"That is because I had only just escaped." The voice settled into something almost conversational, Barry Dort's mouth moving wrong around the words.
"Unprepared, and latched on to a weak girl out of necessity. Do you genuinely believe you could have touched a noble demon such as myself under any other circumstance?"
Ethan stared up at him for a moment.
"Yeah," he said. "I do."
"Maybe. Maybe not." The voice shifted, losing the smugness, replacing it with something closer to genuine curiosity.
"But what I find interesting is what you are. You're not human. Not quite an abomination either — not in the way the Dark Ones' rituals typically produce."
Ethan's eyes sharpened slightly.
"You know about the Dark Ones?"
He kept his tone even, but the question landed heavier than he let on.
The Dark Ones. Those things existed thousands of years ago — long before recorded history, long before any civilization had a name for what they were doing. If this demon knows about them firsthand, he's no small fish. Not even close to one.
"Of course."
"We were there when humans first started reaching into things they didn't understand. We didn't just watch — we guided them, refined what they were fumbling through, filled in the gaps their minds couldn't cross alone."
His head tilted slightly.
"Everything walking around today that doesn't fit neatly into what humans call natural — every witch, every werewolf, every outcast, everyone who got labeled a monster and pushed to the edges — all of it traces back to those rituals. Back to us."
A slight pause, the smile not moving.
"Well. We helped humans do that. They were the ones holding the knife. The credit was always theirs to claim."
Ethan turned that over for a moment, the thought settling in as the pieces aligned. Now he understood how humans had managed to seal away the Dark Ones—because they hadn't done it alone. They didn't have the means. But with demons in their ear the whole time, feeding them the right rituals, pointing them at the right targets—
They used humans to eliminate their own competition.
"So let me guess," he said. "Good guys, right?"
"We are the good guys."
Ethan looked at him for a long second. Then he raised his middle finger.
"Right. And I'm the bad guy. You really think you can just talk me in circles and I'll forget what you are?"
The laugh that came out of Barry Dort's chest wasn't his.
"You are correct." No defensiveness, no hesitation — just honesty, which somehow made it worse.
"We did it purely for ourselves. Wipe out the competition, inherit what they left behind. And it worked — three thousand years, it worked beautifully."
"Deals, manipulation, the occasional torment when things got dull. Humans were easy. We had everything arranged exactly the way we wanted it."
The voice dropped slightly.
"And then the Son of God came." A pause. "And ruined our golden age entirely. The last two thousand years have been considerably less enjoyable — those church people made it their personal mission to hunt us at every turn."
Ethan didn't say anything for a moment.
"So that's why you hate humans so much. You lost your toy box."
"Hate is a strong word." The demon settled Barry Dort's weight against the trunk, almost relaxed.
"We simply want what was ours returned. The arrangement was perfect before it was interrupted." The red eyes moved over Ethan slowly.
"Which brings us back to you. You carry something that has no business existing. Not human, not abomination, not demon — something that shouldn't have come out of those rituals at all."
"You're stalling," Ethan said.
"I'm curious."
"Same thing."
"We designed those rituals," the demon continued, unbothered.
"We know every possible outcome they generate. Every creature, every half-thing, every failed experiment."
"And yet here you stand. Which means either someone modified our work without our knowledge — or something helped them do it."
Ethan held eye contact without blinking.
"And you want to know which one it is."
"I want to know," the demon said quietly, "who has been operating in our blind spot?"
"Nobody." Ethan's eyes started glowing.
"Humans were just doing their thing. I showed up recently. And you lot have been annoying me since day one." He rolled his neck once. "So it's time you went back to whatever hole you crawled out of."
His fingers snapped.
Jaws made of blood burst through every trunk in the treeline simultaneously — rows of jagged teeth tearing through bark, chewing through branches, consuming everything they closed around.
The demon dropped from its perch a half-second before the nearest set of teeth took the whole section of tree with it, hit the ground on all fours and kept moving.
The clearing started spinning around Ethan, slow and deliberate, and on his shoulder Thing broke into a little dance, completely unbothered by any of it.
Ethan watched the demon dart between the remaining trees, its options shrinking as the blood jaws worked through the treeline one trunk at a time.
"Isn't this fun, Thing?"
The demon changed direction sharply, trying to find a gap — but the gaps were closing, the spinning pulling everything inward, and there was nowhere left that the jaws hadn't already reached or weren't already moving toward.
***
A/N: It's decided—the next world will be .
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