The Scumbags Guide to Enslaving Demon's

The horn split the night in two. Streetlamp glass shattered across the lobby, painting nervous shadows taller than men on the walls. Folks bustled with the brittle urgency of men who could be asked to march at any moment. Elena barked commands that crackled like tightened bolts; Seven flexed plated fingers and disappeared through the hotel’s west south wall with several armed men.

Austin stayed rooted where banister met living floor, listening to the hotel breathe beneath boards—feel the vines tighten, taste night.

The rendezvous point had been at the outer line. The palisade — woven green and bone, living fence grown from Flesh-Eater jungle foliage threaded through with Austin’s own sigil — had been an alchemical miracle: it devoured scavengers and sealed windows shut. It hadn’t been bred to broker deals.

The cohort hesitated at the threshold, poking. Drones buzzed clamp-jaws. Cable launchers spat whips of iron that snagged on wood and muscle and screamed as they pumped adrenaline through joints. The drones droned—always drones—but this time they were speaking in contract-language; old administrative words honed to order and dictate. Compliance tongue. The vines trembled.

Austin felt it deep in the anchor lodged into his ribs.

Those words were base: OWN THIS. BIND THIS. OBEY THIS.

If one of the clamps bit deep enough into a tendril, the vine would shudder; falter—a circle of black skin where green had grown before. The contract-drone drilled through metal and demanded that the palisade submit. Bend. Obey.

"They’re singing contracts," Elena murmured behind him. Cold made her breath clouds in the air. "If they clamp down hard enough they can drown out the vine’s soul." She didn’t have to ask what he was contemplating.

DEVOUR’ litany whispered temptation. He saw rows like numbers on an accountant’s ledger: eat the clamp-bot and nullify its binding contract; consume a body and seed the root with antibodies; consume a soul and graft obedience onto every inch of flora . Every fiber worked. All those options funneled into assimilation. The godsystem could taste.

System: [Option: Devour target — Flesh/Creature/Core/Contract. Secondary: Self-Seed — Sacrifice vitality to increase propagation. Risk: Assimilation increased; Instinct increased.]

Austin pictured ink drying on that ledger. He thought of the council’s armor still warm where they dropped it in the hotel lobby, Mason trembling like Autumn leaf in Elena’s embrace. His grandmother nodding slow and solemn as she cast her vote in green. Eating a person would be simple arithmetic. Necessary? Perhaps. Easy, though. Trading lives with your life on the scales. He turned his back and pressed palms into the palmisade’s flesh instead.

"I’ll handle them without sacrificing any of them." He motioned to the guardsmen. "Breakline the clamps. Look out for rooftoppers."

Elena nodded in agreement and sent two men sprawling into the open with barbed javelins. Men met with clamp-mouths that ripped and bit; curses as black steel tore through muscle and tendon, vine around it going slack and dead. But they hacked and prayed, gouging clamp-jaws from the wood and hauling them back by numb arms. Screaming.

Austin pushed both palms into the palisade and it answered under his fingertips: sap and root and thousands of tiny whispers. He did not devour. Instead he gave; freely empted one stray vine limb into the hotel’s nerve-endings, burrowed deep — carved subtle urges of wild cadence and want.

REFUSE. It was subtler than devour but no less known for that weakness. Poison: the gift of vitality instead of reaping it.

System: [Event: Self-Seeding trait applied. Cost: Vitality — Minimal. Assimilation +0.3%.]

Warmth flared in his veins, predatory teeth scraped his insides clean and suddenly there was motion in the vines. Growth burst from where clamps had stripped skin away, tendrils reforming into steel muscle and needle-teeth that gouged into the metal and reversed its instruction set.

Contract-Language stuttered and died at the complete denial. It wasn’t human will. Not demon’ desire. The vines had been taught a foreign language: to REFUSE. To disobey. To accept no master but their own coded programming.

Two clamps already buried in wood screamed out against the high-pitched whine of severed contract. Roots rippled wide as fists, burrowing through machinery and dismantling the clamp-components methodically. One drone crumpled where sigils were leeched out by root-sap newly literate in contract-language enough to kill it through hardware.

The vine was far from perfect—there were gaps, patches where contract languages still filtered through and needed pruning— but it held fast. Together, they held fast—and together that was enough for the time being.

Elena breathed out shakily. "Did you—" She was cut off by the plain facts, etched darkly across his features.

The taste of assimilation sparked at his tongue like exotic minerals. He’d sacrificed himself to the hotel. Completely. Without taking a single life with it.

Firmness rooted him to that reality in ways gentle and razor-sharp all at once.

Shadow hushed above them. Something new knitted through quiet gloom of rooftop: ceremonial chains, smithed rather than stamped into existence by machine. The dark-haired man stepped between shadows until he stopped, silhouetted across them; chill of him stealing heat from world.

Vorth moved like a lioness stalking prey, deliberate where blackened chains blossomed like banners against a cobalt sky.

Contract was an infectious disease that left shadow like rot. Inorganic. Contract-rot. A plague that devoured brick from the edges inward.

"Nobly resisted." His voice carried the barest hint of humanity than most servants’, words filtered by wire instead of wet brain. He cocked his head, royal. "You made plants forget old languages. Interesting."

Austin rubbed his palms free of sap. Behind him, anchor pulsed with awareness of another thread woven into its myriad voices. Victory didn’t taste sweet. Instead his chest thrummed with finite understanding of symbiosis.

"No debts are owed."

Vorth laughed, the sound like filing steel on steel. "Malrec was worried about you." Emphasis hung- heavy in the way he punctuated sentence by reaching out and running his knuckles along vine.

"Sent spies to see if you’d crack or curtsy. Wanted an easy target—someone he could farm—or release and watch tear through his own council. He did not understand economies."

"Economies?"

His chains clacked against themselves as he stalked the roof’s perimeter, eyes boring holes into flesh and vine as if he could will them apart with sheer force of will. "Wars are not won by strength alone. There are other methods than blade." He tilted his head, something mocking—or not quite—in the way he held that word. "Like paperwork."

Malrec’s voice echoed across dusty silence, tin-can and terrible against sudden revelations crowding his mind. Solid as stone Malrec had been; sure. You couldn’t excise a lord from history with proclamation and property forfeiture. Concepts scraped painfully hollow against Austin’s ribcage.

An empire built on name could be so easily crumbled by spreadsheets.

Vorth’s pupils widened. "He will live." Finality painted the way he allowed words to curl around stillness. "You heard me. Anchors revoked. Territories forfeited. Contracts redistributed upline.

Maybe"—head tilted towards slumbering bodies crumpled beneath efforts—"he lives every morning and watches another piece of himself auctioned away to pay his debts. Friends distributed amongst strangers." Venom dripped from mouth wreathed in smile that never reached his eyes. "It will be incremental. Painful. Worse than death for men like Malrec who build legacies from something harder than blood."

Elena’s fists clenched white knuckled. Seven tilted his head, servos humming quietly against absolute quiet. Calculated menace cut deeper than fear itself. Power vacuums of that scale changed the landscape. Redistribution empowered preyed upon those bottom rungs; turned lives into panicked currency. Malrec’s reaction fit that theory like it had been written in tandem. Retaliate.

Fight tooth and nail. Grab what you can carry before everyone else answers the call.

"He’s mobilizing word they want him dead," Austin offered coolly. "If they can scare people into thinking he’s still standing while they bleed him out." His eyes slid lids towards Vorth against spread of rooftop, still predatorously. Chains spread wide as a surgeon’s blade.

Voice slithered from throat sideways, honed to razor. "We gave you a choice." He leaned in close, gaze devoid of everything but black. "Malrec will live. We will bleed you instead."

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