“Keep fighting, Algier!” Enzi cheered, hopping and waving in such a way that it made her breasts bounce up and down. “I believe you might win.”

I ducked backwards and barely dodged a claw to the face.

“Come on, it’s one fucking balaam!” Volce growled. “Stop being a wuss and stab them. I need some fucking points, already!”

One balaam, sure, except it was huge! Unlike Toll, this one had a bear’s head. Its arms were bulging muscle and covered in a thick layer of fur. Worst, it sported claws longer enough that, when combined with its reach, completely outranged my frustratingly small knife.

“You know,” I huffed, hacking to fend off another swipe from the balaam, “you can always help.”

“Algier,” Toll said. “I can tell you their weaknesses. All you must do is ask me a—”

The bear-headed balaam got impatient and charged in. I found my opportunity and lunged sideways, bringing my knife with me as I moved. I ducked under the balaam’s swipe and my knife nicked just beneath their armpit. It wasn’t a deep cut, but it was all I needed.

Once I’d passed through, the balaam paused and stared at me, confused. Then slowly, their body began to evaporate into a golden mist. They stood up straight, holding their disappearing arms limp at their side, and their large eyes were filled with so much sorrow.

When the demon was gone, I rested a hand on my knee and tried to catch my breath. All of the demons were so fucking annoying. Between Toll’s persistence, Volce’s shouting, and Enzi’s… distractions, I wanted to strangle each of them. However, that would have done nothing because demons don’t breathe, so instead I opted for petty vengeance.

“Hey Toll,” I said. The balaam was perched in a tree and they cocked their eagle-like head to the side. “I don’t need… to ask questions. I already know… where your sigil is.”

Toll’s crest rose and fell and their head jerked around nervously. They did not like that one. I cracked a smile at their discomfort.

As usual, I wasn’t being wholly honest. There are six places where a balaam’s sigil usually shows up: under each armpit, behind either knee, tucked inside the divot in the left collarbone, and on the inside of the right thigh. “Usually” is the operant word here. All demons are different, after all, even if they share the same canto.

They’re small and all very difficult to reach. I’d happened to slice three of those spots before I struck the bear-headed balaam under the left armpit, hence why the fight took so long. It could have gone on for longer if I’d been less lucky.

I didn’t know where Toll’s sigil was hidden, but given their distinct bird features I doubted it was near the collarbone or on the back of their knees. Which nailed it down to three possibilities, assuming I’d assumed correctly. The better question was, If I had to fight Toll, how many guesses would I get before they turned me into Swiss cheese?

While smirking out my pride for having perturbed Toll, I heard someone beg, “No, wait, I can give you information! I’m more use to you bound than—”

Begging was pointless. A jet of flame roared out. Markus stood in front of a row of trees with his gloved finger pointed at a demon, flames shooting the tip of it and burning his begging victim to literal ashes.

Once the demon had disappeared completely, Markus turned to me with a wicked grin on his face and a fiery glint in his eyes.

Volce wasn’t having any of it. The little deuce hovered over to Markus with his fists balled at his sides. “You stupid fucking pyromantic horns-for-brains! What the fuck did you do?”

Markus paused as he readjusted his gloves and glanced around, confused. “What?” he said, just like he’d done nothing wrong.

Now the deuce was fuming. I didn’t know a vein could pop out of a demon’s temple, given their corporeal forms had no blood in them, but Volce certainly had one.

His voice rose in pitch. “What? WHAT!?!” He thrust a trembling finger to the trees, which were now black, and burning. “The whole fucking forest is on fire, you belligerent silver-tongued horseradish! What are you trying to do, slow cook my human?”

Right. The forest was on fire. The forest was always on fire. The moment Markus started lighting things up, he’d light everything up. It was a good thing that his rabdos’ flames died out quickly, or else the entire Ring of Betrayal would have been a veritable Hellscape by now. Not that it wasn’t already.

Markus stared at the flaming trees and scrunched up his nose. “It’s not a very big forest, really.”

Toll was searching around the landscape for a tree to perch on, only to find that all the trees were collapsing. Fluffing their feathers, the balaam settled on a rock. It took a few seconds of adjusting before they could get comfortable.

They fixed an eye on Markus. “We must discuss your habit of setting things on fire, haures. It is too much.”

“Too much is the understatement of the millennium!” Volce screeched. “Where the fuck do you even get the ash to power that overpowered rabdos?”

“He borrows from his corporeal form,” Toll answered.

“Fuck you, Toll!”

And so they went. This wasn’t the first time an argument had broken out between the demons. It wasn’t caused by one of them grating on the rest—they were all assholes, and a room full of assholes is always going to stink. Regardless, keeping them at each others’ throats was a good way to keep them away from mine, so I let them fight. Sometimes I even instigated it.

Sighing, I scooped up the erased balaam’s ashes with my bare hand and thought, Inventory. Without so much as looking, I shoved my hand towards a random spot in the air and reality rippled around it.

As I pushed further in, it looked like my wrist had been severed, my hand gradually being swallowed up by reality. Despite that, I could feel still feel the ash in my hand and the temperature on the other side of the hole was perfect, much cooler than the sweltering heat that licked my brow in the real world.

I don’t think I will ever get used to that sensation of detachment. It’s just unnatural.

Putting thoughts of dismemberment aside, I turned my hand and let go. I could feel the ash leave my palm though I couldn’t see it happen. Regardless, I was one hundred percent certain that the ash was in there and I could take it out whenever I chose.

Once I withdrew my empty hand, a new popup blinked before me:

Gained 4 points (shared 4 with Volce)

It’s a pretty neat system, I have to admit. Aside from its tendency to rub it in my face that I was falling far behind the others on points, that is. It only activates when I’m out of danger, so I assume the popup system is tied to stress levels or something.

Anyway, I didn’t bother looking for rabdoses. The demon my companions had delegated to me looked like the runt of their group. The rest of the demons weren’t very combat oriented, and were dispatched quickly by everyone besides Volce, who’d decided to sit cross-legged the entire fight and watch me struggle. There were no bunès or autothith’s, thankfully, which sadly meant that everyone else saw it as a game. And what do you do at the end of a game? Collect prizes. They got the rabdoses, I got ash and sadness.

“Hey, idiots,” I said. All four demons turned to face me and I had to suppress the urge to smile at their expressions, like four enepsis in a rifle’s scope. “Does anyone have a pen and paper?”

Unlike with the map, there was no hesitation. Toll pointed at Enzi, who tilted her head sideways and flashed him an exasperated look. Then Toll, Markus, and Volce went back to arguing.

I stuck a hand out. “Can I borrow it?”

Sighing, Enzi stuck her hand into a hole in the air and drew out a moleskin notebook. My eyes widened when I recognised it.

Speakeasy, Class 3-S. A rabdos made long before the invention of telecommunications. It’s a moleskin notebook that allows communication between two people, distance be damned. If you write on a page on one side of the book, it’ll copy that text onto a page on the exact opposite side.

Enzi clutched the book to her breasts and stepped over to me, making a ceremony out of the whole thing. When she was close, she held the book out to me. I went to grab it, then Enzi pulled it away.

“You can’t keep using a woman like this, Algier,” the enepsi toyed.

I folded my arms. “What do you want?”

Enzi manoeuvred Speakeasy behind her back then crept up to me. She leaned forward so that her head was rested beneath my chin, then stared up at me with big dark eyes.

“A kiss would be nice.”

“What else?”

She reeled back and looked away. I half expected her to pout, but instead a faint smile cracked her lips. “You know, even demons have a past. We never bring it up because it’s usually irrelevant to the present, but I’ve found that humans will ask about it eventually. Once a human gets to know someone, they want to know who they were as well.”

Off to the side, Volce was reciting all of Markus’ exploits and how, in his opinion, the haures was doing nothing but cause trouble in the world.

Enzi faced me. She wasn’t trying to flirt or to seduce me. She just eyed me curiously. Far too curiously. If it weren’t for the jewels glinting off her single horn, I would have thought she was just an average human.

“I want try it, learning about a human’s past,” she said matter-of-factly. “So why don’t you tell me something about yourself. Perhaps something personal, that you usually don’t share with others. I mean, I know you’re strong, Algier, but you can’t keep bottling everything up.”

I didn’t know what to say. She’d kind of taken me by surprise with that speech. Usually, you’d expect a demon to keep pressuring you for what they want in the least imaginative way possible. This was… too sincere. Humanly sincere. And it was highly effective.

Sighing, I ran a hand through my brown hair to get it out of my eyes. “I never actually met my mother. She’d left me at an orphanage when I was a baby. I only knew because the nuns explained it to me.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Enzi said.

I raised a hand. “Hang on. Let me finish.” Reaching into my shirt, I pulled out my mother’s locket. “She left me two gifts. One was this locket, which had been left around my neck. Only I can open it.”

I stuffed the locket back into my shirt and my face set into a frown. “The other was gifted to me when I was twelve. It was a gun, a rabdos, named Erasure.”

Enzi was enraptured by the story and I wanted to keep going. Having such an attentive listener was such a relief, something I hadn’t experienced since who knows how long. However, I realised with a start that this wasn’t right. She was still a demon. I snapped my mouth shut and held out my hand for the book.

The enepsi looked down at my hand, back up at me, then placed the book gently in my palm. “Thank you,” she said softly. Her appreciative smile was too much to bear.

Exhaling, I turned away and pulled up my stat screen, fearing the worst.

[Affection] (new)

Enzi: 1

Fantastic. So the other side of an enepsi’s power is affection. Rather than just trading favours, an enepsi can make a human like them. Obviously, this doesn’t work well on demons as it’s questionable whether demons actually felt anything. However, what makes affection so dangerous to a human isn’t that it forces you to please the demon, but that it makes you want to please them. What that means is that bigger affection equals less ability to resist an enepsi’s wants.

And Enzi was a master of affection. Before entering the Culling, she would hold fan meet and greets where her budding supporters—usually young and impressionable humans—would shower her with gifts. She always accepted them with a smile. More expensive gifts would grant you a “private meeting” with her. I have no idea what went on during those meetings, but given how so many of her suitors were men, I could guess.

Trying to ignore what had just transpired, I nestled down atop a rock and flipped open Speakeasy. Without further ado, I took the included pen that had been pinned to the cover, gave it a twirl, and started writing.

Enzi was leaning over my shoulder in a heartbeat—a terrible distraction no matter who was doing it, but doubly so when they were pressing their features to my back.

“What are you doing?”

“Poetry,” I said. “I’m just taking the chance to relax.”

Enzi tilted her head to the side. “I’ve never heard of a human that writes poetry to relax.”

“Because all the humans you’ve slept with used you to relax.”

“Not all of them.”

I tried to ignore the implication.

Poetry is not my first love, nor my twentieth. As is usually the case with stray human children like me, I was raised by the nuns of the Satanic Order for Humans In Need Of Religious Action, or SOHINORA for short.

For the first sixteen years of my life, I’d lived in an old church that had been repurposed for the new world “religion”, which is just demons posing as guides for humans in need of some practical help and advice. Or, in the case of orphans like me, they were my caretakers.

Wanting to ensure we were brought up as humanly normal as possible, the demonic nuns would make us do human things, like cooking unreasonable amounts of pasta, knitting sweaters a dozen metres long, and training with firearms every second weekend the moment we were strong enough to muscle the recoil of a .22. Perfectly normal.

One of those activities was writing poetry. Of course, not being able to judge what makes a poem good, the demonic nuns would praise our terrible work so long as we made it rhyme. That prompted the orphans to write the most atrocious poetry we could just to see how long it took before the demons realised we were screwing with them.

However, one interesting side effect of this practice was that I became rather good (read, “average”) at writing poetry. Since demons are so terrible at interpretation, we SOHINORA orphans learned quickly that we could pass around secret messages to each other in poetic form. Of course, it needed to be a little abstract, but so long as it wasn’t too obscure, most humans would understand the meaning just fine.

And the demons? They thought we loved it, so they made us write more. Which was terrible because even to this day I don’t like poetry.

This made it easy for Enzi to distract me. I was forcing myself to write anyway, so as I hashed out terrible line after terrible line, I took a few moments between to listen and talk. It was fine, though. I had plenty of time.

“Who’s your inspiration for this poem?” she asked, pressing herself against me to prompt an answer.

“Me,” I answered, “and my desire not to die.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“How I don’t want to die.”

“That’s rather morbid, don’t you think?”

I lowered the book and stared at her deadpan. “When a star is burning, we call it a star. There’s nothing special about it. It gets a designation and we mark its position in space relative to ourselves. But when it dies”—I clapped my hands, causing Enzi to flinch—“that’s when it shines brightest. That’s when we all point to the skies and say, ‘Look, a supernova!’”

The demon furrowed her brows. “I’m not sure I follow.”

I shook my head and picked up Speakeasy. “And that’s why you demons will always be inferior to us. You last forever. You have to fabricate wars and tournaments to emulate something so natural to us.”

“But I don’t understand. Why would you not want to exist?”

I opened my mouth to give a witty answer, then snapped it shut again. This whole conversation was pointless, really. We were never going to see eye to eye. Humans and demons were too different, even if, sometimes, they looked and acted very much like us. I shook my head and went back to writing.

As the air between us grew stale, Enzi let off my shoulder and settled down on the rock beside me. To my relief, she wasn’t pressing herself against me. Instead, she stared into the distance.

“What are your plans?” she asked, jutting her chin forward.

In the hazy distance, a black spire rose above the treetops, its height challenged only by the monstrous walls. The sight of it made my throat catch.

That was a Junction Tower, one of four placed in the middle of the Ring at each of the four cardinal directions. Its purpose was twofold: allow Participants to teleport to another Junction, and to allow the formation of parties. Depending on what happened next, we may not even make it to the Junction. For many reasons.

I shrugged. “I’ll figure it out when we get there. Junctions are hot spots. No point rushing in before we know what’s going on.”

Which was bullshit. I’d seen enough videos to know exactly what to expect when we walked into the Junction. All I needed was for my plan with the estray to succeed and it would work out. Since that alone was tenuous, that meant I was running on a knife’s edge.

With a flourish, I tore out the page I’d been writing on, then its copy at the back of the book, and slapped the cover closed. “Done!” I announced.

The arguing demons all paused and turned upon hearing me shout. I hopped off the boulder and eyed them. “Collect the ashes,” I said, pointing at the circle Markus had left behind. “I’ve had my rest so now we move.”

“About bloody time,” Markus whined. “Five more minutes having to listen to these two whinges and I’d probably have set another forest on fire.”

“Yeah, I bet you would,” Volce grumbled. “You’re probably itching for an excuse.”

Shaking my head. I picked up a rock from the ground the size of my hand. I placed one of the pages on the boulder I’d just been sitting on, right beside Enzi. Then I ceremoniously placed the smaller rock on top.

She tilted her head as she watched me. “What are you doing?”

I closed my eyes. “Leaving something for posterity. Human thing. You won’t get it.”

I kept my hand on the rock and slowed my breath, like I was in deep prayer. Using that as cover, I activated Volce’s power. The deuce was shouting as I did so, and that sudden connection caused him to stutter for a moment. I could feel his confusion, feel that odd sensation of his fiery will marching in along that thread that tied us together, feel him trying to poke around. In the meanwhile, he’d resumed his argument so the others would have no idea that he was scanning my thoughts at this instant.

Or trying to, anyway, since I snapped the connection before he actually got a chance to. I just hoped it was enough time for me, and not enough for Volce.

That part done, I trudged over to the other demons with knife and spare page in hand. Enzi gave pursuit, her head tilted in contemplation.

As I passed Markus, I slapped the second page against his chest. He stopped his vapid explanations to stare down at the paper.

“Since you like burning stuff,” I clarified, then walked right past the demons, continuing our long march northwest.

Markus grinned, flashing long canines. “My, Algier, you must truly care for me if you’re thinking about my needs like this.”

I closed my eyes and tightened my grip around the knife. It took everything I had not to turn around and slice his throat.

“Hey, don’t encourage him!” Volce howled at me. “We just came to an agreement and now you’re trying to get him to light more things on fire.”

“No, you kept screaming your demands,” Markus said. “I kept twirling my finger in my ear.”

“Tell me, how much paper would you need to burn before you are satisfied?” Toll asked.

Volce thrust a finger at Toll. “Don’t you encourage him either!”

“Shut up and let’s go,” I screamed over my shoulder. “I swear, if there’s anything demons and humans have in common, it’s that we’re all bad at relationships.”