Demonic Devourer's Development

The inhabitants of that strange and so much out of place village didn't guard the source of the rainbow water, but someone was almost always close to it. Villagers used the water for what seemed to be their every domestic need. They drank it, cooked with it, washed their clothes in it, filled their lanterns with it, use it to clean their houses… In short, they treated it like almost any other water.

The only notable difference was that they said words of prayers and thanks every time they took water out of the stream. These prayers weren't to the bastards that called themselves gods: the villagers instead prayed to the mountain we were it.

Both had equally zero chances of responding to their daily prayers, but these people weren't stopped by it.

I thought about luring another monster for a distraction, but to do that I would have to escape the village itself, and with sentries looking outside out of the wall's embrasures, that wasn't so easy. I was a little stuck here… but that was good as long as I didn't want to leave.

Worse comes to worst, I knew I could eat and claw my way through the stone and out of this place, but stone wasn't the tastiest thing in the world, and I would need to eat so much, it would be the only thing my taste buds would feel for weeks after.

In other words, I'd prefer to find another solution, and soon. Every hour spent in the village increased my chances of being spotted by accident. I hid well, but even I wasn't infallible.

I thought about reaching the water when the villagers fall asleep, but they didn't stick to a rigid day/night schedule. It wasn't like there was any day or night in here. Instead, these people measured time with "morning" sermons, and seemed to sleep and eat whenever they wanted and whenever food was available.

In search of something that would help me clear the way to the source for long enough to break the surrounding wall, I sneaked around the bone and stone houses, listened in on conversations and stalked people, until a certain place caught my attention.

On a first glance, it was a house like any other in the village. But at all times, two men guarded it—one outside and on inside, as I found out by watching from afar. Someone would regularly bring food inside and take out from inside what smelled unmistakably like waste, and too much to feed and belong only to the guard. And from inside, if I got close enough, I could smell bugmen.

Why would there be bugmen prisoners in a human village? Well, thanks to the boy whom I interrogated, I knew the answer. Children… There were monstrous baby machines inside. Now that I gave this more than a passing thought, I wondered how infusions of monster blood affected the villagers. They clearly were the source of the strangeness in their looks, but what about minds?

But I saw that something like that was the only way for a village so small and isolated to survive. There were, at most, a hundred people living behind the walls. They probably were all inbred like French kings if they lived here for more than a few generations.

This entire place was mildly disgusting. Killing these people would be a mercy to them compared to their way of life: hunt monsters, grow mushrooms, eat monsters and mushrooms, fuck some bugmen because otherwise you would have to fuck your sister… Bleh.

It gave me an opportunity to use, though. I wouldn't need to lure a monster to create another distraction—all I had to do was to free the monsters that were there already. It didn't matter if they would do damage to the villagers or not, as long as they run around trying to catch them and put them back.

The plan coalesced in my head, and the moment when it did was opportune for executing said plan, too. I knew something that would be just the thing to help. 'Pest, cast the dark cloud spell on the entrance to this house.'

That spell was one of the advanced ones that Pest only learnt recently. The over two hundred thousand EXP that it required took him plenty of time to suck… And it would only go slower later on, unless I spent more EXP on improving Pest's sucking abilities, and that just gave me a mild headache.

'Got it.'

I waited a minute. Then an ink-black mist appeared out of nowhere around the entrance to the house and the confused guard, slipping inside through the cracks in the walls and the door, slowly spreading around almost like a liquid.

"What's going on? What's that?" a guard shouted, trying to move the cloud away by wildly waving his hands. "Curses!"

It was my queue. Using the guards' blindness to my advantage, I slipped in the cloud and farther in. In the thick mist of it, my heat-vision was very muted, too, but with what was left of it and my sense of smell, I could orient myself well enough.

"Are you alright out there? I can't see anything!" the guard inside shouted to his colleague.

The guard outside was too busy to notice me sneaking in. Whatever he wanted to say got lost when my stinger pierced his neck. His dying gurgles were muffled by my hand, while another gently put him to the ground.

I disposed of the second guard similarly. By that time, the cloud began to dissipate, and I hurried to do the rest.

There were three bugmen in the house. If not for their protruding stomachs, I wouldn't have pegged them for women—there was nothing female neither in their angular builds, nor in their flat faces. All of them were chained to the floor with the only pieces of metal I've seen here until now.

The chains didn't last a moment under the onslaught of my claws.