HH 2 - Where’s My Money?

Castor set his toolbox down and crossed his arms. “You’re fucking with me.”

“I’m not,” said Gul’thraxis.

“Swear it on your blood,” said Castor.

“C’mon, Cas. How long have we known each other?”

“Long enough to know you’re still a demon. Swear it on your blood or I’m writing your vault off my rotation for nine generations.”

“Hey,” Gully said with a scowl. “Don’t threaten the cleanliness of my vault.”

“I’ll threaten whatever I want, Gul’thraxis.” Castor stepped forward and shoved a finger into the demon’s swollen pec. “That’s my soul you’re talking about. I’m not playing any of your games over this.”

Gully flexed his chest, bending Castor’s finger so suddenly that it dislocated. The human barely gave it a glance and snapped it back into place. Gully bit down on his thumb until steaming blood ran down it, then thrust it onto Castor’s forehead. The ichor seared Castor’s skin, but he weathered the pain like he’d weathered two millennia of torment.

“I swear upon my blood that you, Castor Nameless, are in possession of your soul. My proof is that I have been told as much by [Demon Lord] Bythraxomonius, you have been targeted by a [Hero]’s skill that cannot target a slave, and I can smell it on you with a nose that has never lied.” He leaned in closer, thumb still on Castor’s head. “I also went to your 2,000-year slave anniversary where Lord Bythraxomonious got drunk and lost a bet, so he had to give it back to you.” Gully dropped his thumb. “You really don’t remember that?”

Castor put a hand on the wall and leaned against it heavily. It was true. He had his soul back. After thousands of years, he was a free man. Relief and joy threatened to flood his mind and heart, but it was held at bay by a thick dam of skepticism. If Gully were lying, the demon’s own blood would have become poison. Even so, Castor could see the holes in the oath.

But if it was real, if he was truly ensouled… A hint of a smile crept onto his face, but it died when Castor was struck by a sudden spike of rage.

He’d been free for a hundred years–an entire fucking century–and no one had told him. He wasn’t surprised. That was 100% demon fuckery, but it didn’t take the edge off his anger. It ran through him like a molten river, his heart thrusting it through his veins like a white-hot pump. The pulse in his chest was all he could hear; white noise and a relentless thudding.

All at once, it was gone. Castor’s expression became an unfeeling mask.

“I’ve never even heard of a slave anniversary,” Castor said, his voice as frigid as his fury was hot. 

Gully flinched back at the tone. Wrath Demons fed on anger, but whatever Castor was feeling, it seemed like the demon didn’t like it.

“It’s not a thing normally,” Gully said carefully. “You were the longest-living slave Lord Bythraxomonius had ever owned, so he threw a party. I guess you weren’t invited, which is a real dick move.”

Castor started to feel wary of the demon’s reaction. Gully could crush him with a pinky, so what was he afraid of? Castor had a good relationship with him, but a good relationship with a Wrath Demon was nothing close to friendship. It meant Gully liked to see Castor struggle enough that he’d make sure the flimsy human didn’t get crippled while he used him to test new weapons. 

Demons could pretend that they cared. They could be damned convincing, too. But they didn’t give a shit about anyone other than themselves. Either Gully was displaying caution to trick Castor, or the demon had a stake in this situation that Castor didn’t understand.

“I see,” said Castor. “I hope the party went well.”

“Oh, it was epic my man,” said Gully. “Biggest blood orgy I’ve ever been a part of. Hmm, maybe it was good you weren’t there. You might have been killed by the crush of bodies, even with your immortality.” Gully winked at him. “Shit, you’ve got that free and clear now, too. You can, like, do stuff with your life.”

“Except I have to fight a [Hero],” said Castor. “Who will kill me.”

“Eh,” Gully said, waggling his hand in the air. “The guy is only Level 20.”

Castor took a deep breath. “First, that’s suicidally low to challenge Lord Bythrax, but it sounds like he was planning to grind a bunch of levels using his Incremental Escalation Bloodline. Second, I’m classless, so it doesn’t matter. He may as well be a god.”

“Classless?” said Gully. “How are you classless?”

“I sold my soul for immortality when I was fourteen,” said Castor. “The class ceremony in my homeland would happen at sixteen. I was taken into slavery before I could accept one.”

“So young… Why’d you sell your soul anyway? What’s a fourteen year old need with immortality?”

Castor rubbed at his eyes. “My brother was immortal, and I thought I deserved to be immortal too. I snuck into my family’s arcanum and did the ritual because I was a spoiled, hormonal teenager with too many resources and too little supervision.”

“Immortal brother, huh? What’s the story there?”

“His father was an ascended being,” said Castor. “We’re half-brothers. Or, we were. It doesn’t matter.”

“He could still be alive,” Gully offered.

“I doubt it,” said Castor. “The demon I summoned ate the rest of my family in front of me.”

“That’s rough.”

“Like you give a shit.”

“True,” said Gully. “Just trying to be polite.”

Castor shook his head and thought things over. His head snapped up and he squinted at Gul’thraxis.

“Where’s my money?” he asked.

“Money?”

“If I’m an employee, then I should have been getting paid. Where’s my money?”

“I don’t know, the bank? Everyone’s payroll gets deposited there. It’s on level two, but they have offices in all the sectors.”

“I know where the bank is; I clean the fucking place. How much was I getting paid?”

Gully blew a jet of steam from his nostrils. “If you’re a minion, you’re part of the Henchperson’s Guild. Guild rates are one gold per month.” He scoffed. “Geez, what am I, your manager?”

Castor was momentarily shocked. That was ten times his monthly budget for performing maintenance on the castle. Still, he had no real concept of value aside from what the material suppliers charged him, and he was certain Lord Benthrax forced them to sell things for fortress upkeep at a loss. 

“Is that a lot?” he asked.

Gully shrugged. “It’s a living wage. The real money’s in pillaging.”

Castor did the math on a hundred years of pay at 1 gold per month.

“All right, if I have 1200 gold, then I can probably get myself established somewhere.”

“You should have more than that,” said Gully. “The bank pays interest.”

“Interest? How’s that work?”

“Uh, well, you keep money in the bank, and they give you more money for keeping it there. It’s a percentage of what you’ve got in the account, and it gets paid out monthly.”

“Why would they pay you for keeping your money? Shouldn’t you be paying them?”

“They do something with it. It’s like you're giving the bank a loan.”

“Anytime I’ve ever ‘loaned’ someone something, they’ve kept it. They didn’t pay me anything.”

“Different type of loan. Shit man, you are sheltered.” Gully placed a hand on Castor’s shoulder. “Look, we can stand around and talk about economics that I sure as shit don’t understand, or we can go get you a class so you have a marginally better chance of not getting killed by the [Hero].”

“I could quit,” said Castor. “If I’m not an employee, then I’m not a minion. The [Hero] won’t have to fight me.”

“Nah, the Bloodline already picked you. Besides, if you quit without notice, Lord Bythraxomonius will eat your heart.”

Castor grunted his disappointment, then nodded. He’d figured that strategy had been a long shot.

“Fine,” he said. “How can I get a class?”

“Well, my good sir,” said Gully, bowing and holding out an arm out down the hallway. “If you will accompany me to my vault, I will grant you the honor of using my personal class stone.”

*****

It was a forty-five minute walk to Gully’s suite, even with the Wrath Demon paying to use the castle’s waypoints. He pulled the coinage from his thong, though Castor knew it couldn’t all possibly fit in there.

Gully’s suite was filled with furniture made from the horns of slain beasts, wall art made from the horns of slain halfkin, and trophies made from the horns of other demons. The air was heavy with the thick scent of incense wafting out from Gully’s harem chamber, where sixty nine succubi lived and waited to serve their master’s lustful desires. They were all sisters.

Overall, one could describe the lair of Gul’thraxis as ‘horny’, and the descriptor would encapsulate everything notable about the Wrath Demon’s home.

Gully led Castor through the harem, which was ten-thousand square feet of emperor-size beds, lounge furniture, mana-silk sheets, drugs, and drug-related accoutrement. There was also a full bar with a 24-hour bartender, enough sex toys to start a small business, and enough torture devices to start a thematically similar, but slightly larger business. 

Moving between all of this were dozens of human slaves, serving the succubi, having their souls sucked on by the succubi, demonstrating the toys and instruments of torment for the succubi, and cleaning up all the sticky messes that these activities entailed. They watched Castor with haunted eyes and a mixture of expressions ranging from pleading, to pitying, to disgusted.

Several succubi approached as the pair walked through, and Gully gave most of them a squeeze as he went past, but waved them away before things got too frisky. Each one then inevitably drifted over to Castor, and they looked his nude body up and down with fluttering lashes, sultry moans, and intimate invitations involving some variation of the words ‘big guy’, ‘longjohn’, or ‘stallion’. 

Castor ignored them. Having seen succubi at work, he barely registered that they looked like people, much less like women who were supposed to be sexually desirable. The idea of sticking any part of himself into a succubus appealed to him about as much as the idea of sticking his dick in a meat grinder.

“It’d need to be a big grinder to handle all that sausage, my manaconda,” said one of the female demons.

Castor kept moving, eyes forward, and tried to reinforce his mind against interlopers. He couldn’t keep this many succubi out of his thoughts at once, but it was good practice.

By the time they’d made it to Gully’s vault, they were on the opposite side of the suite. Castor was convinced the demon had taken them through the harem just to show off.

The entrance to the vault was an empty archway, large enough for two Wrath Demons of Gully’s size to enter abreast. Currently, all that was on the other side of the archway was a pit lined with cold-iron barbed wire, coated in salt. The vault was within an external dimensional pocket, and if its enchantments detected an intruder, it would disappear, dumping any would-be thieves into the pit. 

Neither the iron nor the salt was blessed–no demon in their right mind would keep something like that lying around in their house–so it wouldn’t kill a demonic burglar. It would trap them in excruciating circumstances, and the horrible moans coming from within let Castor know that the last demon to break in was still trapped.

They’d been down there for about twenty eight years now.

To either side of the archway was a Spectral Golem wielding a cat of nine tails. The golems gently faded in and out of existence, wispy hair coiling out from beneath dark helms, wafting in an unseen breeze. They wouldn’t stop someone from entering, but they would haunt anyone who took something back out without permission. On the whole, Gully didn’t mind people going into the vault to look around. If anything, he encouraged it, since punishing raiders gave the Wrath Demon a great deal of satisfaction, and allowing them to view his collection was the most thorough way to tempt them to thievery.

The vault wasn’t without protections. At the center of the empty archway, a single keyhole hovered in the air. Gully rooted around in his thong, then pulled the elastic strap out to peek inside after a moment. He mumbled something under his breath, then patted down his body with the rest of his hands like he was checking his pockets for the key. He wasn’t wearing anything other than the tiny article of underwear, so this was superfluous. Eventually, he raised a brow at Castor.

“Do you mind?” he asked.

Castor wordlessly reached into his dimensional keyring and sorted through the hundreds of vault keys he kept. Castor had been tasked with keeping the vaults clean after his first millennium of service as a reward for ‘proving’ himself trustworthy.

At first, the demons insisted on personally letting him in each time they needed some dusting done or their new possessions purged of blood and bile. The demons–as lazy as they were malicious–couldn’t be bothered to keep this up and resigned to give him copies of the vault keys after a century or so, relying on threats to keep him in line. 

These threats had primarily involved genital mutilation, but some were more creative. Gully had threatened to raise a family of ducks in his colon. Castor had personally witnessed Gully successfully keep a woman alive while he hatched a clutch of vipers in her lungs, so he had no doubt the demon could make it happen.

Castor found the correct key–it was made of Unicorn horn–and slotted it into the keyhole. He twisted it six times in a precise pattern, and a door unfolded from the sides of the keyhole. Gully clapped his hands together, then tossed the door open and marched inside.

The vault was well-lit and organized. Its mirrored walls enhanced the sense of the hoard’s size, turning the thirteen floor-to-ceiling shelves covered in enchanted gear into a veritable forest of wealth. A variety of chests sat on the floor, artfully arranged for coins and jewelry to spill out of their tops in a way that gave them that “stuffed-full” look without being messy.

All of that was Castor’s work. 

Gully simply dumped his new stuff in the middle of the room, where a small pile of precious metal, sparkling jewels, and magic weapons currently sat. It had been about a year since Castor last tidied things up, and Gully had made a decent haul in the meantime. Gully was far from the richest demon, but he was ancient and frugal enough to have built himself what most would consider a king’s ransom.

Gul’thraxis placed his hands on his hips, took a deep breath of that old-money smell, and surveyed his worldly goods.

“No fuckin’ clue where that class stone is,” he said.