All our talk about using my skill to just, you know reform the Devil had to be, eventually, tempered by the fact that I'd never tried anything like this. I'd only used the skill once before, and not any of the advanced usages; however, as we got to a point of actual Negotiations, Merry prodded me to try to induce the skill to produce a piece of contract paper, and sure enough, that was something that I could do with it.

That led to me and the Devil looking over her shoulder as Merry wrote with a comparatively oversized pen on a piece of paper larger than she was.

"So, first, remove the Evil system tag," she said, tapping the pen next to where she'd written that down. "That should be a soul-level thing. Second, alter the Devil's form to that of a human. Third, increase the size of his sword, and also his penis," she tapped those two points on the paper, "both are form things, and fourth, break his relationship with Satan, should be a soul thing. In exchange for these, Jerry will be awarded his Full Clear Quest, uh, and I guess also a bunch of experience?" She looked over her shoulder at the Devil, obviously uncertain.

"If it is within my power to give, who am I to argue?" he asked, again putting his hand to his chest and trying to look noble.

"And notable here is that although we have the option of continuing to own the Devil when the contract is signed, after the portion of the signage where whatever we change happens, we're not interested in that."

"Noble of you, though I must suggest that if this ends up with me being bound into an item or some such anyway, don't just leave me on the floor for whomever to pick up. Who knows what kind of horrible life I may lead if just anyone holds my leash."

Merry looked to me for approval, and I nodded. Although I had no real understanding of whether or not this would work, the theory at least was sound.

"Then we're agreed." Merry put two lines on the paper for signing, or whatever, but stood up and obviously remained in the way so that neither of us could move on it. "So... Jerry, I think I'm gonna want to be inside, 'cos i bet we're gonna have to figure out what we're doing on the fly. Be ready for this all to be some kind of real mess, yeah?"

I nodded. The Devil, I noted, seemed unperturbed by the idea that this soul surgery might be go terribly wrong, even with us saying exactly that in front of him. Instead, I just held out a hand to the fairy, and she found her way back into my mind, or I guess into my magic, in the moments after she reached her own hand out to take mine.

I waited for her to be settled, and then nodded at the big red man next to me, taking the pen and signing my own name in the space provided.

The Devil instead pricked his own finger and moved to write with his own blood, which.... okay? But he paused at the last moment.

"This could really work, couldn't it?" he said, and a smile spread over his sharp-toothed face. "I'll no longer simply be some idiot monster for others to crush. I'll be free to make my own choices. With this contract," he placed his finger to the page, blood immediately soaking into the page, "I will be reborn!"

I found myself with a raging headache--not because the magic instantly activated, which turned out not to be correct. Instead, I had to activate the skill, The Devil's Rebirth Contract, to activate the item, the Devil's rebirth contract, and that just fucking pissed me off.

But it did activate, and when it activated, a lot of things happened. Mostly, the Devil shattered into glass pieces, but also, I got a quest window, the Dungeon registered me as having killed the final boss, and then those glass pieces swirled into a vortex of air and dived into the scroll. As it did, I felt... something, like I was a little more full than I had been, but not in any way that made sense to me.

The scroll vibrated, and Merry and I both grimaced, as the Skill tried to do something, but I didn't have nearly enough experience to tell what, and neither did she.

After a long moment, Merry was able to provide me with a mental picture; as with the efforts to rebuild my skills and items, I was left with what seemed to be a shattered thing, but all laid out in what was obviously a space set aside for it. Like when we'd taken apart an item and been given a bunch of odd magical pieces to reassemble, the parts weren't normal; instead, the Devil's body was separated into concepts, and each concept tied to physical stuff.

And, I guess, we were supposed to put it back together ourselves, or... I guess just modify it ourselves? At the start it was kind of hard to know, though it ended up being more of the latter.

Look--I'll level with you. I wish I could properly describe sorting through the presumably-fake biology of a Dungeon-created Devil and combing out concepts like "Red skin", "Evil", "Horns", etc. I wish I could describe a fairy mentally holding the pure, unattached concept of penis size and turning it around in her hands and around looking for a switch or a dial to make it go up. And I wish I could properly describe exactly what the fuck the thing with the "Satan's Valet" title was supposed to mean, because it was a giant confusing ball of circuits and gears and whatever else in Merry's understanding of things and all we could really do it pluck it out with a giant pair of tweezers, trying not to let it get tangled up with anything else, and then just throw it away.

What I'm saying is I'd like to describe insanity properly, but I just can't. Some things just aren't supposed to make sense.

All I can really tell you is that when we more or less put the Devil's body together in a way that was described by the contract, the contract itself recognized that we had accomplished what we promised. Maybe we had also done some kind of damage--again, hard to tell--but done was done.

And then the contract shifted and disassembled the Devil's Executioner Blade, because we had also put that down in the promise. We... kind of achieved what we were looking for there too? I'm not sure we did a good job with it, though.

The contract seemed to accept that it had been fulfilled, when it was fulfilled. And then I was presented with an emotional trigger that I could pull, or I guess two; one was decidedly more selfish than the other, and Merry and I agreed that if I did that, then in spite of whatever was written on the contract, the Devil would become my minion. The skill was deliberately written with betrayal in mind, contract or not.

But after pulling the other trigger, a man appeared in front of me. He was about the Devil's height, weight, and body type, and was carrying the Executioner's Blade in one hand... and a black suitcase in the other. He was no longer red-skinned, horned, or clawed, though he was still dressed in little aside from a loincloth--except that he was now also wearing a fedora, for reasons that I admit I honestly could not explain. The fedora and briefcase seemed, in my mind, to match, though I couldn't really explain either.

The former Devil let his sword fall to the ground and immediately lifted his loincloth, which pissed me the hell off as I had to turn my head to not be staring right at a largeish man-dick. He dropped it after only a moment, though, immediately doing the kind of patting-around-his-body that you expect someone to do when they were aware that their body had been transformed and they didn't have a mirror handy.

Meanwhile, I distracted myself with the Quest.

[ GOOD AND EVIL ] [ FULL CLEAR ] The Devil of Pearland Dungeon has requested that you deliver a declaration of war to the Dungeon God Kalamitus in Galveston Wharf Dungeon. Accomplishing this will affect both Dungeons significantly and may have severe consequences for your world. [ REWARD: Full Clear (Xzyrtvwartcihz), Redemption ]

I frowned at the window, because the line about the quest affecting the Dungeons seemed incongruous with what I'd been told. I mean, in theory, if I replaced the Dungeon Administrator and freed Kalamitus, then yes, that would technically affect both dungeons, but would they be affected simply because I completed the quest? The Devil had said, before, that when the Quest was accomplished, the dungeons would "spill out" into the mortal world, but neither the Administrator nor Kalamitus had said anything about that, specifically.

"I'm... beautiful!" cooed the man formerly known as The Devil, both hands on his rosy, flesh-colored cheeks, as tears rolled down his eyes.

Hey, boss, don't mean to interrupt, but...

Merry mentally gestured towards a clock hanging in midair, which suggested it had taken a little shy of an hour for us to... more or less tweak the Devil's dungeon... code? Which meant that whatever the boss of the dungeon was, now--this guy, or another Devil, or whatever--it would soon be spawning, or... whatever.

I just gave Merry a mental shrug in reply, because honestly I didn't care, and tried to figure out whether there was some other devious thing about this Full Clear quest that I hadn't yet considered.

And so the next few minutes passed in relative peace, until the clock hit zero.

Out of all the things that I expected to happen, I certainly wouldn't have put on the list that the Administrator's avatar would appear in the room, sitting on the Devil's bone throne in front of a lava waterfall curtain, his glasses still opaquely blocking his eyes behind, his Hawaiian shirt fluttering in an invisible breeze. Somehow... perhaps mostly because we couldn't see his eyes, he managed to pull of an intimidating aura for someone who was, admittedly, a nerdy little beanpole.

The former Devil whirled as soon as he appeared, though, flinching back as though he'd been struck. Me, I sensed him, and Merry immediately tried to reach out to see what she could sense from the guy, but...

He's blockin' me, she said after a moment. Or maybe he's not real, and this is just a dungeon monster to look like the guy?

Actually, that made a lot more sense, yeah. I'd already seen that monsters could be the mouthpieces for an Administrator, so why not be more direct?

The beanpole raised one hand, and the Devil's newer, larger Executioner Blade fluttered across the room like a small bit of metal caught in an enormous magnetic field, smashing into his hand at incredible speeds--but stopped dead where it landed, as though his grip was weightier than the stone walls that... that frankly had already been shattered by the sword being thrown at them with somewhat less force than that.

"You've taken something of mine yet again, Mr. Applebee." The fake Administrator stood up from the bone throne, his too-small fingers carefully considering the sword in his hand as though they were quite familiar with it. "I must admit, I didn't expect that you would find a way to still get your hands on that Full Clear Quest in spite of how badly you screwed up absolutely everything, and yet, here you are."

"M-my lord," said the former Devil, bowing down. "It was my own desires, my own selfish--"

"Enough, Lived," the beanpole said, tiredly, "You're nothing but a child expected to fill the shoes of an adult. It's something all of us here understand too well, and yet you, more than the rest of us, are too naive." And with a flick of his wrist, the fake Administrator threw the black blade end over end, through the devil, and then through the stone floor behind him, the blade vanishing out of sight as stone blocks erupted into the air from the impact.

The ...Lived? Merry had to tell me that it was Devil spelled backwards, which okay... the guy looked down at the hole through his stomach and gurgled blood, fell over, and shrank down into an item--a corpse doll. I considered that for a long moment, before the Administrator's voice brought me back.

"It's pathetic, really," said the beanpole, gesturing with one hand to make the stone blocks scattering into the air pause in space. With only his will--I could swear he wasn't using telekinetic force, according to my senses--he tossed the corpse doll down into the hole in the void and replaced the blocks in the floor. "When I told you that the Quest was still here, I meant it, though of course I didn't believe you could accomplish this, even after the hint that the Hag gave you. In fact I laid a trap that if you ever owned the Devil's Soul... well, it wouldn't turn out well for you."

That seemed entirely in the Administrator's character, and also made sense as a general moral rule, yeah. Owning random Dungeon monsters, sure; the system already did that. Enslaving people was highly immoral, and a bad thing in general. But owning something that was supposed to be a mythological character, and a major one at that... that seemed like its own kind of hubris.

"I was in a different Dungeon and had the opportunity to turn one of their minibosses," I said, conversationally, "because she made the same mistake you did. That was in Armand Bayou. Instead I notified the Administrator and she rewarded me. I'm not actually all that interested in ...well, trying to screw everything up, I guess. I had to, here, to get what I wanted, but... I'm not in it to see the world burn."

"Oh, you had to." The Administrator turned to me more directly. "I see, you had to. You just had to mess up all my plans and the way my system works so that you could kill me and take over. It simply must be."

I ground my teeth a little before replying. "Okay, fine. I wanted to, but not because I want to hurt you, not even to see you die or to get my reward. I did it because I said I would do it and I wanted to actually do what I set out to do."

"How noble," the beanpole replied, with heavy sarcasm.

"It's not noble, but it's not evil either. Honestly, try and tell me that I seriously inconvenienced you, or even that you couldn't possibly see it coming." I crossed my arms in front of me. "Meanwhile I still don't understand the consequences of the quest or whether or not there is some secret even more awful thing that's going to happen when I accomplish it that nobody's said yet."

"Yes, I thought you would enjoy that quest description," the beanpole chuckled. "And since you've messed with my Dungeon, I suppose I won't bother to answer your question, either. You simply have to make up your own mind."

I considered his words for a few seconds, and then accepted the quest, wordlessly. I'd already made up my mind, really... but I hesitated. And if he did that on purpose just to screw with me... well, from what everyone had said, whatever was going to happen needed to happen at some point anyway. If I wasn't going to get any more information, then screw it.

The beanpole smirked at me and have a half-hearted shrug.

I moved towards the entrance, thinking I'd just walk away from this conversation and back to the nearest Fairy Dungeon entrance... but it was sealed, as was (I noted quickly) the exit. That meant that the Administrator's avatar was... now, effectively the Dungeon Boss.

If not forever, at least in this moment, for me.

"Going so soon, Jerry?" The beanpole removed his glasses, and beneath them, instead of the black voids from before, were two burning orbs of fire. "Sorry, but I have one last challenge you have to defeat in order to get my recommendation. If you'd taken the bonus fight in the crypt, I might have left it at that, but I really want to see you test your limits. After all, you're a very rare breed."

The beanpole Administrators' arms and legs suddenly lengthened and his skin turned black, his Hawaiian shirt stretching and becoming consumed with fire until it was consumed and replaced by a black business suit. His face seemed to vanish into shadow, but for the burning orbs of his eyes, as well as a burning fire that he held within his mouth, backlighting his smile from within.

"You were willing to give even the Devil what he wanted," said the beanpole, his voice coming out as an insane scratching raspy voice that made my ears ring when he spoke. "So now you're going to give me what I want. One last fight, one true fight before the end."

I glanced up at the species ID above the Administrator's head, my heart clenching with sudden alarm.

[ THE SLENDERMAN - Lv 250 ]