Chương 132: An Impasse

Ch. 132 - An Impasse The Iron City was a collection of smithies, warehouses, and cages. There were no homes to speak of. The closest anything came to that were long barracks filled with beds. Those were empty right now, as were the rest of the buildings the blade bothered to look through. The people who lived here fled before it, huddling in the shadows and the upper floors of taller buildings. As it went, it studied the powers and upgrades that had happened during its period of darkness.

Everything had changed, but for now, the most important changes were those of the Infernal Path. It had already advanced to the fourth level, but it was a complete mystery to it, and the blade needed to understand what was happening to it. The Infernal Path and your progress along it signifies your understanding of the underworld.

Granted Powers: Abyssal Majesty: For 1 Life Force, you may command a lesser demon to obey you for a time; for 5 Life Force, you may force them to become enthralled to you and do your bidding. These costs are increased by 10x for normal demons. Abyssal Resonance: In the Pit, the land itself is imbued with the souls of evil. Rather than fight you, as it would with most denizens, the torments it possesses flee from you, lest you devour them.

Bottomless Depths: You gain access to the demon souls you have been storing, and your soul storage is doubled. Dark Consecration: The bridge between creation and damnation has been reached, and all powers previously earned on the Infernal Path are now accessible to you. Endless Hunger 2: As Endless Hunger 1 doubled the speed with which you siphon from your enemies with the Aura of Hunger, Endless Hunger 2 doubles the amount you drain from them.

Hellfire 1: Grants you the attack Hellfire, which will unleash gouts of tainted green fire from your blade with a range equal to half of your Aura of Hunger for 5 Life Force. This damage cannot be extinguished or healed with holy magic. Hellfire 2: The damage of all your fire-based abilities is doubled. Of all of the abilities, Endless Hunger struck it as the most interesting, though Dark Concentration was without a doubt the most useful.

It was the one that allowed it to interact with these tainted powers and devour demon souls without any strange negative consequences. At least, it was pretty sure that the second one was true. To verify that, it plucked a lesser demon soul at random from its overflowing soul storage and devoured it. As it did so, it noticed that one soul was so dark that it made all the other shadows glow by contrast. +15 Life Force. So that's what a demon prince looks like, huh? It asked itself as it observed the foul thing.

The souls it stored milled about and mingled, but only that one seemed to be actively trying to escape. The blade wasn't concerned. For now, it did nothing with that soul. Instead, it plucked a regular demon soul and demanded, Why is the Iron City special? What's it for? The last time it had tried this, it had been bombarded with a sketching alien tongue that was only barely understandable. This time, though, it heard and understood the simpering pig demon quite clearly.

"Have mercy…" it begged, even as it started to dissolve.

"Let me free and I'll tell you anything you want to know." There was no freedom, though. All that happened was that the filthy demon told it everything it knew before it dissipated entirely. Unfortunately, that wasn't much. It spoke of concepts like industry and called it the forge of the Outlands, but it was just repeating things it had heard, with no real understanding of them. It did receive a few relevant facts, though.

The Iron City was the unconquerable seat of power that separated the desolate, infinite outlands from the high infernal realms. It was ruled by Lord Voltrim, though the blade had to consume a few more demon souls to understand exactly how all the pieces fit together. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Apparently, the realms were sort of a spire, but not like a tower.

"They are stacked one on top of each other," another soul whispered, "Each for different sins, and different souls. Where you stand now is separated from the next realm by the gates of this city, and this city alone." That didn't entirely make sense to the blade, but it was a topic to research more later. For now, it wanted to know who was talking to it, how this body worked, and why it could command it, but not any of the other demons it had tried.

While it walked forward with its strange, clanking body, slightly distracted, no one tried to stop it. They were afraid, and they had every reason to be. The demons it could see were scrawny things, and without magic, it doubted that half of them could have lifted it, let alone fought it. They were no threat, so for now, the blade ignored them, along with the void in its head, and continued to walk down the soot-stained streets toward its goal. As it went, it explored the strange body it was using.

It was not a person; unlike even the Juggernaut, there weren't even pieces of people inside of this. It was just oil, steam, and metal twisted and beaten into very clever shapes. The blade could not make heads or tails of it. It was like a golem full of cogs. Stranger still, the damage from the blow it had inflicted on this thing's neck earlier was gone. The blade wasn't quite sure how that had been accomplished, but it had.

The thing was unmarred by combat, and the dents and scrapes it had inflicted on its breastplate during their earlier encounter were gone. When it arrived at the castle, it found none of the defenses it expected, or a second wave of attackers. The doors were closed, but that was it; they weren't even barred. They probably just don't want me to destroy them, the blade reasoned. Or this is a trap. While it wasn't sure what sort of trap might be unleashed on it, there was all manner of fiendish equipment about.

There were belts filled with half-finished pieces of metalwork, shuttling them around to who knew where in the dark. There were giant forges that were larger than it had ever seen, and even large vats of molten metal, still boiling away even after everyone had fled. The Ebon blade was reasonably certain that it could not be melted down again, and that the magic, dragon blood-quenched metal of its blade was immune to such things, but it wasn't totally sure, and in such a place…

Well, if there was anywhere in the world that was likely to accomplish such a feat, it would be a monstrous forge in the pits of hell. So, it was wary, but only for the unexpected. As it pressed deeper, it never found the throne room it expected. Instead, it found a drab platform on the third floor that was little more than a floor space cluttered with unfinished projects and a large desk filled with papers that had a good view of all the goings on below. There were no guards there, either.

There was only one demon, who looked like a hunched scribe and bore no resemblance at all to the demon Prince the Blade had just struck down. He was just a scribe huddled away in a ragged blanket as he made note of his drawings with three, no, four hands.

"Have you come to turn my weapon upon its master?" the man asked without looking up from his labors.

"I find it very unlikely such an effort would be successful."

"I…" the knight rasped. The blade hadn't meant to speak aloud, but it went with it, exploring this new function with a hollow, metallic voice.

"I simply seek to escape from these hells and be on my way."

"Then you can do so without my Warbringer," the demon said, finally spinning around.

"It won't even work in creation anyway. The soul pressure is too low. It would melt into a fine mist."

"Soul pressure?" the blade asked.

"How does metal melt into mist?"

"You really don't know anything, do you?" the demon answered with a shake of his head as he pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and regarded not the blade's new body, but the blade itself.

"You're no brighter than the oaf Angarazon. There's a reason he was cast into the outermost lair, and it wasn't because he was too dangerous to keep close." The Ebon Blade stood there in silence for a moment before Lord Voltrim continued.

"Do you think that such a marvelous machine could be made from simple metal? Even cursed brass or hell-cast iron could never hope to withstand the forces involved in my opus. Only soulsteel could hope to endure."

"Machine? Soulsteel?" The Ebon Blade asked.

"Those words mean nothing to me. Stop speaking in riddles."

"There are no riddles here," the demon said, standing on spindly legs and backing away. It's all right here. Take a look. These are the blueprints that were used to construct the machine you currently operate." The blade did not approach the table, though it did glance at the document, noting that none of them were blue. No matter how much openness this demon might profess, it could smell a trap in the way he pressed insistently upon the sword's mental grip on the body as he tried to distract it with mere words.

Those efforts didn't stop as the demon prince went on to explain the nature of soulsteel, which involved taking the raw souls of demons and fallen souls from creation and compressing them with giant hammers. It seemed like a very strange process to the blade, but then, it was nothing more than metal infused with the souls of the unwilling; in the broadest strokes, it wasn't so different.

"Even the greatest souls only produce a bare nugget of what I need. It takes tens of thousands of souls crushed just so to make the work of art you are wearing," the prince insisted, gesticulating wildly, before going on to explain the different properties of human and demon souls. That, at least, the blade found interesting. Though it didn't understand everything the crazed demon prince said, pacing back and forth as he shed his rags to reveal a slender, practically harmless body underneath.

It was nice to know that it wasn't imagining things.

"That's why you can heal it, and even fuel it on your own - because you are full of souls!" he blurted out.

"All my instruments can detect it. Prince Angarazon was a fool to wield you as a weapon. You'd be much better used as a vast reservoir, or a soul reactor!" As the demon lord spoke, he lashed out, not with his hands, but with the scraps of cloth that littered the ground. It wasn't one limb that reached for it, but thirty, in a grasping semicircle.