Lillene

Enjoy!

“Red agrees with you.” Russ frowned and shook his head slightly at the deconstructed trap. “What about the wood thing with a monster core?”

Serenity shrugged. “A complex combination of a trigger and a mana source. The way it’s put together is the reason that tiny Wrath Demon is so small; the man who opened it broke the connection before it finished feeding the mana for a normal Lesser Demon of Wrath, so the spell on the vase did what it could with the reduced mana. It’s not the best way to interrupt a spell, but it does work. It’s pretty common, really; for all that it can backfire and doesn’t always fully stop the spell, it’s something anyone can do. That’s worth a lot.”

Serenity frowned at the device. There was something about it that bothered him, something familiar that he felt like he should have realized. Something he was overlooking. Serenity took another long look at the mana signature; he was certain there was something familiar about it but he was also certain he’d never seen it before. It was annoying, like losing a word he knew right before he said it.

There were no surprises in the second box; Serenity headed back to Aki’s with that itch of familiarity in the back of his head. Aide couldn’t help him, either; all Aide could tell him was that he did not have a visual match. Unfortunately, mana signatures were as much about feel as they were about sight; they were individual and complex. Serenity’s best guess for what was bothering him was that it was someone whose signature he’d seen before using a different Affinity, but it could just as easily be nothing. 

Over the next few days, a dozen more demons were spotted spread across the East Coast of the United States. There was nothing common about them marking them as demons, but Serenity was usually able to come up with what they were based on a description of what they looked like and what attacks they used. They were all about the same size and most weren’t significantly more dangerous than animals of the same size, at least not now that animals were starting to become commonly mana-enhanced even outside high magic areas like Aki’s dungeon. 

Serenity told Russ to make certain that the insect-like species were hunted down even if they weren’t dangerous now. Most of them truly weren’t all that dangerous at the Lesser stage, but Serenity had run into Greater Demons of Harmony and Greater Demons of Cooperation. Greater Demons of Harmony had a tendency to make you harmonize with their goals, while Demons of Cooperation “only” had perfect teamwork, especially when there was a Greater variant nearby. While he hadn’t seen any of either on Zon, he wasn’t about to bet against them being summoned to Earth and they were both insectoid species that tended to stay together, breed quickly, and generally be annoying.

Serenity spent next few days training, trying to figure out a way to track the mana signature of the summoner, and looking at the broken clay remains of more vases from the few cases where the demons’ origins were able to be discovered. The more he saw of the mana signature, the more he felt like he knew it, but he just couldn’t pin it down.

Four days after Sorrow Demon showed up, Serenity took a day trip offworld. He took Rissa and Kerr; he’d finally realized how they were going to get Earth the knowledge he wanted to share: he’d get the standard references from the Mercenaries’ Guild and share them. 

There were no restrictions on copying the books; that was simply too expensive for most people to bother, at least in high quantity. The Guild made Etherium off of them, but the main way they made Etherium was by charging for access to the Library if you weren’t a Guild member. You could buy copies, but that was only worth it once you were high enough Tier to have the Etherium to spend; even then, using the Library was generally a better deal, since local dungeons were always documented as well as the Guild could manage.

Serenity had forgotten that each volume was ten Etherium to purchase. No wonder Vengeance always used the Guild Library instead!

The price was also part of the reason that games like Delve Deeper were popular, even past the fact that it was a fun game; it was expensive but far, far cheaper than a set of books that contained the same information. It couldn’t really be used as a reference in the same manner, but it was an easier, more affordable, and significantly more entertaining way to study.

They headed back to Earth with the only four extra volumes of monster lore that particular Guild had on hand. Only one of the books had anything on demons; even then, it was only five variants with extremely limited information, little more than a description of the monsters’ appearance in nearby dungeons along with fight tactics for the particular groups found in those dungeons. The Guildhouse had some of what Serenity was looking for, but no extras. He was able to order them, but it would likely be months before even the first copy would show up.

The offer to make good copies faster and cheaper in quantity was met with disbelief, but Kerr was still able to negotiate a contract to sell twenty new copies of one of the four volumes to the Guild at five Etherium each. With the exchange rate for Etherium on Earth, along with the portal cost, that wouldn’t be a good deal unless they could get the books copied for under about two hundred dollars each. 

Serenity knew they could easily be printed for that price, but he was also certain that the up-front cost of having them scanned and all the printing setup done would more than eat the profits on those twenty books if that was all they printed. Of course, that wasn’t the plan at all; the twenty books was basically a teaser to the Guild to get them to buy more later. The real profit on the first book was on Earth, where they could probably sell thousands of copies.

For Kerr, it was a double win. Every Guild hall should have a Library, even if she fully expected the books to be cheap enough that most people wouldn’t use it, especially the electronic version. The profit, however, was an even bigger plus. The Adventurer’s Guild was turning a profit, but it wasn’t large enough to be comfortable; if they had to pay for the building they were in, they wouldn’t be able to make ends meet. It wouldn’t even be close. For that matter, if they had to pay Legion in money instead of a place to live, they wouldn’t have been able to. 

For Serenity, the real value wasn’t the money; instead, the real value was that many of those copies would be read. They’d help people learn both the tactics used by delvers elsewhere and some of the monsters that were encountered. Earth’s monsters weren’t all identical to the monsters elsewhere, but they also weren’t all that different. 

The fact that Serenity didn’t have to deal with it was at least as big a win in his book as spreading the information. 

The next morning, Russ came to get Serenity. He wouldn’t explain what it was about; Serenity ended up grumbling about excessive secrecy but let himself be led away anyway. Quincy drove them to the same building Serenity had originally seen the summoning device’s remains in.

The basement turned out to have a large open space that had clearly been converted to contain a single cage. It didn’t seem particularly secure to Serenity, since it was just a box made of welded-together bars with a door on one side, but it was apparently doing its job. There was something inside the cage that was about three feet tall, roughly the same height as the Lesser Demon of Sorrow, but this one didn’t look like a child. Instead, it looked almost exactly like a devil from the horns on its head to the hooves that served as feet. The bright red skin, claws, and vertical slits in its eyes completed the package.

The fact that it was hunched over, paying no attention to them as it played with something on the floor, would have damaged the impression if Serenity didn’t know exactly what it was. “Where did you get an Lesser Obsession Demon?”

Russ snickered. “That’s a perfect name for it.” 

He took the last few steps to the cage, reached into his pocket, pulled a pebble out, and tossed it into the cage in front of the demon. The demon jumped into the air, looked around, then looked down at the pebble. The moment it saw the pebble, the demon dove for it, picked it up, and hooted in joy with the pebble held over its head in something Serenity could see only as a victory pose. The demon pranced around the cage for a bit, then turned around and squatted facing the same way as when Serenity entered.

Serenity had to get a bit closer to see that the demon was making patterns with a collection of about fifteen or twenty pebbles. Serenity couldn’t figure out what it was trying to make, but it moved one pebble at a time with a clear posture of serious thought between each move. It was clearly obsessed with its pebbles, or perhaps with the art it made using the pebbles.

“It does that every time you give it a pebble,” Russ stated without taking his eyes off the demon. “It was brought in for its appearance rather than its behavior; it literally hasn’t done anything aggressive to anyone who didn’t try to take its pebbles away from it. We brought it in by picking up the pebbles with a shovel and leading it away; it was happy to follow its pebbles as long as we didn’t touch them.”

“That’s …” Serenity chuckled and shook his head, bemused. That was just like an obsession demon. It was probably the reason they were rare; they made terrible dungeon monsters. They just weren’t interested in fighting under normal circumstances. Sometimes they made decent guards for treasure, but even dungeons seemed to have issues with channeling their obsessions to be what the dungeon wanted. They could usually be tricked or worked around as long as you took the time to observe them. “That’s such an Obsession Demon way to react.”

Serenity took a step forward and focused on the demon to try to see if the same mana signature was present. He didn’t really expect it, but if the demon was new enough it was possible he’d see something. “Did you find where it came from?”

Serenity heard Russ saying something in reply, but he didn’t listen to the answer. He’d find out that the answer was “Yes, it was right next to him; I have the remains of the vase in a box over there,” when he listened to the recording Aide made later. Right now, his full attention was on the demon, what the mana signature that was on it looked like, and what the demon smelled like.

It wasn’t identical to the smell of the Demon Lord who sent a demon to A’Atla, but it was similar. In fact, it was similar enough that Serenity had the distinct suspicion that the Demon Lord started life as an Obsession Demon of some sort. The fact that it had magic now and could summon other demons was not a good sign; it probably had an obsession Serenity wasn’t going to like.

When he looked at the mana signature again, he realized what he’d been missing for almost two weeks: the mana signature was extremely similar to the one he’d seen on A’Atla. The difference was that this magic used the Arcane Affinity, the Life Affinity, and an Affinity that Serenity suspected was tied to demons instead of that last Affinity and the Night Fire Affinity. 

“This is connected to what happened on A’Atla.” Serenity hadn’t expected that. He knew the Demon Lord was out there somewhere, but he definitely hadn’t expected this. Looking back, it was obvious that the demon summonings were the actions of a Demon Lord.

Lillene

Yes, it’s a demon with a rock collection. I don’t think it’s ever going to upgrade to geologist; rock collector is the height of the Lesser Obsession Demon’s ambitions.