The Twelve Apocalypses: A Damned Soul's Path to the Abyss

As I stood in another plaza, waiting, I couldn’t help but reflect on recent events.

The previous day, Glaustro had handed out final orders and recommendations. He then dismissed us with a command to return to his compound the following morning at eight o’clock sharp.

Mia and I immediately followed his orders to the letter. That meant hunting down the closest equipment shop and purchasing several items that would make functioning on Lagyel possible: a set of goggles, an odd, mask-like air filtering device, and a large poncho that covered most of one’s body and came with a hood.

The total cost came to 200 souls, 100 per set, and it was only that cheap because it was standard kit for Lagyel. I gladly paid for both myself and Mia, even if it made the cat girl shoot me disapproving, embarrassed looks.

If it was standard, perhaps the legion should have provided it for free. But it seemed to be yet another way for the demons to separate ’worthy’ additions to an invasion from those who didn’t deserve to be there. Which, frankly, yeah. A hundred souls should be nothing to a demon. The inability to afford that much would not speak well for their abilities. Discover more content at empire

What confused me more was that, apparently, even demons were ordered to gear up in these. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Their natural toughness should turn any environmental danger into a trivial matter, so the precautions seemed excessive.

Several demons had brought up the same protest when Glaustro told us to acquire all the gear, and were swiftly silenced. The sergeant seemed to take a perverse amount of glee in telling them they would understand soon enough, and that anyone who disobeyed would regret it.

So, the next morning, there I was, herded from the compound to a small nearby plaza where a bored clerk waited with a clipboard.

Unlike the last time I was preparing to invade a world, I actually knew what I was signing up for. Likewise, I wasn’t part of a charging, screaming mob set on nothing but murder, fueled by an invasive command that twisted my mind into a turmoil of rage and desperation.

In a way, it was all… mundane.

There was no grand speech. No threats or promises of pain if we failed. Just a clerk who kept ticking things off, then proceeded to pull a black crystal from a pouch very carefully before tossing it into the middle of the small plaza.

The crystal cracked, and a surge of black energy snapped out in a corona that sliced through space itself. Several seconds later, the view stabilized into an expanse of sand… and nothing else.

No one made a move to pass through the portal. I could only stare blankly as the wind picked up and scattered some golden grains of sand onto the ground of the plaza. The clerk gave all of us a very displeased glare.

It was Glaustro who finally urged us to action, even though the big demon himself didn’t seem all that enthused by the prospect.

"Well, let us be off."

He rumbled the order, then pulled on all the equipment he already had hanging off him. The poncho went up, swiftly followed by the goggles and the breather.

I tried not to gawk at my commander. If he was taking things so seriously, then…

I equipped myself quickly, ignoring the discomfort it caused. The breather was a piece with a short tube you stuck in your mouth, and it seemed to rely entirely on that to stay on top of your face. I was getting better at being in Torment, but gripping that short tube sent pain stabbing through my skull. The goggles and the poncho started itching immediately, worse than any regular clothes.

At least I was getting into the right mindset. The combination of Torment with my new gear did, indeed, make me want to kill something.

Demons filed through the portal reluctantly. I could see them stumbling and shivering on the other side, so it was with some dread that I crossed over myself.

I hated Lagyel immediately.

The sun beat down on us mercilessly, reflected on all sides by a sea of swirling sand. The sand itself felt like graters running over every bit of exposed skin, and I genuinely wished to hop back over into Torment for a second. Unfortunately, since Mia and I were among the last to step through, the portal slammed shut behind me.

That’s when the feeling of weakness hit me like a sledgehammer.

I groaned and clutched at my chest as my heart and mana core stuttered. It felt like some invisible giant was squeezing down on me, assessing me, judging me. The giant must have found me unworthy, because it proceeded to squeeze down tighter, trying to force the life out of me.

Except, a second before it could, the link that connected me to the Abyss pulsed in the depths of my being. Angry energy exploded into my body, shoving back the relentless pressure.

My eyes snapped open, though I couldn’t remember closing them in the first place, and I beheld more than a dozen golden chains wrapped around me. More than half of them started to glow red and disintegrated on the spot, but many still lingered, cutting into my flesh, constraining me, making me feel weak.

I hurriedly dove into my mana core, and I didn’t like what I found there.

My regular mana was just fine, but the demonic fifty percent of me was… dimmed. Made lesser. It was like looking at a picture you knew was supposed to be vibrant and beautiful, only to find the colors faded to nearly nothing under unrelenting sunlight.

I managed to recover enough to glance around me, and I saw those same golden chains around every single demon in Glaustro’s unit, including the sergeant himself. In fact, their restraints were far more numerous, constricting them even more tightly than mine bound me.

The only exception to all this was Mia. The cat girl had startled when the chains manifested around her, but they broke and fizzled out almost instantly, like they had failed to grasp onto anything at all.

Everyone’s chains were rapidly vanishing from sight. I couldn’t touch them even when I reached out. My hand passed through them like a mirage, but I was under no illusions that they weren’t real. They were disappearing, but they weren’t gone. I could still feel them, after all, winding about my soul.

Wow, everyone is a mess, I thought idly, looking at the demons in various states of pain and misery. Several had even fallen over, twitching in agony.

To my shock, Glaustro erupted into laughter. "Please, don’t tell me you’ve only ever invaded weak worlds before? Ha! Welcome to a real invasion, troops. Know that the world itself will oppose you from here on out. You will need to adapt to being here, slowly, and break those chains on your own. If you can."

Having said that, the sergeant flexed. His exertion briefly made his chains materialize again, only for several to crack under his strength and fade away as motes of light, for real this time.

There was plenty of grumbling as the demons picked themselves up. It amused me that I was taking the development much better than they were. I definitely felt the effects of the chains, make no mistake, but my fifty percent of lingering humanity was doing wonders for me.

What wasn’t doing wonders for me was all the sand.

It was easy to ignore initially, when the shock of the chains and the world’s suppression had me preoccupied, but it was getting harder to do so by the second. I felt like the grains of sand were cutting into something deeper than just my skin. Despite the blazing sun, I felt a shiver of fear run down my spine.

Almost on instinct, a shield popped up around me. My body strengthening technique came to life also, giving me a much needed physical boost to withstand all the nonsense. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

So imagine my surprise when grains of sand slashed right through my protections, then crashed into my skin, utterly ignoring the mana woven into that as well. I could do little more than stare in disbelief as my mana shield was obliterated rapidly by the countless grains of sand, one tiny hole at a time.

I flexed my mana, regenerated the missing bits, and then tripled the amount I was using to shore myself up, but it did me no good. The sand just continued to pierce through with laughable ease. My eyebrow started to twitch in agitation.

If I can’t protect myself, then…

In that moment, I realized exactly how miserable my experience in the world of Lagyel was going to be.

Another shiver of fear coursed through me, this time at the thought of what sand like this would have done to my eyes. As it was, my body’s passive toughening was the only reason rivulets of blood weren’t running down every exposed patch of skin I had. While the sand had no trouble cutting through mana, my enhanced, ’naturally’ denser skin stopped the grains flat easily enough. Eyes, however, weren’t as significantly affected by advancement through mage ranks. Neither were lips, for that matter. Or the inside of one’s mouth.

I shuddered to think what it would be like to breathe without proper protection on this hellish world. At least the legion’s interest made a ton of sense. If the underlying value of the sand wasn’t enough, then the sheer torment of living on a planet like this definitely would be.

Our glorious supreme leader probably took one look at the world and creamed himself in ecstasy at the sheer inspiration it imbued him with, or something.

The thought made me scowl. I hated the fact that we just might pop back into Torment to find it completely covered in howling sand.

I shivered uncontrollably, then jumped when a mental presence pushed itself insistently into my thoughts.

It was the voice of my commander, speaking directly into the minds of his troop.

"As you can probably surmise, Lagyel is a desert world. The relevant divisions still haven’t figured out if the mana dampening and cutting effect is a natural property of the local sand, or if the trait is imbued into the sand by the local defenders. We would need to do extensive digging to find out, but the volume of sand available for research and crafting is already valuable on its own."

Glaustro looked mightily amused as he eyed the demons around him, all of whom were flinching and tightening their ponchos to minimize their exposure to the sand. Gazing at them myself, I realized the sand, like the chains, was affecting them even more than it was bothering me. Some of the demons were visibly bloodied already.

"The problem is, this sand is particularly troublesome for us to face. As beings largely composed of mana, it is a natural weakness of ours. So, you will need to work on your healing and defenses while we are here. I warmly recommend enchanted equipment, too, especially with self-mending properties. Otherwise, you run the risk of letting the sand wear away on your equipment until its enchantments fail."

I grimaced. Having seen the way Yules worked, I knew her enchantments were sunk deep into each item, protecting them from damage. However, seeing as the sand could so easily slice through mana, I sincerely doubted that my equipment had more than its natural toughness to face the damnable grains with. Glaustro’s warning certainly rang true. If the sand could to enough damage to armor or weapons, then it would eventually destroy all their enchantments.

This thought made me draw my sword from its scabbard in a panic. The soul blade was the most valuable thing I owned, and if the sand could just damage it into uselessness…

Thankfully, it only took a few seconds of examination while demons groaned around me to realize that I was worrying for nothing. Unlike my barrier and my armor, the blade didn’t seem affected at all. It stood impervious in the face of the sand deluge, its soft green metal glowing as all the grains ricocheted off it harmlessly. Hells, as some of them landed on the edge of the blade, I watched the weapon slice them apart effortlessly.

Now, there’s an interesting thing to keep in mind.

I frowned in consternation.

So far, my sword had shown such effectiveness only against souls. It could slice through them, and the flesh they were tied to, with reckless abandon. But metal, wood, and other such materials? My sword was no more effective against them than a regular, somewhat dull blade would be.

So, if it’s cutting the sand, does that mean the sand… has a soul? That it’s alive, somehow?

I pondered briefly, then decided to dismiss the idea for the time being. Even if it was somehow true, which I found highly doubtful, I could do nothing about it at the moment. Was I supposed to go around slashing at the sandstorm? What would that achieve?

Besides, I didn’t have any proof that the large grains of sand my sword had sliced through were truly ’harmed’ by it. If the weapon somehow stopped their anti-mana properties, then maybe the information could be valuable, but I didn’t even know how to go about testing that theory.

Instead of wasting my time on that, I did as my commander bid. I dropped the strengthening and the shield, then drew heavily on my body refinement technique. Focusing it on my skin alone allowed me to heal quickly from the sand’s minor abrasions, and even toughen up my defenses further.

Of course, that made me realize the best approach would be to just strip down and let the sand have a go at me, so as to strengthen the entirety of my skin all at once.

Which left me with a question: was I enough of a masochistic to do something like that, for an unknown and strictly potential boost to my toughness?