Nascent Demon Lord

The feel of the dungeon had changed entirely. Instead of a fun, open-air series of meadows, it was an oppressively dark cave system. To make matters worse, we swiftly discovered that it hadn't become a B-ranked dungeon.

It was now an A-ranked dungeon. The monsters on the first floor were level seventy.

"Crap, Shadows? I have no idea how your Masters have survived this long," one of the A-rankers said as soon as we spotted the first monster. "A pair of C-rankers should have died just about instantly."

Behind us, the healers let out a collective sigh. I could feel their interest immediately waning. They were only here for the rescue part of our mission, and it seemed that they no longer believed they would be doing any of that. I glared at them, and one of them had the temerity to shrug at me as though I was the one in the wrong. I knew my Master was still alive! How could they think there weren’t any survivors when we had three summons here who belonged to Masters trapped somewhere in this dungeon?

“What are Shadows?” I asked Maxwell rather than continue my glaring contest. We didn’t seem to be fighting the monsters. Instead, when we saw one, everyone shut their lights off, grew quiet, and waited. The Shadows made a strange slithery sound, and once that sound had gone, we turned our lights back on and continued. There were patches of glowing mushrooms and other fungi on the walls, and we burned those when we found them, ensuring we could plunge the caverns into total darkness as needed.

Maxwell sighed. “They’re invisible Demons that absorb their prey into their shadows. They're not very smart, so it's easy enough to get them to go away, but there aren't many who can touch their shadows and live.”

“Can’t they be killed?”

“Not by normal means. You need high-level Holy or Demonic skills to get rid of them. This dungeon’ll be abandoned pretty quickly if it turns out they’re on floors with other monsters, too. Hard to handle monsters you can’t see.”

I pursed my lips and considered that, then studied my skills. Devour and Abyssal Veil had appeared after my evolution, and I was fairly certain they were Demonic skills. Nothing said as much, but I suppose you could call it my intuition as a Demon.

Devour
Effect: Consume the target’s magic.

Abyssal Veil
Effect: User resides partially in another plane. Reduces the effect of physical attacks.

I also had a sense that these shadows were beneath me. It was a weird feeling, something I didn’t think I’d had before. If I had to compare it to something, it’d be like the difference between looking at a perfect climbing tree and looking at a greased pole. Even if you’d never tried climbing either, you kind of had a sense that the former would be possible, while the latter might not be. “Do you mind letting me try something with the next one we come across?”

Maxwell hummed, then went to discuss it with Bode, who in turn discussed it with the leaders of the other three A-ranked teams. They eventually decided to let me try. This dungeon was going to take forever if we had to keep stopping and waiting like this, after all.

“You’re up, Luna,” Maxwell called only a few minutes later.

I stepped toward the Shadow, and sure enough, it stopped its creeping approach and froze. I couldn’t see the body. It was just a shadow on the wall. I wasn’t sure where to aim. Even so, I felt nothing but a faint sense of hunger as I said, “Devour.”

A tear rent its way through reality, and there was a slurping sound that raised goosebumps on my arms. The Shadow disappeared, and I felt something cold and pleasantly tingly in my stomach. It was a little like eating spicy ice cream, except without the taste (probably for the best, really). I turned back to the group. “I can eat them,” I said unnecessarily.

Their unease was clear. There wasn’t much I could do about that. Bode already knew I was a Demon, and the others probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear it.

Maxwell was the first to move. He ruffled my hair. “Well done,” he said. “Let us know if you need to stop, but this’ll help us move forward much faster.”

I puffed my cheeks out at him and huffed, well aware of our audience. “Stop messing up my hair,” I complained, patting it down carefully.

Bode laughed. “Let’s go! Keep on guard, and call the little lady over if you spot a Shadow!”

The first floor contained only Shadows, and the second floor was more of the same. Partway through, however, we stopped encountering them. “They’re avoiding us,” I said when someone commented on it. “I can kind of sense them after eating so many, and they’re purposely keeping away from our party.”

“That’s handy, if scary,” the leader of Witches Five said. Her name was Yuulen. She had very long, red hair tied into braids and blue eyes. She had glasses and wore a heavy cloak over her clothes. “Means they’re more intelligent than we thought, to a degree.” She noted down the information in a book, then tucked the pen behind her ear.

It took us five floors and a full week to find anything else. “We’ve got Bloomshrooms!” someone called.

“Aw hell,” someone else shouted back.

Apparently, Bloomshrooms were mushrooms that looked a lot like normal mushrooms. They tasted like normal mushrooms, too. The effects of eating them, however, were not the same. If you cooked them thoroughly, you’d be sick for a few days. You might survive, or you might not, depending on how much you ate and your constitution. If you didn’t cook them thoroughly enough, the spores would sprout into hyphae, burrow through your gut, and turn you into fertilizer for more Bloomshrooms.

We’d discovered an isolated pile of Bloomshrooms. I peered closer and realized with some disgust that I could see the remains of clothing between them.

A hand yanked me back.

“Don’t want to get too close. Those things are bad news all the way around,” said the leader of Please Daddy. He was a short, sturdy middle-aged man with no hair and pale blue eyes. He seemed nice enough, but his party's name made me wary of him.

I eyed the pile and nodded. We continued on our way. Although we were in a dungeon, with such a large group, it felt more like we were on some sort of cavern tour. We hadn’t even encountered anything that needed to be fought, making it a very strange dungeon.

We were probably halfway through the fifth floor when there was a shout from the front of the group.

“We found something!”

One member of Witches Five was a wind mage, and she’d been sending her magic throughout each floor and carefully inspecting the feelings she received to create a super-detailed map of the dungeon. It was a combination of Skills and skill that she’d apparently gone through training to learn, and the presence of someone like her was required for the initial exploration of any dungeon, Maxwell explained.

I approached as she finished describing her findings to the party leads. Maxwell motioned for me to wait a moment. Once they’d finished talking, he explained, “She found a section of wall that has a small hole in it. There’s a room behind the hole, and while there’s nothing human-shaped within, there are some oddities about it. She’s thinking that there might be a spider-type monster inside.”

The woman, Eula, sketched out what she could sense within. It did look, to my untrained eye, very much like a spider’s lair in a video game, right down to the cylindrical bundles of fibers that might contain prey.

I shuddered. I didn’t like spiders to begin with, and I definitely didn’t like spiders big enough to wrap people up in their webs to suck out their insides. I pointed to a large object in the center of the sketch. “What’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” Eula told us. “It might be the monster, or it might be part of the dungeon itself, or it might be something else entirely. I can’t tell.”

Regardless, we had to hurry. If those bundles were people, who knew whether they might be dead and beyond our reach or alive and at risk of being eaten at any moment? We rushed through the rest of the floor. I felt the Shadows sliding out of the way as we went, and I hastily Devoured any that weren’t fast enough.

“Right here,” Eula said. As she’d told us, the wall there looked different from the rest of the cavern, and there was a tiny hole. “Hello?” she called, leaning close. “Is anyone in there?”

“Eula, don’t –”

Something red and thin stabbed out of the hole at lightning speed. She stiffened and tried to escape, but the red thing had dug into her face and wasn’t letting go..

“Healers!” someone called. 

“Luna, Blessing the second it's out,” Maxwell ordered, and he tried to slice through the red thing. His dagger bounced off it. He tried again, then again. On his fourth try, it cut through. He grabbed the remaining part that wriggled madly from Eula’s cheek and yanked it out of her.

Blessing.

Eula cried out and fell backwards, staring at the hole in fear. I watched, eyes wide, as healers rushed over and started casting more specific healing spells on her. Maxwell brought the red thing over to the rest of us. We left a carefully wide space between us and the hole in the wall as we leaned in to examine the thing in Maxwell’s gloved palm. At first, it writhed about, but after several seconds, it slowed until it fell still and deflated. The red leeched from it, and we finally had nothing but a gray, stringy-looking thing.

We turned our attention to the hole and immediately had to take action. “Back up! Make space!” people called as more red things unfurled from within the hole. They looked like nothing so much as long, thin, red proboscises probing the air for food. A large group was good for general safety, but getting it to change direction took time, so we squished against each other as we anxiously watched the tubules' search. 

“What do you think those are?” the leader of Heavenly Principles asked with morbid fascination. He and the other leaders started discussing whether they should break through the wall and what precautions they should take before doing so. I worried about what we’d find there. Could anyone really be alive?

Master, are you in there? Behind the wall? I called with Telepathy, uncertain whether I could reach him. Thus far, I hadn’t been able to, but I hadn’t tried yet on this floor.

…Lu…na?

The red tubes’ movement stopped, and they retreated behind the wall. I stared at the hole. That had seemed like they were reacting to my Telepathy. But... why would they? A strange feeling washed over me. It said that I shouldn’t pry. That I didn’t want that wall opened.

“Earthen Break, Theodore!”
“Arcan, use Howling Bore.”
“Geo Pulse!”

Before I could consider that feeling any further, the spells had already been cast. The wall crumbled, and behind it we saw a second wall, this one a thick, pulsating red one woven out of the same tubules that had stabbed Eula.

Master, are you in there? I asked again, this time dreading the answer.

As before, the tubules responded. They stilled, just for a second, but I didn’t think I’d imagined it. “Luna?” Maxwell asked as I stepped forward toward the red wall.

Luna… can’t… stop…

My Master needed me. I couldn't be scared right now. I took another step forward. One of the tubules snaked out and stabbed into my shoulder, drawing cries from the rest of the party, but I shook my head. “Wait.” After a moment, the tube withdrew on its own.

“What happened? Why did it leave you alone?” Heather asked.

“I think these are designed to feed off of things,” I said slowly. I turned back, letting them see the hole in my shoulder. There wasn’t any blood, because my body wasn’t entirely part of this world anymore. I’d lost a few points of Health, but it was well within my ability to heal. Blessing. “I can get through here safely. Elementals should be fine, too, I think.” I only added it because I knew we didn’t have any elementals with us. I needed to be the first one through.

The objections quelled momentarily, I walked toward the red wall. It shivered. “Shadow Blade,” I said, and a tear in space the shape of a sword appeared in my hand. I cut my way through the wall. It reformed almost as quickly as I could cut it, but so long as I kept moving forward, the reformed wall was behind me, letting me make slow progress.

“Luna, wait!” Heather called. I heard a wet thud and a cry, and the healers started up another round of casting. She’d be fine. I needed to hurry.

I kept walking in. It only took a few steps, and then I was in the dark. I could see, using the faint light filtering through cracks in the web, that the entire ‘room’ was coated in the same red surface, with tubes stretching back and forth across it haphazardly. As in Eula’s sketch, there were eleven bundles wrapped in the red tubes, just like flies in a spider’s web, then a single, large, round heap of them in the center of the room, like a cocoon. There was nothing like a spider present anywhere.

I cut down the bundles first. Two of them were heavier than the others, and I cut them open. Inside one was a girl a little younger than Nero and Alicia. She seemed to be unconscious, but she was breathing around a thin tube that extended from her mouth and connected to all the rest. I pulled on it, and although there was some resistance, it wasn't too difficult to remove. Blessing. Assess.

I looked long enough to see that her name was Clara and that she wasn’t about to die, then turned to the next bundle.

Inside this one was Alicia. She seemed to be in much the same condition, so I treated her the same way. Then I turned to the cocoon. I could hear the others discussing things outside. They wouldn’t wait for too much longer before they started trying to figure out how to get in safely. I cut open the cocoon. My heart dropped. Out of the cocoon, with a single, thick proboscis growing from his mouth from which sprouted all the rest of the red tubules, dropped my Master. He was covered in blood, black lines like living tattoos writhed across his skin, and a pair of large, ragged wings grew from his back. Nonetheless, he was definitely my Master. 

“Nero,” I gasped. I cut open the cocoon further, slicing it until it was destroyed. Until no one could tell what it had been. Until not a single part of it was still attached to him. The tubes coating the room twitched like a thousand lizard’s tails detached from the main body. I sat down, grabbed Nero, and tugged his shoulders until his head was in my lap. “Illusion.”

There were shouts from outside as the walls turned gray. The tubes were dead. The others started cutting through them. “Nero. Master. I’m here.”

His eyes didn’t open, but a new proboscis grew from his mouth and latched onto me. I pressed my lips together, holding back the sob that wanted to escape. Master, I don’t have any blood for you.

His eyes opened, and I started. His eyes had always been amber brown. Sometimes, they'd appeared more golden, depending on the light, but now there simply wasn't any other word for their color. They glowed gold. “Food?” he croaked. “Food. I need…” There was no recognition in his eyes. He didn't know me. Well, that was fair. I'd been a cat the last time he saw me. Even so, it stung.

I pulled out a small piece of meat from my Inventory, and the tube left me to pursue it. I put the meat back into my Inventory. No, Master. You have to eat normally. Put that away and eat like a human.

He stared at me, uncomprehending. With a sigh, I sliced off the tube. He winced and made a pained sound. The part still connected to him retreated into his mouth and flattened until it looked properly tongue-like. I had the absurd thought that Alicia was in for a surprise if they ever tried to French kiss, and could barely hold back the giggles that threatened to turn into sobs. I took the meat back out and pressed it against his lips. His brows furrowed as he slowly adjusted to what I was asking of him. His lips parted, and his tongue swiped out to drag the meat back into his mouth. 

Heather’s voice reached me. “Luna!” More light poured through as Justice used Heather’s spear to cut through the wall. The party leaders and two healers entered, looking around warily.

“I killed the monster,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward the mess of a cocoon I’d left. “Those bundles have people in them. Sorry. I stopped cutting them open when I found my Master.”

The party leaders went to examine the so-called monster, while the healers started prying open the pods. “What the hell was this thing?” someone muttered. I kept the Illusion up, and Nero silently chewed. Once he’d swallowed, his eyes closed again. He turned slightly toward me, nuzzling against me contentedly. More food.

“In a bit, Master,” I murmured. He didn’t respond.

“We’ve got another live one!” someone yelled, only to get smacked for being inconsiderate. Maxwell rushed over. I heard a loud cry.

“Justice, please help me take Master out of here,” I said.

Justice lifted both of us with ease. It wasn’t fair. No matter how strong I was, I was still trapped in this small body. Telekinesis worked, but it didn’t have any finesse at its current level. I swore to level it and practice until I could move things like an adult.

As we passed Maxwell, who was clutching Clara to his chest, my gaze moved to the other bundles. Was his other daughter in one of them? Once Justice had brought Nero and me out and deposited us with the rest of the party, I asked him, “Can you go help? If you find Maxwell’s other daughter… Don’t let him see her, please.”

“Of… course.” Justice patted my head and ruffled my hair the same way Maxwell did, and I slapped at his hand until he turned and headed back into the room.

Assess.

Name: Nero                                                   Level: 101/200
Birth Date: 04.13.06
Race: Demon - D
Status: AGI UP, INT UP, LUCK UP              Health: 800/800
Skills:                                                              Available Points: 0
     Active: Backstab Lv. 9, Haste Lv. 7,       Passive: Daggers Lv. 6, Sleepless
     Reverse Lv. 2, Devour, Consume,         Nights, Abyssal Veil, Attraction
     Scout Lv. 3, Stealth Lv. 5
Titles: Nascent Demon Lord