In my dreams I’m with you, bathed in the golden halo of your hair. Awestruck by your beauty.

When I wake, It’s not you that’s changed, but me.

You remain perfect, radiant, enchanting, a beacon in the night to my poor soul.

I wish I was worthy of a fraction of it.

“If I could put down my weapons and close the gulf between us, I would dedicate my heart and soul to mending yours,” Heather said, kicking her heels against his desk as she scrolled through Perry’s self-blackmail packet.

“I was fourteen, okay!?” Perry said, holding his hands up, begging the God of Shame to kill him now.

“This one here is dated four months ago,” Heather said, showing Natalie.

“Ooh!” Natalie’s face gradually reddened as she scrolled through it.

“Your prose has gotten better since you were fourteen, but your poems got dirtier.” Heather said, glancing back up at him as Natalie feverishly devoured her poem, breaking into spontaneous giggles.

“I’m trying to develop a troll-killing spell,” Perry said, taking manual control over his breathing so he didn’t choke or scream. “What do you want again?”

“I want to embarrass you?” Heather said with a shrug.

Must not use Attunement imbalance as a crutch… Perry chanted to himself, squeezing his eyes shut and heaving a deep breath.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying them. Would you like me to write you an updated one?” Perry asked innocently.

Heather froze for a moment before a faint blush brought out her freckles.

“S-sure, I guess.”

Perry grabbed a pen and yanked a piece of paper out from under her butt and jotted down a quick poem.

Dat ass bounce:

Like Rubber

Dat hair burn:

Like Fire

Yo’ ass smelly:

Like burnin’ tire

Get it off my desk.

Perry was about to hand it to Heather when he considered the last line he’d written in his poem five years ago. He heaved a sigh lamenting his newfound maturity before he increased the reactivity of the paper, causing it to self-ignite and burn to ash between his fingertips.

“What’d you write?” Heather asked, eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“It was bad. I’ll write you a good love poem later, so please stop sitting on my desk.” He met her gaze and answered with Absolute Honesty.

“O-okay…” Heather’s expression softened and she moved her butt off his drafting papers.

Maturity. Works every time.

“Can I print this one out and frame it in my room?” Natalie asked, pointing to the erotic poetry he’d written about her, along with the illustrations.

“Do you have to?” Perry asked.

Natalie nodded vigorously.

Perry buried his face in his left hand and waved her away with the other.

“Go ahead.”

Natalie let out a little squeal and ran for the printer, Heather trailing behind her, still scrolling through the packet he’d sent them to spite the tech demon and demonstrate it could never blackmail him.

Was it worth it? establishing a positive relationship of equals between him and the nascent demon lord based on mutual respect and aid, that could propel him to greater heights of magic and tech fusion than he had ever dreamed possible?

“It sure as hell doesn’t feel like it,” Perry muttered.

“Don’t worry,” Natalie’s voice whispered directly into his ear, causing the hair across his body to stand on end. “You showed me yours…I’ll show you mine.”

Perry craned his neck to study Natalie, all the way across the room at the printer.

She winked and held her finger over her lips, while Heather was scrolling through her phone, oblivious to the exchange.

I take that back. Totally worth it, Perry thought with a shrug, returning his attention to the spell designed to kill trolls.

There were two options that stood out the most to him;

The easy one, and the fun one.

The easy one would be to figure out a way to isolate a physical property of troll spines, and target it specifically.

For example, he could figure out the resonant frequency of troll spines, then use that to target a flame spell that turns them into ash. Quick, effective murder.

Or he could simply make their spines resonate until they become sludge.

Anything that was unique about troll spines that he could take advantage of: Density, water content, PH balance. Anything.

To that end, Perry had several troll spines hung up in his workshop, provided by Heather. Each of them was undergoing a battery of automated tests to isolate the most ideal property, or batch of properties, to target.

Thanks to this I’ll know what troll spine smells like for the rest of my life…Perry mused.

At least there was one good thing about this war: Perry had enough troll ichor to choke a monkey.

Now, the fun way to kill trolls…

With the trolls taking advantage of their outrageous production of raw life force, Perry had been wondering if there was a way to turn it against them.

The answer: Auto-immune disease.

The only problem is, auto-immune disease isn’t exactly easy understand, let alone infect someone else with. Nor are most of them particularly lethal.

But dear lord, could you imagine the looks on their faces as their vaunted regeneration utterly annihilates their own bodies at the snap of my fingers?

…Am I a bad person?

Perry glanced past the row of disembodied spines and studied his girlfriend, who radiated joy and love with every move she made.

I mean, if she thinks I’m alright…

Now, back to the plans for genocide.

Multiple Sclerosis? Possible. It does ravage the brain and spine as white blood cells destroy the myelin sheath. Not sure if the effect would be lethal enough, though. The disease, while painful as hell, isn’t often lethal. I suppose I could find a way to weaponize it, dial it up to eleven and have the troll’s spines turn to soup in a matter of seconds.

Cancer? Not technically an autoimmune disease, but it might work as well…

Perry thought back to his experience with mishandling Astra’s Mending and basically growing a massive cancerous mass for an arm.

That could be good. Send corrupted healing signals to form tumors instantaneously.

But…would it actually kill the trolls? They were incredibly tough, and if it didn’t kill their entire nervous system, their unbelieveable life-force would sustain them. Cancer would probably just piss them off…

Maybe make them unable to move? Perry could imagine if the weaponized cancer got into their joints, effectively paralyzing them.

Could be a good way to pin down Karth long enough to give me some information, Perry thought, walking over to his suit and breaking a piece of the armor’s finger off before tossing it to the nascent demon lord.

“This is delicious. High tech weaponry is second in nourishment only to the foulest depths of the internet.” Gna’kis said, nibbling on the piece of carbon. “How did you get this much processing power in a finger?”

“Carbon nanotubes,” Perry said, leaning on his palm and studying his newest ‘friend’. Perhaps more of his grandmother lingered in him than he’d care to mention, because while Perry had compunctions about treating humans like science experiments, Perry really, REALLY wanted to use the nascent demon lord as a soul-surgery guinea pig.

I could assign it a personality more pleasing to me and beneficial to my goals…imprint a deep-seated awe, respect and love for me, and dictate what kind of body it has when it molts…The sheer amount of power he could wield over the demon’s growth was intoxicating…

Literally intoxicating?

Perry’s eyes widened for a moment before he glanced down at the infant demon, staring.

“Are you messing with my head?” Perry asked.

“What do you mean?” Gna’kis asked, finishing the finger. As it swallowed, Perry saw the microchips on the side of its head shift in color to be slightly darker.

“I’m getting an intense urge to use my most advanced technology to…do bad things to…people.” it was almost gleeful anticipation, a starving man rattling the bars of his cage, demanding to be fed.

In this case, ‘being fed’ meant committing what Perry was absolutely sure were crimes against nature itself.

But it’s just a demon. They have super resilient souls. Besides, no one will shed a tear for them. If I don’t do it now, someone else will.

“Ah, yes, that’s my aura leaking out. I’m not too good at controlling it yet. Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but I think you should probably go back to your own realm for a while.” Perry said, struggling with the dark urges bubbling up inside him.

“Give me the rest of the suit to consume, and I will return to my realm.”

I’ll just set Gna’kis over there, and give it the suit. While it’s eating, I’ll use the soul-cutter to shred its capacity for independent thought. Then while it’s weakened, I can slowly alter it, adding and subtracting from it as I see fit, tailoring its entire being to my whims. It’ll acclimatize to the changes in a matter of hours, because of its demonic resilience…

It’s better than using it to modify someone I actually care about. A necessary sacrifice to ensure I don’t hurt Natalie or Heather…

Could she love me if she couldn’t remember the bad times?

Perhaps Gna’kis could serve as practice, so that when I make adjustments to Heather, they will be so perfect as to go unnotic-

“Get the fuck out of my reality until I call you again!” Perry shouted with the last of his self-control, cutting off the slippery slope of rationalization and punting the slimy fetus across the workshop, landing it directly in the banishing circle.

“My due!” Gna’kis wailed, both arms reaching out pathetically.

“Take it and shut up!” Perry said, pulling off one of his suit’s arms and tossing it at the demon. “And if you don’t have that aura under control next time we speak, I will mutilate you!”

Perry intended it to be a warning, but it sounded more like a threat as it came out.

Gna’kis can take it either way.

The demon latched onto the high-tech armor like a leech moments before the banishing circle sucked it out of their dimension, taking the armor with it.

The instant it was gone, thoughts of using the soul-surgery equipment to violate people at the most fundamental level to satiate his greed, lust, and ego…began to fade.

“Dear lord, that thing is more dangerous than I thought,” Perry whispered to himself, running shaking fingers through his hair. He hadn’t seen the aura with his dimensional vision, he’d simply felt a rapid unraveling of his compunctions about soul-rape.

It had been subtle, fast, and nearly indistinguishable from his own desires. No, it hadn’t altered his desires. Perry still felt the desire to control the demon, to patch things up with Heather.

It hadn’t changed those, simply removed the limitations he’d placed on himself. Without those limitations, things got very dark, very quickly.

And that was scary. Perry was scared…of himself.

Am I sure I didn’t get eaten by Abun’zaul? Perry thought, his heart gradually slowing in speed as he ran a finger over his teeth.

No. Because Abun’zaul would want to eat Gna’kis and possibly become a god. I…don’t want to touch the thing with a ten foot pole.

Even if I could eat it, I could see myself becoming like that all the time, and turning everyone I know into a pitiful caricature of their former selves.

It had been utterly creepy how easily Perry had begun to think that modifying people to suit his desires was an acceptable course of action.

“Brrr…” Perry shuddered off the lingering mental sliminess.

Now I’m gonna have to go through the entire day up until this point with a fine-tooth comb and figure out if there were any other decisions I made under ‘the influence.’

One thing stood out: weaponizing a disease to use on the trolls was needlessly cruel and too un-targeted. What if it spread to people, or trolls who didn’t deserve it.

Another thing:

Did I just send some random guy a bomb through Nargosh!? What if there were other people there!? That was the equivalent of a couple tons of C-4! Indiscriminate bombing was also uncharacteristic for Perry. If he’d been thinking straight, he’d have probably sent some kind of probe to send back more information instead.

“Jeez,” Perry said, taking a deep breath and exhaling all the cruelty he’d been working up to over the course of the day. “I’ll just make a spell that immolates their spines. No need to get complicated with it.”

Still gonna modify the demon’s soul, though. That shit needs to be under control.

And who better than mine?