David sat on the cold stone floor at the very back of the derelict temple. His back rested against the wall. In front of him was the bound, mountainous back of a grotesque piece of flesh. Above it, the demon’s floating eye hung in the air. He stared at the eye. He was pondering a very specific problem.

  The problem was how to kill Thar’Zul the Devourer of Penitence.

  More specifically, how a Level 11 was supposed to kill a Level 50 anything. Even if that ‘anything’ was currently chained up and defeated.

  Levels, he figured, were not flat multipliers. His own stats and skills proved that much. A Level 50 wasn’t just five times stronger than a Level 10. It was a different category of existence. It was an unpredictable increase in focused, specialized, and equally unpredictable power. It was the difference between a firecracker and a thermobaric warhead. Both made noise, but only one left a crater where a city block had been.

  He refused to walk out of this ice dome and leave a dangerous loose end still intact and breathing behind him. There was no guarantee that whatever force had punished, tortured, or imprisoned this thing wouldn’t change its mind tomorrow. What if its sentence was up? What if the warden got bored? Would he wake up tomorrow, or the day after, or in a week, to find a Level 50 soul-eater treating him like a light snack?

  No. That wasn’t a loose end. It was a live landmine he’d have to spend the rest of his life tiptoeing around. And David hated tiptoeing.

  He had to nip this in the bud immediately. The bud just happened to be a mythical-scale demon wrapped in magical chains.

  So for the last ten minutes, David had been running a simple, productive scam. He’d use the fragment of the Heretic's Shackle to pull a thick stream of energy from the chained demon, let it saturate the metal links until they were hot to the touch, then walk to the back, sit, and drain it into himself. Then he’d do it again. Rinse and repeat. It was like skimming gas from a parked tank. The owner was right there, but it was chained up, and David had a siphon.

  A frontal attack wasn’t just a bad idea; it was a pre-recorded death. His Battle Sense had shown him that clip on a loop the moment they’d entered: walk toward the front, the gut-maw opens, the world goes dark. So he’d gone straight to its back. The chains were sturdy, but David had no desire to test how sturdy. The other option—carving a new door through the temple’s rear wall—was a non-starter. His portals could cut steel. This stone laughed at steel. It would have taken days. Which tracked. It was holding a Level 50. The building code here was serious.

  Soul manipulation was a shiny toy he had to leave in the box. The thing was literally a Soul Eater. It had a PhD in soul shenanigans. David had just opened the brochure.

  The enchanted ice censer was the same story. Its whole purpose appeared to be stilling or removing energy to create ice. It wasn’t ideal for the chains. It may have had no effect, but David wouldn't risk it. Perhaps that's why the unbound, smaller demon had wielded it. Trying to use it was like jiggling a key in a lion’s cage lock while the lion watched you.

  So he went down the list.

  He had death energy sitting in his bones like cold silt. He had heat energy—literal fire-adjacent magic stuff—making a warm spot in his chest. He had demonic energy, fresh from his petty theft, buzzing in his veins. He had his new, untested soul-manipulation sense. He had his portals. He had Battle Sense with its helpful, horrifying previews. And he had his special eyes, now showing him the demon as a dense, pulsing web of power and the chains as glowing, straining conduits.

  David had turned the back half of the temple into his own private gym. Every trip from the rear wall to the demon's back was a drill. His Battle Sense needed the practice, and the chained monster was a full-time instructor that really wanted him dead. Its thick tail was a central column of instant death, but the base where it met the spine and the chained, spear-like tip were workable. He'd walk the line, feeling the skill itch in his brain, mapping the safe zones. He’d absorbed so much demonic energy his personal magic field had ballooned from two feet out to a hard stop at ten, refusing to stretch another inch no matter how much he stole. So he’d started trying to funnel the excess directly into Battle Sense until it felt like it worked, keeping the precog flicker running constantly in the background. It became a low hum in his skull, a second layer of vision over everything.

  Now, chain fragment in hand, he walked up to the demon's back again. Letting his focus drop meant a tail strike moving faster than he could see. It would hit him like a hammer swatting a fly, or worse, knock him around front where the gut-maw waited. But David was careful. He stayed a calculated step ahead, his skill painting the ghost of the next half-second in the air, keeping him just outside the range of that blinding speed. The guidance couldn’t save him if he strayed into the kill zone, so he never did. He just kept using the thing, milking it for energy and skill mastery, stocking up for the main event: figuring out how to turn its own chains into a grave.

  Of course, the classic plan of stabbing it until it stopped moving was technically on the table. He’d tested it. The charred, weeping patches where he’d hit it with combined balls of heat and death energy hadn’t healed. They were still raw and open, with only the very earliest marks showing any kind of scarred seal. It was fair to say the chains binding the creature were already wringing it dry, leaving very little juice for something as trivial as wound closure.

  David had driven his spear into the creature’s back enough times to know the metrics. The plain steel tip sank in maybe a centimeter. When he infused the spear with heat energy, it drove in about an inch. On a creature this size, that was a scratch. He wouldn’t risk using demonic energy—feeding a demon its own power seemed like asking for trouble. Portals, fared slightly better, but whatever energy existed in its cells violently rejected his portals—David supposed the skill was never intended to be used as a weapon, so without leveling, it made sense; he was essentially using a car door as a battering ram.

  Death energy, however, was the most… reactive. Infusing death, or death and heat in the spear then stabbing caused the local muscles to seize violently, once nearly snapping the metal tip in a convulsive grip. That was… something of a clue. But the hide was incredibly tough. The demon didn’t even flinch at the scratches. The giant eye watched him, unmoving, unblinking. He felt a low, strange certainty that it was watching him with something like mirth.

  Sure, he was slowly carving into the same spot where its maybe-heart would be, working the tip in like he was trying to cut an overcooked steak with a butter knife. It was progress, technically. But it would take forever, and David didn’t have all day.

  He rose, his every sense attuned to imminent death, and approached the bound demon until he could feel the heat from its back.

  David placed the Heretic's Shackle fragments on the ground. The chain links settled against the stone with a dull clink. He looked at his own palm, then at the exposed patch on the demon’s back. The skin there was bare for the first time, the armored plates chipped away from his persistent, shallow spearing. He raised his hand and moved it toward the demon’s back. The motion was gentle. It was slow.

  Whenever David activated his skills, it was instinctual. Calm Mind ran on mana. Battle Sense ran on mana. That much had been obvious from the start. What hadn't been obvious, was that the source had never changed. He realized that even when he thought he was using demonic energy to fuel his skills, that fuel only powered the things that came from the demonic energy itself—his Demonic Energy Manipulation, his Portal Magic, his internal circulation. His System-granted skills always defaulted to mana. He hadn’t noticed the distinction before. But he’d been absorbing a real demon’s energy for a while now, not just an imp’s or some mammalian creature’s leftover spark. The quality was different. Thicker. More aggressive—the difference in the fuel lines felt obvious.

  It felt as though he’d peeled back an unseen layer of casing and could now feel the wiring beneath—something he was never meant to sense at his level.

  His hand hovered in front of the demon's partially armored back. David gathered all the excess demonic energy saturating his ten-foot magic field and began to slowly pour it into the dense center of mass in his chest. Correctly this time. That spot felt like a sun, or a cramped, overheated energy factory. He focused on the specific, strange part of it that he associated instinctually with his Battle Sense skill. The process was slow. It felt like trying to thread a needle while wearing oven mitts. He was sure a lapse in concentration would cause the elusive skill to reject the oversaturation of energy. The skill, like his other System skills, was probably only meant to run on mana. And as David had noticed, demonic energy was a natural catalyst for change. Or more probably, for corruption.

  [Battle Sense Lvl 3 → Battle Sense Lvl 4]

  David's Battle Sense leveled up. He didn't feel any different. His hand was still hovering above the demon's back. He moved it forward slowly.

  Then he got an urge.

  Before, the skill showed him things. It gave him a quick, visual clip of what would happen if he stepped left, or swung right. Now, with the skill infused and grumbling with demonic energy, the information came as a physical pull. A psychic itch in his muscles. He felt an urgent tug to tilt his wrist three degrees to the left. He did it. The urge smoothed out, replaced by a low certainty that this was the correct position.

  Battle Sense had always been the hand that guided him. It was like having a cheat sheet for the next two seconds. Reliable. A bit like carrying fate in his back pocket.

  Now it felt like fate was tugging on his sleeve, impatient, pointing him toward specific, beneficial futures with the insistence of a backseat driver who was somewhat malicious and wanted nothing but pain and destruction.

  He followed the skill’s guidance and placed his bare palm on the demon’s back.

  On contact, David’s perception fell into the demon. He felt like he was seeing its soul. He almost pulled back on instinct, a cold jolt telling him to retreat. But his Battle Sense didn’t complain. The malicious urge in his muscles held steady, a flat line of predatory approval. So he remained. He looked.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The soul wasn’t a shape inside a body. It was a place. A vast, jagged fortress-world built from blackened stone and warped energy, floating in a void. It pulsed with a faint, distorted light that came from within its own walls. The walls were the problem. They weren’t just stone. They were made of souls. Hundreds of them. Some were completely consumed, dead material fused into towers and barriers for reinforcement. Others were still active, tormented fragments woven into the structure, being slowly corrupted in cavernous internal halls.

  The whole fortress was a machine. Its only function was capture, corruption, and digestion. Terraces and bridges spanned its interior, not for movement, but as pathways of influence, guiding souls toward refinement or final absorption. The architecture had a strategic, horrible intelligence. It was a self-consistent realm of pure consumption. It was lawless, dissolute, and wicked. It waited for the right moment, the perfect leverage, to maximize disorder and corrupt anything pure into something ripe.

  Looking at it didn't hurt his eyes. It hurt his understanding. The scale of what he was touching, what he’d been siphoning energy from, rearranged his mental furniture. It was a lot to take in.

  [Soul Manipulator Lvl 1 → Soul Manipulator Lvl 2]

  David remained firmly outside its soul, merely peering in from the doorstep. As long as he did that, he’d be safe. But he felt the pull. Unlike Jamie, whose soul felt like a locked bank vault, this thing’s soul was an open door with the light on. It wanted him to enter.

  David scoffed.

  Yeah, right.

  David saw a gray panel appear in his vision as he peered at the soul-fortress. Words printed themselves on it.

  [Demon Soul. This is the soul of a Devourer of Penitence.]

  He looked from the words back to the sprawling construct of blackened stone and tormented souls. The label wasn't wrong. It just wasn't useful.

  Helpful, he thought. That really narrows it down.

  He wanted more information. His Battle Sense remained still. He focused on gleaning the soul's interior. His attention fixed on the specific sight before him—the jagged, blackened stone of the fortress walls, the warped energy, the trapped souls moving within them. He was trying to see into it. The gray panel flickered and updated, scrolling out a new line of text.

  [Demon Soul - Thar'Zul the Devourer of Penitence

  Status: Hungry

  Description: …and the Devourer of Penitence moved through the courts and temples, tracing the fracture of the first tribunal, bending its judgment toward desire and corruption…]

  He read it. Courts. Temples. Tribunal. He understood the words, but their meaning here—what courts, which tribunal—was a blank. He was getting fragments without the connections.

  Then he saw a familiar word. Corruption.

  He looked from the words on the panel to the soul-fortress made of tormented souls. He looked at his own hand, resting on the demon’s back its veins and channels filled to the brim with the corroding nature of the demonic.

  Huh, he thought. Maybe that’s why it’s interested.

  Penitence was the feeling of remorse for wrongdoing and the desire to atone. This demon was a devourer of it. To have penitence, one had to be pretty evil. Or pretty damn saintly. Even if you had no remorse, and were a complete psycho, remorse could be manufactured. Take an evil soul and make it suffer, and it would regret its evil, at least with regard to avoiding suffering.

  What did that mean—that it liked to eat evil souls? Or to corrupt good souls to evil? Maybe that’s what corruption was to it. Did that mean it considered David evil? Or corruptible? Or perhaps on the first steps to becoming evil?

  Well, David wouldn’t be winning any Boy Scout awards any time soon, but he didn’t think he was that bad. He was no saint, sure. He had been a hero once. As a firefighter, he saved lives for a living. He had learned on earth that being a hero could cost you everything. Heroism had stripped him of everything he valued long before he came to this world. David wasn’t evil. He just had good pattern recognition. The demonic energy could try to corrupt him—but good luck. It was going to find that the wiring was already rerouted and the doors were locked from the inside.

  David focused on the task at hand. Demonic energy had to take a backseat. The creature was a literal demon. Fighting fire with fire only applied to stabbing your enemies or severely unfair military warfare. In real life, it was a terrible idea. Fire plus fire just made a bigger fire.

  Soul energy was useful. But he didn't know how to reach it. Plus, he wasn't getting anywhere near that horrific excuse for a soul.

  Death energy was so far his most effective tool. The demon's soul was an open invitation to getting eaten. Its metaphorical doors were wide open. David doubted any other being would have such a seemingly welcoming soul. Even that pipsqueak Jamie was unassailable. It was an obvious, intentional trap. An entrance with no exit.

  Maybe if he filled its soul with death, he could kill it?

  That introduced the second problem. David’s circulation felt like magic. His portals too. Even his healing and weapon infusion felt like magic. But when he shot fire? When he mixed death or heat energy and blasted it out of his magic field? It was just energy. The only reason it dealt any damage was because it fused with flames. That was why he didn’t get a skill for it. He was manipulating energy, but what he needed was magic.

  If he could merge death with soul and heat, fill the creature’s soul with decay, entropy, and entropy’s cousin—flaming black death—while the chains were already draining it? Maybe he could deal it a blow it wouldn’t be able to recover from.

  David used his Battle Sense. The skill was different now. It wasn't a guide. It was a greedy, malicious little gremlin in his head that got excited at the prospect of causing pain and corruption. It urged him to merge the death energy settled deep in his bones with the heat energy churning in his chest, to push that mixture through every cell in his palm, and to shove it into the demon.

  It made a kind of sense. His soul was connected to his body. This would connect his soul to the demon’s. He was hesitant. The thing was a Soul Eater. Walking into its soul, even through the back door, was a terrible idea. The gremlin in his head didn’t care. It practically begged for him to do it, salivating at the thought of the death and pain he would cause.

  If this thing wasn't bound, drained, and chained soul-deep, I’d be dead a thousand times over, he thought. But it is.

  David, trusting his skill’s new, corrupted need for evil, did it.

  His palm sank into the demon’s back. It didn't feel completely physical. It felt metaphysical, like pushing his hand into cold, dense water that was also a building. He did two things at once.

  First, he pushed the death energy out of his bones, mixed it with heat energy, and sent the combination through his metaphysical palm. It wasn’t just fire. It was a black flame with a silver, ethereal luster, burning more than the physical. Hell, in a specific, localized sense, broke loose.

  Second, he engaged his Energy Affinity skill directly. He didn’t pull from his own reserves. He drew from the bound demon in front of him, stealing its energy and using it to fuel the black-silver flame. A small section of the soul-fortress wall in his mind’s eye crumbled. The flame in his palm changed. It stopped being a fireball. It became a comet-like stream pouring from his hand into the demon’s soul-fortress.

  The demon reacted for the first time.

  The giant floating eye shuddered erratically. The demon’s physical body seized. A shudder ran through it with enough force to snap the bones in David’s arm with a dry, sickening crunch. Pain shot up to his shoulder. David held on. He kept pouring.

  The demon used the connection they now had. It pulled.

  David’s body was sucked into the demon’s soul. His body was connected to his soul, so it went where his soul went—into the demon, through its back, not its stomach. He’d seen the pull coming in a flicker from Battle Sense. He didn’t disengage. The gremlin in his head was overjoyed because David was causing immense pain and destruction, which directly satisfied its malicious, corrupted nature.

  Inside the soul, the death-flame was a contagion. It hit the first inner wall of the vast fortress. The death-energy in it acted like a metaphysical acid. The soul-stone, made of compressed soul-stuff, began to decay and burn at the same time. The flame spread.

  The demon diverted power from fighting the chains that bound and drained it, sacrificing stability. It began burning the imprisoned souls stored in its lower tiers, using their screaming essence as frantic, patchwork shields. Sections of the fortress wall crumbled into ash. Others melted and reformed, only to be eaten away again.

  David felt the torrent of power the demon was desperately expending through his Energy Affinity. He grabbed it and redirected it. He fed the demon's own stolen strength directly back into the spreading flame.

  The flame changed. It went from a spreading fire to a concentrated, starving entity. It became a serpentine ribbon of annihilation that coiled through the fortress's terraces and bridges, seeking out the densest clusters of soul-stuff—the corruption chambers, the digestive core.

  The demon tried to consume David through their connection. A wave of predatory, soul-eating hunger pressed into him, trying to unmake his essence. It was the attack of a being that had eaten hundreds of souls. It was immense.

  David’s sense of self fractured a little under the pressure. Parts of him felt like they were being pulled apart. But the attack met something different. He wasn't just a human soul. He was Deathborn. His soul had the structure and hunger of a predator, too. The demon's consumption tried to unmake him, but David's soul consumed the consuming energy. He healed the damage by eating the attack. It was a feedback loop of negation. The demon was a Soul Eater, but David was something new—a being that could eat the death it was dealt. It was a bad matchup because his body was his soul, and he could consume soul to heal his body, and the demon was already in bad shape—bound, drained on multiple fronts, and with its soul on fire. The demon was weak, bound, and drained on three fronts: the physical chains, the soul-chains, and David's active siphon. It would have easily killed anyone else. But David was a soul-eater of a different flavor.

  Distracted by its soul being on fire, weakened by constant drainage, and baffled by prey that ate its essence, the demon's will fractured.

  David kept draining its energy and funneling it directly back into the flames. He turned the demon’s own power into the fuel for its annihilation. The black-silver flame grew. It was no longer just a fire inside a world. It became the world on fire. David caused it all, a tiny point of absolute ruin at the center of a cataclysm, like the surface of a star—a wave of pure, erasing heat that dissolved everything it touched.

  Piece by piece, the fortress-world dissolved. Towers of captive souls vaporized. Halls of corruption boiled away. The scale shrank from a vast landscape of skyscraper-sized structures to a crumbling district, to a single, burning building, to a solitary, cracked platform.

  All that remained was David, and a tiny broken fragment of the demon's soul. The fortress was gone. In its place floated a charred and cracked shard, no larger than David’s palm.

  Then his body was ejected from the demon. He was back in the temple, on his knees, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side. He quickly healed it with a focused surge of heat energy, the bones knitting with a warm, itchy sensation. The chained form of Thar’Zul the Devourer of Penitence was utterly still. The giant eye was gone.

  [You have defeated a Temple Demon — Soul Eater Variant, Thar'Zul the Devourer of Penitence Lvl 50]

  [Lvl 11 → Lvl 12]

  Then the massive body tipped forward. It fell a few inches before the chains snapped taut with a deafening metallic shriek, holding the colossal corpse upright, barely suspended.

  It could have killed him a thousand times over. But its primary mistake, was forcing David into a state of unacceptable paranoia.

  It had been bound by the Heretic's Shackle, drained by the temple's own mechanisms, and weakened by David's constant, petty siphon. Its soul was imprisoned within chains of light, its physical form anchored by glowing metal. It had been starved of worthy corruption for an age, left as a test and a trap in a temple at the heart of an impossible dungeon. The conditions that led to this moment.

  The demon was dead.

  David felt the phantom pains from having his soul go through a meat grinder of damage and repair. It manifested as a dull, full-body ache, a deep soreness in his bones and behind his eyes. He ignored it. One problem solved.

  He rose.

  Then he went to go and fetch Mara.