off course, the alpha releasing a pained howl that rumbled the soil.
A metallic copper tang at the back of David's throat surged from the thick, displaced air the illusions left in their wake. As if they had really passed by, gutting him. He spat, ignoring it. "It makes one fake to hide the real attack," he called out, strafing the now-circling Alpha. "Jamie, ice where I say. Rhea, hit its eyes the second it’s close—I’ll say when and where. Shoot where I shoot.”
David conjured then shot balls of demonic fire at the injured alpha. Rhea and Jamie mimicked his actions.
As Cinder moved to flank the injured Alpha under David’s orders, the demon suddenly whirled, her greatsword slicing through the illusion of a second warg poised to strike, distracted. David stepped forward, guiding them with his illusion piercing gaze.
They fought for seconds that felt like minutes. David barely kept them alive with shouted calls. Rhea fired javelins. David shot bolts of blood-colored flame. Jamie hurled ice and harried the alpha. David’s pet demon lifted stagfiend chitin spears from the surrounding corpses and hurled them exactly where David commanded, its every strike landing perfectly.
Then, through expert coordination, each of them targeted the real alpha’s leading foreleg.
It was the single, glorious moment they needed. His minion, Cinder, was already in the air, having used the distraction to leap, sword held in a death grip. The deathly demon dropped like a falling anvil, all her weight and the weight of her sword focused into a point behind the creature's skull.
The Alpha stumbled.
But it wasn't dead. Cinder's plummeting strike didn't crush its skull. At the last possible second, the massive wolf twisted its head, an illusion hiding the movement, and the greatsword slammed into the thick, crystalline spikes armoring its shoulder instead. The sound wasn't a final crunch, but a brutal, cracking thud. The Alpha let out a pained, furious snarl and wrenched itself away, the sword grating against bone before pulling free.
The beast stumbled back, dizzy, favoring its wounded leg, its star-bright violet eyes dimmed with pain and fury. The two remaining illusions flickered and vanished, the lie no longer worth the energy. It stood alone, bleeding, its sides heaving. It looked at David, at Cinder now standing between them, at Rhea with fresh javelins and stagfiend spears already orbiting her, and at Jamie scrambling to his feet, shards and blocks of ice suspended around him like cold debris in orbit.
The group’s last coordinated strike landed hard. The giant alpha paused, studying them like it was deciding which of them to kill first. It growled, and reality around it began to change. The ground, the trees, even the sky warped as a slow wave of shifting energy spread outward toward them, wrong and heavy in a way even David’s energy affinity couldn’t identify. The injuries had forced it to get serious. Up until now, it had only been playing with its food.
David tried to use his vision to pierce the spreading change. His energy affinity saw nothing but swirling, perfect patterns he usually saw when he inspected the real world in detail. He pushed his oracle aspect, searching for the alpha's location. But saw nothing, the world was changing, but the changes were beyond 20 feet, quickly closing in on their location. He tried to feel for its soul with his death abilities. Like his aspect, his soul sight only worked at an even closer range. He figured the alpha had pulled back to the very edge of its illusion skill, intending to kill them once it set in place.
His Battle Sense had changed. It no longer shouted warnings to save others. It just murmured now, a faint impression of what could happen, of who might die next. A whisper in the wind he had to strain to hear. He'd trained it, gotten used to the feeling. But right now, trying to tell real from fake in this chaos? It was beyond even that. Keeping them alive was impossible.
Even though he couldn't see it directly, his aspect could make out blurred forms closer to him—Rhea, Jamie, Cinder.
"Jamie! Rhea!" David yelled, his voice cutting through the warping air. "Ice shell! Now! Turtle up, dig it into the ground! Make it thick, make it dense! Rhea, keep it solid! Push outward! All directions, all the time! Don't let it down no matter what you see! Not until you see a system notification and allocate the stats!" He added the last part just in case. There wasn’t even a guarantee its level was 28, but David suspected it was real. When he'd seen it with his aspect earlier, it had shown up clean, and within its 20 foot range, nothing could fool his aspect. The thing had already faked system name tags. Perhaps it could fake its death—that’s what he would do.
That meant for the remainder of this fight, Jamie and Rhea dead weight. More blind than he was. They were screwdrivers, and he needed a wrench. Useful, talented, but the wrong tools for the job. Until the creature was dead, they were on their own.
It was just David.
And his undead demon, Cinder.
Suddenly, David stood in another section of forest. A wide, yawning cave opened in the side of a rocky slope. Floating rocks drifted in the air, caught in invisible gravity wells. Some rocks shot up, others sideways, some down. A bird flew too close and was rocketed into the canopy. David felt vertigo. He saw signs of habitation by the cave: a weapon rack, a clothing line. On the line was a bloodstained, human-sized red hoodie. On its front was a faded graphic the Band Nirvana, a painted moth. Beside the cave, resting against the inner wall, was a giant, gargantuan weapon—a thick wooden haft banded with metal. The ogre's weapon.
David's blood went still. He jerked back, leaping away and raising his spear. It's an illusion, he told himself. But it looked real. He hyperventilated, his heart hammering against his ribs. It's not real. Calm down. Even his Calm Mind skill struggled against the visceral panic. He poured mana into it, forcing logic through the fear. It's just an illusion. The ogre isn't here. Kill the wolf. One problem at a time. Then he cursed himself. Stupid. It didn't teleport me. It's an illusion. But how did it know? A mental attack? Maybe it had seen this place before. Knew the danger.
Jamie and Rhea were gone. David was alone. He couldn't even see Cinder. But he could feel her through the thrall tether. If not for that, he wouldn't know his soul-bound demon was right behind him.
Now, beyond his aspect’s range, he couldn't tell what was real. Everything had pathways of energy, but the alpha was manipulating that energy to mimic life and reality perfectly. The location changed around him.
His aspect was working, but its range was limited. He could see the real forest around him in a short bubble, maybe twenty feet. But the alpha had threaded the illusion into reality itself, like a painting with a new layer painted over it. It was an expert application of magic. Everything beyond his twenty-foot bubble of abyssal sight was an entirely different place, everything within the bubble blended with reality perfectly, if it wasn’t for the dull sensation in his eyes exposing the truth, it would have looked utterly seamless.
He saw nothing else. He felt nothing but a sharp, violent flash of injury through the bond—Cinder, attacked, knocked beyond his range. Now that it had isolated them, the alpha was going after his minion first, viewing her as the most dangerous threat.
Which to David, was honestly quite insulting.
Then the illusions shifted again, specifically for each of them. It showed Cinder that David was a pack of giant, snarling wargs. It showed David that where Cinder stood, a pack of wargs now faced him, teeth bared, hot breath fogging the air. A bid to get them to fight each other, to kill each other once weakened.
He understood now why the wargs were so plentiful here, why the Marked Legion, the abyssal priests, and even that damned ogre weren't crawling all over this territory. Even stronger creatures would lose to this thing.
Unfortunately for the alpha, David was the worst possible match-up.
"Come," David commanded, his voice flat in the false forest. Cinder was at his back in an instant. They didn't stand back-to-back. They both faced forward, a line against the illusion. He couldn't see her before, but he’d known she was there, badly damaged but functional.
David instantly reviewed the situation. David had his Aspect. He had Soul Sight. He had his tether to Cinder.
His aspect had only spotted the soul-eating demon’s true eye when he was within twenty feet. His soul sight worked at an even closer range. That meant if the wolf was outside that twenty-foot bubble, he couldn't see it with his aspect. If it was moving at speed, he could only react to its attacks at the last possible instant.
The thrall connection was a one-way street. He could send thoughts, words, sensations, commands. He had even pushed his awareness of Battle Sense through it before. He could share his emotions, not that he ever wanted to. He would never share his Aspect. Ever.
Because it was a soul thrall, and because he allowed it, Cinder could always sense where he was. But the control, the power, was his alone. He’d built it that way. He usually kept the connection clamped shut. Opening it fully was overwhelming, nauseating—like wearing a VR headset on a rollercoaster, except the rollercoaster was also becoming a completely different being obsessed with murder and the glory of its god, which was you.
He had no choice now. Not a full opening. That would be suicidal in a fight where he was already disadvantaged. But a partial one. A crack in the one-way door, just a few inches wider. To share his Battle Sense with her. To expand his own senses through hers. And because he had a plan.
He pushed with his awareness. He opened the connection a sliver.
The world doubled. He was still in his body, spear heavy in his grip, the giant warg’s illusionary forest pressing in. But he also had a second set of eyes— and senses, like a violent, static-filled radio channel tuned to a different frequency. He couldn’t move the second body. The connection was one-way. But he could see what Cinder saw. Through her eyes.
He could feel every single thing the demon felt. Perfect, he thought.
Through his demon’s eyes, he saw a different slice of forest. She was surrounded, a maroon island in a sea of gray fur and snapping teeth—the rest of the wolfpack, keeping her busy. An illusion.
He sent a command, not with words, but with the raw intent: Circulate everything you have for defense.
Through the open sliver of the connection, he could feel it directly. The raw, churning flow of demonic energy inside her. He studied it.
Cinder’s Raw Innate Selective Demonic Reinforcement wasn’t a skill. It was an instinct. He felt it happen. Every scrap of wild energy circulating through her body would suddenly compress, a violent tidal surge, into a single point—her shoulder, her fist, the edge of her greatsword—for a fraction of a second. It was total, momentary commitment. All-or-nothing. It unleashed overwhelming force, then abandoned that focus entirely to shift to the next strike. It was how she shattered charges and pierced armor. Not refined technique. Predatory timing. Perfectly timed, hyper-efficient impacts. Automatic as breathing.
The trick, he realized, the thing he had been missing the whole time, was to stop fighting the energy. Like when he used his corrupted battle sense, the answer was synchronization. Let the corruption take him. Want what it wanted. Let it run free and mirror it instead of restraining it. He could open the pathways, but the energy would not listen to a stranger. To use demonic energy, David had to think like a demon, be one. Like his demon, Cinder. He had to give in.
That meant if he ever wanted to use its full potential, he had to stop suppressing the rampage and accept that it would damage him every time he used it. That was fine. He could heal.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
David had to let go.
[Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 8 → Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 9]
He got a rough handle on it. Feeling it directly showed him what he’d been missing. He was still slower. It took him a second, two seconds, to move the energy like that. He couldn’t spam it in a fight. But it was enough for sparing, decisive uses. If you had preparation. Or foresight.
Next part of the plan. He ordered Cinder to push a portion of her demonic energy outside her skin. To circulate it there. Under his guidance, his stalwart demon got a demonic magic field, similar to his own. Her field immediately thickened, condensing into a dense, ten-inch layer hugged tight to her scales. Why? David had no idea. He sent the impulse:
The field pulsed and expanded to ten feet.
Cinder had no magic, as far as David was aware. Her other skill was locked. A result of her unique creation. But she was an undead. A deathless revenant. So he mixed ‘heat energy’—not generic body heat, but the specific, high intensity waste-product energy that was a side effect of his own overcharged existence—with death energy. He threaded the chaotic blend together until his demonic energy could carry it, then sent the combined stream through her, into the expanded field.
His Battle Sense cackled with a kind of vicious glee at the plan. About time, David thought.
He commanded Cinder to use the new energy mix to reinforce her body and her weapon. Then, he used her body as a proxy. A range booster. Like a WiFi extender for his will.
Around both his and Cinder’s ten-foot magic fields, he opened portals. They were tiny. Pinpricks. They looked like motes of black dust, barely visible, too small for anything unwelcome to break through. He preemptively sent every ounce of raw demonic energy he had left into his own legs and spine, priming himself.
All of this happened in two seconds.
In David’s peripheral vision, he saw a hazy, smoke-like figure about twenty feet away, drawing closer slowly. He ordered his demon to play along with its illusions. He purposely kept his gaze steady, spear raised, looking the wrong way.
He knew the warg would attack if it realized they weren’t reacting to its illusions. Now, it was testing them. Once it was certain, it would attack. It would commit. Who it attacked didn’t matter.
Because David was going to kill it.
He felt the impulse of its impending pounce, felt it. A claw piercing his abdomen, seconds into the future. His Battle Sense tugged at him with premonitions. It’s coming. Move left. Swing. Dodge. Strike its nose. Pierce its brain. Cause it to writhe in agony.
David ignored it. Instead, he threaded his mana—all of it—into the dozens of tiny, demonic pinprick portals he’d littered all around their fields, all to his right, where the alpha was gathering itself to pounce. Then in the same instant, he and his demon, with raw energy surging in their legs, exploded in the opposite direction, a blur. His portals violently rejected the mana.
The world evaporated.
A spatial storm erupted. The illusion of the strange, mountainous cavern entrance dissolved. In its place was a massive, silent concussion of chaotic spatial energy. A localized explosion in the fabric of everything, contained within the overlapping magic fields.
When the violent ripple of nothingness settled, there was no stealthy predator. There was a heavily breathing giant wolf, riddled with wounds, missing chunks of fur and flesh, one violet eye gone dark. Dying.
The moment David had realized it couldn’t attack from a distance, the wolf was as good as dead. He'd planned that the moment he’d threaded his energy through a thrall for the first time.
He’d planned this from the moment it left his sight.
David grabbed his bound imp—the thing was trussed up in the soul-binding energy of a Heretic’s Shackle fragment, twitching uselessly. He told Cinder to knock it out. He didn’t trust himself to do it. Selective reinforcement wasn't a skill he'd found in a menu. It was an application of demonic energy, and demonic energy was endlessly versatile, like mana's very evil, very twisted sibling. He was still new to it. He’d just learned the basic idea, hadn’t even gotten the hang of the pressure yet. It was like getting handed the keys to a more powerful car; if he didn't learn the pedal feel, he’d crash through a wall. Or in this case, blow the imp’s head clean off its shoulders, wasting good material.
Cinder struck the creature with a measured blow from the pommel of her greatsword. It went limp. She placed a scaled foot on its chest, pinning it.
He knew the moment the alpha warg died, the illusions would shatter and Rhea and Jamie would stop turtling up in their ice fort. He moved quickly.
David walked up to the dying alpha. It was a mess—more a heap of giant, bloody fur and open injuries than a threat. He was surprised it was still breathing. The creature was too massive to wrap the shackle chain around any limb. So he cut a hole in the thick hide of its shoulder with his bone spear, threaded the cold metal links through the wound and out another, and pulled. He was glad to see the bindings take immediate hold, their energy latching onto the creature’s fading soul with a final, greedy click.
He told Cinder to pin the unconscious imp to the ground. She used some of the many stagfiend spears littering the clearing among the stagfiend corpses, driving one through each of the imp’s limbs. Then she heaped carcasses over it, a grisly blanket.
Then David put his foot on the alpha’s chest, right where he knew its spine was. He filled the space beneath his boot with a concentrated surge of demonic energy, a brutal, unsubtle application of force. He stepped down, hard.
The creature’s chest exploded in a fountain of gore. Blood and viscera rose in the air in a thick spray before slapping down onto the wet ground with a sound like a hailstorm.
[You have defeated a Level 28 Adult Warg — Alpha Variant.]
[Lvl 15 ? Lvl 16]
David opened his status and dumped every new stat point into Demonic Energy. The alpha’s body was a ruined mess. He couldn’t fix that. But that was fine. All he really needed was its soul and a few usable parts.
A few paces away, a massive, angular, spiked structure of ice—like a small fortress the size of a truck—shattered with a sound like breaking glass. Damn, Jamie, David thought. All that ice wall construction practice back at the clearing paid off.
Jamie and Rhea stumbled out from the dissolving shards. They saw the massive corpse. They saw David standing in the middle of the carnage. Their faces were a mix of surprise and something like awe.
“The illusion just… popped,” Jamie said, his voice missing its usual boom, edged with shaky adrenaline. “One second there were six of it, the next… this. That was crazy.”
“It was… wild,” Rhea said, shaking her head and breathing heavily, her eyes scanning the corpse, then David. Her tone was flat, but her gaze was sharp, taking in details. “How did you pinpoint the real one?”
David fell to one knee. Gotta sell this. He placed a palm against his own chest. He filled his immediate magical field with death energy, letting it seep out of his pores like a cold, invisible mist.
Jamie and Rhea rushed over. David sent a mental command to Cinder, and she lumbered to his side as well. Jamie shivered as he got close. Rhea placed a hand on David’s shoulder. Her breath fogged in the sudden, localized chill.
“You… hey, you okay?” Jamie asked, his bravado gone, replaced by genuine concern.
“What’s wrong?” Rhea’s hand tightened slightly.
David took a covert, deep breath, drawing in the ambient life energy from the two beside them, pulling a sliver from their proximity. Then he pulled pure death energy from his bones, and filled his magic field with nothing but the energy of death, a thick dense black field for anyone with the skill to see the nature of death. The temperature dropped further. Jamie shivered again, harder. The hairs on the back of Rhea’s neck stood up. She felt a slight, unnerving dip in her stamina, a sudden fatigue that matched the deathly cold.
“When I killed the alpha… it… fuck. It cursed me,” David said, his voice strained, a good performance of pain. He let his shoulders sag. “Something powerful. I’m dying. I need to purge it.”
Jamie jerked back, releasing him. Rhea’s hand stayed, her grip firm. David felt a faint, ridiculous pang at that. Aww. She really cares. I’m touched. He genuinely was.
He drained her a fraction more, just through the contact and his controlled breathing. Rhea’s eyes widened slightly. She felt the drain this time, a distinct sapping combined with the sickly death aura pressing in from all sides.
“It’s dangerous for you to be here,” David ground out. “If it jumps to you… I’m not sure I could save you.” He did his best ‘serious, noble sacrifice’ act. “My minion will guard you back to camp. I’ll be okay. The first creatures should avoid me—they’ll sense the curse and steer clear. I just need to focus on purging it.”
They were conflicted. It was written all over Jamie’s face. Rhea searched his eyes, her analytical mind warring with the physical evidence of the deathly aura and his apparent weakness. Finally, she gave a single, tight nod and let go. Seriously, what the hell was wrong with that girl, wasn’t she afraid of dying? “Don’t die out here,” she said, the words blunt, almost an order.
They left, with Cinder herding them away. Her real job was to make sure they didn’t double back to spy.
Alone in the gore-strewn clearing, David let the pained expression drop. He stood up, brushing dirt from his knee.
Now for the test subjects. Two souls—one alpha warg, one bound imp—and a whole hell of a lot of fresh corpses. The materials were finally in place.
He’d sent Rhea and Jamie back to the clearing with a story about a contagious curse. A lie. He needed the quiet. The level 28 warg, a house-sized thing with violet eyes that could weave perfect illusions, was dead at his feet. Its insides were a mess from his spatial explosion trick. David stood over the corpse, the bodies of a few imps and a stagfiend scattered around him. A private workshop.
On his solo hunts, David had practiced on souls. Mostly imps, a few hobgoblins too, and one very dead werebeast. He’d discovered two things. He’d confirmed a suspicion he’d had for a while. Skills weren't stored in the body. If they were, his undead demon Cinder would have been born with a stack of them. The idea that skills lived in the soul had been the next logical theory to test.
He’d been right. Skills were contained in souls. Even the weakest, low-level skill from an imp looked like a knotted, bright star in the soul's fabric, with roots that threaded through everything. Powerful skills from bigger things were vast, complicated structures, incomprehensible at a glance.
He’d also found that trying to weld a stolen skill onto a living soul was a disaster. It overwhelmed the host. The roots wouldn’t take. They’d thread in wrong, crack the soul, drive the thing insane, or just destroy the souls foundation and hollow it out, turning the person into a vacant husk. Maybe his Soul Manipulator level was too low. Or maybe the whole idea was just broken. His dream of becoming a skill-thief had died right there. He’d already had enough of madness in his life. His Calm Mind skill was the only thing that kept the static out. It was the only reason why he hadn’t spiralled. Well, any worse than his present state. Trying to graft skills was like performing brain surgery with a jackhammer.
So, time for a simpler solution. He needed the warg and its illusion skill. But the giant not-wolf was dead. He didn't want another undead. Not for this. An undead spy would be vulnerable to anything that could feel or detect death, at least at the earliest levels. Assuming such a skill could even be gained.
The second thing he’d discovered would be useful for the sea of corpses and the one living imp he’d kept tied up.
He mirrored what he’d done to create Cinder, but focused. Different. He went inside the dead alpha warg’s fading soul, his body sinking into its flesh.
The giant alpha’s soul manifested as a vast, predatory structure of overlapping, half-transparent layers, like a cathedral built from fractured glass and shadow. Each layer reflected a different version of itself, slightly out of sync, creating false depth and distance that bled outward from the core. At its center burned a dense, violet nexus shaped like a wolf’s eye, cold and watchful, anchoring the illusions while projecting countless hollow echoes of reality around it. The whole construct pulsed slowly, warping perception with every beat, as if the soul itself was teaching the world how to lie.
[Warg Soul - Alpha Variant
Status: Vengeful
Description: …from its violet eye the world learned how to be deceived, and in deception, it sealed the fate of even princes…]
David read the description in the wolf’s soul.
Damn, he thought. How good was this thing's illusion skill? The "princes" part hooked his attention. Royalty. Did that mean warg royalty? Or some other kind of royalty entirely? He hoped it meant something like a village chief he could easily kill in the dark. Not something in a castle. Castles sounded like a lot of work.
David turned and walked into the bound and static soul, and looked for its skill.
He found it—a pulsing, violet star, tangled deep in the soul's structure, threads running through a huge portion of it. Blinding in its complexity. More detailed and complex than anything he had ever seen. He didn't try a careful extraction. He used his Soul Manipulator skill like a crowbar, hacking and breaking the area around the skill-star to dislodge the whole mass. It was a messy, destructive piece of soul-dismantling. It worked.
He fed. He consumed about eighty percent of the living imp’s soul and forty percent of the warg’s. The influx of power surged through him, a hot, wild rush. He cut out the warg’s heart and several key organs. He infused them with his own blood—which was, in a way he was still figuring out, a carrier for his soul—and then dragged the physical parts into the living imp’s soul space.
The work was grueling. He traveled back and forth between the two soul realms. Each time, he welded a new piece of warg—a lung, a section of sinew, a knot of instinct—to the imp’s soul. He used his soul-infused blood as solder, his demonic energy as the torch, his soul-flame as the heat, and spammed his Infernal Thrall skill every single time to bind it. He felt the thrall tether snap into place early on, but he didn't stop. He kept going until there was no warg left in the physical remains; he’d placed all of it into the imp’s soul.
The imp’s body began to change, twisting and growing with each addition. It wasn't enough. The structure was unstable. So David added parts from the dead stagfiend—chitinous plates, tough ligament—to supplement and reinforce. He drenched each piece in his blood, infused it with his soul, dragged it into the imp, and welded it on with more demonic fire and thrall-spam until the foreign parts dissolved and became indistinguishable from the whole.
[Soul-Manipulator Lvl 4 → Soul-Manipulator Lvl 5]
He felt dizzy from the blood loss. For the umpteenth time, he pulled heat energy and demonic energy from the source of power in his chest into his circulation, using it to knit his body back together, his body converting the energy into fuel, producing blood, making up for the loss. Finally, he isolated the massive, dislodged skill-star. He gripped it with his will, keeping it from dissolving, and carried it into the living imp’s body. In the soul space it had weighed a ton, but in reality it was weightless, only overly large. Inside the imp’s internal realm, he welded the violet star directly into the new, hybrid soul.
When it was over, the imp was gone. Each part he’d drenched in his soul blood merged with its soul had changed it bit by bit, the body reflecting the soul it housed, until it was wholly unrecognizable. What stood before him was a giant black wolf, as big as the house-sized warg it had been made from. Slightly bigger, in fact. Its eyes glowed with the same vivid violet. It had dark, sleek fur. He ran a hand along its side, feeling the softness, until his fingers hit something hard. Beneath the fur, in sections along its flanks and spine, was hard, segmented chitin from the stagfiend, with hair growing from the cracks. His giant black wolf. With illusion magic.
Perfect, David thought.
[Soul-Manipulator Lvl 5 → Soul-Manipulator Lvl 6]
[You have created a Homunculi, an Alpha Variant, a Warg and hybrid of races, a feat the dungeon system refuses to reward you for. Force the system to acknowledge your achievement.
Lvl 0/100]
He wondered about the logistics. Maybe it turned out so wolf-like because its soul was mostly warg now. 80% warg, 5% imp, 15% Stagfiend, and David’s soul and magic binding and fusing it all together until it took hold. He thought about the dead wolf heart and organs he’d fused into a living soul, and how dead parts didn't seem to poison it. He assumed they should. Maybe soul realms worked differently. Perhaps it was because he’d drenched them in his own soul-blood, marinating each part, turning them into something that wasn’t completely part of one single plane. Maybe physical things were never meant to be shoved into soul spaces. Maybe he was just breaking the rules.
Good, he thought. Fuck the rules.
David cleared his mind and checked his status, focusing on Infernal Thrall. The pressure behind his eyes tightened as he pushed his aspect into the skill, forcing it open. A second stat screen appeared beneath the skill’s description, then with a thought, beneath his demon, cinder’s stat screen lay another.
His giant magic wolf’s stats:
[Name:
Level: 0
Primary Class: Locked
Strength: 10
Dexterity: 7
Constitution: 31
Mana: 34
Demonic Energy: 38
Skills: Demonic Energy Lvl 0, Absolute Mirage Lvl 11]
The numbers were painfully low when compared to his total. Strength ten, dexterity seven. Decent for a level zero, I guess. The constitution was solid, and it had both mana and demonic energy in small pools. That was new.
Then he saw the skill. Absolute Mirage Lvl 11.
The alpha must have had the original skill at a higher level. But it had kept some skill levels way beyond what he’d expected. Level eleven. Higher than any skill he personally had. For the second time, he found himself having to catch up to his own minions. It was incredible. It was also extremely annoying.
The new creature’s soul was different from his demons, where cinder looked like a crate of potential, a single building block ready to receive more, his wolf’s looked like something of a much larger, closer-to-complete structure.
Like Cinder, the giant dark wolf viewed him with a sense of awe, as its creator. But there was a strange difference. Where Cinder’s devotion was a silent, obedient weight, the wolf’s was layered with an immense, palpable pride. It stood before him, head held high, chest out, a low rumble of satisfaction in its throat. It looked like it had just won every fight that had ever been fought.
Hey, David thought, staring at the proud creature. Weren’t you just born? What are you even proud for?
The wolf, sensing his attention, met his gaze. Its violet eyes held a depth of smug accomplishment that seemed utterly unearned and completely genuine. The thrall bond buzzed with a static of reverence so loud it was almost noisy, underpinned by that unshakable hubris.
He stepped closer, and peered into its soul.
The soul took shape as a compact, layered structure of fragments each opposing the other in color, stacked with hard precision. Cracked translucent plates and dense molten-dark slabs locked together at stress points, heat driven through carved seams. The soul formed like a layered hall of mirrors built into a brutal bunker that someone had set on fire from the inside. A violet star sat fixed at the center, sharp and absolute, only briefly visible as layers shifted but never moving. Uneven illusions spilled outward, snapping back along reinforced edges. Each pulse cinched joints and welded fractures, the structure holding itself together through constant upkeep and control.
[Hybrid Warg Soul - Alpha Variant
Status: Calm
Description: …from its violet eye the wolf learned deception, and in deception, the wolf learned truth…]
He looked at the giant, proud wolf that had been alive for about five minutes. It learned truth. The thing was just born. Obviously, the description was talking about the future. Well, he thought. That's not foreboding at all. What's the 'truth' it's supposed to learn? The vagueness annoyed him. Prophecy was always a pain.
David sighed internally. He reached through the bond and turned the volume down, dimming the connection just enough to mute the overwhelming psychic noise of its reverence and its pride. He didn't need the static. What he needed he had just crafted; an excellent minion. A master of illusions.
"Let's see what you can do," he said aloud, his voice dry. The wolf's tail gave a single, slow, dignified sweep. It was ready. Of course it was. It was clearly the best wolf for the job.