Chapter 2525.1: Rogue Soul (Part 1)

Gritting his teeth in frustration, Lith made sure one more time that no one was around and that his arrival had triggered no silent alarm that might have escaped the Eyes of Menadion from the outside.

He waited in a nearby alley for a few minutes, but no sound nor person came.

At that point, Lith used Gravity Fusion to quickly climb the nearest wall and reach a vantage point on the top of the tallest building he found.

As he looked at the landscape, he noticed that just like Reghia, the city of the children of Glemos was a patchwork of different city blocks, each built to help members of different species to cope with their semi-fallen state.

The buildings that reached all the way up to the ceiling were inhabited by goblins who needed space to house enough of them to practice high-level magic despite their individually weak cores.

Entire city blocks were comprised of lush green areas that were too thick with trees and wild to be a park.

Even though light spread evenly from the arrays, several city blocks were pitch black from a darkness of magical origin. Some houses were as luxurious as mansions while others were little more than burrows, their entrances marked by circular holes in the ground.

'My bet is that reverted ogres live in the green, Balors and Fomors in the Mansions, trolls in the darkened areas, while Hati and wargs live in the burrows.' Lith thought. 'Which leaves out where the reverted orcs live.

'They descend from the elves just like the goblins so they should like trees and stuff.' Yet looking at what he had already assumed was the goblins' nest, he found the idea ridiculous himself.

'I'll worry about this later. My first priority is to find Solus. Let's check why earlier she cut the mind link without a word.' Lith opened the connection again, noticing a very long blue strand that extended from him and moved past the horizon.

'Fuck me sideways, that's why!' He thought while shutting the link down before it was even fully formed. 'Aside from orc shamans, fallen races can't Awaken, but many of them have outstanding mana perception.

'If any of them is close enough, they would not only uncover my position, but even Solus'!'

Cursing his bad luck, Lith returned to the alley and summoned Valia, Varegrave, Trion, and Locrias. With the Demons on the lookout, he could afford to enter a meditative state to try and use his bond with the tower to locate Solus.

While sitting down on the ground with his eyes closed, he sensed her presence somewhere on the east side of the city, but he had no idea how far and deep she was. Then, he put inside Soluspedia a scroll reading: "Where are you?".

The answer came out of the pocket dimension in the form of a piece of paper that said: "City Hall".

'Any idea which building might be the city hall?' Lith asked and the four Demons shrugged in confusion.

'You are the one who interacts with Emperor Beasts on a daily basis.' Locrias said. 'You are the one who should know.'

'That's assuming that the leader is a beast.' Valia countered pointedly. 'During both Ne'sra's raids, a Balor was in charge. Balors descend from humans so we have to search for a human-ish settling.'

'It makes more sense if the leader is an orc.' Varegrave tutted. 'Thanks to their ability to control mana crystals, they are the only kind of monster that can cast tier four and five spells even in their fallen state.

'It's likely that the reason they didn't take part in the raids is that shamans are rarely born among orcs whereas the members of the other fallen races all have the same abilities from birth.'

'And there it is.' Trion sighed, drawing attention to himself. 'Definitive proof that too many cooks spoil the broth. What do you want us to do?'

'Keep guard while I conjure reinforcements.' Lith replied while pondering the Demons' respective arguments and finding them all valid. 'Even by restricting the search to the east side, it would take days to search it by ourselves.

'And that's assuming we are on the right level. The only silver lining is that the collected energy of the mana geyser is available to everyone in the city, including me. I need just a short rest to conjure as many Demons as I can without the need for Invigoration.'

Black chains darted out of Lith's chest and the Demons, each one finding a different soul willing to join his cause that in turn conjured more. Lith gave one eye each, preferring quantity over quality since it was a scout mission.

'The greater our numbers, the faster we'll scour the city and find Solus. Also, giving the Demons little energy means making them harder to detect.' His train of thought derailed when he noticed that instead of spreading forward, the chains were amassing all around him.

Now that the Abyss was open, Lith could feel countless hands grasping at him, begging him for a second chance. There were so many souls and so many voices in his head that for a moment he lost control over the Call of the Void.

'How is this possible?' Lith thought while the pain and misery of every Demon that took form flooded through his head, making their lives and deaths flash in front of his eyes. 'There are more souls here than in Kolga and the place was a slaughterhouse.

'Even there most had died for long enough to forget everything about themselves but their resentment. Here, instead, they can't be older than a few decades. What did Glemos do?'

Pain, hunger, grief, and death.

Each soul belonged to a different individual but they had undergone the same path in a life as short as brutal. As each newborn Demon sent new waves of misery crashing against Lith's mind, the chains kept spreading unchecked.

During his short twenty years of life, Lith had killed thousands of people belonging to all races. He had slaughtered hundreds that very same day. Among the souls that followed him, there were those of his fallen enemies whose grudge kept them from moving on.

Usually, it wasn't an issue since the chains ignored them, cutting them off from Lith's bloodline ability in favor of supplicant souls willing to help him. A Demon of the Darkness would be conjured solely on the condition that both Lith and the soul agreed.

This time, however, a few of the souls haunting him exploited his distress to get ahold of the chains and forcefully drain the energy they needed to gain a physical form.

The intrusion sent a jolt through Lith's mana core, snapping him out of the seizure. He recalled the chains back and ordered the Demons to terminate the anomalies before they could fully turn into Abominations.

'We meet again, murderer.' Even without the chain, Lith could still hear the thoughts coming from a one-eyed puddle comprised of darkness magic and a spark of his stolen life force. 'After all this time, I was starting to lose hope.'

'Yozmogh?' Despite his stupor, the Tiamat recognized the voice of Zolgrish's slave, a Balor who he had killed during his tour as a Ranger.