Lilith: Origin of Succubi

Torien crouched low and stalked up to the watchtower with her cat ears perked up and twitching at every noise. She had drawn her daggers since it would be hard to shoot in such a confined space once we were inside. When she reached the entrance, she gently put her ear to the weathered wooden door and listened in.

("I hear something inside. I can't tell what it is by sound, but it's likely a demon,") Torien said through the bond.

I nodded and poured some mana into my armor of light to strengthen it. I poured even more mana into my sword, the thin mithril blade soaked it up and the light reshaped itself into a thicker weapon, more similar to what I preferred to use. I quietly moved up to the other side of the door.

("On three. I'll go in first,") I told her.

She nodded and placed a hand on the handle. ("One, two, three!") She yanked the door open, and I lifted my shield before pushing in behind it.

Immediately, I spotted a spider-like demon leap at me from the corner of the ceiling. I caught it with my shield and swiped across its leg with my sword, cleanly detaching a limb from the monster. The unfazed demon tried to wrap around me with its other legs, but I shoved it away before firing a short stream of icicles at it from the tip of my sword. The first couple hit, but the remaining ones shattered into mist against the stone wall behind it.

The demon scuttled across the floor, trying to get behind me, but Torien darted in and removed another of the demon's legs with her daggers. The giant spider stumbled and tripped over itself to get away from this new threat, but I was able to slash at it using the distraction. Now cornered between the two of us, the monster focused its attention on me. The entire bottom of the spider demon looked like a silently screaming face with long fangs that tried to bite at me as it jumped. I sent a surge of light mana through my shield to increase its surface area and catch the demon, though the inertia still sent me sliding back across the dusty floor.

Above me and to the right, Torien appeared in a black haze with her bow fully drawn before firing a black arrow that split into a web that pinned the spider in place. With the monster stuck, I surged more mana through my sword and dropped the heavy blade through the demon like a meat cleaver, cutting its abdomen in half. The limbs of the spider struggled for a moment as foul-smelling ichor pooled out of its body before falling still. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Torien turned her face to the side and made a gagging noise at the stench. I didn't envy the person who would have to spend time cleaning this place. Something told me that the stench of rot and gasoline would be a hard one to clean up.

I covered my face with an arm and pointed at the window across from us. "Open up the windows, let's try to air this place out while I drag the corpse out of here."

"Sure," Torien replied. She began to open up every window she could as I shoved the two halves of the spider's body out the relatively small door. It was a bit lucky that I had cut it into two pieces, because I didn't think I would get it out of the door otherwise. How the thing had squeezed its way into the tower, I had no idea.

("Seriously though, catching it in a web?") I joked with her as I pulled the two halves a few dozen feet away from the door.

("I thought it would be poetic,") Torien said with a tinge of amusement flowing through the bond.

I dropped the two parts of the spider before pulling the corpse open to examine the insides. ("I'm not sure this demon could even produce webs.") Using my mana to change the shape of my armor, I created oversized gauntlets that would keep this thing's ichor far away from my hands as I dug through the body.

("Did you find its core yet?") Torien asked.

("Working on it. Do you hear anything else in the tower?") I used my gauntlets to root through the disgusting demon's flesh looking for the stone. It should be a big one based on this monster's size.

("I don't think there's anything else inside. I'm poking around, but I think I need to step outside and wait for you to clean up in here a little,") she replied.

When I finally pulled the stone out, I was surprised to find that it looked like a nature core. ("Torien, come out here. Does this look like nature mana to you?")

I held out the ichor covered core as she approached with a wrinkled nose. Her eyes shifted into long slits as she looked the core over. "Yeah, it's definitely a nature core. That's really rare."

"What do you think we can do with it?" I asked as I turned the rock to examine it from all sides.

Torien shrugged. "Nature cores are rare enough that I'm not as familiar with what they're used for. My first instinct would be a nature staff or something similar, but it could possibly be used for farming or gardening as well."

I moved the core to my other hand before stripping the thick magic armor from my right hand and using a water ritual using light scribing. The ritual circles spun in front of my hand before activating a jet of water to clean the gross fluid from the core. This ritual had a small purification effect to it, so it was a good choice for things like this. Once I got all the ichor off, I sniffed it a few times and decided it was clean enough to stick in my pack. I swapped the core back to my right hand before releasing the magic in my left gauntlet, so all the gross stuff I had been digging through would fall to the ground rather than all over my arm.

"Your magic is becoming even more impressive," Torien commented.

I shrugged. "Having to learn everything the hard way has made me focus more on the useful stuff. I had been using arms of light so much before the system died that it wasn't a challenge to pick it back up early since it was fresh in my mind. Besides... being able to shadow leap with a bow drawn and manipulate the shadow magic in your arrow to catch the monster in a web construct is really impressive too. It's amazing you've been able to make so much progress when you were only barely tapping into those abilities when the system died."

Torien smiled. "I think it comes more easily to me because of the karma ability thing. But it is nice that I've become so much more versatile."

I glanced down at the bisected demon corpse. "It's unfortunate that the system doesn't give us kill notifications anymore. It wasn't necessary in this case since I literally cut it in half, but there have been a few times that I almost got tricked by a demon playing dead."

"It's the opposite for me. I stay tense for longer because I don't feel safe until I hear it. Since it never comes, I always feel this sense of unease until we burn the body," Torien replied.

"Should I get to it then?" I asked, gesturing to the corpse.

Torien looked around. "Probably as good a time as any. This should be far enough that the stench shouldn't travel back to the tower based on the wind."

I nodded and pulled out my Book of Recollections to look for something suitable. I cast the ritual using light scribing and a fire the size of a bonfire lit up between the two halves of the demon before suddenly exploding into a roaring fire. The sudden surge made the two of us jump back in surprise. My eyes widened in horror as the monster's ichor caught fire like oil, and the trail of blood lit like a fuse traveling toward the watchtower.

Torien quickly jumped through the flickering shadows closer to the tower and cut off the trail of ichor with a quick detonation of a shadow magic arrow. The fast moving trail of fire burned until it reached Torien and flickered before settling into a burning line.

"That's new..." I commented as I walked over to where Torien had stopped the spreading fire.

Running a hand through her hair, Torien sighed. "That was close. This is a bad sign. The demons are picking up new mutations."

I knelt down to examine the unburned ichor more closely. "What causes it?"

"The mutations?" Torien asked. "Hard to say. Ambient magic, animals that have a lot of magic they're preying on, maybe just something about this area after everything that's happened. The fact that they have mana cores the size of our fists probably should have made me consider this could happen. We'll have to be more careful," she said with a sigh.

"We should make a point to clean up the ichor then, just in case. A spark could light the entire watchtower on fire. The stone structure would probably survive it, but there's a lot of wood pieces that would need to be replaced, like the door." I said, glancing back at the tower.

Torien frowned. "We'd better get started then. If all of these watchtowers are infested like this one was, our mission could take a while."

I laughed. "Hopefully the next one won't be another spider with flammable blood."

While I spent time essentially mopping the floor inside the watchtower with the purifying water I created, Torien looked around the upper part. As rough as things were, the building was actually in pretty good shape, all things considered. Some of the wooden shutters and furniture would need to be replaced, but I had been expecting things to be much worse than they were.

"How do you think it got in, anyway?" I asked while peeking through one of the small windows.

"It probably came in while it was small and got bigger while it was inside. It must have been luring prey into the tower somehow," Torien replied.

We spent another half hour or so cleaning up and blocking off all the windows before leaving and heading to the next tower on our list. It was going to be a long day if we needed to evict any demons from the three other towers we came across. Torien seemed happy to be spending time with me though. She was in good spirits and laughed and joked with me more than usual. Despite the work we were doing, the two of us were having fun together.

Unfortunately, the next tower we came across was in much worse shape. After walking for nearly two hours to the second tower, we found that it had collapsed. Shards and fragments of the stone walls had been sprayed out all over the ground like it had been shot with a cannon. It must have caught fire at some point as well, since all that was left of the wood pieces was charcoal and ash.

"Lilith, I found something," Torien said, waving me over.

Under a piece of stone wall was a humanoid skeleton half-buried in ash. The skeleton had been picked clean of flesh, and there were teeth marks along the larger pieces as if something had eaten them. The skull looked human, but with large cavities in the sides of the skull that looked natural rather than something that had happened to it.

Torien grimaced. "This was a beastfolk of some kind."

"It looks like they were eaten," I said, pointing out some of the marks I noticed on a femur bone.

Torien nodded before digging through the dirt and ash and pulling out a chain with the metal dog tags they use at the adventurer's guild. "This is a steel rank adventurer. Looks like a fire mage. That explains all the ash. They must have died before system's end, probably around the time of the siege on Traehall."

"Do you think those spiders were already here back then? This place looks like a bomb went off."

"I'm not sure, but I doubt it," Torien said with a shrug.

I dug around some more, but there wasn't much left of this person's things other than burned debris. The only thing that was intact was a metal dagger with the remnants of a leather grip that had burned away.

Torien pulled one of the tags off and looked over it before placing it next to the skull and sticking the chain with the other in her pocket. "We should bury him."

I nodded. "I can use some earth magic for that. Where should we do it?"

Torien stood up and looked around before pointing. "Near the tree line. People worry if there's a body buried too close to their place of work," Torien said with a dry chuckle. "I'll gather up the bones if you want to go dig a grave for him."

"Okay. Follow me over you're done. Try to stay within range of the bond. We should try not to spend too much time on this. We still have two more towers to survey," I said.

"It won't take long," Torien replied.

We spent another half hour digging out the hole, burying the bones we could find of the poor adventurer, and marking the beastfolk man's grave. It took a while for our jovial mood to return on the way to the last two towers. It was going to be a long day.