Plugged In: Reincarnated As A Demon Lord (Now I'll Conquer The World)

Lucien raises both hands, palms out, doing his best impression of a man who has personally weathered a dozen hostile takeovers and lived to tell about it.

"Alright, gentlemen, let’s slow this down and treat it like the negotiation it clearly wants to be. You’ve got grievances. I’ve got a bleeding heart and, as of about ninety seconds ago, apparently no abs. Let’s find a resolution that works for everyone at the table."

The big demon’s eye twitches.

"And honestly?" Lucien continues, gesturing vaguely at their whole operation with the easy confidence of a man who has never once read the room incorrectly. "Sloppy grip on the sack. No getaway route. Zero brand consistency between your clothing. You’re bad at this. Sincerely. In fact, I’d be happy to assist you in setting up—"

The punch lands before he finishes the sentence.

It’s not even a good punch.

It’s a lazy, contemptuous, backhanded thing, more insult than violence, and it still sends Lucien stumbling sideways into the dirt, his split lip blooming red against skin that used to be immune to this sort of indignity.

"Go away!" the demon growls, unimpressed. "Before I stop finding this funny."

Lucien spits, wipes his mouth, and looks past the thug at the wolf-kin woman still slumped in the dust, wrists raw, eyes daring him to be one more disappointment in a long line of them.

Something in his chest tightens. Not magic. Not ash. Just something stubborn and human-shaped, the one part of him the border crossing couldn’t strip away.

He climbs back to his feet.

He turns to Val, lip dripping, and gives him a look that screams a little help would be nice.

Val, arms crossed, watching the whole thing like dinner theater, simply shrugs. "You wanted to be a hero. Heroes bleed. It’s in the job description."

"Absolute traitor." Lucien mutters, and turns back around.

He steps up to the demon again. The thug is already laughing, delighted, the kind of laugh that comes from a man who has never once had his worldview challenged.

"Oh, he’s back."

"I really do think," Lucien says, straightening his collar with as much dignity as a swollen-lipped smile allows, "that if we just sat down, maybe over drinks, on me of course, we could find some common ground—"

A second punch.

Same jaw, opposite side, symmetry restored.

Lucien staggers, laughs through the pain, and calls back Valgereth. "This still counts as productive negotions!"

Serenith, hovering above the basin with her wings flapping in small circles, does not laugh. Her hands curl into fists at her sides, halo flickering faster than usual, the divine equivalent of a woman chewing through her own lip.

Lucien steps up a third time.

The wolf-kin woman stares at him like he might genuinely be unwell. "Are you... insane?"

"A little," Lucien admits, swaying slightly, grinning around a mouth full of blood. "Crazy about supporting women, mostly. In every sense of the word. I’m very hands-on with my advocacy work, very committed to—"

The third punch connects.

He goes down properly this time, dust kicking up around him, and from above, Serenith’s stomach does something complicated and unwelcome. She should be furious. She is furious. She is also, infuriatingly, charmed, because he doesn’t even know this woman’s name and he keeps getting up anyway, and there is nothing in any celestial handbook that tells her what to do with that feeling.

So she does the only thing she can.

She doesn’t intervene.

Doesn’t announce herself.

Just lifts one hand, fingers trembling with restraint, and lets a single thread of holy magic spill downward, quiet as a held breath, sinking into Lucien’s skin without so much as a shimmer to give it away.

Lucien, unaware, gets back up again.

The big demon’s grin is starting to crack at the edges now, confusion creeping in where amusement used to live. "What is wrong with you? Stay. Down."

"I have a policy against that." Lucien slurs, blood running pink down his chin. "Bad for morale."

"Last warning," the demon snarls, dark magic crackling tighter around his knuckles. "Walk away or I kill you where you stand."

Lucien doesn’t even look at him.

He turns instead to the wolf-kin woman, kneeling despite every instinct in his newly fragile body screaming at him not to, and bows his head. "For what it’s worth, this has been, hands down, the worst rescue in recorded history. I had a whole speech. Bugatti was supposed to be here. There was going to be a dramatic entrance."

She stares at him, something unreadable moving behind the gold flecks in her eyes.

The thugs are still cursing, still circling, one of them spitting insults about his mother, his kingdom, his complete lack of survival instinct. Lucien ignores all of it, focused entirely on the woman in front of him like the five armed men aren’t even worth the effort of acknowledging.

The fourth punch catches him square in the jaw, and this time the big demon doesn’t stop.

He lunges, driving Lucien into the dirt, fists coming down in a graceless, furious rhythm, less a fight now than a demolition as dust and blood mix on the ground below them.

Somewhere above the ridge, a shriek of pure fury tears out of Serenith’s throat.

"FIGHT BACK, YOU IMBECILE!"

Her voice cuts through the noise, through the pain, through the ringing in Lucien’s skull, sharper than anything the demon’s fists have managed.

It lands somewhere low in his chest and detonates.

Lucien’s arm moves before he fully decides to move it.

The punch is weak. Barely a punch at all, really, more of a tired, half-conscious flop of a fist against a jaw that has spent the last four rounds gleefully unbothered.

It should have done nothing.

Instead, the demon’s jaw simply comes off.

Not cracks.

Not dislocated.

Off, clean and total, the whole lower half of the thug’s face detaches in a spray of dark blood as his entire body leaves the ground and sails backward through the air, crashing into the ground, and sitting moving. He ends up folded over a boulder, twitching for a few moments before going completely still.

The silence that followed lasted for about three seconds.

The remaining thugs stare, then scream in unison, already scrambling backward over each other. "IT’S HIM! THAT’S THE DEMON LORD!"

They don’t even bother grabbing their fallen friend. They just run, tripping over rocks and each other in their hurry to be anywhere else on the continent.

Lucien sits up slowly in the settling dust, ears ringing, lip still split, and stares down at his own hand like it belongs to a stranger. Faint gold light pulses beneath his skin, fading even as he watches it, warm and unfamiliar and absolutely not his.

He looks up.

Serenith is already descending, wings folded, expression carefully arranged into something almost neutral.

Almost.

There’s a smirk tucked into the corner of her mouth that she isn’t quite fast enough to hide.

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