Introduction + Chapter 1

Artemvian Delacreu Moneti was sitting on a stump, waiting for his assassins to arrive.

It was raining and the sky was dark, for midnight had passed long ago.  He debated infusing his body with flame-elemental mana for the sake of keeping warm but decided to enjoy the cold.  There was something to be said about feeling new sensations so near the hour of his death.  It could be because he was growing sentimental in his old age, but Artemvian regretted not spending more time outdoors instead of cooped up in that library.

There were many other things he regretted.

He’d been trained by the wetboys of The Empire since he was no more than 6 years old.  He had no memories before that, except for a weeping woman who received a fat coin pouch after she gave his hand over to a cloaked man.  The woman’s hand had been warm and safe.  The cloaked man’s hands were cold and clammy, unpleasant.  But he knew better than to fight back, even at that age.  Artem remembered looking back one more time, leaving the weeping woman behind.

Since then, his life had been one filled with death and violence, until the pathways of his mind ran with rivulets of blood.

It hadn’t always been bad.  Sometimes, he helped people.  He had liked doing that.  Back nearly four scores ago, when dark things still walked the night and The Empire had yet to grow strong enough to protect every nook and cranny.  The wetboys doubled as guards of the night, protecting the populace from all sorts of devils, daemons and sometimes, from their own foolish selves.  

Yes.  It hadn’t been the worst.

He smiled as the first of the assassins reached him.

The assassin stepped out of the shadows and even without the moon, the young man exuded a presence.  Perhaps it was more correct to say lack of a presence but noticeable nonetheless.  The night seemed to grow darker, the shades a little bit longer.  The sounds of rain became muffled, and through those subtle signs Artemvian knew that the assassins had arrived.  Surely, this man in front of him wasn’t the only one.

It was only out of courtesy that he’d come alone.

“Magus Artemvian.”  The assassin spoke, his voice warbled through the enchanted mask.

Artemvian bowed his head a fraction of an inch in acknowledgement.

“You should’ve ran.”  He spat, stepping aside as more assassins filled the clearing.

“Would’ve ben dishonorable.”  Artemvian smirked, knowing that the man could see him.  Then he placed a finger over his heart, making the shape of an X.  “Don’t make it painful and I won’t fight back.  Cross my heart.”

The assassin hissed.  “It’s not too late.  We can keep the other assassins at bay, buy you time to get away.”

The ancient mage sighed, shaking his head and seemed to grow older.  “I’m tired, brother.  Besides, the Emperor will find out.  And then he’ll have you hunted down.  Then that someone might lose you and then he’ll have to be hunted down.”  The mage raised his head higher.  “The cycle ends with me.”

“Don’t be a fool.”  His voice became filled with purpose.  Urgency.  “We can take care of ourselves.  You did more than enough for this Empire and the Emperor.  Leave, Artemvian.  Just leave.  You’re nearly a hundred years old, enjoy what little years you have left.”

“Perhaps I’ll live to be two hundred if you let me go.”  Artemvian quipped.  “Then someone will see me walking around with a cane and you’ll still get in trouble.”

The man snorted through the mask and the tension between them lowered somewhat, their conversation easing into a familiar rhythm.  “And how would you do that?”

Artemvian waggled his fingers.  “Magic.”  He said dramatically.

The two of them said nothing.

“The Emperor’s scared of you.”  The assassin said at last.

“He should be.”  Artemvian had a faint smile on his face.  “Magic, remember?”  His smile turned bitter.  “Besides, I know too much.  About daemons.  Devils.  The lore of Monsters.  That era is long gone, when humans shivered at the claws scraping against their walls at night.  The night is no longer owned by monsters, it is a place of sex, drugs and gambling.”

“I’m just the relic of a bygone era.  We both knew what would happen when the Prince became Emperor.  I was too connected to his father.”  Artemvian shook his head.  “Get it over with.”

“Artem… it doesn’t have to be this way.”

“It does,”  Artemvian snapped, “By the stars, I’m not perfect.  One day, I’ll be tempted.  To prolong by life by a few years, or to become emperor myself.  Or perhaps I’ll end up falling in love-”

The assassin snorted but Artemvian continued.

“-with a beautiful woman with great curves.  Then I’ll make a deal with a daemon or a devil, or some Outer God, if not one of the deities that we know about.”  Artemvian’s voice grew heated.  “I’ve lived long enough.  The things I know should be buried with me and end with me.”  Then in a sad voice, he added, “I’ve already burnt the library.”

“What?!”  The assassin took a step closer.  “You mean-”

“The Supenatura Historius Library.  The most complete collection of essays written by yours truly on matters such as Daemons, Devils, Monsters and your friendly neighborhood Chosens.”  The mage stood up, stretching his legs.  The rain matted his robes down to outline his nearly skeletal body.  “The knowledge… dies with me.  Or it will be misused.”

“This is the only way.”  The assassin muttered.

“This is the only way.”  Artemvian Delacreu Moneti agreed.

“Thank you, for everything.”  With those words, the Assassin blurred into motion and thrust his dagger into Artemvian’s chest, right in his heart.

Artemvian looked into his killer’s eyes.

“Good hunting, apprentice.”  

“...Good bye, master.”

And Artemvian died.

Chapter 1

Artemvian Moneti Delacreu awoke with a single thought.

“By the stars and forsaken hellfire, I died a virgin.”  

He opened his eyes and immediately closed them, realizing that he was outside and it was raining.  Fat droplets of water continued to fall on his face with a melancholy cold with enough speed to sting.  Slowly, he peeked out of one eye and saw huge clouds covering the sky, hiding the sun and shadowing the world with shades of gray.

Then he remembered.

He was supposed to have died.  He had let his apprentice stab him in the heart.  It had been fatal.  There was no way he could have survived that.  Yet… Here he was.

He slowly, sat up.  “Is this the afterlife?”

So Artem readied his heart to finally meet the Keepers of the Afterlife, of which there had been many debates about, and stood to his feet.

Finding it the act of standing to be laughably easy.

Artem had gotten used to the creaking joints, the neverending back pain and the general clunkiness of his declining body.  By the stars, during the later stages of his life he had been in constant pain.  But right now…

He waved a hand, coalescing the puddles on the ground into one giant surface to look at his reflection.  An easy enough application of mana to manipulate the physical properties of water.

“By Brimstone and Sulphur, I’m younger again.”  He muttered, looking at his reflection.

Standing just a shade shy of six imperial feet, his hair was a mixture black and gray; just like Spice from the South and East.  He was slim, but not too much to stand out and even his eyes were the same.  A color somewhere between black and brown, unassuming in every way.

Yet, the wrinkles were gone and the whites were notably absent from his head.  Even his receding hairline was… proceeding? Proceeded already?

“Hellfire.  I would’ve died earlier if I knew I would get my hair back.”  He saw his reflection grin back at him.  Who knew he’d be so happy with a head full of hair again?

Finally he looked around to see where he was.

“Everyone wants to know about the afterlife but no one actually wants to go check it out.”  Artem muttered under his breath.  “Guess I can cross that off my bucket list.”

He was in a small alley of sorts, fenced in on either side by tall buildings.  Artemvian had never seen anything like these buildings, they were enormous.  They seemed to rise up and up, seemingly scraping the sky and giving him a sense of vertigo.  The mage shook his head and focused on his surroundings again.  There were black shiny knapsacks reeking with the smell of spoiled food.  As if noticing his gaze, a few rats scurried away into the darkness.

Out of curiosity, Artem opened one of the black knapsacks and the smell made him gag.  He closed it immediately.

“Oh Blasted Heavens.  Is this Hell?  What the hell was that smell?”

There was no way this was the Afterlife for everyone, atleast definitely not the heavenly kind.  There had been hotly debated topics of Nirvana, Vahalla, Elysium, Hades, Tartarus and whatnot… but this type of smell?

“By the gods, I’m in Naraka.”  Naraka was one of the buddhist hells, and Artemvian strongly suspected that he was in the one reserved for those who stole food.

Artem audibly groaned and began to ready himself, launching into one of his infamous long-winded whines which he often did in front of King Theo during Royal Court Hearings just to annoy him.

“S-Stop! Please!”  Someone cried out.  “Someone help!”

Artemvian’s body moved on reflex.  He had been wetboy extraordinaire and didn’t live to be an old age by being incompetent.  Plus, this new body was just begging to be tested.  Flexing his finger into claws and hopping up and down in three quick motions, Artemvian pulsed mana into his body –though the earlier mirror exercise proved that his magic was still effective in this world.

Then he hid behind one of those metallic spoiled food containers.

And promptly realized he was naked.

“Never just rains… always pours.”  He spat, shutting his mouth at what happened next.

He watched, horrified, as three… things poured in.

One was a human, just like him.  Except… he was all wrong.  The man –Artemvian was guessing at his… her… it’s? Gender for he seriously couldn’t tell– had purple hair which shot straight up, defying the natural orders of the world.  He had also adopted a pair of eye-constructs colored completely black which brought up a whole host of questions about how he could see out of those things.  But the most horrifying thing was the thing attached to the man’s shoulder.

Instead of an arm, the man had this parasite made of steel acting as a pseudo-appendage.  It whirled and clicked like machinery, obviously moving in conjunction with the man’s thoughts.

“Fascinating.”

The other man was a lot more normal.  

Normal for someone who sold his soul to a Devil that is.

Instead of a regular head, he had scales and an elongated snout designed to snap up fish.  His head resembled that of an alligator.  It wasn’t the most out of place here in Naraka, though Artem did have to question why a daemon would choose to stay combined with the man even after he died.  Could it be possible that the afterlife had a whole new economy that fostered the deals between Souls and Daemons? 

The third man who cried out for help was just a regular person.  No steel parasite on any of the limbs nor any signs of daemon workings.  Just… just a very plain guy.

Like Artem.

He felt a twinge of guilt.  He was nearly a hundred years old for the Sun’s sake.  He shouldn’t be afraid of a couple of bullies, possessed by daemons or not.

“Shame on you, Artem.”  He whispered, enjoying the sound of his younger self’s voice.  He could get used to this.

Sighing, Artem came out from behind the metallic container.

“I hate to interrupt… but I wanted to ask for directions.”  He tried to smile and wave, one hand covering his private bits.  “I’m afraid I’m a bit lost here.”

Immediately, all three of them stopped.

And using that moment as a distraction the man who was being attacked slipped out of their grasp like an eel, running out into the streets without looking back.

“Aaaaand that’s what I get for trying to help.  Blasted Hells.”  Artem resisted the urge to rub his eyebrows with his hands, lest he reveal his Leviathan and shock the two poor souls into eternal damnation.

He made a note to write that joke down for later.

“Once a Librarian, always a Librarian.”  He told himself.

“The fuck?  This chap is naked? And we fucking lost our score! Fuck!”  The alligator-daemon possessed man started to walk towards Artem, his hand reaching inside his clothes and taking out a long metallic dagger.

But the dagger had no blade.  It was just an elongated cylinder.

“Oh really? Not even a clean stabbing? You’re going to beat me to death?”  Artemvian whined, “I’m starting to hate Naraka already.”

As if answering, the alligator man growled.  Then with a flick of his wrist, the daemon-possessed man called forth a blade of electricity which crackled with impending violence.

“No hesitation in attacking… possession of an enchanted weapon…”  Artemvian drawled, his eyebrows raised in concern.  “Unless you’re part of the militia or military organization here in the afterlife, I’m going to assume you’re a bandit.”

“I’m going to count to three.”  Artem finished.  “One.”

The other man with the parasite-arm approached as well, an ugly grimace on his face.  Instead of taking out an enchanted weapon, the man’s whole arm began to crackle with contained lightning.

“Interesting to see but not nearly as impressive as the alligator face.”  Artmemvian quipped.  “Two.”

Then promptly he released the mana he’d been holding in, casting a simple spell.  Really, he couldn’t even call this a spell.  It was brute force work, but more than good enough to deal with bandits.

Artemvian snapped his fingers and manipulated the gravity around their heads with pinpoint accuracy.  One moment, the two men were walking forward with angry expressions promising violence and the next, they fell to the ground like they had a blacksmith’s anvils attached to their chins.

The two men slammed to the ground so fast that they both broke their jaws.

“Ugh… wha… ghkk…”

“.....Fu—ck…. What.. is this…”

They struggled but Artem’s manipulation of gravity continued to hold them down.

“Want to know the secret?”  Artemvian said, striding forward towards them.  “Never actually count to three.  Waste of time, really.  No one really stops at three anyways.”

Bending down, Artem touched the alligator-daemon-man’s forehead.  He would quickly separate the daemon’s mana from the man’s own.  Once that was done, the possession would end.  Perhaps the man was an unwilling victim.  It wasn’t like Artemvian had any attachment to this man who ended up in hell.  But Artemvian ended up in hell as well, so who was he to judge?

Perhaps by doing things, he could reset his Karmic wheel.  He would find someone, a Bodhisattva or one of the Buddha and then lodge a complaint.  ‘Look! I did something good! Surely I’m a good person! I don’t belong here!’

Artem froze, frowning.

There was no Daemon Mana.

The man was just…

A man.

Moving quickly, Artem checked the metal-appendage on the other man as well.  If it was a parasite of some sorts, there should be-

Again.  No abnormalities.

On instinct, Artem reached out with his senses, touching upon the ambient mana in the air.  If this was the afterlife, it should be full of-

“Oh hellfire.  By the Fallen Stars.  By the Earth.  By the Sea and Sky and all things that’s holy and accursed, by the blasted First Emperor’s baby son’s DUNG!”  Artem cursed, quickly moving out of the alley and out into the main street.

Something sped by so fast that it summoned up a curtain of water which covered Artem’s view for a split second.

And as the curtain of water lifted… Artem saw.

The roaring of metal carts with their top covered, moving at the speed of wind itself.

What he had thought were clouds were smoke, being belched out by large buildings resembling cannons pointed into the air.  But that wasn’t all.

People with metal parasites, blinding themselves with all manner of things and walking around with small smoke-rings coming from their breath.  More people that looked like they were possessed by daemons but that Artem knew deep inside were not.  They all whispered, passing him by and trying not to look at him but failing.  Some of them walked, seemingly talking to no one but having spherical circular images superimposed inches from their eyes.

He turned and saw a large rectangular block which showed a scantily clad woman.  She kissed the air and beckoned to him, moving in slow sways of her hips that suggested very bad things.  But it wasn’t the imagery that was concerning, it was that it had to be an illusion but it was not.  There was no mana behind it.  Artemvian reached out with his mana sense and sensed nothing.

None of these people were using magic, even the ones with those small blue lights flickering from their eyes.  They weren’t daemon possessed, nor were they Chosen Ones with special powers.  The large rectangular image –which was showing some kind of food now– wasn’t an illusion spell.  As the people passed by him, they tapped at something on their wrist or held something in their hands, their eyes glued to the contraptions.  Even those strange contraptions had no magic –yet, they behaved like Arcane Engineered Apparatuses.

Artem grabbed the nearest passerby.

“Hey, what the fuck man? You fucking bum, I don’t have any doillies.  Try-”

“Where.”

“What?”

Artem stepped in close to the man, and unconsciously summoned his mana.  He knew that his brown irises would flash with a myriad of blue and green but right now, he didn’t care if people found out he was a Magus.  Right now, he was scared.  More scared than he had ever been in his entire life.

He needed to know where he was.

“Where am I?”  He snarled, grabbing the man’s wrist.

“Ow! What the- Geez! That hurts!”  The man tried to escape Artemvian’s grasp but it was no use.  He finally relented.  “You’re in Nero City! Let go!”

“...Date? When?”

“2099! 2099!!”

Artem let him go and the man ran away.

He looked around again and another thought –more of a question– came to him, his natural penchant for swearing picking up the alligator-man’s vocabulary.

“What the fuck is a Nero City?”