He placed his free hand against the wall and shoved.
His red-haired assailant released his arm and simply sidestepped as his massive bulk flew through the room.
Landing on his feet, Clement pulled himself to his full height. He unlatched his face plate to get a view of the room.
The sight caused a prompt frown to settle on his face.
“We’re going to have to pay for that.”
His sword hung embedded in the wall parallel to the floor. Its emerald encrusted hilt stuck out, pointing towards him. The less said about the hole his helmet had made, the better.
Gertrude’s sole green eye danced with mirth. “Hmm. Don’t care. A little sloppy aren’t we?”
Clement shrugged. There wasn’t much else he could do. He had never once beaten Gertrude in a spar. “Back already?” he asked after a moment.
“I just had the strangest encounter,” Gertrude said, spinning in a wide circle. Droplets of blood flew from one hand, speckling a still-intact wall with tiny red spots.
Clement glanced back to the kitchen and his bowl of cereal. It was far enough away to avoid the blood and most of the drywall dust in the air. Most.
It would probably be fine.
Still, his frown deepened as he glanced back to Gertrude.
“You didn’t get the milk.”
“I just had the strangest encounter,” she repeated in that voice. Mirth in her eye faded off as she glared at him.
Clement just sighed. He allowed the bulk of his armor to sink into the apartment’s couch.
The couch groaned out protests against the weight.
Clement never much liked protesters.
“Alright,” he said, “tell me about your encounter.”
“There was a little girl blocking the doorway–rude,” her snarl turned thoughtful. “And a fire hazard. Anyway, cleared my throat. She turned around, giving me a glimpse of her eyes. Black sclera, red iris, slit pupil. Sound familiar?”
“A demon? What happened to research first?”
“Well, I didn’t know she would be there,” Gertrude said as she skipped across the room. With a hop, she landed right on Clement’s lap. “But her hands and legs were made out of some hard exoskeleton. The hands were particularly sharp.” She waved her cut hand around as she wiggled around on his greaves.
Probably not the most comfortable thing. His armor was not as soft as the couch. Gertrude didn’t show any signs of discomfort. She simply angled herself to the side and stretched herself out with her head and feet on either armrest.
Throughout it all, the couch protested more.
It would have to go.
“But here’s the thing,” she said. “The girl said that she was human.”
“A lie. Incomplete disguise or natural form. Bad at hiding herself or unable to?”
“Neither. I believe her.”
Clement glanced down at Gertrude with his perpetual frown deepening further. “You believe her,” he said when she failed to elaborate.
“Her hands had obvious graft points. I couldn’t see graft points for her legs or eyes, but I’m sure they existed. She claimed to have been experimented on by a necromancer. Given her age, she probably mistook some diabolist.”
“The Elysium Sister did mention that they had originally come here to exterminate a necromancer.”
Gertrude waved her bloody hand around. “Details.”
“So? Course of action?”
“Eradication, of course.”
“Simple as that? No pity for an experimented upon human?”
Gertrude let out a melodious laugh. “Pity? And here I thought we knew each other after twenty years.”
Clement shrugged. There wasn’t much else he wanted to do. If she desired eradication, she would have it. He would dive head first into Hell if Gertrude asked.
“Besides,” Gertrude continued, “she reeked of demons. Even taking into account the limb grafts, she shouldn’t smell like that. That’s aside from the fact that she had probably been here to talk with that hel downstairs. Can’t let someone like that go.”
Opening his mouth to comment on the hel, Clement was interrupted by a loud rumbling.
Gertrude shot him a glare. “Fine,” she said as she threw herself off his lap, “I’ll go get your stupid milk. You better appreciate me.”
“Always,” he whispered to himself after she had disappeared out the apartment door.
Clement remained sitting for another minute before he decided that he needed to clean up. With his sword half out in the hall, it wouldn’t be easy to use should an actual enemy attack.
Before he did, he stopped by the target notebook on the table.
He quickly scribbled out a new entry immediately under the hel. There weren’t a lot of details other than grafted limbs, but Gertrude could help add more later.
Author’s Note: Minor note in comments for Patreon and PayPal supporters. And everyone else I guess, if you want to look.
Chapter 005
Finding Catherine wasn’t half as hard as Eva had imagined it would be.
Really, quite the opposite.
It was as simple as walking into the Brakket Academy main building and heading for the secretary’s desk in the reception area. Catherine sat at her usual desk, absolutely absorbed in whatever was on her computer monitor.
Eva had no idea why she had expected anything different. It was doubtful that she had a home outside of her secretary desk.
A few minutes of standing around, waiting for Catherine to finish whatever she was doing and Eva had still not received even the slightest acknowledgment that she existed. Catherine had a set of headphones on, ones that covered her entire ears and had an attached microphone to one side, but her eyes should still have worked.
“Their whole team is dead! Get on the point!”
Eva froze at Catherine’s sudden outburst.
“Do I have to do everything myself?” Catherine let out a low growl. “Pathetic humans,” she hissed under her breath.
Eva kept frozen until the growl died off. The scowl on the succubus turned to a grin radiating pure evil in the blink of an eye.
That almost scared her more than the shouting. Still, Eva had a task. To accomplish that task, she needed to get Catherine’s attention for ten minutes.
Waving her hands a few times elicited no response from Catherine.
With a sigh, Eva blinked from her side of the desk to Catherine’s side, placing her just over the demon’s shoulder.
The screen was a flurry of lights and colors. Caricatures of people ran around the screen, most of whom were targeted and killed by Catherine with pinpoint accuracy. The images moved so fast that Eva barely had time to process what was happening.
It was giving her a mild headache. She had no idea how Catherine could keep up with it all.
Eva reached out and slid one side of Catherine’s headphones back behind her ear. Carefully, of course. She didn’t want to startle Catherine into attacking.
Turns out, her worries were misplaced. Catherine was far too focused on the game.
Eva didn’t get it. But then, she had never used computers outside of classwork–both at her old mundane school and here at Brakket. She would much rather be reading through musty tomes than whatever it was that Catherine was doing.
“Winning?” She knew enough about games to know that winning was a thing.
“If you would cease your distractions,” Catherine said without taking her eyes off the screen. “I am utterly annihilating these pathetic mortal brats.”
“Children? Surely there are more engaging targets.”
“Mortals are all children to me.”
“Fair enough.” Eva leaned forward with narrowed eyes. There were words scrolling along the left side of the monitor. “What is an ‘aimbot?'”
“When mortals find that they cannot beat me, they constantly accuse me of cheating. It almost got me banned one time, until the company personally monitored my playing and determined that I was not using any sort of hacks or programs.”