Chapter 394: Don't Laugh, You Couldn't Beat Level Two Either
Bruno said, "You see, Count, I've had this one locked up for nearly five years now, and every single time, that's all he ever says."
Kian took one look at the daemon's shape. Oh, nice. A Tzeentch daemon, this one had proper credentials.
His mouth curled into a cruel little smile.
"You're going about this all wrong. Do it my way, and I guarantee you, in a matter of days, he'll spill everything he's got."
The bird-headed daemon watched the group muttering behind the glass, contempt flashing in its avian eyes. It was a proud, credentialed servant of the great Lord of Change, god of Truth, nothing like those wild unaffiliated daemons. Everything was proceeding exactly as its master intended. Some mere human Inquisitor was never going to pry its master's secrets out of it.
But the next instant, the case opened, and Kian strode in with the burning blade raised, stab stab stab, three strikes, or rather two and a half. The bird-headed daemon let out a genuinely agonized scream, those two-and-a-half strikes leaving it at a quarter health, its soul stretched thin as paper.
"Right, I think this is roughly how the spell went."
Kian muttered to himself, working through the ritual Silentium had taught him, and burned a brand straight into the daemon's core essence. With that done, the case sealed shut again, and everyone left.
The bird-headed daemon, wracked with pain from its wounds and its soul stretched to its absolute limit, tried to steady itself.
"Stay strong! This is just a human trick. All of this is part of the Lord of Change's grand design! Trust in truth, trust in wisdom, the Lord of Truth will see me through this!"
Even in agony, the Tzeentch daemon kept feeding itself reassurances.
That was when the brand Kian had left on its soul activated.
A cluster of screens flickered to life across its soul, and for a moment the daemon was simply stunned. But the shock passed quickly, and it focused in, studying them closely. This was a seasoned daemon, one that scorned such a petty human trick on principle, and instead studied it out of genuine curiosity, wondering what method the enemy thought would actually break it.
The first screen showed a metal foot, split into several segments, each held together by screws. A mouse cursor kept fiddling with the screws, sliding them into open slots, slowly dismantling the foot piece by piece. But the cursor kept making mistakes, sliding screws into the wrong spots, leaving no open slot left, and failing the puzzle. Every time it failed, an eerily catchy voice would chime in over the screen: "Don't laugh, you couldn't beat level two either!"
The bird-headed daemon's brow furrowed at the sight. This was an absurdly simple logic puzzle. Tzeentch daemons were famous for their intellect and scheming, and with its mind it had already worked out nine hundred and ninety-nine possible solutions in an instant.
"Pathetic!"
It watched the screen for a good while longer. The cursor kept fumbling around like it had no intelligence whatsoever, picking the wrong slot every single time and failing over and over. Every few dozen seconds, that same taunting line would pop up again: don't laugh, you couldn't beat level two either.
Irritated by the cursor's incompetence, the daemon shifted its attention to the second screen.
The second screen showed a great bridge, monsters swarming in from the far side, and on the near side a tiny figure firing a gun nonstop. Every so often, two beams of light would drift down from above through the monster swarm. Red beams were debuffs, slowing fire rate and the like. Blue beams were buffs, boosting fire rate, improving projectile spread.
Every time the little gunman touched a blue beam, his firepower surged, mowing down the monsters across the bridge in waves. As the screen showed him soaking up more and more blue buffs, his firepower kept climbing higher and higher, cutting through the horde in sweeping arcs.
Watching the mob-clearing spectacle on screen, the bird-headed daemon felt an odd little thrill of satisfaction despite itself. Even a daemon could get a kick out of a good clear-em-up game, though normally the only human games they ever bothered with were simple match-three puzzles.
But just as it started to enjoy the carnage, the little gunman on screen began drifting straight into the red debuffs instead. His weapon degraded from a heavy autogun down to a rifle, then from a rifle down to a pistol. The pistol's firepower couldn't hold back the swarm anymore, and the little gunman got swatted flat by a monster's paw. Game over.
Don't laugh, your turn, and you couldn't beat level two either.
The bird-headed daemon was baffled.
"Wait, what, are you actually braindead? Why would you walk straight into the red gate!"
It kept watching, and every single time, the little gunman would drift into the red gate right at the peak of his firepower, whether by accident or on purpose, tanking his power right before getting flattened. Failure, every time.
Watching this display of pure, self-inflicted incompetence gave the bird-headed daemon something close to an aneurysm. Renowned for its intellect, it simply couldn't stand the sight anymore and forced its gaze away, onto the third screen.
The third screen showed a man in a maze, a number 1 floating over his head, surrounded by monsters with various numbers of their own hovering above them. The little figure could kill any monster with a lower number than his own, and every kill made his own number grow. At the end of the maze waited a princess, guarded by a boss with an enormous number.
Every single time, the little figure would grind up his number by killing the weaker monsters, but before his number ever surpassed the boss's, he'd charge in eagerly to fight it anyway, and get flattened in one hit. Game over.
Don't laugh, your turn, and you couldn't beat level two either.
For a brief moment, something hollow flickered behind the bird-headed daemon's eyes. But it caught itself and snapped back to focus almost immediately.
It stared at the hundred screens now circling its very core essence, each one running its own little logic puzzle, and every single player on every single screen losing through the stupidest possible choices, over and over. Watching the parade of idiocy, the daemon's calm, wisdom-laden expression slowly twisted, its composed gaze giving way, bit by bit, to raw fury...
By the second day, the daemon had broken completely. It sat there catatonic, eyes rolling up and down uncontrollably, drooling.
"Heh heh... your turn, and you couldn't beat level two either... heh heh... don't laugh, don't laugh..."
When Bruno resumed the interrogation, the bird-headed daemon spilled every single secret it had, like beans out of a bamboo tube.
Bruno looked at the daemon, thoroughly broken and gibbering now, then turned to Kian with real solemnity.
"Count, I'd like to extend you a formal invitation. Join my order. With methods like yours against daemons, staying at the side of an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor, doing internal cleanup work, is a genuine waste of your talents. Only on the front lines against daemons themselves would you truly do justice to the gifts the Emperor has given you."
Kian, meanwhile, had a bag of cream cookies in hand and was stuffing them into his mouth without pause.
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