Chapter 20-495: Epilogue VII – I Will Meet You There (1/2)

Fifteen years after Shroudbreak...

Paco Vilyo looked around himself with a rictus grin as he picked himself up from the crater of his impact.

He was shaken, damaged, and he was surrounded by a blasted, barren, and broken landscape where nothing lived... or rather, everything was dead, including himself.

But the pain, the insinuations, and the gloomfire were all gone.

He was free of his Gloompact, finally.

It had been a pretty good ambush. He had been rebuilding the farmland and lives of the village he had come from so long ago, protecting them with terrible lethality from those who tried to prey on them and make them grow drug crops, burning maize and beans and giving the people nothing to turn to but them.

Dead men made for excellent vivic fertilizer. Their belongings made nice seed capital. Their associates made superb target practice.

He had killed them, speaking to them in the language they understood, tracking them remorselessly, and in the end they had broken and fled... but not before word had gotten out of what was protecting that insignificant little village and its people.

They’d waited years, but they had come. Daemons, their idiot servants, with new Pacts and eager eyes sick for the power and status promised them.

It had been a good attack, well thought out, with numbers and powerful creatures and coordination.

He was pretty sure he’d gotten just about all of them before he died, and his Pact took him Down.

That was where he was now, the Realm of the Dead. Dead sky, dead land, dead souls who only had one another to prey upon... and he was fresh blood, scarred by the Pact released with his death, with no real power of his own...

He only smiled more broadly as the first slinking soul that had also earned a trip down here, and had grown by slaying others like itself, came stalking up through the shadows that moved as if alive across this sunless land, seeing ready prey.

He was still injured in this after-life state, but he was not weak. Oh, no. Heavenbound Hall had made sure that he was trained up, and his Pact was just a resource for him, it built upon what he already was.

The Tats upon his soul ignited, even as harsh emerald fire came up around his hands. With rather more speed than a fresh weak soul reeling from the pain of Pacts removed should have, he charged into the fight with this bottom-feeding slinking killer...

-------

The daemons circled around him warily, having learned harsh lessons about his emerald fists.

He had not died a Good person. It didn’t bother him, having made peace with the fact that he just wasn’t that kind of man. He could be cruel and harsh, and was unrepentant of the fact. He discriminated and had his prejudices... but he knew them, and could suppress them if it was useful, but they were all part of him.

But he had not died that sickening purple of corruption and decay, and he was proud of himself for that, if nothing else.

Were it not for his Pact, he would not be here at all now, but that was fine. He had made a decision for power when he was young and rash, and it had led to much death and blood, aye, taken his chance at having children of his own... but it had given him some very good years, there at the end.

If he was to dissolve into nothing here, his soul torn apart as a meal to daemons, that was also fine.

But he had prepared himself for this fight, and he knew how to fight this ilk. Oh, yes, he did. His soul was a weapon made to kill Fiends and the Undead, and these Evilborn murderers and killers had found that out, much to their sorrow.

He could feel the gloomfire whispering to him again, pleased at his performance; this Realm was offering him its power, a change in form and status, a chance to gain what so few of the souls that plummeted from the aether were ever able to.

A Daemonic form, with his memories and persona intact! With the power of a daemonic body, survival here would indeed become much easier, at the cost of becoming an aspect of Death, a minion of the endless methods of decay and dissolution.

His hands still glowed emerald around the glowing Tats on the back of them, more dangerous than any mundane weapon, as so many of these would-be hunters had found out.

But his time was done. He had killed a great number of them, leaving them and their essences to die and be absorbed by the Glooms, taking nothing from them but the balance and serenity of the ki from them meeting their proper doom to keep himself healed and whole.

Now, these aspects of starvation, drowning, suicide, addiction, murder, slaughter, grief, hunger, and other methods of dying and death were gathered around him, including several strong enough to be tough fights all by themselves, as he’d found out when others of their kind had come for him... or he’d come for them.

He’d been hunted and hunted, and he’d been run to ground now.

When the lone wolf couldn’t bring down the tiger, it went looking for the pack. That they’d all be instantly be ready to kill one another after he died was a given, but for now, they had a common goal.

The emerald light of his hands reflected in their purple-black eyes, defying them, mocking them and all that they were.

“Warlock,” whispered a somnadaemon, an aspect of death by dissolution in dreams, of running from the world so desperately that one died from wasting in their denial of it. “You cannot escape now, unless you care to take up the power of Gloom.” She sounded wickedly satisfied when the soulfires on his hands did not change in the slightest. “Your conviction will not save you now!”

“I think you are wrong.”