Consciousness returned to me in fragments.

  First came the pain, then the cold, and then the taste of iron and disinfection.

  I lay on a slab that was either a prison cot or an autopsy table, cheek pressed to cool steel, drool leaking from my mouth. The back of my head throbbed with a pulse like a dying hard drive. The world was spinning, but only inside my skull.

  A voice above me hummed something that might've been a K-pop song.

  I tried to move, but my wrists were cuffed to the cot, and the effort made my temples spike with fresh agony.

  A shadow leaned into my periphery. "Wakey wakey, Peter. Don’t tell me you were going to sleep through my magnificent visit?"

  I cracked my left eye.

  Elshiko perched over me, wearing her party-costume nurse outfit again, cleavage and leg on full display, the top button undone to the border of legal exposure. She held a syringe in one hand and a lazy smirk in the other.

  "Are the others alive?" I rasped.

  Her mouth curled. "Sort of. Takezo is still an asshole, and the chiquita is unscathed. It was a real miracle how she went from like a third of her body into a fully healed form.” She clicked her tongue. “But anyway, I’ll be harvesting your kidneys now. Try to not move too much, so they don’t get damaged.”

  In spite of the raging headache, I wanted to laugh, but it didn’t sound completely like a joke. Actually, after I killed two of the guards, they might actually have been reducing me to spare parts. “You’re joking, right?”

  She moved the table to get my head to her and started cleaning the clotting blood from my temple. The pain ratcheted from bad to worse. “You were supposed to laugh. Takezo would be mad if I did that, so I would have sent someone else to do it.”

  Ha… ha… ha. “You are hilarious.”

  “I know, so I guess you’re just a bit slow.” Elshiko fished a capsule from her pocket, popped it open, and let blue dust rain onto the raw skin. It stung like industrial acid, but my head stopped throbbing. "There. You should be at least as functional as you were before."

  "That’s not a very high bar."

  "True. I could also overdose you. Want to see how much that takes?"

  "No." I tested my hands. The cuffs were sturdy, set into the cot. Blood slowly trickled down my arm. “Could you unlock me?"

  "No, but I could lock you down a lot harder," she said. "Boss wants you alive for your trial." She poked my bicep with the syringe, and a warmth crept through the muscle, spreading through my veins. “Hold still.”

  I held still, and memories flashed before my eyes. Francesca getting stabbed. My brain coughed up images of the arena, the flash of Kallisto’s spear, Francesca’s body folding around the blade like tissue paper, the way the blood sprayed everywhere. I clamped down, hard.

  Elshiko made a little pout. "Aww, want a lollipop?"

  "No." I kept my eyes shut, focusing on not throwing up. "Is Takezo all right?"

  She clicked her tongue. "You should be more worried about yourself. He’s still an absolute jerk. Didn’t even want to let me heal him the moment he recovered enough to refuse. He also still owes me for it. I spent three hours working on him, intensely, so he owes me three intense nights. He has yet to start paying up though."

  I smiled a bit, in spite of the circumstances. “Will you want me to pay as well?"

  “No. That adds to Takezo’s bill. He will pay for all the treatment I’ve given you.”

  Ouch. That stung, even worse than the syringe. I wasn’t so unappealing that even a succubus wouldn’t touch me, was I?

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “Don’t worry,” she cooed, as if reading my mind. “You can try your luck with chiquita. She got a brand new undercarriage, so she will surely want to take it for a ride.”

  That made me blush. Strongly. Yes, she was technically correct.

  Elshiko snickered, then leaned in so close I could smell her perfume, roses, and nothing else. "Plus, I’m sure you murdering two of our own on live feed for no reason will leave a lasting impression on chiquita. She’s the type of girl that loves that."

  My pulse stuttered. That was also most likely correct.

  Elshiko smirked and left.

  The thoughts meshed in my head for a while. But eventually, the thoughts of Isabella faded, and memories of Francesca flooded my mind. In the silence of the cell and the lack of stimulation of being cuffed down, I had nothing else to think of.

  Damn it.

  Shadow!

  Time froze, and Shadow appeared, still in his perfect suit, towering above me with a faint smirk. “Seems like consequences caught up with you rather sooner than later.”

  “Unpause the time, please. I don’t need to extend my prison sentence.”

  Shadow shrugged. “What did you call me for then?”

  “Guidance. Is there any skill that would let me move a soul into a new body?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Why are you asking me a question you already know the answer to?”

  Because I was scared of how everything around it was named. With a sigh, I conjured the skill tree. And it was there, soul transfer, a level twenty-five skill… in the class of an demonist, straight in the path of the devil specialization. “Why is the specialization called the path of the devil? Nothing else is called a path.”

  “Because whoever named it had no sense of style.”

  Of course. That wasn’t an actual answer. Just like he wouldn’t answer me if I asked him about the mechanics of Kallisto’s cloak. From what she said, whoever she killed ended up in her cloak. So, Kallisto had Francesca’s soul in her cloak. Theoretically thinking, I could get the soul from Kallisto, bring it back to Earth, and then put it into a new body.

  A practical impossibility. But it was something I could try.

  I allocated the first point to the demonist class. A passive, demonic blood. Plus ten to strength, dexterity, endurance, and speed.

  The moment I put in the point, the world around me changed. I saw through the eyes of a man who wore a cowboy hat, a coat, and held a gun in his hand, aiming at a dead demon with five holes in its head.

  Shadow’s voice echoed through my head. “The first time I killed a demon, I realized the thing wasn’t any smarter than an animal. It had no powers, nor magic, nor weapons. What made it dangerous to me was that it was fast, strong, nimble, and tough. So I figured that if I became faster, stronger, nimbler, and tougher, then such a being couldn’t ever cause me a problem. What I did not realize was that I set myself on the path of becoming a demon.”

  The world returned to normal. That sounded even worse than how the path was called. Couldn’t that be in something I could read before picking the skill?

  Well, anyway. After the first skill, I could either advance through a bunch of smaller stat nodes and skills about demon knowledge, or skip around that, and spend points on nodes that gave more stats and no skills.

  Shadow told me stats were more important than skills.

  So far, I hadn’t seen anything that contradicted the statement. Hell, Kallisto absolutely destroyed us through stats alone.

  She wasn’t using any magic, special weapons, tricks, or advanced skills.

  But she was unbreakable.

  We didn’t even scratch her with anything we threw at her, and that held for all of us aside from Isabella’s last attack.

  Kallisto also wasn’t all that fast, either. I survived a few hits from her, so she wasn’t incredibly strong, and she didn’t even try to evade. When I thought about it more, she didn’t show anything that betrayed any supreme intelligence or any special charisma.

  Yet nothing could harm her, because she had an absurd amount of endurance.

  I allocated all the stat nodes, ignoring all the skills, just to get more stats. Each stat node let me choose the mains stat, for which I picked endurance.

  Then, at the level fifteen node, I had to choose a secondary stat to allocate points into.

  Well, I needed offense beyond modern weapons, so that was either intelligence, dexterity, or strength.

  Everyone else had built into dexterity, and at the same time, everyone got demolished by Kallisto. The dexterity and willpower build everyone was using was made to fight other mages from Earth. The moment we faced a being from outside of our System, someone built with a completely different context in mind, it lost its usefulness.

  So, I made strength the secondary stat and put everything else into it, whenever the System allowed me to.

  I still had a few skill points left after I reached the level twenty skill, instead of which I took stats, and so I closed the tree.

  Shadow still stood near me, smirking.

  “What’s with the smirk? Aren’t you going to comment about me ignoring all skills I can and just getting more stats, instead?”

  “I wasn’t planning to. I mean, your build makes perfect sense. Isabella loves a good pincushion, and your best use is to bleed, so someone more competent can use your blood to enter the portal. You might even get an employee of the month badge. Or mommy’s favorite pet tag.”

  Why did I ask? Like, every time I asked a slightly dangerous question to someone from the more experienced people, I got brutally shot down. And that was assuming Shadow was like a person, and not a magical script.

  The irony still amused me though.

  I was about to stand trial for murder. I had watched three people I cared about die, with one of them escaping death through divine intervention, and I had decided to spend my entire life making a build that imitated a demon that did all the killing.

  But I had a build, and the cloud of indecision faded from my mind.

  I rested and soon fell asleep.