***The Infernal Plane of Lust***

***Amon***

Jada led me away from my crew's quarters and we emerged back into the main hallway. “Wow, dude, you sure are a no-nonsense guy. To whack Uphir in the face like that. Worse, the dude took it like it was no big deal. Just what the hell did you do to your people for them to be so meek? I doubt even Khorne could do that to his officers without having a fight on his hands.”

“It may be best if you ask them about that,” I replied, throwing the ball back into Jada's court. There was literally no point in explaining my relationship with the others. Either they accepted me as their leader, or they did not. Back in Baaar, they had seen what I did to those who failed to meet my expectations. Also, it wasn’t as if following me came without benefits. “Suffice it to say, I wouldn't tolerate anyone taking such a tone with me. Uphir needed the reminder.”

Jada gave me a look that screamed that she thought I was bullshitting her.

I sighed and admitted, “The fault also lies partly with me. I have been too soft on them lately, which gave him the idea he could talk to me like that in the first place. All I did was to remind him that he chose to follow me and not the other way around.”

“Hm.” Jada only hummed in reply, apparently having nothing to say to that. She guided me down another hallway while she pointed out the living quarters of her various sisters.

I paid only half of my attention to her relaying the castle’s distribution of private quarters, relying solely on my eidetic memory as a demon to make do if the information ever turned out to be vital. Meanwhile, I studied the various artworks, seeing them in a new light after Isabella had literally pulled me into one. The magical skill of the creator was several levels above everything I had ever made, and I wondered whether I could improve on my own creations by studying the enchantments.

Me using soul magic in my creations was maybe more powerful in terms of combat applications, but the spacial pillar at Ashley’s quarters was a work of art that I wouldn't be able to duplicate in a thousand years.

Sadly, studying the craftsmanship and weave of magical circuitry was easier said than done, as I often found my attention wandering to a picture’s pair of perfectly shaped tits or a statue’s ass that seemed to wiggle on its own. There was literally no escaping finding something that spoke to my instincts.

And that surely was something the artist had aimed at when she created these pieces.

When I found myself leering after a fresco like some mortal who drove by a hot female, I slapped myself hard enough for the echo to be audible throughout the hallway.

Jada interrupted her explanations and looked at me with a befuddled expression. “Is something the matter?”

“No!” I replied quickly and tried to focus. “Everything is fine! It’s just that all these artworks are distracting. Who came up with the idea of putting them on display like that in the first place?”

Jada gave me a knowing smile. “Oh, it’s mostly Danielle’s work, though she encourages the younger ones to set up their own pieces. It might interest you that some of these works come from Isabella’s hands. Not the enchantments, but the artistry.”

“I see.” Though I suspected that Isa had at least a helping hand in some of the magic, or she wouldn't have known to find me that quickly once I touched the pillar. “Say, I wondered how that sister-thing works? Are all of the succubi in this castle truly Ashley’s? I never heard of a demon family holding together like that. She must be ancient.” Didn’t Isa mention once that succubi can’t have that many offspring – maybe once a millenia?

Jada chuckled. “Yes, and no. Mother is indeed ancient when it comes to the likes of us. Some say she lived through the last power struggle for the position of Planar Lord. Though, I suggest you never mention her age in her presence. She is kind of prickly about that.”

She turned around and looked at me while walking backwards. “As for us being sisters, we are, but in some cases more so by choice than by blood. It doesn’t matter to mother. We are all her children in a way.”

I raised an eyebrow. “But, shouldn’t there be a lot more succubi in this castle than the rumoured forty-one? And Isa is…”

“Hers, as am I, and Claire and Danielle,” Jada answered. “And a few others are our daughters and granddaughters. There is no obligation to stay with the family. The only rule mother upholds is that you are either with the family or against us. There is no in-between or grey area. Some chose to leave over the centuries and others died when they didn’t meet expectations. It is the Infernum after all.” Then she clapped her hands together. “Which reminds me – since you know Felicia already. That one is actually my daughter by blood if you are strict about such relations. Mother took the egg from me and reared her up, though I look after her when I have the time.”

“Indeed.” I nodded, accepting the explanation with a questioning tone in my voice.

Jada looked actually a little ashamed. “Let’s just say that my motherly instincts aren’t the best and leave it at that. Ashley is much better with taking care of demonlings.”

I blinked, debating whether it would be wise to ask for further details on the topic. We demons were a sturdy race by nature. If nothing smashed the egg or took active measures to kill the newborn demonling – survival was pretty much guaranteed. I and most of my hatchmates as far as I knew had survived a hatchery that was designed to weed out the weak. The caretaker hadn’t done much more than to give us food and the barest of educations, and still, enough of the demonlings survived to make his endeavour worthwhile.

Which brought me to the conclusion that Jada must be the worst mother ever if Ashley went so far as to take her egg away – if it was true that succubi only laid a single egg. Or rather, should I have said that Ashley must be an exceptional mother among demons? It certainly was hard to keep and entire bloodline of demons working together. I wasn't certain whether I would be able to do that even if I commanded the power of a Planar Lord.

“We are almost there.” Jada turned back around and descended down a stairway.

Frowning, I followed her into the castle’s underbelly. “I thought you wanted to show me around? Is there anything interesting about the cellar?”

“Oh, you.” Jada huffed. “Didn’t I already promise to show you the interesting stuff? Don’t think that I didn’t pay attention to you. Down here are Kasdeya’s laboratories. From what Isa told me about your handiwork with enchantments, I figured that would rub all your right spots.”

“A laboratory?” I asked. “And who is this Kasdeya?”

“Another sister of ours,” Jada launched into the explanation. “Though, where Danielle is the artist or Claire the bookish type, Kasdeya loves everything related to magic and technology. Mother had her put up shop down here so that visitors wouldn’t be scared away.”

I flicked my tail and smirked at the explanation. “I see, so what are you and Isa then?”

“I am the sex fiend of the family, of course!” Jada answered without hesitation or shame. “As for little Isa, she is still too young to specialize on a specific trait. And she is always pretending to be the innocent and pure one in the family, but give her another millennium, and I bet she will be our best plotter and schemer. There we are.”

We entered a huge workshop that contained everything a craftsman might wish for. It was a hall that must have undermined half of the castle, though I suspected that spacial magic was at work here.

I felt my mouth water at the sight of shelves full of raw materials, tools, and rows of machines, everything sorted and painstakingly labelled. It was a craftsman’s paradise and much better equipped than anything I got access to at the warband’s headquarters.

There was only one problem.

“Won’t this Kasdeya be mad if you show me around her sanctum without permission?” I asked, imagining my own reaction to finding someone playing in my own workspace while I was working on a project. Oh, it wouldn't be pretty.

“No.” Jada shrugged. “We often come down here to play. It’s the only way to meet Kasdeya since she is somewhat of a nerd.”

“A nerd?” I questioned. The term didn’t mean anything to me until I searched my soul’s memories, which gave me a somewhat understandable picture of the concept.

“A cellar child,” Jada added insult to injury without the slightest hint of remorse. “I swear, if we wouldn’t come down here from time to time to interrupt her projects, she would run out of life energy and die among her creations without anyone being the wiser. It’s so bad that Ashley gave us a rotational schedule of bringing someone down here for her to feed upon.”

She turned and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Oh, Kas! Kas, where are you!?” Her voice threw an echo through the vast workshop, but there was no answer.

Jada continued the rallying call after a moment of silence. “Wherever you are, we are here, and we are going to play with your stuff! Oh, what might this machine be? I wonder what the pretty red button does?”

Faint footsteps were now closing in on us and a moment later I noticed two red horns bobbing up and down behind a row of man-sized CNC machines to our left. The owner appeared a few moments later, red-faced and out of breath, her white hair sticking to her face.

From all the other succubi I had met so far I was used to lascivious dresses that revealed more than they hid. Or even forgoing clothes completely.

Kas on the other hand wore a sturdy worker’s outfit that was covered in oily smudges and stains. It had also more pockets than I could count, holding more tools than I would see any use for on a normal day of hard labour in my own workshop.

“Jada! If you dare to touch my stuff, I will give Ashley an improved form of the chastity belt she had you wear the last time you fucked up! I will make it so that you will get electrified even if you just try to pleasure yourself,” Kasdeya threatened while swinging some kind of welding tool.

She was a small, but curvy female. Her head only reached up to my chest, which brought her straight red horns to the height of my face.

Jada blanched. “Is that a way to greet a sister who is paying you a social visit? I even brought you a like-minded male to associate with.” She gestured at me.

I immediately stopped smiling, realizing that Jada might just have brought me here to ‘feed’ me to her emaciated sibling.

“I don’t want any visitors down here.” Thankfully, Kas wasn’t interested in me in the slightest. “Last night I got nothing done because there was always someone who stumbled into my workspace without permission!”

I cleared my throat and asked, “I didn’t want to intrude but seeing all this, I got interested. Would it be possible to get a tour?”

Kas looked at me for the first time, allowing her eyes to wander from my face to my chest and then further down.

“– a purely intellectual one?” I clarified quickly after Kas had studied me as if I was just a piece of meat.

“He is the one I told you about, remember?” Jada petted my shoulder while she stood behind and to the side of me, using me as a shield against Kas.

Kasdeya frowned, clearly not remembering anything.

“Isa’s boyfriend?” Jada whispered, giving me the impression that the two of them had discussed me beforehand.

Kas looked at the ceiling with a blank expression, apparently searching her memories. “Oh, that. I admit I wasn’t exactly listening to you when you mentioned him.”

“Kas…” Jada sounded genuinely disappointed. “I was counting on you taking care of him for a few hours while I saw to other things.”

I quickly whirled on Jada. “Hey, what about-”

“Sorry, but I have to go!” The succubus spun around and quickly fled the way we came. “Have to get in touch with Danielle and Claire. Make sure to make the most out of your time with Kas!”

Blinking, I tried to make sense of why she brought me here if she didn’t intend to show me the whole castle. After a moment, I turned back to face Kas, who looked at me with a raised eyebrow. Silence followed, without either of us knowing exactly what to say.

This stand-off as it was felt uncomfortable, so I tried to break the ice with an introduction. “Hi, I am Amon. I am good at killing things… or hurting things… and making enchantments… to kill things… or hurt them.”

The white-haired succubus blinked at me. “Enchantments, I can get on board with those. And it’s okay if your communication skills are a little challenged. You are a male after all.”

“That’s at least one common interest!” I deliberately decided to ignore the insult and beamed at her, proud of my social skills. After all, I was the one who had spoken first while she just stood there.

Kas sighed and gestured for me to follow her deeper into her workshop. “I will show you a few things I am currently working on until Jada comes back. Maybe you have some skill after all, though I doubt it.”

I followed the succubus past the first row of machines while she spoke. “Jada spoke about you, and that you are very young.”

“I am, but I have a soul that is more than skilled with magic and enchantments,” I explained. “And I found myself being interested in the arts.” I pulled a medallion from my spacial storage that I had worked on alongside my staff, figuring that showing was better than telling. “Though I have to admit that all of my works so far focused more on practical use and reliability than anything else.”

Kasdeya took the offered medallion and retrieved a pair of glasses from her work suit. I sensed her infusing a tiny bit of her magical energy into the item, causing the glasses to glow faintly blue while intricately carved runes lit the metal frame.

“A teleportation circuit.” Kas immediately recognized the enchantment. “Though, this one is apparently self-activating. The activation condition seems strange though. It continuously checks the holder’s magical flow and activates once it reaches a certain threshold? Ah, I see what you tried to do here. The idea is to create something that teleports you out of danger as soon as your magical defences are depleted. Though, that won’t help you right now. The destination is set somewhere outside the castle. Not a good idea to use something like that during the storm season, though I am interested in the technique you used. I am more of a runecrafter myself, but you used a circular inscription to directly imitate a spell matrix instead of forming it from scratch.”

I found myself smiling. Up until now, I hadn’t had anyone to talk to about my chosen craft. Not even the insulting enchanter back at the warband’s headquarters had recognized the techniques that my main-soul knew to create with careless ease. But Kasdeya recognized the worth of this system with a single glance.

“According to my soul’s memories, this system is superior to the one that I have seen so widely used throughout the Infernum,” I explained. “The downside is that you have to consider the exact physics of your enchantments as if you would cast the spell yourself. And if you layer the spell with other effects, the enchantment becomes indefinitely more complex. On the other hand, if you do it right, there will be no burning out of the enchantment if you overuse it because the artefact itself is only a spell projector. At least not before the artefact's user breaks himself.”

“Which might be seen as another downside,” Kas added with an evil smile. “Some may prefer the artefact breaking before they break – so to speak.” She pulled out a strangely formed rod made out of steel and handed it to me. It also widened at the base, making it somewhat uneasy to hold. “What do you think of this? One of my sisters got it from another succubus den and I have been trying to reverse engineer it ever since.”

I held the heavy ‘item’ with three fingers, wondering whether I should comment on the form at all since the tip was shaped like a male’s organ. In other words, it was a dildo. Given my first impressions of Kas, her handing me this had come as a surprise.

Then again, I was speaking to a succubus. There was no point in complaining about the female’s nature. Sighing inwardly, I concentrated on the enchantment itself.

“This is quite the invasive bit of magic,” I murmured to myself while I studied the item with my mana sense. “The creator tried his best to obscure the enchantment by embedding it deep inside the object. I bet they placed the enchantment on a smaller rod first and then layered mundane metal over it? But it’s still too hard to feel for only that.”

Kas nodded overenthusiastically. “Actually, it’s cold-forged iron to hide the magic! I’ve had problems reading the enchantment, but I am afraid of breaking it if I tried to remove the outer layer.”

“Well, knowing what it does would help as a first step?” I suggested.

“Oh, that one was easy,” Kas replied. “The test-subject’s life-force was extracted slowly upon insertion and converted to mana. Which the wielder of the rod could then use to cast spells.”

I thanked the Infernum that the female wasn’t calling it a dildo. Because it totally was one if I understood her correctly.

“Ahem,” I cleared my throat. “That sounds… useful… if someone has an overabundant pool of life-force and lacks mana.” It certainly wasn’t the case for me or most other demons. The Infernum was a place so saturated with mana that converting life-force, the energy that kept your physical body going, sounded like a masochistic act.

Just like mana was just an umbrella term for all the various forms energy could take on that were known to physics, life-force was responsible for a being’s ability to regenerate and stay young and healthy. Just like with mana though, the details were of course indefinitely more complex and required lifetimes of study.

But it was generally known that the more mana a being held, the more energy bled over into its life-force, causing any mortal spell caster to be indefinitely more healthy and long-lived than his or her mundane counterpart.

I sighed. “Forgive me for not getting it. This thing sounds useless to demons like us… which doesn’t mean that the employed techniques to create such an artefact in themselves aren’t interesting.”

“Oh, but I am not interested in the artefact as it is, or the techniques,” Kas purred back. “All I want is the conversion part of the enchantment.”

I frowned. “The conversion?”

“Yes, think about it.” She took the dildo-spell-rod out of my hands. “All I want to know is how it’s possible to convert life-force to mana. Because if I can do that, then the reverse is also possible. And the ability to convert a demon’s enormous mana pool to life-force…”

“Would be actually very valuable,” I finished while a teeth-showing smile lit up my entire face.

Seeing my expression, Kas actually took a step away from me, but I grabbed her hand and held her tight. “Oh, mistress Kasdeya. You wouldn’t refuse my help to fathom all of this artefact’s secrets?”