They were never meant to hunt.
Incubi — creatures of darkness, revered among the demonkin, and cherished by their kind not for what they did… but for what they could become.
Born with the blessing of a higher demon, an Incubus did not roam the world in search of prey. It waited.
Passive, almost inert, it drifted through the dark, absorbing silence like breath. It lingered in forgotten ruins, in places where the sun's reach had died generations ago. It did not lash out. It did not crave flesh.
Not until it found a source.
A living, breathing soul that resonated with it — like a spark falling into oil. From the moment of that connection, the ritual began.
One soul would not suffice. The Incubus would seek out fifteen others — same in age, in spirit, in flavor, as the first one. And then it would weave them together, binding each to one of its sixteen cores — eyes that pulsed not with vision, but with life.
Sixteen lives.
Ten years.
No interruptions.
No distractions.
A sacred ritual. A cursed evolution. Only then, with its body fully forged in stolen vitality and its soul swollen on devoured time, would it be considered worthy to ascend.
To truly awaken.
To serve at the side of the demon who had marked it.
And to become a consort — a vessel of pleasure and despair.
This was a demon's courtship.
But...
What if the ritual were to be interrupted?
What if even one of the sixteen evolving cores was severed from its source before the completion of the awakening, the connection undone?
What became of a failure — an Incubus that fed, but never bloomed?
Would its master still call it worthy?
Would the gates still open for it?
Ezekiel knew the answer.
They would not.
The end of such a failure was only one...
Death.
Poisoned by the very same mark that allowed its existence.
Steel-toed boots pressed into the blood-slick stone. His breath was steady. His heart, less so.
Then, from before him, a voice — like razors dragged across solid metal — echoed.
"I've never seen a human so desperate to walk into the jaws of death… that he would challenge death itself for an invite."
It was an abomination, that voice.
High-pitched and brittle, full of mockery and something older than malice — amusement.
It echoed in the hollow cave, sending goosebumps crawling up Ezekiel's skin.
But he couldn't afford to show disgust. Instead, he pressed down his instincts and feigned undisturbed calm.
The Incubus tilted its head. Amused — as if it could read him like an open book.
"Shall I call it brave? Or shall I call it foolish?"
Ezekiel's lips curved upward. Not quite a smile.
"I wanted a glimpse of the great being that laid resting in this insignificant place."
The Incubus purred — like a pleased kitten — except the sound was so guttural, so warped, it felt like it could split ears from the inside.
And yet, Ezekiel didn't flinch.
He didn't step back in contempt. Instead, surprise colored his thoughts.
Something was off.
He'd only meant to buy time with meaningless words. But the creature responded to him, too different from the way he'd calculated.
An unawakened Incubus shouldn't have understood societal nuance. Or sarcasm. Or compliments.
The puzzle pieces he'd forced into place in his mind prior to facing the creature... now felt incomplete.
"Since you know your place, I shall give you a chance to prove yourself worthy. Where do you come from, human?"
The question was asked with genuine curiosity — like a noble entertaining a beggar. Not quite mockery. Not quite interest.
Ezekiel tilted his head, careful not to look directly into the creature's sixteen smoldering eyes.
"From a distant land," he answered slowly, voice calm. "Much farther than these woods. There, they have structures made of concrete and glass that reached toward the skies. Mounts made entirely of steel would hover in the air. In that land, one would be able to both see and talk to their kin on the other side of the world with simply the intention to do so."
He didn't have to be a genius to know he couldn't let the incubus learn of his association with Fwerah. But he also couldn't be completely untruthful.
Incubi were masters of emotions. They could sniff out falsehoods like blood in water.
The silence dragged on.
Goosebumps crawled over his skin as the creature stared at him. Sixteen eyes, unblinking, scrutinizing him with cold, clinical interest.
He felt like a pinned insect beneath a magnifying glass.
"How curious. Such a place should not exist in this world, yet you do not seem to be lying."
Ezekiel's jaw tightened, barely perceptible. He had confirmed it now.
Something was awfully wrong.
An unawakened Incubus — confined to its nest since birth — shouldn't have known the shape of the world beyond.
The creature in front of him was too articulate. Too lucid. Too present.
It shouldn't be like this.
According to everything he knew, an Incubus undergoing ritual awakening didn't move from its nest. It didn't even speak, beyond fragments of dreams. It didn't hold conversations. It didn't question intruders.
It always waited. Dreamed.
It influenced — and rarely acted.
Even the sixteen victims wouldn't have actually vanished into thin air. Nor were they dragged here against their will.
Perhaps they were called. Whispered to in their sleep.
And they had walked to their own doom, lulled by something that they deeply yearned for, just as he had.
That was how it worked.
After securing its targets, an Incubus's sole purpose was to ensure the completion of the ritual.
Even if it meant infiltrating dreams to send — what it believed to be convincing — visions of its victims' safety and bliss.
After all, it couldn't afford to be hunted, so it had even sacrificed several levels to upgrade a useless accessory into a Platinum-tier artifact. To act as a proof of the dream's legitimacy.
Common sense dictated that as a blatant intruder, what Ezekiel should have faced here wasn't a conversation, but an overwhelming fight — and possibly — death.
Well, he wasn't planning on dying so futilely, either.
But the creature before him had betrayed all his expectations, several times now.
Has it awakened already?
No — if that were the case, all the sixteen victims would be dead by now and he would have failed the quest.
Suddenly, Ezekiel felt brave enough to try something.
A huge gamble with his life on the line...
Even so, he had to figure out just what was going on.
"Curious, huh?" He started, a playful smile ghosting his lips. "How would you like to hear more?"
The Incubus suddenly laughed. The sound was like nails scratching across glass.
"I am intrigued," it said after a few seconds, with the amusement of one looking at the defiance of an ant that it was about to crush.
Inventory.
"Then, we must start with a gift." Ezekiel replied, still calm, still playful.
The Incubus tilted its head, more curious than cautious. It had already determined that it could kill him with only a flick of one of its countless limbs.
Perfect.
Ezekiel hurled a health potion directly at its face.
The glass vial shattered on impact.
Hissssssss—
The cave filled with the sound of flesh burning. No fire. No heat. Just a sound like acid eating through skin.
The air warped, shimmering around the sizzling impact point. A low growl twisted — rose — screamed.
But Ezekiel was already gone.
{Stealth Activated}
His figure flickered out of sight, slipping into the shroud of shadows.
The Incubus shrieked. Its body convulsed, spasming in rage and agony.
And its voice — its voice... changed.
"You fucking pest! I'll kill you! I'll rip your head out of your filthy little body and bathe in the blood that gushes out of your throat—!"
Gone was the rasping screech of metal. In its place was a human voice.
Male. Young. Furious.
Ezekiel, crouched beside a jagged wall of White Stone Ore, froze.
That rage. That tone. That inflection.
This wasn't the voice of an Incubus.
This wasn't a monster's scream.
His mind caught up to the pieces his instincts had already strung together.
The potion had hit. But the damage... it was supposed to be minimal.
Health potions — products of light elemental magic — were like acid to creatures born of darkness. A low-level Child of Darkness would have melted down almost instantly.
But for a Level 149 Incubus — slight irritation or a mild burn was the best one could hope for.
These creatures instinctively knew how to shield their bodies to lessen or even mitigate the damage completely. It was only a basic health potion, after all. Defending against it was as simple as breathing for them.
But the reaction depicted by this Incubus was beyond exaggerated.
And then that voice.
That unmistakably human voice.
There was only one explanation.
Rare, but not impossible.
Sometimes... in extremely exceptional cases, the ritual of awakening would converge.
One of the souls being drained — the life force meant to nourish the demon — fought back.
And won.
When that happened, the roles reversed.
The victim became the master. The Incubus, only a shell, its consciousness devoured.
That would explain the curiosity, the unusual behavior, the incapacity to use the instinctual defensive abilities of a true Incubus.
His eyes impulsively moved to a single object displayed in his still open inventory.
Dhamra's Locket (Platinum)
He had questioned himself constantly.
Why Lance? Why Dhamra?
He had then answered those questions with the idea that Lance's words would simply have been more believable than the others. But he still couldn't figure out why only Dhamra's remains were meant to be found.
And how?
Incubi feasted on the bodies of their victims at the end of the awakening. It was a symbol of celebration for their success.
But only Dhamra had been spared from such a brutal end. Left behind to be found by his brother.
It wasn't simply a convenient narrative of a Pseudo-Epic Quest. It was because, the Incubus... No —
Dhamra couldn't possibly consume his own body.
So he had left it, as a final act to a decade of lies.
This man... even after winning the battle against the former Incubus, he hadn't stopped the ritual.
Instead, he had discarded his previous life and lived as an imposter. Patiently waiting for ten years in order to awaken, to earn the right to stand beside a higher demon as its companion.
Dhamra was never the victim.
He was the profiteer — a man cruel enough to betray his own people.
Perhaps, he was more of a monster than his predecessor.