“Oh, that is fucking disgusting!”

That was at least the tenth time in the last five minutes that Volce had repeated that exact complaint. This time, it was prompted by him dabbing blood off my calves. I’d torn off a bit of my jacket’s sleeve to use as a makeshift rag, and the deuce had been contorting himself into a demon pretzel ever since I gave it to him.

Despite the beating I’d taken from the needle shot thirty minutes prior, I wasn’t too badly beaten up. More than that, I was just exhausted. That brief few seconds of borrowing Volce’s power had coincidentally resulted in most of the pinpricks on my arms and side congealing. Furthermore, I was far enough away from the blast that my jacket had taken the brunt of it. The needles hadn’t stuck in too deep.

For the most part, I just needed to clean the wounds so they didn’t get infected. I’d done most of it myself, but there were some wounds that I couldn’t reach and ended up strongarming Volce into doing it, under the threat of having Enzi tend to me instead.

“Argh! I’m sick of this!”

Volce hurled the bloody rag onto the ground. Then he grabbed one of my water bottles and threw it at the rag for good measure.

Enzi stood from her seat atop the base of a tree. “Volce, don’t litter!” she reprimanded.

“I’ll stop littering when the human stops being so… so… smudgy!” The deuce kicked the bottle he’d tossed for good measure. It went flying into a patch of undergrowth. “Seriously, humans should be made out of alcohol or something. Blood is just… urgh!”

Sighing, I looked up from a patch of dirt, where I’d been lying shirtless. “Volce, you’re a demon. You can’t drink alcohol.”

The deuce spun around with his fists balled. “Oh, I know that. But you humans are great when you’re drunk. Real stupid, real easy to manipulate.”

Enzi let out a light-hearted chuckle which she stifled with her fingertips. She noticed me glaring at her then tilted her head to the side. “I’m sorry, Algier. It’s just that he said something agreeable.”

“I didn’t know demons had a sense of humour,” I said tartly.

Her lips twitched. “It seems there are many things you don’t know about us.”

My eyes settled onto the arm that Enzi tucked behind her back.

“It stopped evaporating,” I stated.

The enepsi nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

“It only stopped evaporating now.”

Enzi’s hand was in a terrible state after she’d sliced it with Gale. A nasty V had been left on her palm, and her face had been contorted ever so slightly with pain brought on by ash sliding into the wound. During our run through the forest, she’d left a thin trail of smoke behind her. Enzi had tried to cover it up by taking up the rear, but all I had to do to see it was turn around.

It wasn’t too bad, but as long as she was evaporating, she’d be less helpful in a fight. Wounds don’t stop a demon, but they won’t move very fast if, say, a leg is missing.

Smiling, Enzi held up her palm. It was completely smooth now, with all traces of ash washed off. She’d been playing with the water bottles that I’d left out for Volce to use earlier, making a few poor attempts to flirt using water as a prop. No doubt she’d washed her hand down while I wasn’t looking.

Not that I minded all that much. I had so much water I was at no risk of running out.

Her wound wasn’t “healed”, exactly. It was more like putting stitches on a cut to stop the bleeding. It was still tender and could open up again if not properly healed. If she couldn’t keep the wound closed, she’d disintegrate ever so slowly, like a hole in a damn draining her until there was nothing left but a meaningless sigil.

Repairing a corporeal form isn’t an ability exclusive to enepsis. Every demon can manipulate their form to a degree. In fact, one of the more interesting feats a demon can perform is to pull off pieces of themselves and form them into physical objects. Softer or less dense materials are easier to make, such as cloth and paper. Harder materials like steel take forever to produce and never have the properties of a rabdos. Liquid, ironically, is so difficult to synthesise that most cantos of demons unattuned to water don’t even bother with it. After all, demons rarely needed water. When the object is produced by the demon, it no longer has any connection with them. It becomes an object like anything else.

For example, Markus had already weaved together threads off his corporeal form to repair his suit. He was quite talented at it as well, given that, after only a moment of looking away, his suit was fully repaired and looked like it had just been dry cleaned.

It sounds strange that a physical amalgamation of a demon, partially bound by the rules and principles of the physical universe, can be so… metaphysical. It makes a lot more sense if you think of it like this: a demon’s sigil is like the CPU which form the bulk of its will and behaviour, and the form is the RAM which can be used to process those actions. Like in any computer, you can add more or less RAM, partition it off to an application, or just let it idle. Likewise, a demon’s form can be larger, smaller, and be bent slightly to perform particular tasks, but always within reason. Remove some of the form and they’re fine. Remove too much and, just like a computer, the whole thing crashes because it no longer has the memory it needs to run. But unlike a computer, you can’t reboot a demon.

Enzi stepped over to the dirty rag that Volce had thrown, grabbed it, took another of the water bottles, and washed it down. Upon seeing this, Volce came barrelling up to her and swiped the rag off Enzi, causing the enepsi to let out a startled yelp.

“What did I tell you, Tits?”

“Hands off your human,” Toll answered.

The balaam was perched comfortably upon the lowest branch of an acacia. Sunlight barely trickled in through the canopy here—a relatively pristine patch of forest in a scarred world. It was cool here and a little humid. Somehow, I think the balaam appreciated that. I know I certainly did after nearly getting fried to a crisp.

Volce thrust a finger at the Toll and was about to shout, but the balaam beat him to the punch.

“Fuck you, Toll,” they said monotonically. Then they gave their body a shake, causing the rag they draped over themselves to fling around, dropping dirt and grass.

The deuce growled and tossed the rag again. It got caught in a shrub this time.

“Volce, go pick my stuff back up,” I said.

The deuce’s face twisted into a scowl. “I’ll give you a rag, stupid human.” Then he hovered off to clean up after himself.

Despite his complaints, Volce had actually been quieter than usual. It was only a few grumbles here and there which broke up the silence. For the most part, though, he’d been silent while patting my arms and legs down, as though lost in thought.

Enzi considered me a moment with her head tilted to the side. Seeming to come to a decision, she walked over to where my shirt had been hanging to dry on a broken branch. Giving it a flick to snap out some of the creases, she then brought it over to me with a grin so wide it made creases at the corners of her eyes.

“Here you go, Algier,” Enzi said, presenting me my dried shirt. Of course, she leaned forward as she did so. She took any opportunity to flash her significant breasts to me. Reluctantly, I sat up and took it from her.

As I slipped the shirt on, my shoulder twinged with a sharp pain. It wasn’t the needle wounds causing that—no, it was deeper. I think it had happened when I got knocked back by Enzi’s strike and landed hard on the road. I gave the shoulder a roll to try work out some of the pain.

Enzi knelt down beside me and her big dark eyes met mine. She thoughtfully touched a hand to my back where none of the needles had struck. “Algier, since Volce doesn’t want to clean up your wounds anymore, why don’t you let me?”

I rushed to answer before Toll had the chance. “No.” I didn’t bother explaining, but the reason was simple: I didn’t want to owe Enzi any more favours.

Seeming to read my mind, Enzi said, “Don’t worry. I won’t ask for anything in return.”

“I know you won’t, and that doesn’t change anything.” After all, she didn’t need to ask for anything, I just had to feel like I owed her something.

Thankfully, I hadn’t owed her any favours after she’d saved my life in the lithium pits. I know because I’d already checked my stat screen. Rather than favours, however, my “affection” for her had increased by one. Lovely. I don’t know why, and I don’t really care. Enzi was getting progressively more annoying to be around and I needed to push her away.

I was really beginning to appreciate this stat screen. I would have never realised that I’d gained more affection for Enzi without it. Those number may have been arbitrary but they helped me make better decisions: I became colder towards Enzi and proactively rejected her prior advances to help me, opting to endure Volce’s grumblings instead.

Smiling coyly, Enzi leaned in and whispered. “If you’d like, I can kiss the wound better.”

I furrowed my brows. “Demons don’t have saliva.”

“But I do. It’s partly why I’m so famous. Though I’m sure you know all about that. I bet you’ve seen my performances.”

“No, thank you,” I said, and shoved Enzi away. “There’s nothing attractive about someone who’s perpetually faking it.”

She gave a small hum, stood, then brushed down her knees. She considered me down her button of a nose. “You are a difficult man, Algier. I don’t think I’ve ever had to chase someone for so long. I’m impressed.” She flashed a brief smile before her face twitched briefly in pain.

Two dull claps sounded beside me. I turned, then looked up and met two burning red eyes.

“Yes, very impressive Algier,” Markus said, his tone filled to the brim with snide. “Your sex drive has been so crippled by your need to survive that you’ve successfully rebuffed the world’s second biggest whore. Now.” The haures fixed me with a dead serious expression. “Can. We. Go?”

I leaned back against a tree trunk, cracked open a water bottle, then took a drink. Then I pulled a ration out of my inventory and peeled open the wrapping. I made sure to chew as loudly as possible.

If that wasn’t frustrating enough for Markus, Toll then answered him, “No, because we are not all ready to leave.”

Markus plastered a stiff grin to his face and cocked an eyebrow at Toll. “Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck—”

“’Fuck you, Toll.’ Yes, I am aware.”

“Then are you aware that you’re getting very close to becoming fried chicken?”

Toll cocked their head. “No. I am not capable of being fried as my body contains no flesh.”

I was enjoying this. Seeing Markus get upset filled me with so much pleasure. It also put both Enzi and Toll on edge, which took their attention away from me.

Taking comfort in the lack of attention, I took off a shoe and tipped it upside down. Rocks and sticks had been piling up for most of the day and it was about time I tossed them out. My feet were aching after that run through the lithium fields and the culprits were pouring out in tiny fragments. It was absurd that such tiny, inanimate objects could be responsible for so much discomfort.

I eyed Toll. “Hey.”

The arguing stopped for a moment as four pairs of dimly glowing eyes settled on me. The balaam cocked their head.

Here was the difficult part. I needed a healing item. I was confident the demons had some between them and that I would need to bargain for one. However, as was the case with all deals, being at an information disadvantage would only get you screwed over.

I couldn’t tell you how many times that used to happen to me when I was a kid. Me and the other SOHINORA orphans used to trade for what meagre possessions we could scrounge under the watchful burning eyes of the demons. It was how we learned to get ahead in a world where everyone had a place set out for them based upon test scores and tightly defined performance metrics. During that time, through trial and many errors, I quickly learned an important lesson: each person, whether they be a demon or a human, valued everything differently. Once you understood their personality, you could know what to give them in order to receive something of far greater value in return. But no matter what valuation was placed on an object or act, one fact always remained a constant: the rarer something was, the higher its value would become.

Therefore, I needed information. That was where Toll came in.

From some basic deduction, it was clear that Markus had a bunch of healing items. Throughout that whole ordeal in the lithium pits, he’d been merrily skipping down the road. When he had taken a hit from Wrongtonk, he quickly healed up from it using a Rise and Shine and seemed entirely nonplussed about the situation afterwards. That meant he had plenty more where that came from. Furthermore, if he happened to have a stash of Rise and Shines on him, I figured that would explain where he was getting all the ash to feed his rabdos: he was cutting into his corporeal form then reversing the effect just before dawn, resulting in no loss of form each day. At least, that was my running theory at the time.

Volce had already told me he’d given his last Rise and Shine to me. Since then, I hadn’t seen him pick up many new rabdoses. However, there were other types of healing items. There was an off chance he had a different type of item before we’d partnered, though I doubted it given that I felt he seemed too stupid to pull off a bluff that crafty. In fact, that would have been borderline lying.

Enzi, despite her form evaporating before my eyes, was not using any healing items. That alone was enough to indicate she was fresh out. There was the off chance that she was holding onto it to use as a favour or even for the upcoming fight with the estray. Both of those outcomes I doubted. If she wanted to offer it to me, she would have done so before Volce started patching me up. On the other hand, if she did have any, for her not to use it after evaporating for so long meant that, at most, she had one. That was useless to me. My goal was to trade for one, and if she was treating one last healing item as something so precious, there was little chance of that happening.

Finally, there was Toll, who was a complete mystery. They’d been so secretive the entire time I’d been cooperating with them that there was really no way to guess what they had. Besides, even if I did find out what healing items they had, it wasn’t like I’d get anything from them. Bargaining with a balaam was like trying to pull teeth from a bridge troll: even if they had any, they wouldn’t be interested because it wasn’t a question.

All that settled, I just needed a number, and I needed to make sure that the answer Toll gave me was vague enough not to incur a high debt. I smoothed my expression so as not to give away any hints and asked the question I settled on.

“Amongst the party, do we have five or more healing items?”

The balaam immediately replied with a simple, “Yes.” They’d learned their lesson after I pulled that same trick with the map.

Toll eyed me, feathers bristling. They expected me to ask the next question. They were never going to hear it.

The reason I’d chosen five was because I felt it was a good estimate for what remained. If I’d chosen a number that was too low, I’d get no meaningful information. On the other hand, a number that was too high was more likely to get a no in response which, again, was meaningless.

Smirking in satisfaction, I decided to see the damage. I pulled up my status screen:

[Questions owed]:

Toll: 3 mundane, 5 inquisitive (was 4).

There are four classifications of question that can be asked of a balaam, all of which are both arbitrary yet significant to the functioning of their power. Mundane questions are simple things, like whether you had a bank account or not. Inquisitive questions are related to general, less secretive phenomena such as how much money you had in your bank account. Seeking questions concerned matters of a secretive or relatively unknown nature, such as the password to your bank account.

Then there are divine questions. Few balaams could give a divine answer, but when they do, it’s like they’ve peered into the secrets of the universe. For example, they might discover loopholes in a bank’s digital security that would allow you to steal billions from the bank without detection. The answer might not exist, but if it does, a sufficiently powerful balaam would know it.

I wasn’t doing too bad, given Toll had already cashed in the higher value seeking questions, leaving only the lesser inquisitive and three useless mundane questions.

Sighing, I stuffed my shoe back on then went to work on the other foot. “Markus, let’s make a deal.”