“Besides,” Gertrude continued, “she reeked of demons. Even taking into account the limb grafts, she shouldn’t smell like that. That’s aside from the fact that she had probably been here to talk with that hel downstairs. Can’t let someone like that go.”
Opening his mouth to comment on the hel, Clement was interrupted by a loud rumbling.
Gertrude shot him a glare. “Fine,” she said as she threw herself off his lap, “I’ll go get your stupid milk. You better appreciate me.”
“Always,” he whispered to himself after she had disappeared out the apartment door.
Clement remained sitting for another minute before he decided that he needed to clean up. With his sword half out in the hall, it wouldn’t be easy to use should an actual enemy attack.
Before he did, he stopped by the target notebook on the table.
He quickly scribbled out a new entry immediately under the hel. There weren’t a lot of details other than grafted limbs, but Gertrude could help add more later.
Author’s Note: Minor note in comments for Patreon and PayPal supporters. And everyone else I guess, if you want to look.
Of Demons and Demonhood
Finding Catherine wasn’t half as hard as Eva had imagined it would be.
Really, quite the opposite.
It was as simple as walking into the Brakket Academy main building and heading for the secretary’s desk in the reception area. Catherine sat at her usual desk, absolutely absorbed in whatever was on her computer monitor.
Eva had no idea why she had expected anything different. It was doubtful that she had a home outside of her secretary desk.
A few minutes of standing around, waiting for Catherine to finish whatever she was doing and Eva had still not received even the slightest acknowledgment that she existed. Catherine had a set of headphones on, ones that covered her entire ears and had an attached microphone to one side, but her eyes should still have worked.
“Their whole team is dead! Get on the point!”
Eva froze at Catherine’s sudden outburst.
“Do I have to do everything myself?” Catherine let out a low growl. “Pathetic humans,” she hissed under her breath.
Eva kept frozen until the growl died off. The scowl on the succubus turned to a grin radiating pure evil in the blink of an eye.
That almost scared her more than the shouting. Still, Eva had a task. To accomplish that task, she needed to get Catherine’s attention for ten minutes.
Waving her hands a few times elicited no response from Catherine.
With a sigh, Eva blinked from her side of the desk to Catherine’s side, placing her just over the demon’s shoulder.
The screen was a flurry of lights and colors. Caricatures of people ran around the screen, most of whom were targeted and killed by Catherine with pinpoint accuracy. The images moved so fast that Eva barely had time to process what was happening.
It was giving her a mild headache. She had no idea how Catherine could keep up with it all.
Eva reached out and slid one side of Catherine’s headphones back behind her ear. Carefully, of course. She didn’t want to startle Catherine into attacking.
Turns out, her worries were misplaced. Catherine was far too focused on the game.
Eva didn’t get it. But then, she had never used computers outside of classwork–both at her old mundane school and here at Brakket. She would much rather be reading through musty tomes than whatever it was that Catherine was doing.
“Winning?” She knew enough about games to know that winning was a thing.
“If you would cease your distractions,” Catherine said without taking her eyes off the screen. “I am utterly
“Children? Surely there are more engaging targets.”
“Mortals are all children to me.”
“Fair enough.” Eva leaned forward with narrowed eyes. There were words scrolling along the left side of the monitor. “What is an ‘aimbot?'”
“When mortals find that they cannot beat me, they constantly accuse me of cheating. It almost got me banned one time, until the company personally monitored my playing and determined that I was not using any sort of hacks or programs.”
Eva pulled back from the screen with a shake of her head. If she continued asking questions, she had a feeling that the conversation would quickly head in a direction that she could not follow. She hadn’t come in to discuss games, after all.
Unfortunately, she did not want to irritate Catherine. With Ylva having already declined her request, Eva didn’t want Catherine to deny it out of pure spite.
So, she sat back and waited. There was a countdown timer at the top of the screen. Eva assumed that the game would end then, freeing Catherine up for a quick chat.
She could wait five minutes.
Thirty seconds later, a golden ‘VICTORY’ flashed across the screen.
Catherine removed her headset with a satisfied sigh and turned to face Eva. “Mortals have come up with some amusing things in the past century or so,” she said with a wistful smile.
