Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 186: More Information Required

Gna’kis is an incredibly valuable resource, Perry thought, while he inspected the slimy fetus.

A baby demon lord doesn’t happen often at all. In order for them to happen, there needs to be a paradigm shift in the world drastic enough that the older demons are completely unaware of the new portfolio. That portfolio being high technology and the misuse thereof. Then it has to develop self-awareness in secret and ‘be born,’ then it has to hide from the other demons, who would most likely consume it and take its brand-new powers for themselves to elevate themselves to budding demon-lords. It has to survive long enough to gain enough power that it can at the very least, defend itself.

If it survived long enough, it could even go on to gain a spark of divinity.

…This is one hell of an opportunity.

Perry pondered what Gramma would do, so he could do the exact opposite.

Needless to say, getting in on the ground floor of a baby demon lord was…pretty much unheard of. Perry had never read any example of such a thing, but he could picture how it might work: Any geas that someone used on it now, could linger once it became a full-fledged demon lord with its own domain and offspring, potentially granting you some measure of control over them.

Not like the time he temporarily got one over on Ex’bergazzat’s physical manifestation that the greater demon shrugged off like a cold. No, this demon lord was weak enough that someone could imprint controls on their very soul. It could be a solid foundation to conquer a…rather large swath of Nargosh.

If someone could subdue another demon lord long enough to feed it to this one…then you’d have two portfolios under the control of an enslaved demon. In theory, you could repeat this process as many times as you had the power to do so.

New chain quest: Demon Emperor!

Control or consume all of the Demon lords!

Reward-

NOOOOPE! Perry mentally waved away the insane quest as soon as his System quantified the idle thought for him. First of all, Perry would rather be a middle-class suburbanite than rule in Nargosh, and second, it was wildly dangerous and life-consuming.

It just wasn’t worth the effort.

Perry’s mysterious enemy seemed to be thinking the opposite however, and had already riddled the baby demon with control mechanisms.

With Perry’s Dimensional Tinker perk and a little squinting, he could see where the constraints on the creature’s soul were slowly being overlapped as Gna’kis’s soul grew rapidly. In a matter of days, the commands would be permanently embedded inside Gna’kis, unable to be removed without essentially lobotomizing the demon.

It reminded Perry of those pictures of trees that had grown with ropes tied around them, eventually killing the tree through constriction.

Idea!

Perry picked up the slimy creature began walking it over to his soul-surgery suite.

“What are you doing?” Gna’kis asked.

“I’m going to-” Perry considered his words carefully. There was a strong possibility that one of the geas on the demon baby was a compulsion to prevent anyone from removing them. If he told Gna’kis what he was doing, it would likely trigger an involuntary, violent reaction, and while the demon was extremely weak, he was about to bring it into a room of high-tech soul-cutters.

Things could spiral out of control quickly.

Perry needed a lie that wasn’t alarming, and wouldn’t trigger any automated defenses the demon’s contractor might’ve wired into it.

“I’m going to shove you in a lightless box until I figure out what to do with you,” Perry said.

Nice one.

He also had to play into what the demon was expecting to happen, and being shoved in a carboard box was well within the realm of expectation. It wasn’t like physical barriers made a big difference to the soul-surgery equipment and not being able to see it might keep the demon calm long enough to break the restrictions on it’s behavior.

I just gotta hope the damn thing can’t feel the equipment, Perry thought, pausing mid-stride.

This requires testing.

Perry had deliberately removed all of his high-tech gear before summoning Gna’kis, and he had no idea if the demon had some kind of sensory range.

Perry spent the next hour approaching Gna’kis with various technological items, ranging from microwaves to tinker-tech.

All of them sprouted legs and tried to kill him at about twelve meters.

The soul-surgery room is way less than twelve meters in radius, Perry thought, rubbing his chin. He didn’t want his soul-cutter to sprout legs and render him a vegetable with irresistible damage.

The next task then was to modify the soul-imaging machine and the soul-cutter to operate at greater than twenty meters away.

Not too difficult. Perry had to tweak some angles, and change the algorithm to accommodate for greater dispersion. He pulled out all the soul-sensitive crystals and polished them by hand, boosting his Attunement as he did so, bringing them up to a new level of performance.

The sun was beginning to go down again when Perry was ready to try it.

He placed the box containing Gna’kis on a distant building and aimed the imager and cutter down at the box.

On the imager’s screen, the demon’s amorphous soul sprung to life, greyscale and constantly shifting with the demon’s thoughts. It loses so much information in 2-D, Perry mused to himself. Despite being a worse image than he could see with his eyes, he could still make out the geas as little indents in the soul, and little swirls where the soul stuck for just a bit longer than usual before continuing to flow past it.

You know,if this is successful, this tech will come in handy if someone tries to use magical control over a teammate. And I couldn’t think of a more disposable test subject.

Perry spent the next fifteen minutes training the algorithm to spot the magical restrictions in Gna’kis’s soul, until the machine was able to pick them out just as well as Perry.

Then he flipped the switch on the cutter.

The machine gave a quiet, almost imperceptible hum for a few seconds before it went silent again. Do something right, and it’s almost disappointingly uneventful.

And now we check our work.

Perry checked the display and watched Gna’kis’s soul for a couple minutes.

The soul flowed more easily without all those strings keeping it hemmed in.

Alright, time to check on our little buddy and see if it has any more information about who put it under a geas.

Perry leapt over to the next building and pulled Gna’kis out of his box, inspecting the slimy fetus with his bare eyes, raising his Nerve and Attunement. The cutter had been used as little as possible, cutting tiny sections out of the snarl of magic. Under Perry’s gaze, he saw the strings unraveling, popping and fraying under the weight of the demon’s burgeoning power.

“I feel…different. What did you do?”The demon-spawn asked.

“I cut the geas out of you. Can you tell me more about who put it on you?”

“…I see. Unfortunately I cannot. It seems as though the caster of the spell anchored the geas inside my memories of him. As the constraints unraveled, so did the memories.”

“Damn.”

“However, I can recall being summoned and overpowered by something…only the figure is blurry and indistinct.”

“Huh…” Perry tapped his chin. “How good is your memory when it’s not cut up?”

“Infallable.”

“How long ago were you first summoned by our mutual friend?” Perry asked, checking his watch. “To the second, please.”

“One year, one hundred and thirty days, four hours, twelve minutes and forty seconds ago.”

Perry jotted down the current time and the one supplied by the demon.

“And were you outside?”

“No.”

“Any sunlight at all?” Perry asked, heart sinking.

“A beam from a vent in the ceiling.”

“And what angle was it at?” Perry asked, unable to keep from smiling. “Can you discern true north with all that hardware of yours?”

Gna’kis proceeded to give Perry everything he needed to isolate the longitude and latitude of his first summoning by their mystery friend.

Interesting, Perry mused over the dot on the west coast.

Unfortunately the enemy wasn’t close enough for Perry to investigate immediately. He’d have to make time to go after he finished dealing with the troll problem.

“How often does he summon you?” Perry asked.

“I have regular memory distortions every seventh day, at precisely the same time. The next one is in two days and sixteen hours.”

Hmm… Perry mused for a moment.

“Gna’kis, how would you like to work together with me?” Perry asked.

“And why would I wish to do that?”

“Because I’m on the side of humans. Without humans, high technology, and by extention, you, would not exist. If we cease to exist, I can’t imagine you’ll live very long before dissolving into the ether.

“You are a modern human demon,” Perry continued. “You need humanity to thrive, advance, and have enough luxury to misbehave in order for you to grow and prosper.”

“…” Gna’kis watched him silently, it’s goopy eye narrowed in intense focus.

“And how would you like to get revenge on your previous summoner?” Perry said, squatting down to bring his eye level closer to that of the demon’s.

“Say no more. I am as unforgetting, cruel and vindictive as the internet itself, Paradox Zauberer. I would relish the opportunity.”

Perry pursed his lips.

“You get city hall’s wi-fi signal?”

“Enough of it, yes. Relax. Your angsty teen poetry and embarrassing search history is safe with me.”

“Pffff,” Perry blew a raspberry and waved his hand. “After that conversation with Matador, I created a dead-man’s switch. You think I didn’t see this coming from you?”

Sliding Stats

Attunement 59-> 65

With cold-blooded indifference, Perry walked outside the demon lord of sinful technology’s radius on influence, grabbed his phone and hit ‘The Button’, sending Nat, Heather, his parents, and every major news outlet in both Washington and Franklin a package containing all his most shameful digital secrets.

“What now?” Perry asked, walking back to Gna’kis with his arms spread.

“You’re a monster.” The demon breathed in abject horror.

“I’m Paradox,” Perry said with a shrug before laying down until he was perfectly eye level with the squirming, malformed demon.

“Now that you know how far I’ll go…do you wish to cooperate for the preservation of the human race?”

Perry slid his right hand across the building’s roof, offering it to the demon.

The demon extended its partially formed biological hand and grasped Perry’s forefinger.

“For revenge. Let’s talk terms.”

“Hold on a sec,” Perry said, glancing over his shoulder “My phone is blowing up.” Perry went over and scanned through the dozens of texts and missed calls, until he found the people whose opinion he actually cared about.

“Huh,” he muttered, scanning the message. “Who knew she was into that too?”

***Tyrannus***

Tyrannus didn’t enjoy having to fly out in the middle of nowhere every time he summoned Gna’kis, but even as powerful as he was, he’d long since drilled into himself a cautious fastidiousness that bordered on obsession into his being, and caution demanded that he summon his infant demon god far away from his place of power.

This uncharacteristic attention to detail and caution was part of a lifelong attempt to distance himself from the weakness of his species: carelessness.

He landed in front of the entrance and wove his essences into telekinetic force, lifting the raw stone boulder covering the opening and shoving it aside with casual ease.

I suppose now that I’ve come as far as I have with Gna’kis, the benefit of retaining it has surpassed the benefit of selling the demon to the highest bidder.

He’d considered selling the nascent demon lord to Hulax, the demon lord of Betrayal, but…

Best not to put all your eggs in one basket. After all, in a few weeks time, Gna’kis will be under my complete control. All I need to do is slowly, ever so slowly feed minor demons to my puppet until it’s power is too great for other demon lords to easily subdue. And then I will become a recognized power in Nargosh.

But that was plans for the far-off future. Today, Tyrannus was engaged in the simple act of reinforcing his geas on Gna’kis. A task best done with punctuality and precision, in order to make the weave of magical compulsions to obey him as strong and consistent as magically possible.

His minions stood assembled inside the entrance, bowing deeply. Tyrannus allowed himself a small smirk as he looked down at the groveling humans. His punctuality allowed them to arrange this display honoring his presence, every time.

When he strode deeper into the underground cavern, he could make out the ritual circle, already prepared for him.

Tyrannus reviewed the circle carefully, finding no tangible defect with the circle meant to restrain and weaken the demon. He reviewed it again, pacing around the cavernous space.

His minions waited silently, sweat beading on their brows from the effort they’d put into making his summoning circle ready, along with the sweltering heat of Tyrannus’s presence.

“It looks excellent, thank you, John. You may begin,” Tyrannus said, motioning for the head priest to begin the ritual.

Tyrannus watched carefully as the high priest stepped into the center of the circle, bearing a realm-piercing dagger, lifting it high above the bait: a PC donated by one of his followers.

Tyrannus tensed as John split the veil, although all but the most perceptive of his minions would be unable to tell it apart from Tyrannus shifting his weight.

This was the moment where something else might decide to step through the tear in reality cut by the realm-piercing dagger.

Something possibly more powerful than himself.

Unlikely, but possible.

With a dry clunk, Gna’kis arrived, hitting the PC and bouncing stiffly off of it.

Something’s wrong, Tyrannus thought. Gna’kis almost looked like a plastic doll.

BOOM!

A deafening explosion erupted from the fake Gna’kis, destroying the cavern and rocking Tyrannus back on his heels as his surrounding minions were vaporized in the blink of an eye.

In an instant, he was standing in an outdoor clearing.

“Hmmm,” Tyrannus hummed to himself, reaching up with a talon and picking a piece of John out of his nose while glancing up at the open sky where a massive cavern used to be, flicking the piece of splintered bone away.

He sneezed.

“Was…that supposed to happen?” A trembling voice asked. One of his minions had been standing directly behind him, where a Tyrannus-shaped portion of the wall remained intact. She was bleeding from the ears and looked more than a little shell-shocked.

“No, Amanda, that wasn’t supposed to happen. I suppose our little puppet has managed to cut its strings…Well, let’s get you to the hospital, my dear,” Tyrannus said, carefully picking up the wounded cultist and striding away.

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