Chapter 9-272: Some Pain and Suffering (1/2)

Purity can work wonders multiple Pacts cannot, Fred tapped calmly. That said, there is a lot to be said for pain relief.

“Yeah, I’m, like, just because of that, I’m surprised you don’t stay that way.”

I’m sharing with a bunch of Hellbound women who don’t particularly like it, he admitted. It’s also a form of theft I’m not exactly comfortable with.

“Erm. Can’t you, ah, borrow their appearances?”

Yes. Core power of the Hungry Kiss Pact when you Consume a woman. Hungry Heart does the same on the Demonic side for men taking men, he confirmed.

“Right, stealing someone’s life is just murder and theft of the highest order,” the holo-gnome murmured. “Would you be permitted to for infiltration purposes?”

There are less murderous ways of gathering information and changing your appearance, Fred typed. I’m not a dop. -Nor-, he thought, -am I Shvaughn, who would do so without batting an eye.-

That said, the women had been extremely useful for hunting down dozens of total bastards as bad or worse than themselves. He didn’t like doing it, but they had all deserved to burn, for stuff that went well beyond ‘merely’ tormenting a mighty angel that could have saved them all.

Idiots hungry for power. He could only sigh, and his hellscars blaze hungrily at his guilt, self-reproach, and judgmental anger.

It was indeed useful to have something handy that would feast happily when you sinned as a warning sign, although the women inside him didn’t much seem to think so. They were burning all the time, just like him, except their Sins ran much, much deeper...

He would open a dialogue with them at some point, because there was no reason not to. Shvaughn would just take what she wanted from them, treating them as callously as they had treated everyone else, turning them into victims of their own making once more, likely before taking any semblance of self-identity they had remaining and just subsuming them into the gestalt personality she’d made of herself.

“Well, I doubt there’s anyone around who would blame you for opting out of those scars, given what you’ve been through.”

It was meant to be encouraging. After all, a gender swap wasn’t a small thing in the eyes of society.

I would blame me, he tapped out with a silent sigh. That was the thing about being Heavenbound: it didn’t make this a decision of simple convenience for himself. Doing this, trapping the souls of those women, his Hellpact burning them greedily as it waited for all of them to be sent to Hell; had he really done all that just to get strong enough to pull that angel out of there?

Yes, Traveler had made the decision, and she could be terrifyingly ruthless when it came to such things. But...

She had told him that she expected to be removed from the world when the Shroud collapsed. She would not be here to see what would happen afterwards, and so there were things she had to do, to get in place, before the Shroud was destroyed, and whatever lay out there beyond the Haze came down to entertain itself.

She was pretty certain there was a city of near-Titanic undead on the moon, held off only because they didn’t want to be enslaved to the Shroud, but doubtless looking to set up their own necromantic empires when it went away.

They would have to be taught a lesson, and that meant there would have to be people here who could teach them that lesson.

What, he wondered, would people do when the gods actually started talking back to them? Making actual demands of them? Would those people who were happily falling into Evil powers suddenly realize the implications of what they were doing, had done, had gotten themselves into?

That there really and truly were unholy powers in the universe, and those idiots were now under obligation to those forces?

That the only thing they had of worth in the eyes of those forces was their souls, and that only while they lived? After they died, they were just currency, raw materials to be refined and the profits of the Alignment Wars extracted from them?

Heaven and Hell burned over his soul; his Pacts were never silent, never still. There were no words, no guides to behavior, save those the Angelos had passed down... and the Angelos had never claimed to be able to truly interpret Heavenly will and desires.

Indeed, the angel had stated that Free Will was the foundation of mortal life, and him interfering with mortal choices of what was Good simply removed any benefit from the conflicts that Good might harvest.

Free to choose. Free to walk away. Free to Rise, free to Damn themselves.

Without that freedom, they were but slaves to an arm of the conflict, giving nothing, gaining nothing, nothing more or less than the Soulborn who had already given up their Free Will at death, having made their choices.

The Angelos had been happy to relay what the various Faiths of the gods considered proper forms and rituals, the purposes behind them, and what the gods represented, bringing them all into what was truly an interplanetary, interdimensional Faith that could unite them all... and when and if the gods actually could answer, would see them prepared for that eventuality.

His Hellpact wanted him to take the power that he could from those who were weaker, as was his right; dominate, possess, hoard, and centralize all that power and influence to himself. The Hungry Kiss concentrated that desire against women, as the Poison Kiss did against men.

Take everything they had and were for yourself, do it again when you wanted to. The difference between the infernal Kiss Pacts and demonic Heart Pacts was largely a matter of style, of discipline vs. whim, division and lust of the sexes vs envy of others of the same sex.

As Eryllian and Ruedian Amazon Pacts basically preyed upon the differences between the sexes, he wondered if the Hungry Kiss Pact had been devised to take advantage of them. It would not have surprised him at all. It didn’t work on the Amazon Pacts from the Good goddesses, after all...

It appears that it is time to make some of them an offer, he thought, and his Sight turned inside.

---

There were fourteen of them there in his Pactspace. Their souls were all bound up against the beating Runes of his Hellpact, the vestigial hellfire burning over them, feasting on their Sins, surging up whenever he indulged in Sin, and also whenever he resisted it.

Only doing nothing, like right now, as he basically watched Traveler spilling the beans to the world of Racial Class Levels, were they not really screaming.

They couldn’t see or hear one another, but they could see and hear him, and feel his presence, which was not unexpected. It gave them a chance for them to beg and plead, and for him to play with them.