David shoved everything else out of his head—the ice dome, Jamie’s struggling, the dead demon’s bulk—and looked at his status. He looked at his skills. A weird weight sat behind his eyes, tied to the Infernal Thrall skill, a sort of psychic leash made solid. His eyes itched, deep in the sockets. He focused on the skill, pushing his aspect at it. The usual block of System text—the same dense paragraph of obvious information he always glossed over—appeared in his mind. He ignored it, his focus punching through to what lay beneath. A new, different stat screen shimmered into view.

  His undead soul-bound demon’s stat screen:

  [Name:

  Level: 0

  Primary Class: Locked

  Demonic Energy: 374

  Skills: Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 0, [Locked Lvl 0]]

  David blinked. Okay. That was a thing.

  The blank name slot was an obvious prompt. The Level 0 made a grim sort of sense—fresh out of the box. But the rest of it? A mild, clinical shock settled in his gut. He welcomed it. A surprise you could read was better than a mystery.

  Two skills. Demonic Energy Mastery was straightforward. Maybe all demons came with that pre-installed, like blinking. The second one, just [Locked], with its own Level 0 tag, hooked his attention. He didn’t know skills could be locked. Why would it be locked? His best guess pointed at the Frankenstein mess of death-energy, demonic juice, and soul-flame he’d used as solder and scaffolding to stitch the thing together. Maybe the lock was a compatibility issue. A bug in the system.

  His eyes went back to the number. 374. Its Demonic Energy rivalled his own pool. He’d practically emptied his reserves birthing the thing, and seeing the energy stick, seeing it register as a stat, was deeply satisfying. A good investment.

  But the real kicker was the layout. Demons only have one stat?

  He turned the idea over. It kind of made sense. Humans, hobgoblins, probably everything else, ran on the spread—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Mana. A buffet of specialties. Demons just had the one: Demonic Energy. One fuel for everything.

  Then how was the level 50 temple bastard so tough? Its corpse, even dead and chained, was harder than stone. How was it so strong? The answer presented itself, simple and clean. Pure circulation. It wasn't about having a 'Strength' stat. It was about constantly channeling that one, versatile energy through its body, hardening its skin, amplifying its muscles, until moving and striking was like breathing. The way David himself circulated demonic energy through his own veins and channels until it was second nature.

  And the suction vortex from its stomach-maw? That was probably demonic energy, too. Shaped, directed, given intent. That served as a clue. A big one. The nature of demonic energy wasn't just power; it was potential insanity. Raw versatility. If you only had one tool, you learned to use it for everything—prying, hammering, cutting, sucking. Demonic energy was the ultimate multi-tool, and demons were the mechanics who never needed another box.

  The thing knelt. It was six-and-a-half feet of maroon death and polished horn, the temple’s dusty air moving in and out of the slits in its torso. It waited patiently, for his command, as if its very existence was bound to his word.

  David looked at it. He had a monster. He needed a name for it.

  Lilith popped into his head. That was a demon name. It felt borrowed. This wasn’t a borrowed thing. He’d built it from spare parts and hatred. Asmodeus? Mephisto? They sounded like stage magicians. This thing’s fingers could probably punch through stone. It needed a name that fit the hands-on management style.

  Knight. That had a shape to it. A knight was a thing that stood between you and everything else. This thing would stand between David and anything he pointed at. But knights were good, or they were supposed to be. This thing’s face was a permanent look of cold judgement, its skin the color of a week-old bruise. It wasn’t good. In fact, it was whatever the opposite of good was. It was a very sharp, very loyal instrument. Calling it ‘Knight’ felt like putting a lace doily on a chainsaw. Funny, but not quite right.

  Knight was close. But it was wrong. Like an ill-fitting cloak. It needed an edge. A point.

  His mind went back to its locked skill. The cause was probably the burn job. He’d torched the soul-eater’s gargantuan soul-fortress down to cinders; maybe some scorched embers of what it used to be were left in the fragment. It tracked. The whole inner realm had been on fire. As a final touch, he’d only lightly heated the merged soul with deathly soul-fire, laced with demonic energy, just enough to solder it together—a warmth much lesser than the inferno that had originally broken everything down. So the lock might be a sealed part, a part that didn’t get fully forged. Made sense. And Demonic Energy Mastery was probably just standard for any demon. Something it was born with, like an instinct.

  He’d bound its soul by hammering his Infernal Thrall skill directly into its soul realm nonstop during the whole creation. The connection now felt like being a psychotherapist on shrooms and cocaine. He could sense every part of it—its consciousness was rudimentary, a basic existence with an almost infantile grasp of the waking world. And its loyalty was a blinding, etched soul-deep. A loyalty so blinding it gave David a headache. It was a soul-deep, jarring, mad loyalty so intense he’d had to mute the thrall bond just to concentrate. He couldn’t think through that psychic noise.

  But now he had a super loyal, massive undead demon. His new biggest fan. And woven through all that devotion, threaded through its entire being, was an extremely wicked mean streak. It was evil. Predatory. A strong, simple urge to stab things and break them. Like someone had given a mass murderer the undead body of a monster and then told it David was its god.

  Nice, David thought.

  The name hit him all at once. Cinder.

  It was born from a world on fire, from a process of soul-arson where everything was fuel and aftermath. David understood fire. His understanding was practical, a clear-eyed recognition of its components: the initial spark, the consuming fuel, the transformative heat, and what remained when the active burning stopped.

  Cinder was that final component. It was the enduring ember. It was the solid, hot remainder that held the blueprint of the inferno that had created it, ready to become a new fire with the right air and fuel. If you fed it enough kindling, it could grow from a single coal to a conflagration. It could grow to engulf the world.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Your name is Cinder.”

  The creature tilted its head. Its smoked-glass black eyes didn’t change. It repeated the word, its voice like a smooth quake in a tunnel. “Cinder.” It gave a single, slow nod. Perhaps too new to the world to understand why a name was significant, but knowing, on a fundamental level, that it needed one.

  The name stuck. A notification appeared behind David’s eyes.

  [Infernal Thrall Lvl 1 ? Infernal Thrall Lvl 2]

  He pushed it aside. Naming the thing had welded the connection shut. He turned his attention down the length of that bond, to the thing’s soul.

  It looked like a hot, heavy box in his head, with orange lines glowing through the cracks. A grey square of text appeared in front of it.

  [Undead Demon Soul

  Status: Waiting.

  Description: …a conflagration under a creator's will, feeding the lands, kindling the hunted...]

  He was reading the broken-up lines when another grey square slammed over the first one.

  [You have created an undead deathless revenant, a demon and hybrid of races, a feat the dungeon system refuses to reward you for. Force the system to acknowledge your achievement.

  Lvl 0/100]

  David read the words. He’d made a new thing from scraps and fire. The system’s reply was a flat no. No reward. The pettiness of it was almost rude. No, it was totally rude. This was an Impossible dungeon. Fairness was a broken concept.

  He wondered what would happen if he made the system acknowledge it anyway. What happened at one hundred? Whatever it was, the impossible system would hate it.

  He figured the system was just a machine, a set of rules. The real problem was the Impossible dungeon trying to kill them. But picturing the system as a smug guy behind a desk, a guy he could really annoy, made every win a little better.

  He tried to pull death energy from the demon corpse. It had just died, so the energy should have been there. It wasn't. The big Heretic's Shackle chains on the body were hogging it all, sucking it up.

  He had some death energy left in him. His body made it on its own, a side effect of the Deathborn skill. It wasn't like mana or demonic energy, something he made on purpose. It was more like heat energy. You don't make heat on purpose, it just happens because you're running. Death energy was like that for him. Steam from a radiator.

  He didn't touch the chains. The loose links on his belt hadn't done anything to him, but that was probably because he wasn't wearing them. No point testing it.

  He held his hand over the chains instead, a few inches above them. He reached for the energy with his affinity, not from the corpse, but from the energy currently moving through the chains as they drained the body. It was like sticking a cup under a leaking pipe.

  A string of leftover demonic energy and a thick, cold chunk of death energy came loose into his hand. It went down his arm and into his bones, settling deep like he'd swallowed a handful of snow that wouldn't melt.

  He looked at Cinder. She had claws and teeth. She didn't have a proper weapon. David had an idea.

  His demonic-and-death-energy cocktail apparently let him boss bones around. Of course, he didn’t have all day to carve the meat, inch by inch.

  But the bones?

  He put one hand on the demon's forearm. He kept his other hand over the energy-draining chains. He mixed his own demonic energy with the death energy he'd just stolen. He pushed that mix into the demon's arm bone. At the same time, he kept pulling more death energy straight from the shackles' drain. He used the energy being sucked out to reshape the bone from the inside. He wasn't filling a cup. He was using the leak itself.

  The bone was stupidly hard. Working it felt like trying to bend a steel rod by staring at it. He pushed. He focused. He sharpened the bone from within until it was a blade waiting inside the meat. He couldn't cut the demon's skin, but its own skeleton could.

  It took twenty minutes. His head ached from the focus.

  When he was done, he had two things. A spear made from the demon's spine, point nasty and sharp. A big, crude greatsword made from the whole arm bone, more like a sharpened slag of ivory than a real sword.

  He handed the heavy bone greatsword to Cinder. Her hand closed around the closed bone fist that made the rough grip. He kept the spear. It was heavy, maybe as heavy as that censor he'd lugged around. He'd get strong enough to use it.

  Both weapons were rough. The greatsword was a sharp lump. Theo would be full of jealousy if he ever saw it. The spear was a literal spine with a sharpened tip, barely straightened. But their edges, made from a level 50 demon's bones and forged with stolen death, would cut through things harder than regular metal.

  He wished he'd saved more of the demon soul. If he had a bigger piece left over, he would have absolutely turned the hobgoblin elite into an undead demon hybrid. Maybe even Corbin. The idea had some appeal.

  He needed to find out Cinder's capabilities and her drawbacks, if she even had any. If she didn't, the only reason he'd even need regular thralls anymore was if they had useful skills or knowledge that would get lost in death. Most people didn't bring much to the table.

  He considered telling Cinder to hide in the temple shadows. He could wait until he was separated from the group, then come back and claim he'd beaten and enthralled her out in the forest. That might smooth things over, since some people might get suspicious about Mara dying right after they'd argued. But hiding her carried the risk of losing a prime asset. She was built from rare materials, and he couldn't just leave a tool like that sitting in a corner.

  And she looked nothing like the materials he'd used. The loyal demoness was a lean mass of contained destruction, all maroon scales and sharp edges. Nothing like a human or a hobgoblin. Nothing even like the chained-up lump of a demon she came from.

  He would bring Cinder out in the open. That meant any future thrall creation would have to be done in private from now on. Only an idiot would see him transforming corpses and not connect the dots. If the group turned against him over it, he could probably kill them all. Use Corbin, his other thralls, and end them. Collect their dungeon fragments. But he didn't have any spare demon souls to craft more minions from scratch, and he only had the one new thrall slot from leveling up. The math didn't work in his favor for a fight.

  He would win, probably. But the cost would be astronomical.

  He would have to keep this ability to create hybrid undead demons a secret from the others for now. It was a card he couldn't play face-up yet.

  "Follow me," he said to Cinder, handing her his old spear to carry for him. Then he headed outside to Jamie.

  Outside the temple, the hobgoblin stood a few meters back. Jamie was in the center of a deep, frozen ring in the dome wall. The ice around him was thicker, layered in frantic waves. The mana around Jamie was completely still.

  A hole shaped like a rough doorway was in the dome, leading to the forest, David was just in time to see its formation. Concerned faces were on the other side. Jamie stood before it. He looked terrible.

  Jamie stood shivering so hard his joints seemed to rattle. His skin was corpse-pale, his lips a vivid, unhealthy blue. Every piece of his clothing was stiff and white with a thick rime of frost. He looked like he’d been dragged through a blizzard. A huge, stupid, shit-eating grin was plastered across his face.

  “My power isn’t ice,” Jamie announced. His voice jumped and hitched with the shivers. He held up a hand as if presenting a discovery, the movement clumsy. “It’s… I think it’s cold.” He took a wobbling, triumphant step forward and his legs just quit, stumbling him right into David’s chest.

  As David steadied him, Jamie’s right hand swung. The ring finger was completely black, a charcoal line against his skin. At the knuckle, it snapped off and dropped to the floor with a dry tap.

  David looked from the finger to Jamie’s face. What the hell.

  Jamie seemed not to notice. The dumb grin stayed. “I did it,” he mumbled, his eyes wide with exhausted triumph. “I can’t believe I did it. Heh.” He acted like a kid who’d won a prize. Like he’d just scored the winning point in a game, not like he’d permanently broken a piece of his body. The energy in that severed finger was perfectly, utterly still. David had a feeling that particular stillness wasn't something you could fix. It felt permanent.

  This kid was crazy.

  David stared at him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Jamie’s grin faded a little. He blinked, his energy draining into something more subdued. “Is Mara coming..?”

  David looked at him. He put on his best sad performance and shook his head. His voice factual. “The level fifty… it… took her.”

  Jamie looked down. He nodded slowly, a single, heavy dip of his chin. He turned toward the hole in the dome.

  They left. The four of them. David, Jamie, the hobgoblin thrall, and his first demon, Cinder.