Aranayn nodded. “What will you do to not end up the same here?”

  Correct question. I’ve thought about that a lot, actually. “First of all, I will put a lot more limiters on my power. Right now, I only have two, and then power compartmentalization for large power spikes. Here, I will put my first limit at one percent of my total strength and split it apart by many more limiters. And as for what I will do, well, for starters, I won’t become a corporate assassin.”

  “What will you become then?”

  A smile found its way to my face. “First, I will take a break. And then, I will want to join some law enforcement as a detective or something of that sort. I’m sure you have worlds that aren’t as peaceful as Khelinos.”

  Taewyn graced me with a glare. “What’s wrong with living in peace?”

  “I am a restless soul. I cannot go without conflict for long. But that doesn’t mean the restlessness cannot serve a good purpose.”

  Aranayn finally smiled. “Palai will certainly find you a position to your liking.” He rose. “I will consult the other gods. We are virtually guaranteed to accept your offer. What’s the timeline in which you can close the tunnel between our realm?”

  “First, I need to stay for twenty-four hours here, so I don’t return suspiciously soon. Afterward, I will need about two to three days to get things done. Also, if you could send Palai here for me to arrange my departure, it would be great.”

  “It will be my pleasure.” Aranayn headed for the door. “See you around, Dreamwalker.” He gently closed the door behind himself.

  Taewyn relaxed on her chair and formed a playful smile. “So, where are you planning to stay?”

  “I saw this nice meadow behind the city, so I figured I would crash over there.”

  She jabbed me in the arm. “You are so funny that you should become a comedian. You will stay with me, and you will pay for it by taking me to a brunch right about now.”

  That sounded like a plan.

  We went for the brunch. She took me to her favorite place, where they made a degustation menu for us.

  Some of the meals were great, others less so. But I appreciated all of them. Though most of the menu felt as if made for rabbits. They had an impressive array of vegetables and fruits, but they didn’t serve all that much meat.

  Taewyn seemed to be pleased though, enjoying all of it.

  And I enjoyed that she enjoyed it.

  The blood seeping from my back glued my shirt and suit to my back, but that didn’t matter much.

  The drinks fit my suit a lot better. While they were sweet, they contained alcohol, which helped with the vegetables.

  And Taewyn became even more fun to be around once she got tipsy. She had started telling me stories about her travels across their realm. I loved those.

  Since their gods crafted physical worlds and their realm barely separated the physical from the spiritual, the beings from both types of worlds mixed freely in the realm.

  They had about five billion total people in the physical worlds, so fewer than we had on Earth, but nobody counted the souls in the spiritual worlds.

  We finished the brunch, and Taewyn got up, ready to go show me around.

  I smiled and stood up.

  My head spun.

  I crashed on the floor, unconscious.

  I woke up in a comfortable bed, lying on my belly.

  Taewyn sat by the bedside, sipping hot tea, gaze unfocused.

  My back didn’t hurt anymore, which felt great. “Are you okay?” I asked, forming a smile without trying to get up.

  She jerked her body, and almost spilled the tea. “Oh, now you ask. Do you have any idea how much that scared me? What were you thinking when you didn’t mention you had an envenomed, bleeding wound on your back? How can you be so careless?”

  “In retrospect, I should have mentioned that first. Sorry about that.”

  “Yes, you should be sorry. In what world do you ignore your own wounds? Have you gone insane? Seriously, Lucas, why wouldn’t you want to have that treated?”

  “I thought it was just a scratch.”

  “And you certainly didn’t feel the continuous bleeding, did you? Your shirt, jacket, and pants were drenched when I took them off. That your suit is waterproof means you have to feel it even more intensely than when wearing normal clothes. Also, what’s with all the scars on you? Elenoara fainted when she saw your body. Fainted!”

  I slowly sat up on the bed. I had new, brown pants, no socks or shoes, and only the bandage over my back on my upper half. “I’ve been through a few fights.”

  “A few? Elenoara has been a healer for her entire life, for over a hundred years, and she hasn’t seen as many scars combined across her entire career.”

  To be fair, I had quite a collection. This still made me smile. “I’m sorry for having scared both of you.”

  “You keep saying you are sorry but you don’t sound the tiniest bit apologetic.”

  Well, I did enjoy how flustered it made her. If I wanted to get rid of my scars, I could have. I chose not to, as they represented a part of my life I wanted to remember. That I had to remember. “I’m sorry that I’m not sorry.”

  She rolled her eyes as she sipped from the tea. “Promise me you won’t do this again.”

  I got up from the bed and started to slowly stretch. All my limbs felt fine, nothing hurt, and nothing bled. An excellent start. By the looks of the room, clearly carved inside a tree in the same style as her living room, we were most likely in a guest room of her apartment.

  “Yes, flex your muscles,” she said venomously. “How did you get so much muscle anyway? Your musculature is absurd, and I mean it in the unnatural sense.”

  “When I get wounded, my master’s demons heal me. They like to make little improvements here and there in the process. I get wounded often and have exercised for my whole life, so yeah, I’ve got some muscle.” And by how her gaze lingered on me, she liked what she saw. So, I made sure to pose a bit as I stretched.

  Taewyn did take her time watching me. “I will bring your suit.” She laid the teacup on a small table that stood next to her and rose. She vanished through a curtain before she returned with my suit, neatly folded, in her hands. The stack of clothes featured a new shirt.

  “Thank you.” I started dressing up, comfortably in the shirt that imitated the style of my own. From the window, I glimpsed the sun started to set. I was out for a good few hours.

  After I dressed, Taewyn carefully measured me. “Now, if you are done concealing mortal wounds from me, we could go have a dinner. I am starving.”

  That sounded good.

  We went out for dinner. She took me to another restaurant, where we had a different degustation menu, made of completely different meals, but still almost exclusively plants.

  I could live with that. Once again, Taewyn seemed to be happy.

  I enjoyed that.

  We chatted through the dinner, once again, exchanging stories about our lives. However this time, I did most of the talking. She wanted to know the stories of my scars.

  I had days’ worth of those, so I started with the one how I was once hunting down a rogue mage and he made a house collapse on me.

  The sun had long since set before we headed back to her apartment. Along the way, she picked up two bottles made from hardened leaves that surely contained alcohol.

  My suspicions were confirmed after we arrived at her apartment. We relaxed on the couch, she popped open one bottle, and we started drinking.

  As she drank, Taewyn got progressively flirtier.

  I answered in kind, but then she sat on my lap and leaned against me. “Be careful, Envoy,” I said. “You might end up with a broken heart.”

  “It’s my heart, so I can do whatever I want with it. Yes, yes, I get that you live a dangerous life, so any relationship with you might get cut short. But if I never take any risks, why live at all?” She leaned in to kiss me.

  I didn’t need to specify that I meant that her broken heart was going to come from me cheating on her. If she wanted to play, sure, I was up for the game. I kissed her, and things went well from there.

  We did quite a bit of smooching before we moved into her bed. I let her take the lead as I wasn’t sure how elves actually had sex and what boundaries they did or didn’t have.

  Things went rather standardly though. One thing that I pondered was how much my view was twisted by my usual partners being succubi and similar beings.

  I couldn’t tell if Taewyn barely knew what she was doing, or if I was just too used to shagging sex demons. In any case, I made sure to use absolutely nothing demonic.

  At the same time, things seemed to work really well for her, at least judging by how much she intensely moaned.

  I enjoyed that.

  And did take things slow to make sure I didn’t accidentally do something she disliked.

  That didn’t happen, and I successfully pounded her to sleep.

  Once she slept like a corpse, I lay next to her and closed my eyes to sleep.

  Cold steel pressed against my throat.

  Well, fuck.

  I reopened my eyes and saw a slender figure towering above me.

  A woman with medium-length, dark hair and shining violet eyes glared at me, wearing a leather outfit. She held a long dagger in her left hand, which she pressed against my throat. No right arm.

  Phew. I waited for a few seconds to let my breath steady. And only then, I matched her glare with a smirk. “If you want a turn, you’ll need to drop those pants.”

  For a moment, she found no words. “Get up.” She slightly lifted up the dagger.

  I got up from the bed and let her guide me to the living room. She closed the door to the bedroom without making the tiniest sound.

  I crashed on the sofa. “So, what do I call you?”

  “Xanaya. Do you even understand your situation, Lucifer?”

  “I’ve got the rough idea. You somehow heard about the elves treating someone with symptoms that matched the effect of the venom you had on the dagger you stabbed Lucifer with. You came to investigate and, oh what a coincidence, the man had a wound at the exact spot where you stabbed him. Yes, you are correct.”

  “If you understand that, then why are you so calm about this? I could kill you on the spot.”

  I rolled my eyes. “If you wanted to kill me, you would have waited for me to fall asleep, and you wouldn’t have come alone. You haven’t done that, so you aren’t here to kill or to expose me. You are here to make a deal, and if I were to wager a guess, I would say it’s about the missing arm.”

  She sheathed her dagger behind her back. She didn’t sit down though, still glaring at me. “Could you at least pretend you aren’t so full of yourself?”

  “Why should I?” I looked for the bottles of booze and then remembered we emptied them both. “You are completely unprepared to wage a war against me. Yes, the previous Lucifer couldn’t create portal networks, so you had no reason to prepare for those. But I can, I do, and I am ten times the asshole he was.”

  “I agree with the last part.”

  “But I do appreciate you waited for Taewyn to fall asleep before you came to spoil the evening. So, if I get you your arm back, will you keep my secret?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Can you even do that?”

  I pushed power into my eyes. The world’s colors shifted before my eyes, and I worked the frequencies to see souls. As I expected, the spell Alsha hit her with froze off a part of her soul.

  Without that getting fixed first, no healing could return the arm to her.

  “Has Dark Alexandra ever met you without a mask?” I asked.

  For a moment, she looked like she wanted to protest. “No.”

  “All right. We will need to go to my realm for me to repair your soul, and then I’ll have Dark Alexandra heal you up.”

  “I am not trusting a demon princess.”

  I shrugged. “Then get yourself a prosthetic arm.”

  She didn’t like hearing that. But she also wanted her arm back, and she had probably tried everything she heard about in the Mirrorrealm. “I will think about it,” she finally said.

  I got up and headed back to the bedroom. “Wait for me somewhere in the Void around Khelinos, and I will pick you up in about half a day from now.”

  She watched me walk away and then vanished into shadows.

  I returned to the bed and went to sleep.

  What was I going to do about Xanaya?

  I hadn’t the faintest idea. She could screw me over in a million different ways, and I hadn’t an idea how to stop her.

  Meh, I could solve that tomorrow.

  Lucas 9

  Taewyn slept like a corpse. At some point, I checked her pulse to verify she still lived.

  I prepared breakfast for her, a mixture of vegetables and fruits, and brought it to the bed when she finally woke up.

  First, she needed water, and then, she very much enjoyed the breakfast. We went from that straight for lunch. She seemed happy, which was highly unusual because we had been together for almost twenty-four hours.

  I spent with her the time I promised.

  To save me the trouble, Palai came himself when the time came. He descended on his wings of flame, just as Taewyn and I were heading home from a restaurant.

  Taewyn’s smile vanished from her face, and she clutched my arm. “Must you go?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I will return… with a bit of luck.”

  By the face she made, she didn’t like the sound of that. Understandable, but my vacation day had ended. I didn’t budge, and after a bit more discussion, and a big kiss for good luck, I ascended into the Void with Palai.

  We stopped up above Khelinos. “How are things looking at the Tower?” I asked.

  Palai looked in the Tower’s general direction. His amber eyes shone for a moment. “Still in deadlock. Your master is being surprisingly patient.”

  “I would use the word lazy,” I said. “But before I go there, suppose I still wanted to move in, but that I would need something to do. Khelinos is beautiful…”

  “Yet boring,” he filled in for me. “A man needs a purpose else his mind will go astray.” He spread a field of fire around us, and we flew like a meteorite through the Void.

  In about fifteen minutes, we slowed down and stopped. In front of us floated a world made of three rings surrounding a small, artificial sun.

  “This is New Sarn,” Palai said. “The trade hub between the core system and the outer reaches, and a completely artificial world. It’s the only world in our realm that has electricity, and it also happens to be a crime-infested shithole that, frankly speaking, we have no idea how to handle.”

  That piqued my interest. “What would be my role?”

  “A junior inquisitor. In your world, I believe, it would be called a detective.”

  “In the worst world in your realm?”

  He sported a smile. “A man of your talents cannot live without a challenge.”

  Not wrong. Not that clapping Taewyn’s cheeks wasn’t fun, it was, but at the same time, I needed something to do. And also… “Is meat common in the world’s diet?”

  Palai laughed. “Yes, elves prefer a nearly herbivore diet, but they are mostly alone in that preference.”

  Good. Very good, actually. “I think I’ll enjoy that. I’m ready to go.”

  A globe of flame, once again, enveloped us, and we flew through the Void. Palai took me to a viewing distance from the Tower and dispelled the barrier. “I will pretend I don’t see you.”

  He turned into a pure flame and vanished.

  Well, he was going to watch me, so I had to fly naturally. I approached the battle lines and cloaked myself in a reflective magical field.

  I flew through the Void, sped up, and reached the battle lines. Once I dove among the endless swarm of Void ships of the Mirrorrealm, they noticed me.

  But the fire of the Void ships couldn’t piece my shields, so I just flew through. The swarming demons mostly ignored me, busy being blown up by the ships’ fire.

  I flew to the portals and met Alsha. She floated on her throne of clouds, expression bored to tears. She raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment of my presence. “Went to scout?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without your armor?”

  I shrugged. “I needed to not be noticed, and it’s not like they can catch me.”

  “I suppose.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  But I didn’t care and entered the portal to Hell. Once I exited there, I moved to the beast warrens in the outskirts. I already had a portal set up there.

  I changed into the armor and put on the helmet. I connected the portal to the network, then stretched my power into the Mirrorrealm, all the way to Khelinos.

  I moved myself there and stretched out my detection field.

  Xanaya awaited me floating in the Void nearby, as I told her to. Good.

  I soulstepped to her.

  She jumped in her skin and reached for her dagger’s hilt. Aside from the sheathed dagger, she wore leather pants and a reinforced tunic, her hair caught by a steel circlet.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  She didn’t look ready, gaze darting around, breath sped up. “Yes.”

  Well, she was taking a giant leap of faith. I gently caught her hand. “Accept the spell.” I tried to move us into my portals and succeeded.

  We moved all the way to the portal in Hell.

  Xanaya materialized without issues next to me, her right arm still gone. She looked around, eyes wide.

  “Welcome to Hell,” I said. “Or well, the part no one likes, so we will have privacy in here.” I moved my hand, and the energies twisted around me and formed an armchair. “Take a seat. This will take a while.”

  Xanaya scanned me once more, and then she carefully sat down. “What are you going to do?”

  I took off the armor and settled back into my suit. “I’ll repair your arm. To manipulate souls, I need a lot of soul fragments. Hell is full of them, so it’s best to do it here.”

  I started working on the arm. The frozen-off part of her soul had been shattered, so the edges weren’t clean at all.

 

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