Chapter 4

  [The Magnificently Destructive Blade of Utter Darkness and Burning Death accepts your proposal to rename it to Burning Darkness. Burning Darkness wishes to become a part of your bonded item set, and wishes the right to distribute EXP to set stats at its discretion upon leveling up.]

  ‘Ahhhkaaay, so … can you ask Burning Darkness why it wants to do that?’ I asked Button.

  [Burning Darkness doesn’t wish you to think it doesn’t trust you, but expresses displeasure at the idiotic choices of its previous bonded owner. Burning Darkness sees great potential in being a part of a unique bonded item set, and is curious to see the heights it could reach as such, all the while ensuring its bonded owner receives the best possible results out of the set.]

  Hm. This was clearly a weapon that was thinking for itself, and it wasn’t happy with the way its life had been going. This Ugrathar fellow had now been called an idiot twice — once by The Genius, once by Burning Darkness — and I was beginning to think I had done Hell a favour by shooting the damned demon in the face. To be honest, I couldn’t blame the sword being somewhat distrustful — bad experiences tended to produce that result, and I was curious about the idea of a whole semi-sentient set of weapons and armour. Perhaps the proto-soul would serve as an AI assistant, just like Sys had before? Although Button was kind of already doing that. Hm. Was worth a try anyway.

  ‘Alright, I accept the bonding under these conditions,’ I proclaimed.

  [Burning Darkness expresses joy and approval.]

  [Bonding in progress. Please wait!]

  I felt queasy all of a sudden, reminding me of being horribly hungover after leave on a certain orbital station in the company of a certain young lady. My eyes teared up and I wobbled, only my SAC keeping me on my feet. On top of that, I saw a reddish black mist spreading out from somewhere, enveloping both me and the sword completely. I wasn’t sure if it was really happening or if I was just hallucinating or dreaming or something.

  ‘What … the … hell?’ I groaned, and I felt like I was going to throw up.

  [Bonding in progress. Burning Darkness has requisitioned Hell Mana.]

  [HMP (Hell Mana Points) remaining: 10]

  All I could see was the message, everything else faded out. What? I recalled having some 450 HMP, and that damned sword just took most of it? Why? Was this what it would feel like to run out of the stuff every time?

  [Bonding complete.]

  [Burning Darkness is now an article of your bonded item set.]

  [Burning Darkness has named your bonded item set: Machine Armaments of the Hellfire Lord]

  ‘The what now?’

  I was barely able to stand, let alone think, and now this? I felt something moving in my hands, which wasn’t unusual given the sensors in my gauntlets, but said sensors had never been this sensitive. I peered down, and to my utter shock, the sword was wiggling and shrinking in my hands right before my eyes; the blade becoming shorter and narrower, the hilt adjusting to human size for a two handed grip.

  [Burning Darkness expresses satisfaction with the bonding process.]

  [Burning Darkness expresses its wish for you to learn swordsmanship in anticipation of glorious duels in the future.]

  ‘Shit!’ I muttered. Shooting things with high velocity armour piercing flechettes was definitely my preferred method of settling conflicts. ‘Alright, Button, tell Burning Darkness … first of all … welcome to the team. Secondly, I’ll see what I can do about swordsmanship, time allowing. And please ask him what the hell he was taking all that mana stuff for? It’s making me feel like crap.’

  [Burning Darkness has adjusted its body for ease of use by you, its new owner, and requisitioned and altered a part of your SAC to provide a suitable sheath for it. The cost of these have been covered from your available HMP.]

  ‘Whhaaaaat?’

  I brought up my SAC schematics to my NeuroHUD, but I couldn’t see any modifications on it. Damn! I activated the reccie drone and I had it fly a small circle around me with its camera pointing at me. The images I received shocked me to my core. The plain, dark charcoal gray colour had changed: my SAC now had blood-red highlights here and there, similar to the patterns on Burning Darkness. But that wasn’t the part that worried me. Next to my rifle’s slot behind my left shoulder, there was now a second slot that looked like a short, open ended sheath for a sword, complete with a similar mechanism my rifle slot had for ease of access. This sword was quite the willful and independent little devil, wasn’t it? I sighed, knowing that I had signed up for this myself without asking too many questions. My fault.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and as I grabbed the sword by the hilt and flipped it over to put it on my back, the mechanism raised and tilted the sheath, and I found it as quick and easy to slide the blade into it as it was with my rifle.

  At the same time, that drunken, groggy feeling began to disappear. With a thought, my Hell Mana Points appeared on my NeuroHUD.

  HMP (Hell Mana Points): 14

  It was slowly ticking up, wasn’t it?

  ‘How does this work? Replenishing this Mana stuff I mean?’ I asked Button.

  [Your soul constantly draws in ambient Ring Energy, and converts it to usable Hell Mana until its store is full. Speed of collection and Hell Mana storage capacity is determined by your Soulstrength stat.]

  ‘Ok, makes sense. What does my Willpower stat do?’

  [Your Willpower stat determines the speed with which you are able to use Hell Mana to form and cast spells or perform skills, as well as the quality of said spells or skills.]

  ‘Right, of course. So, while we’re at it, what about Strength and Constitution?’ I inquired, deciding I needed some sort of understanding of this before I left the shuttle wreckage for the recon mission.

  [The Strength stat corresponds to the physical strength and speed you are able to exert through your musculature. The Constitution stat corresponds to the sturdiness of your body, which determines your ability to withstand physical attacks and how much damage you will suffer due to said attacks. Your unique bonded item set’s Physical Defence stat together with its Durability stat acts as de facto Health Points, until they run out. Your set’s Magical Defence stat introduces resistance to magical attacks, which your human body lacks as a default.]

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Right. Kinda made sense, and I didn’t think I needed to ask about my so called “Health Points”. Going by what Button had said, and by how the different stats and values were named, I figured my Health Points would decrease when suffering damage due to an attack, and said damage would be calculated by some sort of formula, taking my Constitution’s values into consideration. I had 230 HP currently, and I was sure letting it fall to 0 would be game over. Luckily, my SAC had a Durability stat of 890 points, and I was fairly sure any attack would chip away at that first. And since its Physical Defence stat was quite high at 1350 points, I was sure the formula would produce generously low numbers for damage taken. Armour’s gotta do what armour’s gotta do. And if I was right, that +110 Strength my SAC had among its stats, added directly to my own strength, thanks to the servos and synthfibers. That kind of worked the same way as before, my powered combat suit being a force multiplier. And that raised an issue I hadn’t addressed until now. The power cells. I had a few spares in the shuttle, but I couldn’t find an intact charging kit yet. I brought up the power cell menu on my NeuroHUD. It showed both cells full and charging. Charging? Really?

  ‘Button!’ I called out. ‘What’s going on with the power cells?’

  [After creating your soul and adjusting your body to withstand the environments of Hell, two kills had been assigned to you: one demon lord, one demon champion. The resulting energy was, however, too much for your soul and body to take all at once in the form of levels. It was deemed to be the best option to channel the considerable excess energy into your equipment. A part of the energy was used to create a proto-soul for your items, and to establish the levels of the set. A part of it was used to alter the articles of the item set. One such alteration was that the power cells of your SAC are now capable of charging using Hell Mana, provided to it by the proto-soul, as it is provided to the proto-soul by your own soul.]

  ‘Oohhkaaay. That … sounds alright, actually,’ I said, wanting to smile.

  Unlimited charging then. Not bad at all. I was also beginning to believe that the thing The Genius referred to as a soul, wasn’t the same thing as what the religions and philosophies I was familiar with would consider one. It was more of a tool, or maybe some invisible organ, that could handle energies and Mana. I sure didn’t feel any different now that I had one, and I had definitely been a conscious, self-aware being before now, so there was that. Although, with Burning Darkness as an example, it did seem to produce quite a bit of will and awareness, so I wasn’t really sure. Oh well, I could ponder this later, sitting in my seaside cottage somewhere on Earth, spending my pension on cocktails and barbeques. For now, it was time for the commencement of a long-awaited recon mission.

  ***

  Thank all the gods, real and imagined, that among the various software suites of my SAC, it had a mapping function. In my almost eighteen years of service I had never used it — grunts like me usually left that sort of tedious work to squad leaders and lieutenants — but now, being on my own in a strange and quite frankly scary place, I realised the immense merit of it. The feeling of being lost and disoriented was still there, but not nearly as pronounced as it had been before. Well, a good mapping function was a good mapping function, and I had nothing to fear. I hoped.

  I had no idea how or why this place had been built, or for what purpose, but without a map to trace my route, I would have gotten completely lost in this seemingly unending forest of hundreds of evenly spaced fiery columns, with no way to find my way back to the shuttle. It was tedious work to draw the map and mark my progress through the neural connection, but it was a necessity. With my SAC’s compass going mad — Hell apparently wasn’t big on proper magnetic fields — I’d had to designate North, South, East and West arbitrarily, but I had no complaints.

  The mapping suite was quite good at keeping track of distances, and after an hour of walking and relying on my reccie drone for early warnings, I had progressed three kilometers in the direction I had designated North, without bumping into any lifeform, alien, demonic or otherwise. Why north? Because I’d had a nagging feeling it was where I needed to go, and I knew that the nagging feeling was actually coming from Burning Darkness on my back. And since I had had no idea where to even start or where to go, North it was. So, after one hour and three kilometers later, my drone finally ran into something.

  I’d been keeping the little drone at least fifty metres ahead of me at all times, hoping it would be enough of a distance to avoid detection, or failing that, to prepare for either fight or flight. Now, I watched the relayed images, trying to determine what I was seeing, what lay ahead just over fifty metres in front of me.

  The forest of columns came to an end where the drone was hovering, giving way to an empty area like a square. From what I could see, after another fifty or so metres of stone tiled emptiness, an endless row of open archways stood; passageways presumably leading outside. Whatever outside meant here. That was the good part. The bad part, as the drone camera panned slowly from left to right, was the hundreds, if not thousands, of dead demons littering the square, the passageways under the numerous arches, and probably beyond.

  The closest bodies right in front of the drone made it easy to identify the two warring factions: horned, tree-bark skinned bull-man hybrids of different shapes and sizes versus blood-red, leathery skinned, more humanoid fellows; same as the ill-fated Demon Champion and Demon Lord I had encountered. I was looking at the field after a battle had been won and lost. Who had triumphed over who, I couldn’t say; broken, hacked apart, burned, eviscerated, blasted to bits, beheaded, turned inside out — the bodies and their numbers didn’t offer a clue. However, I surmised that the idiot Demon Lord might have been fleeing from the bullish Demon Champion all the way into the forest of unending pillars, and by some insane bad luck for them, to the place where I had crashlanded. On second thought, there must have been some other factor than their bad luck at play, but it was something for later to ponder. I had to make a decision here.

  Now, I wasn’t a coward; every soldier or marine I had ever served with would tell if asked. I did, however, have second thoughts about going out there and potentially running into a demon army of thousands all by myself. That kind of suicide wasn’t exactly appealing to me. But that’s why small recon drones were a thing: to be able to have a quick look-see before committing to anything foolish.

  I flew the drone forward, watching the feed intently, piloting it towards one of the archways. As I had thought, the passage under the creepily built, dark, vaulted ceiling, was a blood-soaked slaughterhouse. The fighting, likely an all out melee of magic and brawn, must have been vicious and unforgiving, even by demon standards. The drone made its way through the roughly ten metres long passage, and as soon as it popped out the other end, I made it fly at least ten metres up and as close to the wall as I could. Hopefully no-one had seen it.

  It took me a minute of watching the camera feed to get a picture of the outside world. The first thing was the sky. Because, for some reason, there was a sky. And probably because this was Hell, the sky was a vast, uninterrupted canopy of clouds made of glowing crimson and orange fires and the blackest smoke imaginable, constantly moving and swirling. Instead of lightning, I saw occasional bursts of flames, almost like an upside-down volcano, spitting molten rock, except the fire and brimstone did not fall to the ground, but returned to the clouds, as if the clouds had their own gravitational pull. I had never seen anything this weird before. Then there was the outside of the building itself that sheltered me. For it was indeed a building. The drone being too close to the wall I couldn’t guess its size, but the walls and the arches underneath spread as far as I could see both left and right. In front of the vast building, another fifty metres of empty square lay; the same black and red stone tiles as inside, and the same, gruesome remnants of demons that had been felled in battle, staining the ground with their black blood all the way to the far edge. There a stairway as infinitely wide as the square and the building, led down. I couldn’t make out what lay beyond. A forest of some sort, perhaps.

  While the scenery was both breathtaking and terrifying at the same time, I had to focus on the important part: the hundred or so bull-man demons, very much alive, standing amongst the countless dead, gathering around something in circles, quiet and still. Through the drone camera I could see movement only in the middle of their circle. I had a bad feeling about this.