“Long live the demon king!”
“Long live the demon king!”
I quickly learned after entering the fort that the way every soldier greeted each other was with those words. I marched with the group until we reached a somewhat unwatched hallway, and then I slipped away as easily as I had entered. At that point, I had a sense of déjà vu. Remembering getting myself captured by the demon lord Aberis, I started to think that entering this way might have been a bit reckless, especially since I didn’t even know where the princess was.
However, as soon as I brought up my map, I took a breath. I noticed this once I took on the skeleton’s karma, but the skeletons didn’t appear as enemies to me. That was part of the reason I was willing to go along with the charade in the first place. Likewise, sense Life detected everything in the castle. All of the demons came off as red. Only one dot appeared in the castle that wasn’t an enemy. That had to be the princess, I was sure of it.
Carefully looking around, I actually felt a bit more comfortable pretending to be a demon rather than a skeleton. I knew when it came to karma and this dungeon’s strange rules, looks probably had nothing to do with it, but I at least could come off as a demon as long as you didn’t check under my helmet. Demon helmets thankfully protected the horns rather than exposed them as some kind of status symbol. Actually, so far, the demon’s walking around didn’t seem all that different from Shao. I was wondering if they were truly the enemy in all of this.
Given the game like nature of this world sometimes, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that humans were the enemy all along or some cliché like that. I had spent plenty of time with the prince and princess though, and I couldn’t imagine them being bad people. If there truly was an enemy, it was probably not everyone. You had your good and your bad, although I had to leave some room to admit that the nature-twisting way that miasma could affect people was hard to call good.
I started moving carefully, taking full advantage of my dungeon skills to move around without being detected. I couldn’t take the quickest path to the room the princess was in. I ended up having to take a round about way which ended up taking much longer. Just as I could see the door down the hallway, I heard another door nearby open and hid behind a tapestry. It was at that point that I could hear some of the demon’s talking.
“The princess is a boorish woman, to think that she would give you a blackeye, my lord.”
“I like them a little feisty.” The other man said. “I never knew that the woman was so beautiful. I also hadn’t heard that she already had a lover.”
“Whoever this man is, we’ll hunt him down and string him up!”
“No… actually, I’d rather like to play with her until she submits to me! I’ll tie her down and have my way with her! As for her lover, he can watch as I turn his woman into mine!”
It turned out that whatever this dungeon lore was, it was a bit saucier than I expected!