Chapter 18: PEST. An exercise in futility
Chapter 18: PEST. An exercise in futility
I hated being stuck in creatures I could control. No, not hated—by now I was fucking done with hatred. It was just too damn tiresome. Instead, I resented it with passion. To be a passenger on a ride and be unable to choose where it moved… Absolutely fucking awful. The fact that I only just had a taste of freedom and now lost it only added to that feeling.
Despite this, I was distracted from that resentment by all the curious and strange things about my current host. That, and the pure pleasure of sucking EXP out of him as fast as I could. And damn, the guy had a shit-ton of it, just lying around free! Which is something that I’ve never seen or heard about before.
It’s not like he had a class. No, just EXP and a bunch of skills that shouldn’t belong to a bird. ‘Devourer’ was the strangest one, and I couldn’t say at first what it did. My observation soon showed that first, it let Voren get EXP from eating corpses. Then there were his titles… I’ve heard about demons who escaped from Hell sometimes, or were summoned, but I didn’t hear anyone mention they looked like birds. Or were birds, because that’s what Voren’s character sheet told me in the ‘Species’ line, and not ‘demon’.
After Voren ate the body of my previous host and got a bunch of EXP from it, he set to hunt. And hell, if I had doubts he was something with actual fucking brain in his head—and I didn’t doubt, because no matter what I told him, if he wasn’t more intelligent than a monster, he’d be my puppet right now—I would’ve abandoned those now.
The guy set off to exterminate every creature he could in this forest, I swear. The first thing he did after our first conversation was going to the nearest stream and building webs all over it, and then in it, too. Webs! Some thicker, some thinner, some straight, some in weird shapes… And then he flew to the next watering hole, and the next one, and repeated the process all over.
I talked little with him at that time, content with watching and throwing out jabs when mood hit me. But when after a full day of building webs, a day that added me good thousand EXP and then some. Enough with addition of what I already had to level up my ‘EXP Draining’ ability to level 2. I also had some left from that kobold, and from before, but that wouldn’t be enough to level it further. Which was a real damn pity. The faster I will suck all EXP out of Voren, the sooner he will kill himself on someone.
And then, after some sleep, Voren returned to his first nets, and I had a good feeling that this plan was fucked. The nets may have not caught everything that went to drink in the stream, but damn it if there wasn’t enough fish and rodents and other fucking animals to fill a good third of what I just sucked out. And it was only one set of traps of the many.
When Voren cleaned them all, he moved around the forest to make even more, hunting creatures of his size as he went. He had a clean technique for it. He would just swoop in, grab them with claws, and sting their eyes out. Or just outright peck through them.
The more Voren stuffed his stomach, the worse my mood became. I had plans and plots, but they all held little substance at the moment. I wished Voren would just burst from everything he ate, but not to the death—just enough that some predator he didn’t eat yet would finish him off. Pipe dreams, hah. The guy had a black hole in his stomach.
Eventually, after I levelled ‘EXP Draining’ to level 3, and it made about zero fucking difference, I grew desperate enough to say ‘Screw it!’ to myself and forget about Voren’s free EXP, no matter how damn tempting it was, and suck out the rest of his character sheet. First, of course, abilities—the key tools of attack and defence.
Both his level 1 abilities disappeared into nothing in an instant, but this was when strangest thing happened. Or, well, just strange. Voren was fucking strange as he was. When it happened, he almost choked on a piece of meat. His pain shot through me, and I hurriedly removed myself from his receptors and from the sensation.
After a moment of pause, Voren let out an indignant chirp and shouted at me, ‘You bastard! Do you think I will stop just because you took out some useless abilities?’
I wondered what brought him that pain. Normally, the EXP extraction process was painless, like a mosquito bite. Still, my smugness overrode my curiosity. ‘This is just the beginning! Just you wait and I will make my next host piss on your corpse. I’d like to see your despair when you are wingless and helpless.’
He just let out a bird-snort, like he was in control here, that fucking eating machine. ‘Despair? Ha. You are just an annoyance.’
He finished his current meal, a simple rabbit, and flew into a web-nest where Voren slept at nights. Then I registered more pain coming from him. Confused, I watched from his eyes as he sat there, wondering what the hell it was all about.
‘Hey, annoyance. Still feeling smug? Take another look at my skills now,’ he thought at me.
So I did, and motherfucker! The ‘Berserk’ skill I sucked out was right back, like I didn’t do shit!
‘Asshole demon. Don’t you think you are so invulnerable.’ If I had someone’s teeth to grind, I’d be doing it now. ‘Does it feel very nice to lose and get abilities? I can at least make you fucking suffer, and I will.’
He let out a birdsong that could pass as a laughter. ‘Bring your worst.’