Chapter 60 (Patreon)

Chapter 60

Riven couldn’t help but smirk at that one, and he began to feel a little bit better having his friends back so he could talk about what happened.  “Succubi huh?”

“YES!”  Athela whacked him again and sat her big thorax down on his lap with a prompt humph.  “Though you should really wait a while before you even attempt to bind one.  I assume they’ve already started knocking on the door in your mind?”

Riven blinked, then nodded.  He could feel numerous otherworldly creatures, their auras, pressing up against his consciousness - inviting him to come speak with them.  “Only a handful, but yes.”

“Well ignore them for now.”

“Why?”

“Because the longer you wait, the more time they’ll have to discover you.  Don’t commit to one until you have more options.  Plus you can’t bind them until level 35 anyways, right?”

“Right.”

Athela nodded vigorously. “Yes yes!  I’d say wait at least a month!  Despite your fast progression, binding demonic familiars and acquiring new contract slots is very hard to do most of the time and is not to be taken lightly.  Wait a while and then decide, don’t even try to talk to them now.  Oh and that poor Ben guy, such a shame!  Was he at least tasty!?”

Riven’s eyes narrowed at the chipper spider in the dark, ancient cellar, and he didn’t bother to reply.

Athela quickly caught onto the hint, and her usually chipper demeanor faltered under his angry gaze.  “Sorry.  I forget you’re a little nicer than most warlocks I’ve heard of, or vampires for that matter.  You probably felt bad about accidentally eating him.  That’s it, isnt’ it?”

“Don’t feel bad.” Azmoth stated in a deep, rumbling voice as the huge demon approached the other two and slid down the wall with a grating sound of his metal plates against stone until he came to an abrupt stop.  The hellscape brutalisk placed a clawed hand on Riven’s shoulder and shook his head.  “Not your fault.”

Riven gave Azmoth an appreciative nod.  “Thanks man.  Yeah it made me feel shitty, that’s for sure.  What’s worse is that I was trying to save him.  I’ll figure my thoughts out eventually… but onto more important things.  I can now exit the dungeon at any time and end the tutorial if I focus on the command ‘Exit Dungeon’ now that I’ve killed a miniboss, but first I’d like to evolve you two.  You both have pending evolutions, right?”

Azmoth grinned widely and Athela shrieked with delight.

“Yes!  We have our very own evolutions!”  Athela began dancing up and down on her four hind legs, but abruptly stopped to look down at Riven skeptically.  “I’m not sure you can afford them yet though.”

“What do you mean?”

“How much Willpower do you have?  Have you checked out what our available evolutions are yet?  This is another reason why you need to wait on the new familiar, each additional familiar will cost more willpower and every familiar you have will take up more willpower with each of their evolutions.  If you’re not careful you could contract too many and stunt your own growth due to willpower being more of a priority to intelligence.”

Truthfully Riven had been so caught up in his own changes and the events that’d happened that he hadn’t checked his minions’ status pages yet, but Athela did him the favor of pulling them up for him.  Each evolution would cost the master a certain amount of Willpower stat points, otherwise the evolution couldn’t proceed.  He also quickly realized that the evolutions were slightly different in terms of what they offered: Athela had actual race evolutions, while Azmoth had bodily modification evolutions but kept his race the same.

[Available Evolutions for Athela:

• Dryder:  Your blood weaver will evolve into a dryder, a half woman, half giant spider demon that gains a large bonus to magical damage and mana regeneration.  Comes with 1 randomized offensive spell designated by the system.  COST: 11 additional Willpower.
• Abyssal Trapper: Your blood weaver will evolve into an Abyssal Trapper.  This demon has a set of 6 legs and 2 large scythes, along with numerous appendages along its back that are utilized for snaring enemies with webbing or injecting poisons.  This evolution trades the speed of the blood weaver for a slow moving and tanky evolution, but the utility and damage output is drastically increased.  COST: 18 additional Willpower.
• Arshakai: Your blood weaver will evolve into an Arshakai.  Arshakai are humanoids with spider-like attributes, specializing in assassination with their high speed and agility, and utilizing their minor shape-shifting abilities to infiltrate enemy establishments.  Shape shifting abilities are limited to both spider and humanoid forms.  COST: 12 additional Willpower.]

[Available Evolutions for Azmoth:

• Tail: Your Hellscape Brutalisk will gain a tail, increasing the agility per level as well as balance and acrobatic ability.  Your brutalisk will become faster and more nimble.  COST: 7 additional Willpower.]

Riven quickly reviewed his own status page after reviewing the potential evolutions.

[Riven Thane’s Status Page:

• Level 18
• Pillar Orientations:] Unholy Foundation, Blood Specialty, Infernal, Shadow
• Core of Original Sin - Gluttony:] (Under Construction)(???)
• Traits:] Race: Pureblooded Vampire (Extreme Darkness Regeneration)(Sunlight Decay)(Extreme Weakness to Silver weapons, Sun pillar, and Light pillar attacks), Class: Warlock Adept, Adrenaline Junky (Blood)(+15% to Agility)
• Abilities:] Blessing of the Crow (Unholy), Wretched Snare (Unholy), Bloody Razors (Blood), Blood Lance (Blood)(Tier 2), Hell’s Armor (Infernal)
• Stats:] 50 Strength, 98 Sturdiness, 188 Intelligence, 98 Agility, 1 Luck, -308 Charisma,              155 Vampiric Perception, 59 Willpower, 9 Faith
• Free Stat Points: 14
• Minions:] Athela, Level 13 Blood Weaver [14 Willpower Requirement].  Azmoth, Level 9 Hellscape Brutalisk [20 Willpower Requirement].
• Equipped Items:] Crude Cultist’s Robes (1 def), Black Redemption (74 shadow dmg, 68% mana regen, shadow dmg +27%, Black Lightning), Chalgathi Cultist Amulet (???), Leather Boots (1 def), Backpack of Supplies (Guild Hall: Stone Manor), Witch’s Ring of Grand Casting (+26 Intelligence), Cloak of the Tundra (22 def, +56 bonus def vs frost), Breath of Valgeshia (48 def, +13 dmg & +9% mana output dmg for blood dmg, 6% mana regen)]

So he had 34 Willpower already utilized to contain their contracts.  He had 59 currently, which was 25 free points already applied.  That was just barely enough to both get Azmoth his tail and pick any one of the upgrades for Athela - including the most expensive one at an 18 Willpower cost.

“Which were you thinking you wanted?” Riven asked curiously, looking up from the hologram in front of him that portrayed his stats.

Athela immediately let out a long, exaggerated sigh.  “I was talking to my mother about this back in the void.  She’s got a load of her own opinions… but she said to go with my heart.  I think I’ll take Arshakai.  It’ll take some adjusting with the new body, but my fighting style and trait are agility based and I don’t see myself changing that.  Plus the infiltrating stuff would be so neat and I can switch back into a spider whenever I need to!  Hehehe!!!”

The spider mischievously rubbed her two front paws together, causing Riven to grin.

“Fine.  Let me apply my points, and I’ll start the upgrade process now.  Is there anything I need to know about these evolutions before we proceed?”

He looked from Athela to Azmoth, but both shook their heads and remained in quiet excitement.  It was palpable for both of them, Riven could feel it, and he quietly assigned all 14 of his free points to Willpower.  Though he didn’t need all of them for the evolutions, the additional few points would help for whatever evolutions or minions came next.

But upon selecting the evolutions for his minions, the changes were a lot more violent than he’d expected.  At least in Athela’s case.

“AAAAAAAAHHAHHHHHHH!!!!” Athela screamed in both excitement and incredible pain as her body shifted, limbs snapped, and parts of her innards began to bulge and split her carapace as inky, smooth, pitch-black skin started replacing her harder exterior.  She belched ichor and writhed on the floor while hiccuping the nasty stuff out of her mouth every couple seconds during sudden, abrupt movements as her body expanded.

Meanwhile, Azmoth looked back over his shoulder with a ‘Tehehe’ chuckle as his lower back exploded - and out of it came a long, thick tail.  It was spiked, covered in plate armor just like the rest of him and easily doubled the length of his body from the tip of his head to the tip of his new appendage.  Sinewy, muscular flesh underneath and between the spikes and obsidian plates flexed as he waved it around in the air, and the demon looked rather proud of himself as he spun around to excitedly show Riven.  Sometimes Riven forgot that Azmoth was still a baby in the eyes of demonkind, but moments like this gave him pause to remember and he celebrated with the large demon with a thumbs up and a laugh.

*SNAP-CRACK-POP*

“OW THIS HURTS!”  Athela groaned and rolled around on the floor, finally coming into the final stages of her evolution as her body’s features began to shape themselves from the writhing mass of flesh and muscle.  Toned calf muscles, thighs, abdominals and arms quickly took shape as ichor was slathered onto the floor after being purged from her body.

Riven’s eyebrows rose in surprise upon her final completion, and as Athela stood up in the darkness of the cellar they resided in - Riven couldn’t help think that she was actually quite pretty.  He would never, EVER tell her that, hell he’d go to the grave with it so that she didn’t get a big head or make fun of him for the rest of his life, but even as weird as it was to admit it to himself - he had to acknowledge it.  It was very much a surprise considering he had been expecting something more along the lines of thin and wiry with more spider-like features, but she looked more human that she did arachnid now with a very demonic twist to it.

She’d turned into the semblance of a young woman with silky, black hair that trailed down to her lower back.  Her skin was a mixture of white and pitch black, as black as the void, and it almost glinted in the light of Azmoths flames as Azmoth flared up slightly to look at the tail he’d acquired.  Athela was stark naked, had prominent womanly curves and features, the body of an Olympian and a perfectly symmetrical face with a strong but very feminine jawline.

Then came the demonic touch:  She had the same two brilliantly red eyes.  A long, black tongue briefly whipped around the room at a length well over twenty feet as she stretched - cutting through the far stone wall like a knife through butter before she withdrew the tongue to zip it back into her mouth as she gave Riven a pearly-white and perfect smile.  She had six arachnid legs protruding from her back as well, each of them far sharper, longer and larger than the ones she’d had in the past - and she was easily able to climb up the wall using them or even just using her humanoid limbs as well that seemed like they could stick to surfaces without a problem.  The extra legs were essentially blades coming out of her back, and were no doubt to be used as weapons.  On top of that, every movement she made was utterly silent… Riven was pretty sure that it had to be a perk of some kind because she made literally no noise walking up the wall until she began to test it herself.  She tapped the ceiling up above once as it made no sound, then tapped it again with the same spider leg with a resultant sound.

*Picture is below in attachments*