Paladin of the Sword: Chapter 4 (Patreon)

Present

It had been ten years since Darren’s mother died. Ten years, living alone in the depths of hell. At that time, he had gone from boy to man. Darren didn’t know the day or year, but based on the passage of time, he felt like he was roughly twenty years old.

Though Darren barely noticed it anymore, day by day he grew stronger. He traveled west, and one day led into the next. His journey took him down to the Third Layer, where many powerful demons lurked. Even that place of boiling molten stone was familiar to him now, and he could travel through it without fear. The number of demons he’d slain was beyond counting, and now the demons feared him.

Darren’s skills improved, and he prepared to evolve them again in preparation for his next quest.

Ongoing Quests

• Slay the Demon Lord Nylyeth the Devil dragon (Fourth Order)
  
  • Reward: Passage out of Hell
    
  • Penalty: The demon lord will attack the City of Limedeep and you will suffer a loss of Devotion.
    
• Slay 300 lesser fiends
  
  • Reward: Progression of a random skill.
    
• Destroy 3 demon settlements:
  
  • Reward: Wealth and an assortment of weapons and daily tools.
    

Darren had been wary of accepting this quest as memories flashed through his mind of that day fighting the cultists. But Darren had traveled west for so long. His journey had been far from a straight line, and he’d been forced to double back plenty of times, but he’d taken every chance he could to head further west for years. He had to be close to the place his mother had told him to head to so long ago.

So, with great reluctance, Darren had accepted the quest to slay the Demon Lord. The penalty was what sealed the deal for him. Darren remembered Limedeep was the city his mother wanted him to go to. Or perhaps it was a country? Darren couldn’t remember. All he knew was that he needed to go Limedeep. And a demon lord was standing between him and there.

By now, Darren had slain plenty of fourth-order demons. Though he was still a third-order paladin, Darren’s Demonbane skill made contending with fourth-order demons very feasible for him. In truth, third-order demons had stopped being a challenge to him years ago, and now when he needed demon hides, bones, or anything that could be gotten from a demon’s corpse, Darren went hunting for fourth-order demons.

Despite his comfort, Darren was still wary of facing something with the title Demon Lord. He’d encountered another demon named such a year before, and the fight had been one of the most difficult of his life. Darren had once been chased by a fifth-order demon, and even then he hadn’t felt the tremendous pressure he’d been up against battling a Demon Lord of the fourth-order.

The way it used its skills and combined its abilities with strategy and cunning reminded Darren of himself in many ways. He often wondered what he’d be if he were a demon, like these monsters around him instead of a human. Would he be called a Demon Lord as well? Was that how the demons saw him?

Darren didn’t know if these were the kinds of things people were supposed to talk about. He’d tried to keep using his voice after his mother died, but with no one to talk to and demons lurking in the shadows, it had always been easier to keep his thoughts to himself. After ten years, he wasn’t even sure if he remembered how to talk anymore. He hadn’t used his voice for anything other than a wordless battle cry in years.

Darren activated his skill menu to avoid thinking about the anxious feeling he felt in his heart whenever he thought about meeting other humans again. The last time he’d done that, things had ended badly.

Darren Heavengrace (Paladin, Third Order)

Devotion: Ardent beyond equal (+7)

Skills: (6 of 6 slots filled)

Divine Aura Mastery 10 (Rare)

• Note: Evolved from the skill Advanced Divine Aura
  
• Enhances the efficiency of all skills that utilize Divine Aura. Makes magical concepts easier to understand.
  
• Enhances understanding of intrinsically magical languages like Divine and Demonic script.
  
• Makes enchanted items easier to identify and understand.
  
• Cost: Passive, no cost.
  

Divine Blessing 5 (Epic)

• Note: Evolved from the skill Hands of Purity
  
• This ability removes the taint of Demonic Aura from anything that can be touched, creating an aura of purity around the user. Deals damage against entities that require Demonic Aura to live. Instantaneously kill all demons in the first order. Passively converts ambient Demonic Aura into Divine Aura.
  
• Cost: Low Divine Aura.
  

Sense Intent 1 (Mythic)

• Note: Evolved from the skill Battle Instincts
  
• This ability lets the user predict enemy movements and attack patterns, regardless of species.
  
• Cost: Passive, no cost.
  

Demonbane 10 (Epic)

• Note: Evolved from the skill Demonslayer
  
• This ability allows the user to enhance their attacks with large amounts of Divine Aura, dealing 10x damage to all demonic creatures.
  
• Cost: Medium Divine Aura.
  

Celestial Storm 3 (Epic)

• Note: Evolved from the skill Ray of Light
  
• This ability allows the user to shoot multiple beams of light in all directions, cutting through whatever they touch.
  
• Cost: Medium Divine Aura and one hour spent in pure sunlight, or a large amount of Divine Aura.
  

Leaf in the Breeze 10 (Rare)

• Note: Evolved from Evasive Step
  
• This ability enhances your ability to dodge and weave through attacks to the point that only opponents with enhanced speed will have any chance at hitting you. When using this skill, opponents at your same order will feel like they are fighting empty air.
  

Limitless Evolution 1 (Legendary)

• When a skill or item has reached the pinnacle of its abilities, this skill can be used to enhance the skill or item. It also reveals the requirements for advancing a skill or item to its next level.
  
• Cost: Three-day casting time, consumes all the user’s Divine Aura.
  
• As a legendary skill, Limitless Evolution does not occupy a skill slot.
  

Demonbane had reached the required level for an evolution, which Darren was glad for. If he was going to fight a Demon Lord, he wanted to do it right and stash every trick he had in his pocket. He spent the next two weeks holed up in a cave on the First Layer performing the evolutions on the skill, as well as upgrading some of his less hardy equipment.

[Demonbane 10] (Epic) has evolved to [Demon Calamity 1] (Mythic)

• Massively enhanced damage against all demons.
  
• The blood of demons heals the user’s wounds and replenishes their Divine Energy.
  
• Demons of a lower rank will experience existential terror at the sight of you.
  

[Leaf in the Breeze 10] has evolved to [Leaf in the Storm, Stone in the River 1] (Epic)

• Allows you to switch from an untouchable style of dodging and weaving to an unbreakable defensive stance instantaneously.
  
• Using this movement ability will focus your mind and enhance your concentration.
  
• This ability becomes faster and more powerful the longer you maintain it.
  

Item Evolutions

• Sturdy Demonhide boots (Rare) has evolved to Demoncrushing Legion boots (Epic)
  
  • These boots increase movement speed and increase damage dealt to demons by kicks.
    
• Firebreath Shield (Rare) has evolved to [Dragonslayer’s Aegis] (Epic)
  
  • This aegis generates a shield of golden light that specializes in defending against fire-based attacks.
    
• Demonhide Cloak (Rare) has evolved to Cloak of Concealment (Epic)
  
  • This cloak hides the wearer from sight, allowing them to defy perception skills so long as they do not draw attention to themselves.
    

Properly equipped to fight a dragon-type demon lord, Darren began his quest. The first order of business was figuring out how to get into this demon lord’s fortress. On that front, he had several options. First, he could attack the castle itself and ambush the demon lord there. Darren didn’t like that idea so much, since there would be too many unknowns, even if he scouted the place beforehand.

He could also wait for the demon lord to leave and then attack it while it was outside of the castle, but then he wouldn’t be able to scout the battlefield at all, he’d have to fight wherever the confrontation happened. Worse, Darren had fought several devil dragon-type demons before, and all of them could fly, either through magic or using wings. If Darren let the demon lord take to the air, it might not even stop somewhere he could catch it, even with his new movement ability.

No, there was one more option, and this was the one Darren had already decided on. He would lure the demon lord out of its lair to fight him. To do that, he would need to go in.

One of the surprises Darren found when exploring the Second Layer of Hell was that he started to find demon societies in increasing abundance. The first layer was essentially complete wilderness, but the second layer had a few scattered tribes here and there. But where he was now, on the Third Layer, there were true monuments to a sophisticated culture.

Already, he’d encountered several villages and towns, and he’d heard the greater fiends he’d encountered camping together and speaking in hushed, guttural languages. By this point, he could even understand many of the words, though most of the phrases he knew were curses and swears shouted by demons moments before he drove Melancholy through their hearts.

Darren quickly identified a village very close to the demon lord’s castle. Given its proximity, this demon lord would not allow its continued existence.

Darren pulled the hood of his cloak up over his head as he made his way to the village. An ordinary cloak wouldn’t have hidden him from the demons, but what he was wearing now was an epic-ranked cloak of concealment. He’d enchanted the item up from a common-grade scrap of cloth into the nearly impenetrable disguise it was now. Using it, even fourth-order demons wouldn’t be able to sense his humanity without a detailed scan from a detection skill.

Darren examined the village. There were several kinds of demons here, some intelligent and others not. Most of them were of the humanoid variety. The lesser fiends, who looked mostly like imps, except grown the size of an average human.

They were fast and were one of the species of demons that always wielded weapons. Their skill varied widely from member to member, and Darren had fought a few who’d been extremely difficult opponents. Most, however, had been easily subdued.

“Did you hear there’s a human paladin on the Second Layer?” one of the fiends said in a hushed whisper.

“Impossible,” another fiend replied, waving around a tankard of roiling blood. “Those are just stories. No human could survive on the second layer for more than a month or two. The Demonic Aura is too thick for them. They’d either die or turn into one of us.” He jammed a large butcher’s knife into the throat of a squealing pig-like demon, which wriggled in terror as the fiend slowly cut the lesser demon’s head off and butchered it for meat.

“I’m telling you, I heard this from a reliable source,” the other fiend said while its companion butchered the demon pig. “He was coming down from the surface after harvesting some humans for the demon lord’s army. Some bandits on the surface’ve signed a pact with Lord Nylyeth, you see, and they’ve been sending us human slaves to butcher and eat. But while he was on his way down, the mounts for everyone in his entire warband were slaughtered by a human paladin.”

The demon butcher snorted. “It seems to me this friend of yours let his dinner get the better of him. I don’t understand why Lord Nylyeth insists on having his food freshly slaughtered. If you ask me, humans should be killed and butchered on the surface. Do it right and the souls will keep long enough in the flesh to be perfectly filling.”

The demon butcher looked up, waiting for the other fiend to respond. But only silence filled the air. The demon butcher looked up from his work. The dying pig had finally stopped squealing, and he finished hacking off the head with a few messy swings that crunched through the pig’s spine.

He hadn’t heard Darren’s approach over the squealing of the pig on the table, nor had he heard Melancholy stab into the other fiend’s chest, killing him with a single blow. The lesser fiend vanished, turned into pure Divine Aura by Melancholy’s power.

“Hey, where did you go?” the demon called. “You run off in fear of your human?” The demon butcher snorted to himself, but the derisive smirk on his face faded when he couldn’t find the other demon at all.

Looking around, he couldn’t find anyone. There wasn’t a fiend, devil dog, or other demons anywhere in sight. This wasn’t a large village, but a few dozen lesser fiends called this place home. And yet, it was completely silent.

“H-hello?” the demon said. “Anyone?” His voice echoed through the empty village.

An instant later, Melancholy swung around and swept through him as well.

This was not a task that was entirely unfamiliar to Darren. He had raided small villages and hamlets like this before. Doing so let him replenish his supplies far faster than crafting and hunting on his own. He reserved his time for just putting the final touches on an item so his Limitless Evolution ability would let him upgrade it.

And so the specter of death swept through the demon village. As far as Darren knew, the demons had no children; they popped into existence fully grown. He’d witnessed the process a few times in the past. When enough Demonic Aura converged on a demonic spirit, a new demon came into being.

This village had been populated entirely by the humanoid lesser fiends and the unintelligent demons they kept as livestock. Not one of them was above the third order, and many were below the first. Darren took care of them effortlessly.

After harvesting everything of value from the demon village, Darren pulled a torch from his inventory and lit it with a candle one of the fiends had left burning. From there, all he had to do was go from building to building, sprinkling tar and oil. Soon, the whole village was going up in flames.

This would catch the demon lord’s attention quickly enough. But one of Darren’s quests called for the destruction of three settlements, not just one. That would certainly get the demon lord’s attention.

Since Darren had already accepted the quest, he quickly left this burning village, even as he saw a large black shape take to the air above the castle in the distance. There was enough room overhead on the third layer that even something as large as a dragon could fly high enough to be no more than a small dot in the sky.

That must have been the demon lord. It was coming to investigate, but it was still cautious. It waited for a group of lower-ranking fourth-order demons to leave the castle and start riding in the direction of the village on horned demonic steeds.

Darren withdrew for now. He activated his movement skill to circle the castle as quickly as possible. There was another village in the shadow of the castle itself, and keeping the castle between him and there would buy him a little extra time.

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