David had tried to make the execution as quick and non-damaging as possible. He had plans for the corpse. Specific plans. Damaging the merchandise now would be like kicking a vending machine right before your snack finally drops—counterproductive and stupid. Her death was the solution. It was a neat, two-for-one deal: remove the lethal, thrall-bonded liability and get paid for it.

  David placed his palm flat on Mara’s abdomen. He engaged his Battle Sense. The gremlin in his head perked up, eager for the pain and malicious havoc of poking around a trapped soul.

  His hand sank into the metaphysical space over her stomach. Then, with deliberate intention, he fell into her soul.

  Her soul-labyrinth stretched out inside. The interlocking plates and shifting walls were all there, but now they were covered in a web of ethereal, bright soul-binding chains. The chains glowed with a draining energy. They clamped down everywhere. Mara wasn’t a Level 50 demon. With the shackles binding her, her soul was weakened, drained. The whole segmented labyrinth had been ground to a halt by the constriction. The sliding plates and rotating walls were frozen mid-shift, struggling to move against the bindings. It was a noticeable difference from the demon's fortress.

  The tight constriction had even forced an opening between two jammed plates. David saw it, a narrow gap leading inward.

  The chains glowed. David understood how dangerous they were. He gave them a wide berth.

  Guided by the malicious, evil tug of his corrupted Battle Sense, David went inside.

  He looked at the drained, damaged labyrinth. The interlocking plates were frozen stiff. Deep cracks ran through the walls. Woven into the whole broken mess was the faded residue of something immense. It was a mark, a stain of power that operated on a scale that made the ‘god’ seem like an angry child. The mark tainted her soul. It showed up everywhere. David saw traces of its power in the swirling, impossible patterns on the walls and in the deep fractures. Trying to comprehend its full nature felt like trying to memorize the structure of a hurricane by standing in it. He got a clear sense of scale and ancient, dead power. It sat right at the edge of what he could understand. Trying to understand it brought a pain he wasn't ready to handle. So he looked at the cracks in the wall instead.

  With his free hand inside her space, guided by the evil greedy gremlin, David channelled death energy and demonic energy into his body, then mixed in heat. He started attacking her soul from the inside. He didn't light a fire. He made himself into the fire. From right there in the middle, he smashed pieces of her soul and pulled them into his own flesh, absorbing them. Mara was no soul master. She couldn't move or react because of the chains. It was a buffet.

  [Energy Affinity Lvl 5 → Energy Affinity Lvl 6]

  What David was doing was objectively evil. He wasn't a good guy, but he wasn't a raving maniac either. Mara was no longer a threat. She was dead. There was no moral reason for this. He was damaging her immortal soul for power, eating the traces of the dead god in her soul, and swallowing parts of her immortal soul. It was a step past death.

  Did she deserve it?

  The answer was no.

  It didn't matter how much the little gremlin in his skill insisted he keep going, thrilled by the whole thing. The answer was still no.

  Wrecking the place was only the first part of his idea.

  David kept at it until he figured he'd wrecked and absorbed about a third of her soul. He gathered the leftovers. He ended up with four main pieces. Two were about the same size as the demon's soul fragment but thinner, like big, jagged wafers. One was a massive chunk he had to tuck under his arm like a clumsy piece of luggage. The fourth was the thick, charred demon fragment.

  "Got the parts," he muttered, shifting the heavy piece under his arm. "Need to get out of the workshop first."

  Getting out of her soul realm was a hassle. The metaphysical space resisted, like trying to climb out of a pool of thick syrup. He pushed through and returned to the temple with his haul: four human soul fragments and one very thick demon soul fragment.

  He unwrapped the Heretic's Shackle fragment from around Mara's body. The moment the chain came loose, her badly damaged but still intact soul detached. It didn't hang around. It zipped off into nowhere, probably headed for whatever counted as an afterlife in this hellish place. If reincarnation were real, she'd think twice about messing with him in the next life. The body went limp.

  Just before the empty corpse could fully settle, David took one of the smaller human soul fragments and, on a hunch, thrust it back into the vacant soul-space in her body.

  With his free hand, he wrapped the Heretic's Shackle fragment around her body again, binding it tight.

  Keep the structure. Don't let it collapse. Please stay put.

  He held all the remaining fragments—two human, one demon—tight in his grip. He reentered the empty soul-space he'd just provisioned with the fragment.

  Inside, he sacrificed the largest human fragment to the glowing, ethereal bindings of the shackle, treating it like a live wire and letting go before contact. The chains snapped around it eagerly, anchoring themselves to the soul-stuff instead of a living will. He hoped that would act as a mooring point, a paperweight to keep the metaphysical space from collapsing.

  Now he had three fragments left: two human, one demon.

  Here was his idea. He held the fragments together like a weird sandwich: a human fragment, then the demon fragment, then the other human fragment. He pressed them. In the cracks and seams between them, he started pouring demonic energy. The energy acted like a thick, black paste. Fill the hole. See if it holds. He added bits of his own excess soul next, his blood—a silvery red glue to hold the demonic solder in place. Finally, tentatively, he slipped in a thread of death energy. The composite soul-stuff accepted the death energy without fuss. He figured that made sense, since the human soul belonged to a necromancer. Probably pre-greased.

  Demon as the core. Human as the wrapper. My energy as the glue, he thought.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  "And... fuse."

  Then he activated his Thrall skill. At the same time, he engaged his Soul Manipulator skill. He used both to press the fragments together, to merge them at the seams he'd just soldered.

  He finished the process and watched.

  The demon soul fragment overpowered and corrupted the two human fragments. The human pieces darkened, their edges becoming sharper, more aggressive. But the demon fragment changed too. It absorbed echoes of structure from the human pieces, becoming less of a burnt cinder and more of a defined, if crude, shape.

  The end product was a small, patchwork soul. It wasn't a skyscraper fortress like the demons. It wasn't a complex labyrinth like Mara's. It was more like a welded-together crate, roughly the size of his own torso. It looked mad crude, like someone had randomly soldered scrap metal together. Most importantly, it was completely enthralled by him. The Thrall skill had bitten deep during the merging process.

  He had not only created a soul. He had enthralled it.

  Well, calling it a complete soul was generous. This would never have worked on anything real. It was a soul in the way a gecko looked like an alligator, or a Roomba looked like a motor vehicle. Crude. But it's mine.

  [Soul Manipulator Lvl 2 → Soul Manipulator Lvl 3]

  “Whatever works,” David muttered.

  David concentrated, and with a minor struggle, he exited the new, mostly empty soul realm and returned to reality. A pinprick of light was trapped in the corpse's navel—the MacGyvered, sellotaped mini-soul thrall he'd made.

  On a hunch that would probably fail, he walked to the dead demon's corpse. With a lot of struggle, he carved loose, hanging flesh from the spot where he'd been consistently stabbing it before. He walked back and placed the strip of demon flesh on Mara's corpse, right above the navel.

  He put one hand on the corpse's chest and the other on its navel. Then he started pouring.

  He pulled death energy from his bones. He threaded it with a huge current of demonic energy—almost five hundred stats worth. The demonic energy acted as a catalyst, corrupting the death energy, making it far more potent and aggressive. He placed his palms flat on the corpse and flooded it with the combined, corrupted power, constantly triggering his Infernal Thrall skill and sending the command directly into the dead flesh.

  David kept pouring the energy into the corpse. Filling a body with death would obviously make it an undead. He knew that. But doing just that wouldn't make it his—not part of his power, not one of his forces.

  "What happens," he muttered, his hands glowing with corrupted energy, "when you fill a corpse with demonic death? With a demon-human dummy soul already planted inside it?" He had no precedent for this. No clue. He was about to find out. And whatever crawls out…, he thought, would be completely bound to his will. Body, mind, and soul.

  The corpse's dead skin began to change, darkening to a deathly grey. It got rougher, like old leather. The patch of demon flesh David had placed above its navel sank into the body with a wet, sucking sound, pulled in by the soul-manipulation he was forcing through it.

  David never disconnected the stream of corrupted death energy. He kept it circulating in a loop through the corpse. He felt his gargantuan reserve of demonic death energy being pulled into the body's bones, drawn down like metal to a magnet. A strange connection formed. It felt like manipulating limbs that were dead, numb, and buzzing with pins and needles, like a limb waking up from anesthetic.

  He started manipulating the bones. He willed them thicker. He willed them longer. Death energy filled the gals, demonic corruption empowered death. The body on the stone floor began to stretch. Joints popped. The spine elongated with a series of dry cracks.

  The transformation picked up speed. Horns, thick and black like obsidian, curled from its temples. Its mouth stretched, and long, needle-like fangs slid over its lips. It grew, stretching to well over six and a half feet tall. Its skin flushed a dark, bruised maroon. Plates of rough, scale-like armor formed over its shoulders, down its one remaining arm, and across its legs. Its face was the only patch of smooth, human-colored flesh left, but it changed too—the eyes widened and sharpened, the lips grew fuller, all framed by those vicious fangs. Its eyes were pools of solid black.

  It was taller, bigger, meaner. Its hands ended in thick, black claws. It's back arched, the shoulder blades raised in a way that made David suspect tiny, vestigial wings might be trying to form under the skin. It had no tail. Its feet were clawed.

  The shackle fragment siphoned energy, but David continuously drained the shackle and sent it back, adding another layer to the loop.

  As David churned more death, threading it endlessly with demonic energy and spamming his Infernal Thrall skill into the mixture, something new happened. From the stump of its missing shoulder, raw, demonic flesh knotted and surged. A fresh, massive arm grew out, corded with muscle and ending in a clawed fist. It was powerful.

  The original corpse had been short. This thing looked nothing like it. It was clearly dead, its skin devoid of living warmth, its movement a marionette's twitch awaiting command. But it was also, unmistakably, a demon.

  Or something in close to both.

  The thing on the stone floor stirred, a single, twitching flex of its new claws.

  [DeathBorn Lvl 1 → DeathBorn Lvl 2]

  David was spent, his reserves almost drained, but he was satisfied. He moved carefully. He unwrapped the Heretic's Shackle from around the new demon-thing's torso. He did it hesitantly, ready to try and snatch back the makeshift, sellotaped soul if the whole thing crumbled or tried to bolt the moment the binding came off.

  It held. The patchwork soul stayed anchored in the corpse's navel, the glowing chains binding stability now fused to it.

  [Soul Manipulator Lvl 3 → Soul Manipulator Lvl 4]

  David exhaled, a slow release of tension. Then he placed his hand on the warm metal links of the shackle fragment and drained all the leftover energy stored within them.

  Mara was a memory. Dead and long gone. The demon was a dead trophy. Decimated and consumed. This thing on the stone floor was something else entirely. Both souls had checked out, one headed for whatever reception desk this dimension had for the departed. The new model was a massive, patchwork combination of undead human and demon, stitched together with death and corruption.

  David looked at it. He felt the connection, a clear line of absolute control. This wasn't her. It had horns, scales, claws, and eyes like pits of ink. It was a thing that shouldn't exist, which made the whole situation pretty strange.

  The undead hybrid stirred. Its shoulders shifted. It pushed itself up on one massive, clawed hand. Its head lifted, those black eyes scanning the dim temple before locking onto David. There was no hesitation. It moved with a jerky, powerful grace, settling back onto its haunches and then bowing forward, going down on one knee in a motion of pure submission.

  David watched the thing on the floor. It stirred. Not a gentle waking, but a tensing of powerful, newborn limbs. He saw the muscles coil under the strange, maroon scale and death-grey skin. He had watched when its shoulders shifted with a sound like gravel. When a massive, black-clawed hand planted on the stone and pushed. He saw when the torso rose. When the horned head lifted. When it turned, and those solid black eyes scanned the room—over the dead demon's chains, the cold walls—before locking onto him.

  It moved. The motion had a jerky, raw power, like a machine learning to be a predator. It settled back on its haunches. Then it bowed, its horned head dipping toward the floor. It went down on one knee. The impact sent a faint tremor through the stone. It held the pose, a statue of perfect submission carved from death and demon parts. It waited.

  There it is, David thought. The payoff. It was time to finally leave the cage of ice.

  System alerts tried to blink into his view. Little blue notifications, demanding he take a look. He didn't get a chance to read them. The thing kneeling before him made a sound.

  The voice that came out was a low rumble, deeper than he'd thought it would be. It had a strange, smooth quality to it, almost sultry, but underneath that smoothness was a flat, metallic deadliness, like a silk sheet over a blade.

  "WHAT IS MY NAME?" it asked.

  David looked at the horned, scaled, kneeling undead, demonic, and soulbound form of the thing he'd made from a corpse and a demon.

  And tried to think of something apt.