Chapter 1388: Conflict
Above the empty ridge of the continent, the Deity of Gods.
Hackzord moved through the karst cave corridors in long, controlled strides—the pace of someone containing something.
The cave system was no mystery to him. He had visited this city before it became something else, had walked these passages when they were still the underground architecture of a functioning settlement with a thousand-year history. The labyrinth of stone meant nothing; he had memorized it without trying. What had changed was what was done with it, and who had been given authority over what was done with it.
That was the source of the anger he was containing.
At the entrance to the experimental venue, a Junior Demon blocked his path. Mask’s chamberlain—Hackzord recognized the deformity: two heads fused together with magic stones, the result of following Nassaupelle’s philosophy with one’s own body before being instructed to. The thing wore the loyalty of a tool that had chosen its function.
“My lord, my master is conducting an important test inside. If you have a message—”
Hackzord raised his hand. The chamberlain tumbled across the stone floor and did not rise.
He had considered the creature for exactly as long as it took to determine it was a Reconciliation-path Junior Demon: no battle adaptations, all its merged stones redirected toward function rather than force. The calculation took less than a breath. The application of force took less than that.
The chamberlain, wisely, stayed where it had landed.
Hackzord pushed open the heavy stone doors and entered.
Behind them, the experimental venue opened into vastness. He had been in large spaces before—command halls, the interior of obelisk towers—but Nassaupelle had a way of filling space that made it feel occupied even when the numbers inside it were enormous. Magic stones were set into the cave walls in their hundreds, glittering like a cold imitation of stars. And beneath those: Inferior Demons, packed from wall to wall—worm-forms, limbless, dense with them, far exceeding the stones in count. They lay penned within low barriers, absorbing repeated stimulation pulses from the magic power core, enduring it with the vacant obedience of creatures whose nervous systems had been designed for something simpler than pain.
Hackzord’s jaw tightened.
Inferior Demons were the base of the race’s hierarchy in the most literal sense: incapable of independent action, incapable of communication, biologically simple to the point of near-uselessness in any practical context. Their only distinction was accidental—their extremely simple meridian channels made them ideal hosts for the Growth God’s Stones. Failed specimens became feed. Successful ones became weapons. It was efficient, in the way that a wet stone producing sparks was efficient: the waste was the process.
None of this disturbed Hackzord in principle. He did not sentimentalize over Inferior Demons. What disturbed him was the spectacle Nassaupelle had made of the work.
The transformation could have been conducted in a sealed chamber anywhere in the city. Instead, Mask had built his laboratory at the center of the most theatrical setting available: a thick pillar of stone connected to four surrounding platforms by suspension bridges, directly above the main mass of the penned Inferior Demons. Every demon who needed to enter the experimental heart of the facility had to cross those bridges. Every one of them was required, by the architecture of the space, to look down at what lay below.
The worm-forms twisted and whined in slow, constant discomfort. The smell of excrement and decomposing failed specimens rose in a thick current through the cave. Hackzord breathed it in and felt his contempt for Nassaupelle calcify into something more specific than the general distaste he had maintained for years.
He built this to be seen.
Not for efficiency. Not for logistics. For the audience.
He crossed the bridge.
At the top of the transformation structure, he found Nassaupelle occupied with something that made the anger Hackzord had been containing become significantly harder to contain.
Mask stood with one of the Iron Bird remnants—a human flying machine towed back by his subordinates—spread before him on a table. Near the table: a cluster of human nobles, their conditions unclear, several of them motionless. One surviving noble, still conscious, was in Nassaupelle’s hands. The man’s face had achieved an expression that left no room for ambiguity: he had been afraid for a long time, and the fear had reached the point where the body stops pretending otherwise. There were wet stains on his robes.
“Nassaupelle!” The name came out at a volume Hackzord had not intended. “Who gave you permission to touch my humans? If you want them for experiments, you come to me first—”
He was aware that his fury was visible. He permitted it.
This was not a small matter. He had planned the migration meticulously—nobles moved from their territories to the Deity of Gods, positioned to prevent Graycastle from converting their political influence into military resources, and simultaneously providing a population capable of managing itself without constant supervision. Dozens of considerations, weeks of careful arrangement, the whole thing calibrated to reduce his administrative burden while denying his enemy an advantage. An Everwinter noble had come to him this morning, shaking, to report that several of his companions had been taken by guards in the night. Whereabouts unknown.
The controlled order he had built was not robust enough to survive Nassaupelle touching it. A noble missing was a rumor. A rumor was panic. Panic in a confined population of tens of thousands spread faster than fire and was considerably harder to extinguish.
And it wasn’t ordinary citizens who had been taken.
It was the nobles themselves—the only layer of human social structure capable of managing the masses without Hackzord having to personally direct every transaction. Without them, the labor requirements of controlling that population increased severalfold. Nassaupelle had not simply violated protocol. He had dismantled a critical piece of the system.
“My lord—” The conscious noble saw him and lurched forward, voice breaking. “Please—”
“Ah. Sky Lord.” Nassaupelle turned from his table with the unhurried attention of a craftsman interrupted at a satisfying problem. “I must say, this is clearly a misunderstanding. I do enjoy working with optimal material, but that—” he gestured toward the noble— “does not include lowlifes. I merged with humanity’s most outstanding specimens six hundred years ago.”
He reached up and removed one of the masks from his collection. A woman’s face, distinct and preserved, settled in Nassaupelle’s hand—almost certainly a Witch’s, from the quality of the features, now simply part of his inventory of other people’s faces.
There were more than ten masks on his head. Hackzord had never looked at all of them directly. He declined to start now.
Nassaupelle’s philosophy on the matter was one Hackzord had heard before: the brain was the center of all intelligence, therefore more brains meant superior thinking capacity. Two heads allowed alternation between deep processing and recovery, maximizing the use of time. A superior race, in Nassaupelle’s framework, was a race that had solved the inefficiency of single-skull thinking.
In Hackzord’s framework, only demonic beasts and Sky-sea Realm monsters looked like that.
He did not argue the philosophy. He had not come here for philosophy.
An invisible edge of the Distortion Door materialized and passed through the mask in Nassaupelle’s hand. The thing fell in two pieces. A line of blue blood opened across the preserved female face, rising slowly as the cut separated.
Nassaupelle’s stance changed immediately—he was a Senior Lord, with a Senior Lord’s reflexes, and the thing that had just happened to the mask had happened fast enough that the adjustment was instinctive rather than reasoned. He dropped the noble. Stepped back. His free hand moved to the wound on his face.
“Sky Lord—have you lost your mind? Attacking a Senior Lord over a lowlife? Do you have any idea what I’ve done? I am the creator of the Deity of Gods. I am the reason our race has a path to winning the Battle of Divine Will. What you’ve just done—you’re nearly declaring yourself a traitor to the King—”
The glee that moved through Hackzord at this was not a minor thing.
Since taking the position of Western Front Commander, he had not felt anything resembling satisfaction. The Nightmare Lord’s disappearance, unresolved and unexplained. The repeated failures to breach the human defenses. Months of reports going from bad to worse. And the entire time, Nassaupelle—who was technically here to support the war effort—doing precisely what he wanted, when he wanted, to whatever he wanted, because he was the creator of the Deity of Gods and no one with the authority to stop him had yet stopped him.
They were not in the King’s Presiding Holy See. Nassaupelle was not a Magic Slayer. If Hackzord allowed this to continue, the next step would be Mask treating the whole of the Western Front as his laboratory and Hackzord as an obstacle to be worked around.
“If you are genuinely loyal to the King,” Hackzord said, his voice returned to its habitual flatness, “you understand exactly what falls within your mandate and what does not.” He dissolved the Distortion Door and stepped back. “Those humans are valuable to the race. Remember that.”
The stare-down lasted only a moment. Nassaupelle broke it first.
“An oversight on my part,” he said. The tone was even—not apologetic, not conceding anything important, simply acknowledging that this particular exchange was over. “I will remember to consult you before the next time.”
“Good.”
Hackzord had no intention of pushing further. He understood the constraints as clearly as Nassaupelle did: the ascendants who kept the Deity of Gods functional were Nassaupelle’s people, trained by him, answerable to him. The Symbiotic Demon program—the weapons this campaign depended on—was his creation. Moving against him substantively would not just eliminate a nuisance; it would dismantle two critical pillars of the war effort. The King would not forgive that.
They maintained each other. Neither could act against the other completely. Both of them knew it.
“My lord—” The noble who had been dropped had managed to crawl to within arm’s reach of Hackzord’s position. He gripped the edge of Hackzord’s robe and wept without restraint. “It is fortunate you came—the others, they had holes drilled through their heads, I was going to be next, I nearly—”
“It’s over. You’re safe.” Hackzord looked down at him. “We’ll speak about this later.”
To Nassaupelle: “Since you weren’t attempting to merge with them—why bring them here at all?”
Mask turned and held up a piece of the Iron Bird: one of the metal components, slightly charred at one end. “I wanted to ask them how the core of this functions.”
Hackzord followed the gesture. His eyes settled on the intricate mechanism mounted at the Iron Bird’s nose—a weapon array of some kind, the craftsmanship dense and precise in a way that conflicted with the apparently inert material it was made from.
Outside, he walked the suspension bridge back with the surviving noble on his shoulder.
The man was speaking in a continuous, grateful rush—fortunate you came, the others, their heads, I nearly—and Hackzord let it run. He set the noble down at the far end of the bridge, held him in place with one hand, and looked at him for a moment.
The noble had witnessed the experimental venue. He had seen Nassaupelle’s face beneath the masks—the actual configuration of what was underneath. He had seen what had happened to his companions. He had seen the Inferior Demons. He had seen all of it.
Hackzord needed a workforce that was stable, controllable, and afraid in a productive direction rather than a chaotic one. A terrified noble who had seen the inside of Nassaupelle’s laboratory was not any of those things.
Even Hackzord, who had been dealing with Nassaupelle for decades, found the experimental venue difficult to walk through without something souring in the back of his throat. What the noble had just experienced would not stay contained behind his eyes. Humans talked. Rumors moved through a closed population like disease.
He lifted the man by the collar, out over the bridge railing, above the shifting mass of Inferior Demons ten meters below.
“No—no no no, my lord, Sky Lord—”
He released his grip.
The screaming lasted until it stopped. The Inferior Demons sensed the arrival of food and moved with their characteristic excitement—swaying, compressing toward the center of the fall, the mindless pleasure of organisms responding to stimulus.
Hackzord watched for a moment, then turned away.
He returned to the human residential section and found Marwayne waiting for him at the entrance—expression careful, deferential, with the practiced calm of a man who had learned to be patient with people who held his life.
“My lord. The people who were taken—what happened to them?”
“I investigated personally.” Hackzord’s voice was even, his account prepared. “They had been communicating covertly with Graycastle. The intelligence apparatus is managed separately from my command, so I received the information later than I should have. But I arrived in time: per your customs, they haven’t been executed—they’ve been detained in Sky City. After the war concludes, arrangements can be made for their return. A ransom, or similar compensation.” He paused. “The remaining nobles have been assessed. This will not happen again.”
Marwayne breathed out slowly, the long release of someone who had been holding tension without a name for it. “I see. Thank you, my lord. We are grateful for your attention.”
“It is nothing. As long as all of you carry out your assigned duties, there will be a place for humans in the world that follows.”
“Of course, of course.” Marwayne reached into his robes. “Ah—while you were in the inner city, someone delivered this. Addressed specifically to you. There may have been an error in the routing, but it arrived here, so I thought it best to pass it along.”
He held out a letter.
Hackzord opened it.
His pupils contracted.