The squad of soldiers and bureaucrats, led by the court wizard rode on in silence. Each member of the unorthodox squad was too preoccupied with their own fears, ambitions, and thoughts to muster the energy needed to converse with their peers. The only sounds that disrupted the tense silence were the footfalls of their galloping horses and the occasional grunts of the riders as they urged their horses to either go faster or maintain their brutal pace.

Only the soldiers with the most skilled eyes and advanced training as mounted scouts noticed the first clue as to what awaited them in the sleepy town they were fast approaching. Their horses were speedily galloping through a densely wooded area, but some of the soldiers kept their eyes open and alert to try and find even vague clues as to what waited for them.

A few soldiers who possessed remarkable sight and the training needed to scan the ground while atop horses noticed thick footprints in the ground they sped by. The skilled horseriders kept their eyes glued to the ground and noticed distinct sets of footprints, some of which were noticeably different in size even in the few seconds they got to observe them before the prints were too far away to see.

The soldiers looked at each other and did their best to communicate their ominous finders without speaking. Before they said anything they wanted to be as sure as they could have been.

Meanwhile, the court wizard was distracted. Lost in his own thoughts, the wizard remembered the mysterious circumstances that caused him to assemble this squadron and lead them towards the most distant settlement from Baron Hightower's protection and militia that was still technically within the baron's territory.

The wizard's recollection of the odd events of the day went back to when he had first been informed about another task the baron had asked him to complete. It all began fairly early that same day.

Not long after waking up the wizard received a telepathic message from the baron. The baron had informed the wizard that his son hadn't come home last night via a set of enchanted amulets that allowed the two to communicate telepathically across vast distances.

The baron wanted the wizard to see if he could locate the nobleman's son. That was, in all honesty, a reasonable task to assign to a wizard and far better than the usual tasks the baron forced onto the wizard.

Had anyone asked the wizard for his opinion about the baron's son and told the wizard to be candid, the wizard would tell them that the baron's son was a surprisingly skilled bureaucrat. If they convinced him to chug a pint or two of wizard fire liquor before asking him, he'd also likely reveal that he considered the baron's son a man too easily swayed by the charms of the fairer sex.

The wizard, knowing better than to reveal mildly insulting insights to even a non-noble parent, told the baron that he'd get right on that mission. And in the interest of fairness, the wizard actually had been working on that mission when he was given a task the baron deemed more urgent, by the baron in the flesh no less, which was itself a sign of the urgency of the new duty.

The wizard spent the hour after being asked by the baron to find his son assembling the material components he'd need to cast the scrying spell the spell-slinger's devilish familiar had recently taught him. He had almost been done placing the components where they needed to be, when he heard someone activate his mental alarm by entering his home, uninvited, via teleportation circle.

The wizard had immediately ceased his preparations and turned to head towards the bottom layer of his arcane abode and greet whoever it was who had entered his lair. He had a hunch as to the identity of his uninvited guest and if he was right then that meant he had no time to waste.

Due to his magically reinforced body, and a network of teleportation circles leading from one part of the tower to another, he was able to reach the foyer leading into his home just moments after he received the notification that the tower had an uninvited visitor. And his hunch was correct.

Standing right beside the teleportation circle was the mighty and ambitious Baron Hightower himself. Upon seeing the wizard rushing into the foyer from a teleportation circle located just out of sight of the foyer, the imposing nobleman smiled grimly at his mystical employee and immediately began to speak.

The baron was a man with an imposing presence. He was a tall man, and his face was framed by his dark hair and the immaculately groomed beard which was equally as dark as the hair atop of his head. He towered over the other people in his court, at an impressive height of just under 2 meters tall.

His fashionable and intimidating black outfit added to his aura of nobility and darkness, while also protecting him from most conventional weapons. He wore what looked like expertly stitched black clothe robes, but the robes hid a secret.

His robes were made from metal-thread, a thin and magical metal that could be stitched into clothes that were fashionable and soft-looking but every bit as protective and sturdy as gold. Metal-thread was one of the territory's key exports and every bit of clothing worn by lesser nobles throughout the territory was made of the stuff.

"Mordred. I apologize for barging into your home like this, and uninvited no less, but I have a task that I fear may require your magical might and is most likely more pressing than the search for my son."

The wizard nodded at his employer and waited for the baron to expand on this mysterious task.

Hours later, at roughly the same time that the godling is pouncing at the orcish raiders who were responsible for her parents' death, the young human Selena Moonbond would fall to her knees as she finally found what she knew and feared she'd find. The corpses of her parents. They were on the floor of their bedroom room, their bodies riddled with stab wounds and their blood had long since ceased flowing out of them.

Their daughter starred at the two corpses, her normally bright green eyes filled now with terror and sadness in equal measure. Their bedroom wasn't as devastated as the family's living room had been but in other ways, the devastation here was far more permanent. After all, furniture could be replaced.

The little girl's mind was blank. She was only 8 years old, and now she was an orphan. When her mind began to recover, several long minutes after she first saw the bodies of her parents, she began to cry. Quiet, heaving sobs wracked her tiny body.

She was too absorbed in her own sorrow to notice that the floor behind her begin to darken. And she was too young to be familiar with the sensation of dark magic gathering around heartbroken people. And she was also ignorant of her own magical power.

Her ignorance made her defenseless against the sorts of demons that could soon rush into the world if she was left alone and her sorrow continued to eat away at her sanity.

The wall to her left began to glow a soft shade of gold.

The orcish brawlers caught up with the godling at the same time due to the angel interrupting the deity's concentration, and their strikes were impressively synchronized.

One of the orcs' fist was sailing towards the godling's gut and his brother threw a punch aimed at the godling's face. The godling gritted its teeth as it felt the painful impact of both punches, its face twisting as the orcish fist slammed into it in an effort to minimize some of the damage it would take, and its abdominal muscles hardening in response to the blow it took to its stomach.

The orcs weren't the sort to let the godling catch a breath. Both brawlers quickly retracted their fists and glared at their enemy. The two brawlers readied themselves to launch what they hoped would be a withering assault using their own muscular limbs against the godling.

Samyaza had contemplated using its own magical power to shield the godling from the orcish brawlers. It had actually debated what to do even as the orcs sailed through the air towards the inert deity following Samyaza's mental shout. It was the godling's curiosity about what the strikes would feel like that compelled the orb angel to allow the strikes to connect with the godling uninterrupted and unfiltered through magical pain reduction.

Samyaza watched and listened as the deity internally reacted to the blow.

[So that's what getting hit feels like? Weird. It's not as bad as I imagined, but I mean... I'm not a fan]

The deity's musings on pain and experiencing a hit weren't cowardly. Nor were they fetishizing. They were fairly ordinary. Which, in Samyaza's mind, was definitely a good thing.

Over the course of its long life, the angel had served more than one master though all it had done was ultimately in service to its true master. Some of the people it had served were odd beings who truly reveled in experiencing pain firsthand.

Samyaza didn't like those masters. It preferred serving masters who were proud, powerful, and preferred to inflict pain than experience it.

[Hitting people can be fun, but getting hit kind of sucks.]

The deity's next observations were about the orcs as they readied themselves to go on the offensive.

[They aren't giving up huh? Not bad.]

At this moment the angel noticed that the godling's bloodlust had gone down. It wasn't gone by any means, but the creature wasn't fixated on it anymore.

The angel wasn't sure what to make of the seemingly abrupt mood swings. But the angel found itself quickly distracted by the fight it was watching.

The godling smiled at the two brothers as they lunged at it. They opened their mouths and monstrously roared at their enemy as they spread their arms out and hoped to build distance between the godling and their more heavily injured sibling.

One of them did this while leaping at his foe, and stomped his foot on the ground just centimeters from where the godling's foot had been moments ago. The resulting stomp echoed loudly and the noise could probably be heard from a good distance away. This was mildly annoying to the deity.

In the excitement of watching the godling experience new things, the angel forgot to explain why it had shouted at it to stop.

Meanwhile, the wizard continued his contemplation of the circumstances leading him away from the safety and isolation of his liar. His thoughts were calmer now, even as he felt his horse galloping closer and closer to their mysterious destination, than they had been while he was in the baron's presence earlier.

The wizard had long ago learned the moral weaknesses of many of the key members of the court of the baron. The baron himself had an obvious and powerful weakness: for all of his ambition and competence, the baron was a man who had an all-consuming desire for wealth.

Had the wizard possessed the calmness needed to detach himself from the shock of the baron coming to his lair unannounced just an hour after giving him a task, he would have been able to predict the gist of what the baron told him.

The baron first told him of a tax collector the baron had assigned to a far-away and tiny community just yesterday. Due to the distance between the baron's castle and the sleepy town he was being sent to, the baron had given him one of the few spare amulets of telepathy that he had in his possession and gave the amulet's magical sibling to a financier who worked for the baron. The tax collector had a simple task: head to the town and begin the process of collecting the year's taxes from the town's inhabitants.

The tax collector had been told by the financier to send regular updates. Yesterday the tax collector had informed the financier that he had successfully arrived in the town not long before the sun would set and would give two more updates within the next few hours.

The tax collector had only given one more update, informing the financier that he had spoken with the mayor and the local captain of the guard and both men intended to aid the collector however they could. The financier had gone to bed annoyed that he hadn't gotten another update but not worried. That changed when he tried to reach out to the collector in the morning and got no response.

After hearing about a lack of updates from the financier, the baron used an amulet he had long ago given to the captain of the guard to try and speak with the man earlier this morning.

The town's captain of the guard was also a friend of the baron's, so when the amulet he used failed to connect with that of the guard's captain, the baron was filled with legitimate worry and not just concern due to greed. It was that worry which compelled the baron to assign a new task to the wizard.

The baron placed the wizard in charge of figuring out what was occurring in the small town. The baron expected regular updates and said that for the purpose of this task the wizard was temporarily the second-highest ranked person in the territory, just after and under the baron himself.

More than the command itself, what stuck out to the wizard was the following statement by the baron:

"If you do not fail me here, I will see to it that you are properly and justly compensated. Keep that in mind and do what it takes to ensure I receive my money and if my friend lives do your best to aid him. I see your efforts, and I reward those who serve me well."

The nobleman had made that promise shortly after issuing his commands to the court wizard. He made it for the sake of ensuring the wizard took this task as seriously as necessary, but he also meant what he said.

The baron's commands were clear, and the promise of just and proper compensation lit a fire in both the wizard and the wizard's familiar. The familiar traveled with the wizard and was at the moment riding on top of the man's shoulder, not bothering to hide from the wizard's squad.

The wizard's squad knew about the imp and bore it no ill will. After all, it had ensured each of them that they would also be properly rewarded for their assistance in this mission, and in the past when it made such promises to the skilled men in the squad it always delivered.

Imps were creatures of ill-intent but when they made promises they did their best to deliver. They understand the persuasive power of promises and knew better than to tarnish their reputations by reneging on promises.

Within a few minutes the soldiers had noticed even more prints, and worse yet noticed that some of the prints seemed to have gone in another direction, which to soldiers with less experience and knowledge might have been misunderstood as a welcome sign. In actuality, the vanishing prints suggested that the hunches of the soldiers were correct, not incorrect.

The soldiers were familiar with the tactics of orcish raiders and knew that small groups of the brutes tended to rely on diversions as part of a strategy to mount successful raids on small towns and frontier settlements. Their tactics were simple: send heavily armored warriors settlement gates as a distraction, while rogues, archers, or mages snuck into the communities or otherwise opened fire on enemies in the settlements themselves.

One of the soldiers took it upon himself to speak up and inform his peers as to the nature of the suspicions of the trained combatants. He was one of the younger soldiers in the squad, but he was every bit as skilled and professional as his more experienced companions. He shouted loudly hoping that that would enable each of his colleagues could hear him.

"Companions! Before we travel any further, I implore you to listen to me for a moment."

After he spoke, he paused for a second and examined his allies. Each of them was doing their best to indicate that they had given him their attention.

"I, and I believe my fellow soldiers as well, have seen thick footprints in the ground below us. And moments ago some of those footprints began to trail off in another direction. I suspect... well sirs, I suspect that we might be traveling towards the fallout of an orc raid."

It took the soldier a second to speak, but when he did he had the attention of the squad. The response to his declaration indicated that his warning was taken seriously. Bureaucrats tightened their grips on the reins of their horses and starred grimly in the direction their horses were galloping in, and soldiers placed hands on the hilts of their swords.

"Shit. I recommend everyone here prepare for combat then."

The wizard's recommendation was logical but curt. And then silence overtook the small squad once again. The wizard began to silently call out to the magic sleeping within him and mentally roused it to be ready to be weaved into spells, or sung out into the world around him as need be.

The demon starred at a wall. It was just like any other wall in the dark castle, made of ill-maintained demonic material and in disrepair. The only reason why the demon focused on that wall, in particular, was that that wall was the one in front of it.

In the past few minutes, the air in the nightmarish castle's dark torture chamber had changed. It was a subtle change, but not one that escaped the notice of the nightmarish castle's lone guardian. The sentinel demon waited longer still, but the subtle change had been encouraging.

In the eyes of the magic-sensitive fiend, the room had taken on a slightly darker hue as dark energy begin to subtly seep into the room. It was as if dark magic, perhaps hate-powered or terror-powered magic, was flooding into the ancient fortress's torture chamber. To the demon, it was a delightful sight and feeling. One that filled its dark heart with evil approximations of wonder and glee.

It could sense that its wait was nearly over. The terrifying demon licked its thick lips in anticipation of the terrors it'd soon inflict on mortals.

And then the wall not far from where the sentinel demon stood, the one it had been starring at, began to shimmer slightly, emitting soft golden sparks. And the gentle sound of quiet weeping began to fill the torture chamber.

The godling was in motion. It was swiftly and carefully dodging or blocking blow after blow coming from its orcish opponents.

The two really were a talented team. The warriors moved in sync and alternated between taking turns challenging the godling and attacking as one organism. The godling allowed them to attack for several minutes and concerned itself almost entirely with blocking or dodging their attacks.

It did this because it wanted to learn how the orcs fought. They were after all the first creatures who had ever hit it, so it made a certain kind of sense for the creature to want to learn from their fighting style. It watched them obsessively, memorizing each subtle movement and quickly learning to predict their strikes. In its own way, it had developed both curiosity about the creatures and respect for them.

After a few strikes passed without any real reprisal from the deity, the godling would launch a swift counter so that it could carefully watch how they reacted. When it did this it was careful to not put too much strength behind its motions and techniques. That was so the orcs could quickly react and get back in the fight, and so they weren't seriously hurt by it.

For their part in all of this, the orcs quickly realized that the godling didn't feel endangered by them. This both surprised and annoyed the two prideful creatures. They knew their hits connected with the creature and should caused the being to feel some pain but it was like they hadn't done anything of note to the entity.

The godling wasn't even consciously aware of the importance of psychological warfare, yet it was dominating the two in that regard.

Samyaza knew that the godling was still mildly bloodthirsty and delighted in hearing the pained grunts of the orcs whenever they fell victim to one of its mild counters.

Samyaza also noticed that more than anything else, the godling was curious once again. Its moods felt like they shifted fairly quickly, but it was aware that the bloodlust wasn't gone. The bloodlust just wasn't alone anymore.

[So are you ever gonna expand on why you told me to stop?]

The godling's thoughts interrupted the silent observations of the angel. After thinking about the godling's mental message, the angel felt a bit embarrassed.

The orc who had been buried was on his feet and in motion. He was walking slowly but deliberately so that he could find the person who had defeated him. He knew the human-looking creature responsible for the time he had spent in the ground was close by. He just had to find it.

And that was when he heard one of his companions, one of the heavily armored warriors' who had charged at the gate during the raid, roar in fury. That sound was followed by a loud stomping noise.

The orc sped up and began to jog in the direction of the sounds.