"We have to follow their trail quickly!" Valen did not wait for the two militiamen alongside him and began to pursuit in their tracks. By broken stems of corn and fresh footprints of heavy boots, he could clearly tell in which direction they were running. He just grunted when he could not hear any steps following behind him, the militia had obviously left their courageous hearts at home, all of them had a guess who was the perpetrator of the incident.

"Damn, it has to be a succubus, this is exactly their style." Valen himself was questioning his sanity for pursuing the demon alone. Demons were trouble, without a good priest or another strong source of holy power, they were troublesome opponents with both speed and strength surpassing that of humans.

"Who would have thought that the clumsy guy gets to me to the point of me being willing to fight a demon alone. " Valen mumbled, thinking that he had grown too sentimental due to the remoteness of the area. His only chance was to arrive in time and make it into two against one.

He had set off shortly after his companion had been lured away and he expected to find the duo in minutes, but he had to slow down to be able to reliably track their advance. Despite slowing down and once even going in a wrong direction for a while, he managed to find the two standing in the corn, hugging each other like two lovebirds. The encounter was sudden and he had barely enough time to point the tip of his sword at the girl and shout at his mesmerized companion.

"Get away from her! It is a succubus!" Valen was about to thrust, when Frei stepped forth, barring his way.

"Do not dare to hurt her Valen!" His bewitched companion shielded the demon in a fox form with his body.

"Bloody hell! It is an illusion spell, get out of my way!" Valen attempted to sidestep and run around him, but it was useless. His stupid squire kept protecting the demon with his life.

"Use your head, she is not who you think! It is our duty to kill the demon before it claims more lives than it already did!" Valen shouted with urgency in his voice and looked into the blue eyes of the demon that were faking confusion and fear.

"Kinky bastard." Valen thought knowing that succubi always took the most appropriate form extracted directly from the minds of their victims. It looked like his squire was into beastwomen with fluffy tails, fox-like ears, long hair and long sharp fangs.

"Fangs?" Valen looked at her with confusion. How had that kinky lowlife come up with an image like that, a catkin with vampire fangs. Who was she supposed to be, a tiger-fox-cat girl? With her appearance her fangs were clearly misplaced! He cursed the stupidity of his squire under his breath for not being able to see through the illusion right away.

"Something doesn't add up." He froze when he saw a second body that was unusually similar to the succubus in front of him. "Have I fallen under some illusion spell as well?"

A wave of fear washed over Valen's heart and he unconsciously placed a hand on his chest where a protection amulet was, hidden beneath his armor.

"Frei, you are under the demon's spell! Don't you see how weird she is? A catkin with those kind of fangs is clearly not natural. Step aside and let me deal with her." Valen tried to circle around Frei again to get to the demon that was laughing at him with her eyes, a warm smile on her face. It clearly pleased her that the fool kept shielding her.

"Stop Valen, she is not what you think, she is a friend!" Frei shouted, but Valen could see that he hesitated when he attempted to block his way again. It was clear that there was doubt in his hearth about the origin of his so called friend.

"Friend? And how would a simple man living on the streets like you make such a friend? What is even your friend supposed to be?" Valen asked incredulously, sure that the illusion the demon built for herself was about to crumble.

"Fine, if you really need to know, the truth is that we are both aliens from a different world and she has been reincarnated into a catkin only to be later turned into a vampire." Frei looked at him with serious face while spouting the craziest nonsense Valen had ever heard.

"So, she is not a demon, but an alien catkin vampire?" Valen asked to be sure that Frei had completely lost his battle against the demon's mind games, he had to give him a better protection charm against mind control later, the standard gear was clearly subpar.

"Yes." Frei answered and he could feel that he really believed what he was saying.

Valen knew that the demon had won the battle for Frei's mind, but it was of no consequence as he had already managed to circle around Frei and promptly launched himself at the treacherous fiend with his sword pointing at her heart.

"DIe!" He was only a few steps away from the demon that was clearly unarmed and would be an easy prey against a fully armed knight like Valen. Right when the tip of his sword was about to enter their enemy's body, Valen felt a sharp pain in between his shoulder blades and immediately lost control of his limbs, falling helplessly to the ground.

Lying on the ground sideways, Valen lifted his head with a great effort and saw Frei that stood behind him with a strange sharp weapon holding in his hand, his blood staining its blade.

"You fool!" Valen uttered in a whisper before all life slipped away from his body, his mind enveloped by nothingness.

* * * *

Frei ran trough the corn field, losing himself in the lustful chase of his object of desire, following behind the hopping white fur that from time to time revealed patches of Nitarja's naked body, her figure becoming more and more exposed as they went, snow white hands decisively throwing her clothes away piece by piece until there was nothing left.

Despite becoming dizzy by the sight, his body burning with a single thought of touching that godly entity in front of him everywhere, all at once, a spark of doubt appeared in his mind. Why was she here and why was she behaving so wild? It struck him as unnatural for her to be this much careless, but before his mind could process his doubts, she turned around suddenly and hooked his torso with her left leg as if to prevent him from escaping her grasp. Standing on her right leg, she pressed her already exposed tender part against him and slowly rubbed against his clothes. His eyes instinctively followed her intense movement, but she grabbed his chin with her hand and forced it up, making him look into her eyes while her other hand held his neck.

"You are mine now, there is no escape. I will fuck the soul out of you as the whore I am." She giggled and quickly pulled down his pants with her hand, the fact that he was not a true knight meaning he was much less armored compared to Valen, making her indecent job much easier.

The moment his lower body was exposed, she unhooked her leg and slid down, swiftly filling her mouth with his no longer soft part. Spreading her knees apart, she began to rub her wet parts against his shin while vigorously working with his tongue and hands, sucking, licking, kneading like possessed by a demon.

When the word appeared in his mind, it lingered.

Demon's and witches, the glass spheres, the tattoo and Nitarja's strange behaviour. She was indeed a bold whore, but she had always been rather meek when they were together like her personality had been reverted to a time when she had been just an innocent girl. Hearing the sound of slurping and moaning while the part of his pants that still covered his shin was becoming wet, his brain managed to push through some logic while most of it was being overwhelmed by pleasure.

The person in front of him did not behave like Nitarja and the situation was too suspicious.

"Why are you here? What happened to Victor and what was the meaning of our last encounter?" He grabbed her shoulders firmly and pushed her away from him, making her fall on her back.

"Oh shut up and come fuck me, I know you want it too." She moaned while rubbing one of her hands in between her legs, ignoring his questions. She waited with her legs spread apart, urging him to come and take her.

"No, we will talk first, it is too dangerous to ignore everything and just bang like animals." Frei slowly pulled his pants up and Nitarja clenched her jaw with force, muscles in her face becoming tense.

"Fine, what do you want to know?" She stood up, more serious than before and walked slowly towards him.

"Why are you even here? Gabri'El has not captured you?" Frei watched her nearing body, using all his will to ignore his desire to let go of all worries and lose himself in her, even if it was just an illusion and by doing so he would expose himself to a mortal danger.

"He tried, but I have escaped." She reached him, but instead of touching him, she began to pace back and forth right in front of him. "In the end all men are stupid in front of a resourceful woman."

"So I tricked him and escaped." She tried to circle around him, while reaching her hand for his face, but he stepped back warily and turned, not letting her to get behind his back.

"Most of males are very easy to trick, it is not hard to replace their brains with their dick." She tried to touch him again, but his moment of carelessness had already passed and he did not let her get close. "Especially when their dreams stand right in front of them."

"Sadly, some unruly boys still try to fight against their desire, which is truly disgusting. Someone has to teach those who always rides on the top." Her voice had changed, becoming deeper and her body became more robust with her nails turning into long, silvery claws, two white horns growing out of her skull.

"Fuck!" Frei dodged when she lashed out with her claw and a thin line of red appeared on his belly.

"Right darling, we will still fuck, but it will be an experience for naughty boys. What could have been a minute ago would have been a far more pleasurable end. Now I will break half of your bones before using you for my pleasure, but there will be more pain than pleasure for you, you mistake of nature!" She jumped at him for a second time, but he had already took out Crow and his trusted companion managed to surprise her by turning into long rapier, his tip puncturing her shoulder even though she moved back in time in order to dodge the short sword he held in his hand a while before.

"Agh, bastard! Fine, there will be no pleasure at all for you. I will simply kill you." The woman's fur and eyes was turning red and she began to remind him of a demon, as she had abandoned all attempts of deception and readied herself to kill him in a head on fight. Frei only gulped and gripped his weapon tighter when he remembered the stats of demons.

"This won't be nice." A feeling of danger appeared in his brain and in a flash, he remembered all the spells he had at his disposal.

"When a fight is unavoidable, strike first." Frei remembered a line he heard somewhere and immediately wanted to launch a series of attacks, but noticed the last rays of light coming from the late afternoon sun and hesitated. His most powerful spells were of the shadow attribute and he could not use them with good efficiency during daylight.

"Looking back, waiting for your companion to aid you? Fine by me, it would not be a fair fight like this." The succubus said while showing her sharp fangs and he immediately realized her true intention.

Her strongest spells were probably of the shadow attribute as well and he posed as a squire all the time. She had to be counting on her increased power during the night to be able to kill him and Valen at the same time, probably by some ranged attack. He had not missed how she looked warily at Crow, not eager to fight in melee against an unknown magical weapon that was out of norm by all standards.

With hard expressions, they both waited while facing each other and when there had to be only minute of daylight left, a figure emerged not far away from them out of corn, surprising them both.

"I have finally found you! Who is she?" A second Nitarja appeared and the demon began to laugh, her racial features receding to copy the appearance of the one who had just arrived.

"This will be more fun than I had expected." As the dusk fell at that moment, the demon lifted her hand and snapped her fingers. In an instant, shadows gathered at multiple places around them and slowly materialized into figures. In a moment, there was nine Nitarjas standing around Frei, making his head spin.

"Let the orgy of blood begin." The demon kicked the ground and covered the place with dust, while starting to mingle with the images she had just created.

Frei made a bet and launched himself in the direction of the one who had entered with the last rays of light before the cloud of dust could envelope him.

"Back to back!" He shouted, launched Shadow Claws behind him and dodged just for a good measure. His action ended up preventing him from getting injured as the demon had used the sound of his voice to send a red bony spear in his direction that made the ground he had stood upon only a second ago explode in a shower of dirt.

The one Frei hoped was the true Nitarja just nodded and let him press his back against hers.

All went still, as all of them intended to use ranged attacks to destroy their opponent as soon as they revealed their position.

"Smell her and throw me!" Crow whispered in his hand and he instinctively listened to him, knowing that the fight would end quickly no matter who would win and he had more than his own skin to worry about now.

However powerful demons were, they still had blood and vampires were very good at smelling blood. Frei focused and threw Crow in the direction of the heavy rancid smell of demon blood. His companion morphed the moment he left his hand, unfolding into a steel spiked chain that flew through the cloud of dust while spinning parallel with the ground.

A while later, Frei heard a grunt, followed by a shriek as Crow had to do something sinister to make the demon scream like that. Without delay, he began unleashing Black Blades one after the other in the direction the sound came from and when there appeared to be no life anymore and the cloud of dust finally settled, he could see the state of their enemy and what Crow had done to hurt her enough to make her scream.

Frei warily walked forward, his eyes focused on a bloody corpse that was entangle by a spiked chain, but the chain did not look like the one he had seen flying toward the demon.

"You devious bastard, well done." Frei sighed and praised Crow when he realized what he had done. The moment he wrapped around the demon's body, he clearly fused at places where the links of the chain touched each other, making it impossible for the demon to unwind the chain form her body. When he held her this way, he shifted his mass from the chain itself into its spikes making them much longer, piercing though her body like some sort of a torture device.

"You are like a portable iron maiden." Frei joked, but felt uneasy when Crow changed back into a sword and his fingers touched him.

"Afraid of me now?" Crow teased him further,

"Bah, not at all." Frei lied, quickly returning him into a scabbard like it was meant to protect him from the spikes he had just seen. "You are a cheat."

He could not help himself but think that Crow's improvised attack had made the fight much easier than it would have been otherwise.

"We were lucky, she encountered too many unknowns. Our sense of smell, dark magic, and your crafty blade. We were supposed to have neither of those." Nitarja walked behind him, eyeing the dead body of the demon cautiously.

"But first of all, I am so sorry because what I have done to you. I just wanted . . Please, forgive me!" Nitarja suddenly fell on her knees in front of Frei, her head hanging limp.

"Stand up, silly." Frei pulled her up and hugged her. "I know everything."

He sniffed her with delight, it was the first thing that gave the succubus away. He remembered the scent of Nitarja's blood.

"There is chaos among the vampires now, every man for himself as they say and I have used it to follow your trail" She whispered with her face buried in his chest, her ears lowered along her hair, clearly still feeling guilty for hurting him the last time they met.

"So, you have not been captured by any angel or knight. . .. ?" He left the question hanging in the air and Nitarja just vigorously shook her head.

"No."

"That lying weasel, really how can someone like him be an angel is beyond me." Frei mumbled quietly.

"Is something the matter?" She lifted her head and gazed at him with her blue puppy eyes.

"Nothing important."

Still, he wondered how it was possible that the demon's illusion worked on him. He thought that the self-defense paranoid mode of his UI from the Divine Universe was perpetually active, since the time it had clashed with Galacron's software upon his entry of the Fabled Universe.

"Could it be that my status has changed?" Frei thought and in that moment something that he had thought that he would never see again appeared in front of his eyes along with a line of text that he had probably missed due to the demon's distraction.

[Reboot complete, reestablished connection with the Divine Universe, Administrator rights detected, Welcome Samma'El]

Frei Galgani - [HellSpawn]

[Infernopedia]

[Teleportation] - no locations available

[Souls] - 2

[Re-roll Evolution]

[SoulForge] - Reforge abilities by burning souls into them.

[DemonForge] - Forge a new demon body using souls.

[HellForge] - Infuse souls into inanimate materials creating artifacts of unique properties.

His breath quickened while reading a few lines of text that appeared in front of his eyes out of the blue.

"You took your sweet time, old junk." Frei said in disbelief when it finally dawned on him that his good old system had finally rebooted. He had to admire how deep the claws of the Divine Universe's system were stuck into his very being to be still able to function.

[Objective "Thorough reconnaissance of a world" failed]

"Don't tell me that I will go back to that ugly small room for asocial psychopaths they call the Adventurers' Guild!" He felt a chill run along his spine and as if on cue, a new system message caused droplets of sweat to appear on his forehead.

[Commencing teleportation to the base of operations]

Instead of a few droplets, it was now a river and terror appeared in Frei's face, unsettling Nitarja that had been looking at him with concern all this time.

"No! I will never go back there, it is worse than the vampires!" Frei panicked when he saw the last system message. Vampires were surely twisted slavers, but there was something about the Hell's guild inhumane inertness and machine-like approach that was more scary than all their blood and twisted tortures combined.

[Teleportation failed, commencing distress signal broadcast. Emergency objective issued "Survive and wait for rescue." ]

"Thank the gods it failed! Wait for rescue? I will wait with pleasure, for eternity." Frei felt the pressure around his heart lessen when he realized that the Fabled Universe was probably not allowing anyone to leave, he started to like the mad place.

"Is something the matter." He focused on the big blue eyes in front of him and was able to smile again.

"No nothing at all." Frei stated resolutely only to be undermined by a loud shout a second later.

"Get away from her! It is a succubus!" A familiar voice disrupted Frei and when his eyes focused on the person that emerged from the corn field, it was Valen.

* * * *

In the depths of hell of the Divine Universe, where no light could reach and only a single person was allowed to dwell, there was a comfortable chair with a hunched figure sitting on it, massaging his left wing.

"Oh, I need to summon some succubi for a proper massage after this, my wings are sore. Hopefully this will finally work, they are not two separate entities after all." Samma'El's fingers were akin to spider legs dancing on a screen in front of him. He could have done it with a thought, but to see all the screens in front of him in space was good for visualizing and remembering problems. He had long left the Arcane Universe in the hands of Greater Demons and Archangels, the exodus of creatures into the Fabled Universe left its Arcane originator without enough manpower to defend itself and his presence was no longer necessary.

"You rely on that hungry beast of an universe too much, I am sure that I can crack it sooner or later!" He touched a few final symbols and the same line appeared in front of him for the thousandth time.

[Reboot complete, reestablished connection with the Divine Universe, Administrator rights detected, Welcome Sammael]

[Did it work Gabri'El? Are you fully connected to the system?]

[This nonsense again? Let me sleep, I had a bad day! There is just some annoying line, it seems that you are not a complete good for nothing after all.]

Samma'El's wings fluttered wildly and he crumbled to the ground along with his chair which could not take his sudden violent movement and broke.

"We can begin with the plan!" Samma'El laughed heartily not bothering to stand up.

[Listen, after restoring system functions for administrators in the Fabled Universe, you just need to locate and devour its core where all the soul power is stored, destroying that pesky universe from within.]

[Hm, that won't be easy.]

His brother seemed downtrodden, his usual boastful attitude and grandeur nowhere to be found.

[How so? Have you not established a position for yourself? After devouring a few thousand souls, only the most powerful will be able to stop you.]

[Ja, but I am in a jail right now for lying, so there will be no killing anyone for some time.]

[How have you gotten yourself locked up? For lying?]

Samma'El could not believe his companion was without luck again, it was like he was another person since the moment he had been robbed of all his soul power. He could not but begin to doubt his ability.

[I lost all my spells and everything, that is how they have found out.]

[Was the lying really necessary?]

[It was! That cockroach needed to be put in his place! Scared, afraid to lose his little bitch that. . .]

[Gabri'El! No more games, find the universe's core and devour it, after that all the souls stored by the Fabled Universe will be ours.]

Sammael's eyes burned with intense dark flames for a second. If Gabri'El really proved to be completely useless it would be the time to find a new Gabri'El again, He would do the same as he had done when he sealed the original Gabriel, Mikhael and all the others in his devious grand scheme to reform Heaven and Hell into a well oiled machine for gathering souls, instead of preaching useless morals. Transparent and efficient, his concept worked flawlessly,, slowly grinding other universes to dust while feeding on their soul power. He had lived a comfortable life under the banner of El since the revolution, a brand he had created as his puppet.

[Don't worry, I will figure it out.]

Gabr'El cut off the connection.

"I have done my part, now it is your turn, brother." Sammael spoke the last word with ridicule. His eyes ended up staring on a book that he had been reading before his latest hacking session and a button that would call his room service aiding him with relaxing the tension in his wings.

"You better do yours, or . . ." He smiled with a sinister smile. "Well, my brother seems a little bit rusty, maybe I will make it into a contest. Fail me this time and yet another one of El will fall only to be reborn anew." Of course no one would know the truth as always, history had become Sammael's whore a long time ago.

"I deserve to rest for a while." He stretched his finger and pressed the button. "Not for a while, for a long time!"