Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

We reached the edge of the storm and brought the army to a halt. After a brief conference with the demons, it was agreed that we would continue forward marching at night instead of the day. Gaap and Malphas shared the responsibility of shielding the mobs from sunlight, and with as many monsters as we had, it was too difficult for them to maintain the necessary fog while we were on the move. We called a rest for the afternoon and picked up the march as soon as the sun went down. By the morning, we would be far enough away from the storm to start killing demons.

Were they looking at me differently? Astaroth had suggested they could sense deception, and I didn’t have the knowledge or experience to mask whatever signals my soul was giving off. My aetheric perceptions were foggy at best. I could locate a demon with my eyes closed, but only if he was within about twenty paces of me, and I was still learning to tell them apart.

Gaap was the only one to comment. After our strategy session, he slapped a hairy hand on my back.

“Welcome to eternity,” he said, before shuffling off. It was the same phrase the System had used, so they had to know I had changed. But it didn’t seem to worry them.

Celaeno and the homies were in charge of keeping track of our targets. Gaap generally led from the front, and Furtur had taken to keeping an eye on the captives. The regulars had to walk, but Batu and Erdene were confined to a wooden shell atop one of the wagons. Either Furtur was suspicious of me, or he had simply decided that managing them was his responsibility. I hadn’t had another opportunity to speak freely with the shaman and the orkhan. I had shards of amethyst and diamond to give to her in case either would work as a focus for her sorcery, but there hadn’t been a chance to do so.

Malphas was too mobile. He spent a lot of time in the air, and the flock gave me running tabs on his position. Astaroth, in contrast, remained close to Fladnag’s wagon. He was active again, but still visibly weaker than he had been before summoning his fire snake. As the night progressed, I watched the moon sink.

Fladnag was driving the wagon, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low, smoke rising from his pipe. Hopefully, whatever he was smoking wasn’t going to inhibit him when things got complicated. I’d gotten the impression that not everything he breathed in was tobacco. Gastard rode beside the wagon in full battle gear. I gave him a wave.

You have everything covered back here,” I said, “I’m going to check in with Gaap at the front.”

He grunted his agreement. Astaroth accompanied me to monitor for spawns. As soon as we were gone, Esmelda and Leto would switch places with a couple of camp followers. I’d told one of the human officers that I was concerned with their safety, and he’d been more than happy to find volunteers to fill their seats and help them blend in with the noncombatants, no questions asked. It was one of the perks of being a Dark Lord.

I resisted the urge to speak with my wife and son before leaving. Having a private moment wasn’t worth giving a hint to Astaroth that something big was about to happen. The peacock had always been agreeable, but he was still a demon.

I’d been marching on foot with Astaroth on my heels. We were only a few paces from the wagon.

“Call us varghests,” I told him, and he nodded, narrowing his eyes in focus. I could feel something happening in the aether around us as he reached out, though my sense wasn’t keen enough to understand exactly what he was doing.

A pair of the horse-hounds came bounding toward us a minute later. For monsters, they were quite friendly. The larger of the two stopped in front of me and lowered its front in something like a bow to allow me to mount. Its yellow eyes hinted at intelligence as it looked up at me. They didn’t have saddles, but the varghests were stronger than horses of the same size, and this one had no trouble taking my weight. Its muscles bunched beneath me under glossy black fur, eager to run.

“Shall I take us to Gaap?” Astaroth asked, perched lightly atop his varghest. The beast snapped at him, but he calmed it with a pat

“Lead on,” I said, and the varghests trotted forward. I had never been an accomplished rider, and my mount was acting largely on its initiative in following Astaroth. I missed Noivern. Theoretically, his death had not been permanent, and he would respawn at some point, but that was only a guess.

Zombies moaned as we passed, and I caught one of the hollows giving me a salute. The hollow knights didn’t speak much, but they were smart, though it was hard to say how much autonomy they possessed. The

trolls were spread out among the ranks, and I counted at least twenty, not including those who were pulling wagons. But the monsters would come up from the supply group as soon as we halted, so they wouldn’t be able to immediately start tearing through my human followers when they were out from under the influence of the demons.

Gaap had assigned himself a personal detail of advanced mobs. A small group of hollows marched along beside him, better equipped than their undead comrades. They wore a mixture of chain and plate, dented and dingy, but perfectly functional, and walked with falchions swinging at their sides. The ape demon looked like a proper general, with a fur cape hanging from his back, sitting astride a chimera. The beast had two heads, lion and lizard, and both eyed me hostilely as we rode around to meet Gaap.

He grinned at me, showing off a bright row of teeth and oversized canines at the center of his dark face. “Come to visit me? To what do I owe the

honor?”

We pulled up the varghests to trot alongside him, a wall of zombies shambling along at our backs. The chimera hissed at my mount, which growled in return.

“Something happened to me,” I said. “I’ve changed, and I’d like to speak with both of you about it.”

“Your soul was shriveled before,” Gaap said, “now it isn’t. What else is there to say?”

Shriveled? Well, it didn’t matter what the demons thought, at least this confirmed that they had noticed.

I’m beginning to feel essence,” I said, “like demons do. I want to be here when you call the mobs together and summon your mist to see if I can get a sense of what you're doing. You all speak to the lesser entities mentally, and I was hoping I could learn to do the same.”

“It’s possible,” Astaroth said, eyeing me curiously. I could have asked him about this without involving Gaap, and he was probably wondering why I hadn’t. “Communication is something that comes naturally to us, and you are like a newborn. The more you focus on your impressions, the clearer they will become. Sending your intentions through the aether is an extension of that.”

“The mist is a spell,” Gaap said, “watching me won’t help you understand it.”

“Can humans not learn demonic magic?” I asked.

“They can,” Astaroth said, “though it is difficult.” Gaap flashed his ample canines at the peacock, narrowing his eyes in annoyance. Was that not something he wanted me to know?

“The hand gestures,” I said, “and the incantations, would they work for me if I learned them?”

“You would only be able to use spells that align with your affinity,” Astaroth said, closing his eyes for a breath. “Ah, your element is water, correct?”

“It is.” They could get a lot more information out of their aetheric sense than I could.

“Then a version of the mist ritual should be within your grasp. Water and air serve equally well. I cannot do the same, as my soul is given wholly to the aspect of flame.”

“It would take you years to master it,” Gaap said. His cheerful mask was slipping. “The other Dark Lord never bothered trying. You shouldn’t either. You have skills of your own to develop.”

Kevin would have gotten to level thirty and unlocked his System a long time ago. Why hadn’t he done any more than that? Was there not a higher tier for Survivors to reach?

“Is he like me,” I said. “The same kind of soul? Do demons have ranks like my System does? I’m an E-class entity now, apparently.”

If this was the last time I was going to be able to have a civil conversation with the demons, I wanted to make the most of it.

Astaroth’s chirp sounded amused.

“We don’t use Kevinian letters,” he said, “but the hierarchy is universal. In those terms, both you and Kevin are in the same class, as are most harbingers. A few of us have evolved beyond to what you would call D class, but only a few.”

“Like who? Where do you both fit into the scale?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gaap said, “we are what we are, and there is nothing above us in this world.” His tone suggested he meant that to be the end of the conversation, but Astaroth ignored him.

“Bael was a class above us,” he said, the feathers atop his head raising as he met the disapproving glare of the other demon. “We are like you, whereas the lesser entities, what you call mobs, are a step below. F-class, if they are considered worthy of a rank at all.”

“What about Harmony and Discord,” I said. “Are they gods? Where does the One Who Knocks fit into all of this?”

“The One Who Knocks is beyond such a scale,” Gaap snapped, “he is everything and nothing.”

“Low A or high B,” Astaroth said, instantly contradicting him. “He is unfathomably beyond the likes of us, but not beyond measurement.”

“Is A the highest?

“Yes and no. The entities who reach that state possess power that is difficult to quantify. Some are greater than others, but they would still be considered to be of the same class. Harmony and Discord are not gods, they are more fundamental than that. Discord is the force that seeks to evolve eternally, and Harmony seeks to bind all things as they are in quietude, in

death.”

That sounded like the propaganda version of what the sides represented. I’d have to ask an angel for their perspective on things if I ever met one. Atlan was an endless plain, and the sky was beginning to lighten along the edges of a horizon of tall grass. Gaap brought his chimera to a halt, and it flexed

its undersized wings behind him.

“It’s time,” he said. His presence beside me felt like a lumpy knot, and a moment after he stopped, the knot seemed to loosen and expand. Its tendrils brushed past me, and it spread through the air like a breeze. This aetheric

thing was going to take some getting used to.

The monsters responded instantly, the shamblers stopping all in the same moment to sway in place, whereas the nearby hollows were actively watching us, and appeared to retain their independence. The more advanced monsters responded to mental commands like soldiers receiving orders rather than robots being remotely controlled.

Astaroth was doing something as well, though his spirit felt more ephemeral, and somehow warmer than Gaap’s. Phantoms were perpetually circling above the monster regiment, though they tended to keep lower than the harpies, and a chorus of their shrill cries accompanied the change as they flew down to settle among the ranks.

“Do you feel what we are doing?” Astaroth asked. “Sort of.”

“Try to give a command to your varghest, use your will to share your intention.”

I closed my eyes to focus on my core, such as it was, a sparkly something or other in my belly. It spread outward, though nowhere near as broadly as what the demons were doing. The varghests essence was barely tangible to me, and I had no idea how to communicate my intentions to it. I imagined my essence as being so much water and tried to pour a stream of it into the beast beneath me.

Move, I thought, go forward.

The horse-hound pricked its ears and turned its head around to growl at me. Well, at least I had done something, maybe. Gaap’s hands moved in an intricate design, and he muttered an incantation under his breath. Almost instantly, a breeze picked up, dragging moisture out of the grass and gathering it into a mist that thickened slowly around us and over the monster regiment.

“How long does it usually take?” I asked, and Gaap ignored me.

“Not so long,” Astaroth said, “it will be finished well before the sun rises.”

I slid down from the varghest, and it shook its shaggy head at me, its tongue lolling. The horse-hounds weren’t so bad, I almost regretted that I was shortly going to have to kill all of them. Gaap was drawing the mist up around him and sending it back over the regiment like a blanket, so I didn’t have to walk far to be outside of it.

Astaroth came to stand beside me as I watched the sunrise.

“There is something on your mind,” he said. The demon was wearing the same robes he had started the journey with, and they were not in top

condition. Parts of his sleeves were missing, burned away, and the rest was dotted with small holes and scorches like someone had been using it to put out cigarettes.

“You could say that.” I wanted to activate my System screens to check how much strength the curse had cost me for the day, but Astaroth would be sure to know what the curse meant. Instead, I slipped down my pack and selected the potions I wanted. Might, Swiftness, Leaping, and Invisibility. Gastard had an identical trio with him. Their effects only lasted ten minutes, but if the fight lasted longer than that, we were in real trouble.

Astaroth straightened his feathers, preening with his hands as a natural bird would with its beak. “The struggle between Harmony and Discord has gone on for as long as there has been time to measure it,” he said. “Most

humans do not live long enough, or delve deep enough, to glimpse even the edges of the conflict in which all souls take part.”

I looked at the bottles in my hands, and the liquids swirling in each. Pale blue, deep maroon, and violet. “It’s a relief to know there’s something bigger going on,” I said. “So much of what has happened to me felt random, arbitrary. I’m just beginning to feel like I understand some of it. But it’s frustrating to think how small I am, how small everything I’ve done is, in the scheme of things.”

Astaroth brought his hands down to clasp them at his waist. A golden light was slowly spilling over the grass in the distance, forcing the shadows to retreat.

“Don’t you fear the sun?” I said.

“It will not destroy me, though it saps my strength.” His voice lowered to a murmur. “That is what you want, isn’t it?”

My heart picked up its pace. “What are you talking about?”

The demon gave me a sidelong glance. “My kind do not understand humans well. They have lived too many lives, perhaps. Compared to you, I am ancient, but to my brethren, I am young. I think I see more clearly for it.”

I didn’t have a ready response, and he went on.

“You have not aligned yourself with either prime, instead carried by the currents of fate. Most humans are the same. Now you want to take a firmer stand. You were sent here to stop us, to save this realm from our master, and that is still what you desire. You see this as a conflict between good and evil, instead of what it truly is.”

It was an echo of what Berith had said, but Astaroth struck me as being more thoughtful than the tiger. “The last time I talked to a demon about good and evil, he acted like he didn’t know what those words meant.”

Astaroth bobbed his head. “Yes, my kind does not understand humans, that is my point. But humans are trapped in their little worlds, their little lives, they cannot see beyond the veil.”

“If Harmony and Discord aren’t good and evil, what are they? You said evolution and stasis, but demons don’t seem all that evolved to me, and the world I was born in wasn’t static at all.”

“You want to protect this world from the corruption of Bedlam, yes?” He looked at me sharply. “Our master’s arrival would bring much suffering and death. Those things are evil. But suffering and death are a part of nature’s course, the cycles of life that Harmony has established. Stopping us does not prevent either of those evils, it merely changes their shape.”

“Are you going to try to tell me that Discord is really all about peace and love?”

“No. It is not.” The demon made a soft cooing sound, pensive. “What I am attempting to express is that from the perspective of what you recognize as good and evil, neither Harmony nor Discord is worthy of your allegiance.”

“What’s left, if not them?”

Astaroth couldn't smile, given the beak, but his eyes, and the shape of his aura in my new sense, managed to convey something like joy.

“Nothing,” he said. “Everything. The chance for you to be more than a pawn in their eternal game.” It felt like he was reading my mind, which for all I knew, was entirely possible.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because that is what I want for myself as well.” Slowly, he knelt, lowering his face nearly to the ground and exposing his neck. “Accept my loyalty, or let my head be the first you take today.”