The Scumbags Guide to Enslaving Demon's

"That," she said, "is why he will personally collect this hotel. Ash if he burns my entire district down."

Austin stared past Rin’s cell at the iron curtain at the end of the vault.

The curtain didn’t move. It hung from the ceiling in thick strips, each stamped with Malrec’s crest; A crown wrapped around an open jaw. Predator’s Sense screamed louder the closer Austin approached. He could smell nothing inside.

He heard something devouring instead.

Elena jumped as her brother dove for the curtain.

"Don’t!" she hissed.

"I won’t hurt you!" Austin called back. He ripped through the metal.

"No, that’s when I worry."

Maelis stepped between them, setting her ember fire free to bathe the curtain in red light. "Fox is right. Malrec kept bloodlines caged only when he couldn’t control them."

Rin growled from her cell next door. Swiping her tails across their chains. "Wow, he controlled any of us."

"One of us."

Austin reached the strips of hanging iron and tugged.

The cell beyond was twice the size of theirs. Lines of green chains laced the cell from floor to ceiling, wrapped around a kneeling woman at its center. She was closer to adult sized than not. Tall and thin despite the way her shoulders sagged with exhaustion. Her hair fluttered behind her, long silver tendrils that brushed the floor. Dark crimson sigils pulsed from her throat, snaking down her arms like veins carved from ink.

She wore no armor. No coat. Nothing but strips of black cloth and the chains that bound her here.

Her eyes snapped open.

Burnt red eyes.

The System uploaded automatically.

[Scanned Entity: Bloodline Demon.]

[Species: Sanguine Matriarch.]

[Danger Level: Extreme.]

[Consumable Abilities: Blood Dominion, Regeneration, Heart- Sense, Crimson Command.]

[Warning: consuming target core will likely corrupt host’s feeding instinct permanently.]

Austin swallowed.

She smirked at him when their eyes met.

"Ahh," she said. Dry throat cracking from disuse. "Another little monster hungry for a taste."

Elena raised the crossbow. "Name."

The demon didn’t shift her gaze from Austin. "Lady Nyssara. Of the Red Vein Court."

Maelis flame flickered. "Nyssara died."

"My execution." Nyssara ground a shoulder against her bonds. Each chain digging further into her wrists as more blood soaked through the cloth at her elbows. "Malrec enjoyed that lie better. My blood can raise armies. Heal fallen lords. Let pathetic men feel brave again for one night."

"Why’d he spare you?" Austin growled.

"He couldn’t get my core without dying."

Rin scoffed from the cell next door. "Or because your precious lord thinks breaking blood makes them yours."

Nyssara spared her sibling a glance. "He thinks that because we all loved him enough to teach him that."

Austin examined the blood chains binding her. Contract Perception crackled around them. Twice as thick as Rin’s tail chains. Wrapped around her wrists first, threaded through the floor and deep into the hotel’s foundations. If he cut the wrong chain half the vault would collapse on top of them.

"What are you hiding in there?" he demanded, nodding at her core.

Nyssara cocked her head. "You hungry, or just planning dinner?"

Both, truthfully. He wanted Blood Dominion. Could taste it curling around her words. See it when he looked at the thrum of life inside her wrists. Imagine drinking that knowledge down. Tracking a predator’s scent through walls. Healing demons with a thought. Making them bleed out curses stolen from their own bloodlines.

He could imagine biting that knowledge out of her throat too.

Nothing but simplicity in that desire. Clean.

Elena touched his shoulder.

"Just talk." She said quietly.

Austin stared at the blood demon once more. Pulled his grip away from her chains.

"How does Malrec intend on using this vault?" he asked.

Nyssara’s smile cracked. "To breed something stronger."

Maelis froze.

"What?" Elena whispered.

"A chimera." Nyssara gestured between them. "Fox instinct. Ravager bone. ember blood. mine. They take what we can’t use and force those bloodlines to breed." She stepped into his space. Levelled her bloodshot gaze with his hands. "None of them live long. But they are perfect. Trained to slaughter until the world can’t hold death itself."

Seven tightened her grip on his polearm. "The Final Cage."

Rin tucked her ears. "I told him you were going to say that."

Austin looked back at the iron curtain behind them. Paused at the rumbling sound coming from the Final Cage locked on the opposite end of the vault. Nothing. Then everything moving inside of it.

The shadow of its monstrous form breathed with each lumbering inhale, swallowing light from the gas lamps around them.

"It’s awake?" he asked Nyssara.

"No." She shook her head slowly. "Not yet."

Seven called up from the hatch above them. Voice echoing down the steam valve connected the two. "But it will be soon enough."

The Chain- Warden hadn’t bothered descending into the vault with them. Trapped to the boiler hall by the root covenant’s link, but easily heard through the opening above. His voice grated onempty vault around them.

"I told you two that when the larder feels hunger," he bellowed down at them. "Whole covenant feels it. The warden activated the vault." He punctuated that sentence by slamming a massive fist down onto the hatch. Steam erupting up at them. "That vault reactivated the cradle."

Boom.

The chain strapped across Nyssara’s chest shrieked at its anchors. Golden energy burst forth from its bindings and exploded outward.

Boom.

Metal shredded through the curtain at their feet. Spikes swung free when the iron sliced in half.

Pointed blades strong enough to tear flesh from bone.

A giant shadow seethed from behind it.

Bone scraps dragged across the floor. Rolling together into the obscene figure contained by the crate behind the curtain. Tall enough to tower over Seven, wide enough to span the room in its grotesque breadth. Four arms. Hoofed feet. A skull stitched shut with strips of thick flesh, framed by long twisting horns.

Two black eyes set into impenetrable holes slit beneath flawless skin stretched across the rest of its face.

[Scanned Entity: War- Born Prototype.]

[Bloodline Makeup: Unknown Corrupted Hybrid]

[Danger Level: ? ?]

[Combat protocols suggest immediate evacuation]

Boom.

The steel door lifting the cage swung upward, catapulting off its hinges and colliding with the far wall of the vault.

Austin yanked Elena behind a nearby root pillar. Seven’s polearm stabbed forward. Flames erupted from Maelis’ palms. Rin cringed behind their own cells, eyes wide as any of them. For the first time since they’d met her.

The War- Born stalked into view.

It hadn’t been restrained by the green chains wrapped around its wrists. They’d fed into it.

Its face split across two seams.

Its mouth was nothing but shadow.

Literally.

Black tentacles forked from where its jaw would’ve been if it had a jaw to begin with.

It stepped toward Nyssara first. Step after heavy step that coated the floor with a fine mist of shattered stone and bone scraps.

"Blood." it said.

Austin charged between each of their heads.

The War-Born swiped at him with its free hand. Slid its arm through the root pillar Austin had been standing next to only seconds before. Stone dissolved into particles. He landed hard on its forearm, yanking his hands free of his pockets and slamming them into the chain wrapping around its elbow.

Arm rigged with DEVOUR— Trigger.

It screamed. Bloodline howl ripping through Austin’s mind.

Fox instinct. Ravager Despair. ember anguish. Blood lust.

His System crashed.

[Unknown Error: Incompatible traits discovered.]

[Caution: continued consumption will initiate corruption protocol.]

He yanked his hand free before it could drag him under. Pull himself into the abyss of whatever torment fueled that thing’s emotions.

It swung its other arm at him. An arc of red hot destruction that Seven caught with his polearm.

Violet light chasing bright red lines across the hybrid’s shoulder. Burn melding into flesh as quickly as it happened. Scarless ribbons of light rolling back into place.

"Nyssara!" Austin yelled, crashing his shoulder into the cage wall behind him. "Can you purge its bloodline?"

Her pupils expanded. "Unwrap one of your wrists."

He searched his mind for the chain closest to him. Nyssara had been anchored to the floor by a thick green knot swollen against her knees. Cutting it would take everything he had left in him, but won’t fry his senses.

Austin slammed his fist into the knot.

"Contract Purge."

Pitch black and flame blossomed across his skin. The green sigil dissolve into nothing. Nyssara’s opposite wrist slide free with barely a whimper.

She brought her bloodied wrist up. Cradled it between both hands.

The War-Born paused. Every muscle in its body locking at once.

Every injury on its body ruptured. Spilled open. Like infection given clear passage to feast on whatever nightmare fuel roasted its muscles from the inside out.

It made a sound then. Wet noise ripped from its throat and coughed into the stale air of the vault.

Enough force to pry dust from the ceiling and push every chain in the room gently side to side.

Shadows crowded around their cells, pairs of demon eyes peering out at them with reflected terror and something new Austin couldn’t quite identify.

He smiled. And for the first time in a long time something dark and hungry twisted in his chest somewhere stumbled across something it was afraid of in return.

"We get first draw."

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