It took a bit of doing to explain to Ixxy that she had been a person before the Tree had gotten its roots on her without revealing anything about Earth, but somehow, Rita managed.

She told Ixxy of the visions and memories she’d seen inside the Tree. She explained how Tree had pulled out of somewhere else in tiny pieces, before trying to recreate her by simply scrunching all of them back together, to limited success. How she’d rebuilt herself piece by piece and how all the leftover bits that she somehow hadn’t found a place for had coalesced into their own weird being: Alice.

Through it all, Ixxy stared at her in rapt fascination, hanging on every word, the work of cutting Alice free completely forgotten.

“And… yeah. That’s basically it,” Rita finished lamely. “I don’t know if that’s unusual for Nightmare Spawn, for all I know it’s how all of them are made. Maybe the only reason I’m not bat-shit insane is because I was better at putting the pieces of my psyche back together again.”

“I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start,” Ixxy finally said after a few moments of just staring at Rita. “I mean, seriously. I have no idea what question to even ask about that.”

“Really, I’ve told you all I know about it,” Rita replied, shrugging. “Alice might know more. I never got her side of the situation. If you want, you can ask her when she wakes up.”

If she woke up.

“Really?” Ixxy asked brightly and Rita winced as she got back to work, crawling, itchy pains raking her chest. It was getting better, though.

“Yeah, once she’s recovered though. But first, for my question, what I want to know in exchange is everything you know as a demon that might be related to this. I know you guys are supposedly the soul experts.”

“And you think that means I’ll magically know what happened to you?”

“Yes, actually.”

Ixxy chuckled and shook her head. “Well, you’re not completely wrong. Your story is very interesting and I have a few ideas. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more than that.”

“What?” Rita demanded. “You agreed…!”

“Guess you should have gotten that in writing, huh?” Ixxy replied, grinning cheekily.

“You BITCH…!”

“What I will tell you,” Ixxy spoke quickly when Rita seemed just about ready to explode, “is that what you described doesn’t sound completely dissimilar to our own process of reproduction. Not the same, obviously, but… not dissimilar.”

“Huh? Your… reproduction?”

Ixxy did another of her apologetic half-shrugs. “Sorry, Rita. I really can’t say more than that.”

“What does that even mean?” Rita exclaimed in exasperation. “Are you like, under some kind of magical compulsion or something? Why can’t you tell me!?”

“Obviously, I can’t tell you that either,” Ixxy laughed.

Rita huffed in frustration. “That means I get another question then, right?”

“You just asked your question…”

“And you refused to answer it. So I get another one. Those are our rules.”

“Alright, fine. Your go,” Ixxy conceded, wisely deciding not to argue the point.

“Earlier, you made it sound like demons are… I don’t know… ‘built’ or something. Designed. Constructed. But now you mentioned reproduction. How does that work? Can you tell me that at least?”

This time it was Ixxy that took a deep breath, rubbing the bridge of her nose with the hand that wasn’t a razor sharp blade.

“Okay, I suppose there is no harm in answering this one,” she eventually admitted. “Rita, did you know that the me out there isn’t the real me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the chirpy demon-girl sitting next to you back in the real world, this one,” she said and Rita felt the faint sensation of a set of nails gently scratching her stomach back in the real world, “isn’t me.”

“Then who is it?” Rita demanded, a little unsettled. It was a stark reminder that while she’d been keeping a close eye on Ixxy here inside her soul, she’d left Ixxy completely unsupervised back in the real world. And unlike her, the demon could multi-task.

“Not ‘who’, ‘what’,” Ixxy corrected her. “It’s… okay, this might be a little hard for you to grasp, but it is a kind of a shell around me. One I can move around…”

“So, like a spacesuit,” Rita interrupted.

Ixxy stopped. Then she cocked her head to the side.

“How do you know that concept?” she asked suspiciously.

Rita realized that she’d made a mistake. This world didn’t know about spacesuits. They probably didn’t even know about space, considering their world’s layout. But what was perhaps more interesting was that Ixxy knew what a spacesuit was anyway.

“What concept?” she quickly replied. “It’s just a suit that has space inside it, right?”

Ixxy eyed her carefully for a few moments, then seemed to put it aside and resumed her work.

“Anyway,” she continued, “that body’s not really my body. I just ride around in it. The real me is… It’s kind of amorphous, I suppose? Immaterial? Spectral? Oof, this is hard. I can’t really explain it. Your language just doesn’t have the words to describe it accurately.”

“Then tell me in yours,” Rita suggested.

She was still touching her tronic back in the real world and somehow she could understand Ixxy, here in her soul, despite it being exceedingly unlikely that she was speaking English.

Whether there was any connection between those two facts, Rita had no idea.

“I don’t think that would be wise,” Ixxy chuckled. “Not in here, anyway. Let’s just say the real me is pure soul. Yeah, that’s close enough.”

That explained why demons were experts in soul-related stuff, if that’s all they were.

“This world is innately hostile to our kind. Deadly, even. Most physical planes are,” she went on. “Which is why we build these bodies to protect ourselves and allow us to walk around here. And we build different ones with different specializations, because we want to do different things when we are here. When I came here, I had a couple of choices for which kind of body I wanted, but in the end, I settled for a Pleasure Devil because I really wanted to try out sex.”

“You wanted to try out sex?” Rita blurted out, surprised. “That’s it? Don’t you have sex where you come from?”

Ixxy gave a bark of laughter. “Of course not! I told you, didn’t I? We’re immaterial! We don’t even have the concept of touch! Oh! Now look at what you did, you had me answering out of turn! You sneaky vixen! My turn for a question!”

The demoness licked her lips, a glint in her eye. Rita didn’t like that glint.

“Timothy or Samual?”

Rita blinked. “What do you mean?” she asked, caught momentarily off-guard by the strange question.

“Who would you rather have sex with, obviously,” Ixxy laughed, sticking out her tongue and making another blush creep up Rita’s cheeks.

“Why do you keep asking these weird questions!?” Rita demanded, but Ixxy held up a finger on her free hand.

“Uh-uh, my turn to ask a question. You can ask yours after.”

“Can I say ‘neither?’” Rita asked, but Ixxy shook her head.

“Nope. That’s not an option. You gotta pick one.”

Rita sighed. “If I had to pick one… Samual.”

“Really? You’d go for the shallow option? Good choice!”

“Hey!” Rita exclaimed. “It’s not like that! I just know him longer, okay? I only met Timothy today!”

Ixxy burst out laughing. “Relax, I’m just fucking with you! Now ask your question. You still want to know why I keep asking these weird questions?”

“Earlier, you implied that you and Timothy had some kind of prior contract” Rita asked, trying to change the topic and ignoring Ixxy’s bait. “What is the deal there?”

“Oh, that,” Ixxy replied, waving dismissively with her free hand. “Funny story, actually. I owe him a good banging.”

Rita nearly choked in surprise. “In exchange for…?” she prompted, coughing, but Ixxy shook her head.

“No, not like that. It’s complicated. Let me start at the beginning.”

And so she did. She started with her arrival through the Obsidian Gate and the whole fiasco with Ruul and the thorough chewing out she got from Sazka, before moving on to her first summoning.

Ixxy, it turned out, was a fairly good storyteller, and it wasn’t long before they were both rolling on the floor, laughing, soul surgery forgotten.

“… there I was, freshly created dick flopping in the breeze, feeling pretty proud of myself for figuring out what I thought was Timothy’s great big secret, when I look over to him and see him lying there on his bed with this look of absolute, total horror on his face.”

“No way!” Rita gasped between peals of laughter.

“Yes way!” Ixxy exclaimed, also laughing. “Turns out, he wasn’t gay at all and I’d just flashed him the biggest tool he’d ever seen! Needless to say, that killed the mood quite thoroughly.”

“Really? Just because you flashed him a dick?” Rita laughed.

“I know, right?” Ixxy complained. “I mean, come on! Us girls see penis all the time and we’re expected to be turned on by that shit!”

They both burst out in fresh peals of laughter.

As the laughter faded, Ixxy turned wistful. “You know, I haven’t even told any of the girls at Triorbus Square this story. I’ve been too embarrassed.”

“What? Embarrassed? You?”

Ixxy stuck out her tongue at her. “Yeah, me. My values are just a little different than yours. Doesn’t mean I don’t have them.”

“Okay, sure, but why does this in particular make you feel embarrassed then?” Rita asked. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Come on! I’m a Pleasure Devil!” Ixxy exclaimed. “I’m supposed to be a professional!”

“Pfft. Even professionals make mistakes.”

“Yeah, and then they feel really, really embarrassed about them,” Ixxy replied. Then she hesitated. “Wait a minute, how do you even know so much about this stuff? Do Nightmare Spawn even fuck?”

Rita thought back to the horrible things that she’d seen in the Nightmare and shuddered in revulsion.

“God, I hope not. I don’t actually know, I was only in there for maybe a week. I have no idea what goes on in there except terrifying monsters trying to eat me.”

“And not in the kinky way?”

Rita shook her head, chuckling. “Most definitely not.”

“Aww. Too bad. I might have gone to visit.”

Both of them broke out in another round of laughter until Ixxy eventually turned her focus back to her work. By this time, the pain was faded to the point where Rita barely even winced.

It was strange. She’d gone into the meeting with Ixxy with so many preconceived notions about what demons were and what they did. Partly because of all the mythology and legends around them back on Earth, but also due to Gora and Timothy’s attitudes towards them, repeatedly warning her how dangerous they were.

Instead she’d found her surprisingly… fun. A little kinky, sure, and far too flirtatious for comfort, but she didn’t seem to have any actual malice in her. If anything, she was a bit goofy.

She was just… a person.

Had anyone ever just tried treating demons as people? Given them a chance? Or was all this hatred and suspicion just a kind of racism?

Rita really didn’t want to think of her friends as racist. Perhaps their personal opinions were caused by traumatic experiences in their own lives. Gora certainly had understandable reasons to hate demons, and she really could understand how a minority whose values and morals differed a little from what was considered ‘the norm’ could be misunderstood and end up villainized in the greater society.

Goodness knows Earth’s history was full of examples.

“Wait, shit, whose turn is it to ask a question? Mine, right?” Ixxy suddenly asked.

Rita shrugged, still smiling. “I have no idea. I completely lost track.”

“Uhh… I laughed so hard I forgot my next question. So you go first,” Ixxy said. “Gesture of good faith, or whatever.”

“Fine, if you say so,” Rita laughed, feeling quite a bit more comfortable around the small demoness. “What’s the best sex you’ve ever had?”

To her surprise, Ixxy’s face immediately fell. “Erm… pass,” she said with uncharacteristic demureness.

“What? Noooooo, you can’t go getting squeamish on me now! We’re doing girl-talk! Come on, spill!”

Ixxy was silent for a few moments, seemingly focused on her work. Rita was just about to prod her again when she spoke up.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she asked softly.

“What?” Rita asked, confused at the sudden change in demeanor.

“This time you have to promise not to tell… actually, nevermind. What am I saying? Of course you’re not going to tell anyone. Duh.”

“What do you mean? You can tell me. Whatever gets said in here will be our secret,” Rita said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ixxy said, waving it off. Then she took a deep breath. “To answer your question… I haven’t actually had sex yet.”

Silence.

“Like… at all?”

“Like, at all.”

More silence.

“Oral sex?”

Ixxy shook her head.

“Anal?”

Ixxy shook her head again.

“Heavy petting?”

Ixxy shook her head once more.

“Handholding?”

The demoness opened her mouth as if to speak, before getting a thoughtful look on her face. Then she closed her mouth and shook her head again.

“Bloody hell,” Rita breathed.

“I plan on having sex, obviously,” Ixxy quickly defended herself. “I mean, I want to, I really do, the opportunity just hasn’t presented itself yet.”

“But… you’ve been flirting with me almost non-stop…”

“Oh please, I’d flirt with anything,” Ixxy said.

“But do you actually even like women?” Rita asked. “I mean, romantically?”

At this, Ixxy actually laughed. “Rita, I’d fuck literally anything I could fit up my snatch, and several things I can’t, as I think my story with Timothy illustrated. It’s not so much a question of romantic interest, but rather who’s willing to pay for what I offer. Me? I’m not picky about my partners.”

Then her look turned predatory. “Now how about you? I still don’t know how you know so much about this kind of stuff for someone that was birthed in a Nightmare. Where did you even hear about anal and what kind of other kinky stuff are you into?” she asked, a glint in her eye.

Rita quickly took a step back, hands held up in front of her. “Me? Oh, no, no, no. I mean, look at me! I wouldn’t even know how any of that would work!”

“Hey, where there’s a will there’s a way,” Ixxy grinned. “I certainly wouldn’t mind experimenting a bit if you wanted to…”

“And I’m sorry but the one thing I do know is that I’m straight. Not interested in women at all, sorry,” Rita replied apologetically.

“So?” Ixxy asked.

Before Rita’s eyes, Ixxy’s face shifted until a handsome, if still diminutive, male face stared back at her from on top of Ixxy’s cockroach body.

“Why would that be a problem?” she asked in a suddenly very deep and masculine voice.

“Holy shit!” Rita exclaimed, scrambling backwards. “That is fucking creepy! Never do that again!”

Ixxy’s face snapped back to normal to reveal a frown on her elegant features. “Why does everyone keep reacting like that?”

“Maybe because it’s fucked up watching your skin flow like water?” Rita suggested. “Nevermind the inherent weirdness in seeing a dude’s face on a hot chick’s body.”

“Aww, you think I’m hot?” Ixxy crooned.

“I think you’d be a pretty shit Pleasure Devil if you weren’t,” Rita replied and to her surprise, Ixxy’s face immediately fell again.

“Right. Of course,” she replied bitterly and went back to focusing on her work.

A sudden, awkward silence fell over them as Rita tried to figure out what the hell she’d said that had upset her this time. Was she mad that Rita had deflected the hot-thing?

“What’s wrong?” Rita asked. Then, before Ixxy could respond, she added: “And that’s my question for my turn, so you can’t lie.”

Ixxy opened her mouth as if she was about to say something cutting, then closed it with a snap. “Can I pass?” she asked instead.

“You could,” Rita replied evenly, “but that would be an admission that something is actually bothering you and I’m going to pounce on that weakness like a rabid wolverine. Expect your next ten questions to be ever more subtle attempts to figure out what is up with you until I finally get an answer.”

Ixxy rolled her eyes. “Oh no, whatever will I do,” she muttered, scowling.

“Just tell me what I said to upset you all of a sudden, oh vile and despicable demon,” Rita said.

A small smile stole itself onto Ixxy’s lips. “Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said. Then she sighed. “Fine. I guess there’s no real harm in telling you. I’m starting to suspect that I might, in fact, be a ‘pretty shit Pleasure Devil,’” she admitted. “And Sazka’s already threatened to kick me out of Aer. That whole mess with Timothy? That… wasn’t an isolated incident.”

“Really?” Rita giggled. “You make a habit of turning into a guy in front of innocent young men?”

“Shut up! It’s not like I did that more than once! I do learn from my mistakes! But… this is all very new to me. And my info package has a lot of gaps. Knowledge without experience only gets you so far. There are a lot of mistakes to make and… I’ve been working my way through them, it seems. Recently I fucked up pretty big in a slightly different way.”

“Bigger than the dick you waved in Timothy’s face?” Rita laughed. “What did you do?”

Ixxy waved away the question with her free hand. “Not important. The point is, I’ve been really doubting myself recently. Nothing was working out, and I wasn’t sure I was cut out for this whole ‘mortal realm’ thing. This contract helped, though.”

“It did?”

“Yeah. I really needed the win. So to get a contract that’s this successful, yeah, it’s doing my self-esteem a world of good.”

“Well… I’m glad to hear that,” Rita replied, a gentle smile on her face. “Glad I could help.”

She really was. If the tronic meant that much to her, Ixxy could have it. She certainly earned it if she could save Alice.

Right then, Ixxy slid her bladed hand out of the floor, straightened up and stretched. “Well, that’s that. Job’s done.”

“What? Already?” Rita asked, startled.

“What do you mean, ‘already?’ We’ve been in here for subjective hours!” Ixxy complained, her hand quickly shifting back to its normal form. “My back hurts.”

“I thought you need to cut all the way around… oh, you have. Then Alice is going to be okay?”

Ixxy shrugged and looked over towards where Alice was still cocooned, though now detached from the greater mass of silk. Somehow, she was still lying on the floor, which now just passed below her. It… didn’t really make sense. But then again, nothing in this place did.

“No idea,” she said. “This only allows the healing to start. It might be a trick of the light, but I think she’s looking better already. Time will tell, I guess.”

Surging forward, Rita scooped Ixxy’s diminutive form into her arms and pressed her to her chest in a tight hug.

“Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you so, so, so much!”

“Woah, calm down! Let’s at least do this in the real world, it’s a little hard to enjoy being pressed against these when I’m this small,” Ixxy protested, patting the tops of Rita’s breasts next to her.

Quickly, Rita pulled her away, holding her out at arms length. “Way to ruin a nice moment,” she said, frowning at the small demoness.

“Heh, I try,” Ixxy grinned back at her.

Rita contemplated the little grinning cockroach-girl in her hands.

“You know, when we first met, I was terrified of you,” she eventually said.

“Wise,” Ixxy replied, nodding sagely.

“I had tons of expectations about what demons would be like. But you’re not so bad after all.”

“Oh, stop it with the mushy stuff!” Ixxy squeaked. “I’m a terrifying demon! Cower before me, mortal!”

“Listen,” Rita said, her voice turning serious. “I know what it’s like to be new somewhere. To not fit in. To feel like you have nowhere to go. If you ever just want someone to talk to, as a friend, come look me up, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re making me blush already,” Ixxy replied, but there was a smile creeping around the edge of her lips.

“I’m serious. I’m glad we met.”

Ixxy looked up at Rita and her smile turned sad all of a sudden. “Me too. It was really nice to be able to open up to someone without worrying about the consequences for a change .”

“Uh, you’re welcome?” Rita responded, a little confused. Consequences?

“And I’m really sorry about this.”

“What do you mean? About what?”

The next moment, Rita’s entire soul shuddered. Thick, dark-gray, almost bone-like tendrils pressed inwards from the deep nothingness that existed outside this soul space, straining against the white sheets of webbing that now formed its boundaries on all sides.

It was a cage. A cage made of bone, clasped around her soul.

“What… what’s going on?” she demanded, turning to Ixxy.

“I’m really sorry, Rita,” Ixxy said, her voice now strangely distant. She was still in Rita’s hands, but her eyes had gone pitch black. Empty.

They looked like deep, dark holes.

Outside, beyond the cage of bone, two large, glowing eyes opened and Ixxy’s voice, suddenly vast and seemingly coming from all around, echoed through her soul.

“I’m afraid dear Timothy made a little mistake.”

From the outside, Rita’s soul looked like a spider’s egg sac.

It wasn’t a particularly flattering comparison, but there it was. Ixxy had wrapped herself around it gently but firmly inside Rita, and it looked like the sac had been enclosed by a mass of gray-black, metaphysical tendrils.

Obviously, Timothy had made a mistake. As mistakes went, it had been a rather reasonable one to make, all things considered. Ixxy’s particular situation was quite unique, after all, and he hardly had the experience to know how that impacted the contracting landscape he found himself in.

She’d also been rather clever, even if she had to say so herself. When she’d set up the addendum to the contract between herself and Timothy, she’d managed to sneak something by him.

She’d added a clause explicitly allowing her to collect souls from others in payment, and doing so contributed to the amount Timothy had agreed to help her obtain. Without it, their arrangement wouldn’t work, obviously, but she’d neglected to add any conditions to this clause.

That meant, it explicitly allowed her to collect souls from other people with no restrictions.

On its own, this was no big deal. It certainly did not allow her to just yank the soul of whoever she wanted, since it in no way overrode their inherent protections under the Grand Contract.

And then Rita had gone and signed those away. True, she’d also signed onto being a host of new, rather solid protections, but they were no longer at a level ‘above’ the clause that allowed her to collect souls. As far as Ixxy’s contract was concerned, they were at a similar level.

Even still, none of that would have mattered under normal circumstances. She would had two contracts, one saying she was allowed to collect souls, the other saying she wasn’t allowed to collect this soul. No interaction.

Contracts could not influence the execution of other contracts, unless explicitly stated, which hers obviously did not.

Except, and this was the trick that Timothy had missed, these were not seperate contracts!

Thanks to Ixxy’s contract with Mulder & Heath, she couldn’t make any new contracts. That was how they’d tried to trap her in the first place. The way she and Timothy had gotten around that was to use their original contract as a vessel, adding addenda instead of whole new contracts.

Where normal contracts had clear distinctions between them and clear separations of concern, addenda did not. By default, they were considered part of the same contract and anything agreed to in one applied to all of the other parts unless explicitly specified.

In Timothy’s defence, he had put in a number of such exceptions, such as indemnifying both himself and Rita from the other’s debts, but the fact remained that the contract as a whole contained two conflicting instructions without a clear resolution between them; one saying she was allowed to yank souls, and the other saying she wasn’t.

In such cases, where there was conflicting stipulations inside a contract, as a final defence against incompetence, the GC had a very simple rule: choose the interpretation that was in the best interest of the contractee.

Normally, this would mean Rita would be fine. Yanking her soul was most definitely not in her best interest, Ixxy’s earlier duplicity during their question session notwithstanding.

Rita, however, was not the contractee. Timothy was, because, again, it was all one contract and he’d signed first.

And what was in Timothy’s best interests was not the same as what was in Rita’s best interest.

Timothy was obligated to assist Ixxy in obtaining more souls until she had enough to pay off her contract. So the more souls Ixxy got, the sooner he was off the hook and therefore the better it was for his contractual obligations.

That Rita had not read the remainder of the contract that she signed onto was not Ixxy’s problem. That had been her choice. Timothy was her legal representative and he had both read everything and asked Ixxy specifically not to provide the remaining documents, so as far as the GC was concerned, she was covered.

In short, the moment Rita had signed the addendum, her soul was free game.

Ixxy could have tried to grab it the moment she’d first made contact with Rita’s chest, but a mix of caution, curiousity and good old fashioned greed had stayed her hand. She’d wanted both Rita’s soul and her payment, something she could now collect legally as she’d completed the contract.

Rita’s friends might be… less than enthused at the prospect, but Rita carried one on her arm. Ixxy was simply going to take that one as payment. They were, after all, identical, right?

Though, if she had to be honest, talking to Rita had been pretty fun there at the end, even if she was just a mortal. Refreshing, even. Liberating, to be able to open up about her fears and insecurities without having to worry about facing the humiliation of any of it ever getting out.

And once Rita’s soul was safely ensconced in Ixilus’s space back in the Abyss, they could chat all they wanted, forever!

Best of all, Rita’s soul even contained it’s own mini-space inside it! Ixxy was going to be able to take a pseudo-physical form whenever she wanted just by stepping inside it! It was going to be amazing! She couldn’t wait to explore its limitations!

“What are you doing?” Rita demanded, holding the little puppet that was Ixxy’s projection inside her soul up to her face. “What do you mean he ‘made a mistake?’”

“Exactly what I said. He made a mistake,” Ixxy replied, speaking both as herself and through the puppet. “But don’t worry. I’m going to take very good care of your soul. I’m definitely not passing this one on to Infertec, okay?”

And with that, she pulled.

Rita screamed as a her entire soul rattled. Loud tearing sounds echoed through the space as wide rips formed in the outer walls.

Damn! This soul was stubborn! Even with such a good, solid grip on it, it was still trying to stick to its body! Normally, souls were fragile things, their grip on their physical forms delicate and easily shattered by even a relatively gentle tug.

Pulling this one loose, however, was like trying to pull sticky taffy through a crevice!

Ixxy was glad she’d taken the time to wrap herself around the soul so thoroughly while Rita had been distracted. If she’d tried to just yank the thing, like she’d originally been tempted to do, she’d probably have had to take it out piece by piece. And she really wanted to keep Rita as intact as possible.

It was slowly coming loose, though. She just had to be persistent.

Back inside, Rita had crushed her puppet body, either by accident from the pain of having her soul ripped out or in a misguided attempt to stop the process, so Ixxy withdrew the last thread of herself out of it. It immediately crumbled to dust.

“Come on, Rita, just let go,” Ixxy said, her voice echoing through Rita’s soul. “Then the pain stops. Aren’t you tired of pain by now?”

“No!” Rita screamed.

She thrust her arms out and thick, sticky spikes suddenly erupted from the outside of her soul. Some of them pierced Ixxy’s tendrils, but didn’t do much to sever her grip. Instead, what they did was sink deeply into the surrounding body, anchoring it deeply. All the progress Ixxy had been making, dragging Rita’s soul free, came to an abrupt halt.

“Oh, come on!” Ixxy exclaimed. “Why are you being so difficult?”

“I thought we were getting along!” Rita hissed from between gritted teeth, her arms trembling with the strain of keeping herself anchored in place. “I thought we were friends!”

“We are!” Ixxy replied. “Why do you think I’m trying to hard to keep you in one piece? It would be so much easier to just rip you apart and take you out one crumb at a time, but I really want to keep you together for your own sake, Rita! And you’re doing everything you can to make that harder!”

“I’m trying to survive!” Rita screamed back.

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic. Death isn’t that bad.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re immortal!”

“And once I take you out of that meat sack you call a body, you’ll be functionally immortal as well,” Ixxy spoke. “Eh… kind of.”

“No!”

Ixxy sighed, in a metaphysical sense.

Souls were such fragile things. She wasn’t pulling even remotely at her full strength, but it was such a gentle balancing act to pull hard enough to get the soul free from all of its material attachments, yet not so hard as to tear it to pieces. But if Rita was going to be stubborn about it, Ixxy was simply going to have to increase the pressure, even if that meant breaking off a few smaller pieces.

Such a shame.

Down below, however, Rita was doing something that drew Ixxy’s attention. She was staring up at the sky, her eyes rolled back in her head, even as her arms still trembled with the strain of holding herself in place.

What…?

The next moment, back in the real world, Ixxy felt four pinpricks of tiny claws on her chest.

Still blindfolded, she struggled for a second to make sense of the sensation. Some kind of bug crawling up her shirt? A pet of some kind?

Then Rita kicked out with two, big, hairy spider legs, ripping Ixxy free of her soul and sending her flying, before crashing into a small vanity table on the other side of the room.

Still woozy from being pulled out of the soul-space so suddenly, Ixxy reached up with one arm to lift the blindfold-shirt off of her eyes and looked up to see Rita staring at her with wide eyes, arms clasped around her chest to cover her modesty.

Then, before Ixxy could move, she opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and screamed.

“GORAAAAAAAAA!”

Ixxy scrambled to her feet and leapt at Rita.

She had no more time. She was simply going to have to rip the stupid spider girl’s soul out with force and if that meant it suffered some irreparable damage, well, so be it.

No matter how much the thought of that hurt. She just couldn’t afford to walk out of here empty handed.

There was already a commotion from downstairs as people reacted to Rita’s scream. It wouldn’t be long before they arrived and she needed to be gone with the goods before they did.

She didn’t quite reach her target.

In mid-air, she was intercepted by another big, spider leg to the midriff, knocking the air out of her lungs, before slamming her back down to the ground.

Ixxy wheezed as she struggled to suck in air after the sudden impact. She tried to roll away, but Rita stepped on her with one of her legs and pinned her to the ground.

Luckily, Ixxy didn’t need to reach her heart to rip out her soul. All she needed was a pulse.

Still struggling to catch her breath, she grinned up at Rita as she rested her hands on Rita’s leg.

“Got you,” she wheezed.

Then her grin faded. She shifted her hands. Tried to feel a pulse. Shifted her hands again. Still nothing.

Slowly, it dawned on her. Rita didn’t have a pulse in her lower body. Her biology was just too damned weird!

If she wanted to collect her soul, she would have to reach Rita’s upper body!

“Let me up!” Ixxy demanded, trying to squirm out, but Rita reared back and three more legs slammed down on her stomach, driving the air out of Ixxy’s lungs all over again and trapping her underneath them, the tiny claws digging into her skin.

“No!” Rita nearly screamed back. “Samual! She tried to rip my soul out!”

The Hunk had made it to the top of the stairs in record time, his sword already in his hand.

Ixxy’s eyes widened. He planned to kill her, or at least give it a jolly good try. She could see it in his eyes. If there was ever a time to pull out all the stops, now was it.

Her skin rippled, muscles bulging as her body increased in strength and speed. She swiped her hand at Rita’s legs even as claws burst from her fingertips, making the spider-girl jerk them away with a squeal, and rolled out of the way just in time to avoid a sword smashing into the ground where her head had just been.

She scrambled to her feet, but was forced to dodge, diving clumsily out of the way of a lightning quick follow-up slash from Samual, before she’d even properly found her balance.

He was fast. Ixxy’s demonically enhanced biology was faster on average, especially now that she’d pushed her transformation magic to its limits, but Samual seemed to get these bursts of speed when he became nothing but a blur. They didn’t last long, mere fractions of a second, but Ixxy could barely keep up with him.

She had to get to Rita, who was cowering in the far corner. One touch anywhere with a pulse, and she’d have her.

This time she wouldn’t waste time trying to pry the soul free. She’d tear the whole thing out even if that meant it came out in tiny little pieces. And if they killed her after that, so what?

She’d have killed a friend, but she’d have her prize.

Ixxy feinted in one direction, waiting until Samual shifted his weight to strike, before she spun around with blinding speed. She used the cramped quarters to her advantage, leaping high over his frantic back-swing as he tried to cut her off, kicking off the wall and diving straight towards Rita, claws outstretched.

Right before she could reach her, something big and red slammed into her face, smashing her into the wall hard enough to leave a crack and make her see stars.

Blinking and shaking her head, Ixxy found herself pinned to the wall by a massive, muscular, red hand around her throat and part of her lower jaw.

She stared up into Gora’s face, twisted in rage. It seemed the Cambion had also made it up the stairs.

“Well, fuck,” she admitted sheepishly between coughs. “Guess you were right not to trust me, eh?”