Chapter 7: Harvesting the Summoners

The basement had gone dark, but Koda didn’t need light to know where the remaining cultists were.

He could hear them. They were five of them left, scattered across a room with only one exit, and every single one of them had watched him snap their leader’s neck like it was nothing.

He moved toward the stairs.

The first cultist he caught was young, barely more than a boy beneath the oversized robe, fumbling with a dagger he clearly didn’t know how to use. He swung wildly as Koda approached, a panicked strike that Koda sidestepped without much effort.

His talons did the rest.

The boy dropped without a sound.

’His body armor is nonexistent, and his weapon is basically a decorative tool. But from the looks of things, he’s cultivated some sort of ability or art; but none of that matters when the body underneath is this fragile.’

A blast of pale light struck him from the side; some kind of ward or spell, thrown by one of the older cultists near the altar. It stung, more surprise than pain, a brief crackling heat across his shoulder that faded almost as fast as it arrived.

Koda turned toward the caster.

"Stay back!" The man’s voice cracked with fear even as he raised both hands, chanting something fast and desperate. "This thing isn’t supposed to be this strong, it’s just a low-tier..."

He didn’t finish the sentence. Koda crossed the room before the man could complete a second spell, and it ended the same way it had for the boy.

Three left. They’d stopped trying to fight back entirely, backs pressed against the stairwell door, one of them yanking uselessly at a handle that had apparently locked itself the moment the ritual circle ruptured.

"Please." The woman who’d been hissing orders earlier had lost every trace of authority in her voice. "We didn’t; this wasn’t supposed to happen. Marcus said it would be simple, he said the binding would hold..."

Koda paused.

Some old, human part of him hesitated for a moment, feeling pity at the sight of her fear towards him.

But he quickly shook the feeling off.

’They summoned me with a cage drawn in blood and tried to make me spend the rest of my existence as someone’s leashed weapon. They knew exactly what they were doing when they lit those candles.’

This wasn’t a demonling too weak to defend itself, cornered by beasts hunting for a meal because that was simply how Hell worked. This was self-defense against people who had planned, in detail, to take away every choice he had left.

He didn’t feel good about what came next. But he didn’t feel guilty either, and that distinction mattered more to him than he expected it to.

When it was over, Koda stood alone in the ruined basement stained with blood; human blood, this time, dripping from his talons onto the shattered remains of the ritual circle.

The ember within his body pulsed. He quickly knelt beside the nearest body and reached inward the way he’d practiced all day back in Hell, searching for that familiar vacuum sensation.

What was absorbed this time around wasn’t the black mist he’d grown used to in Hell.

It was a pale, silvery thread lifted from the corpse instead, faintly luminous, carrying with it something that felt less like raw destructive power and more like memory; fragments of fear, faith, ambition, all tangled together into a single strand of light.

’This is different from Infernal Essence. This is... something else.’

He drew it in anyway, curiosity outweighing hesitation, and the moment it sank into his scales, warmth spread through him in a way that felt cleaner than anything the Imp’s essence had given him.

He moved to the next body. Then the next. Each one gave a little more, a pale thread joining the last, until he’d worked his way through all five.

The altar at the front of the room held one last surprise; a shallow stone bowl filled with dark, congealed offerings, sacrificial essence the cult had clearly been saving for whatever ritual came after the binding.

Koda approached it carefully, unsure what he was looking at, but the pull in his chest told him everything he needed to know before his mind caught up.

He pressed a claw against the bowl’s contents.

The vacuum sensation this time was the strongest he’d felt yet, a flood of both silvery threads and dark mist pouring into him at once, human Spiritual Essence and something that had clearly been building in that bowl for a long time before he’d ever arrived.

The ember behind his ribs didn’t just flare this time. It surged, roaring up through his chest, down through his limbs, into every scale and claw and inch of bone he possessed.

Koda gasped, staggering back a step as the sensation overwhelmed him.

’This is; this is a breakthrough. It’s actually happening.’

Power settled into him differently than it had with any previous kill, not just adding to the fire behind his ribs but reshaping it, deepening the foundation the fire burned on top of.

Somewhere in his awareness, a quiet certainty took root, the same instinctive knowledge that had told him his own fragmented name days ago.

He had broken through to the Demon Awakening Realm, late Stage.

A second subtle sensation rose beneath the first, easy to miss beneath the roar of the breakthrough. A tight, coiled thread of energy, distinct from both the Infernal mist and the silvery human threads, filled with a strange, resentful charge.

’What is this one?’

He didn’t have time to investigate it properly. The moment the last of the altar’s offerings drained away, the air around him shuddered, and the ground beneath his feet seemed to lose all weight at once.

’The contract; it’s gone. Marcus is dead, so there’s nothing left to hold the binding open.’

Whatever mechanism had allowed the ritual to pull him across realms in the first place had apparently run both directions. Without a living summoner and a completed contract anchoring him to Earth, his business here was finished.

The basement dissolved around him in a wash of gray light.

Koda hit the black soil of Hell hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs, claws digging deep furrows into the ash-dark ground as momentum from the crossing bled out of his body.

For a long moment he simply lay there, chest heaving, the familiar sulfurous heat of Hell’s air burning back into his lungs in place of the cool, damp basement air he’d been breathing only seconds ago.