Come to grips with reality

“What?” Your mouth moves faster than your brain. The wizard’s game, you think. She pulled us out? Of the… of the pocket dimension? And now it’s gone?

Lia speaks up to clear your confusion. “When the angel’s bitch came to kill us,” she says, “she broke the seal holding the whole dimension together. Remember how fucked everything was getting once she showed up? Cady got us out of there before the whole place collapsed.”

“So…” you say, wrapping your tired brain around it all. “We’re back in the forest. North of Evris. The real world.”

“That is right,” says Blythe. She places a hand on your shoulder. You want to hold her hand with your own, but the cast would make it awkward, so you settle for gazing into her reassuring eyes instead. Slowly, the reality of it all sinks in.

You’re back in the real world. Not some wizard’s sandbox creation, nor the Earth you once knew, but the world in which you’ve been granted a second chance at life. Blythe and Lia’s world, where you were declared the villain before you even arrived. Where clergymen and adventurers alike will stop at nothing to claim your head. A world that knows you as a Demon Lord.

…

Thanks to Blythe’s efforts, and the mana potion that Cady ‘found,’ you are soon able to produce enough mana to use healing spells. With your magic restored, you spam the spell as often as you can. Once you are able to move without unbearable pain, you shift your focus to Lia. All of her cuts and burns heal easily, but her left eye is, unfortunately, lost. As her mobility returns, you notice her becoming more distant: she spends most of her time in bed, facing the wall; when she is involved in conversations, she rarely attempts to make eye contact with anyone; her efforts to adjust to monocular vision come in sudden bursts of energy, but she gets disheartened easily when things go wrong, and she claims to be too embarrassed to let you or Blythe help her. It hurts you to see her this way, but you’ve done everything your magic can do. Time is the only thing that can help her now.

Many conversations are had in the breaks between healing sessions. The first thing you do is come clean about the angel who visited you in your dreams. Although you felt guilty about keeping it from the girls for so long, somehow neither of them blame you for it. Based on your description, Lia identifies the angel as Lady Phoebe, the Angel of the Moon. Apparently, Lady Phoebe is known for her ability to connect to the mind of anyone, anywhere in the world. There are rumors that the strength of her power is tied to the phase of the moon, but you can’t afford to rely on something like that. With someone like that on your case, there’s no use in hiding from now on.

Which leads to the next topic of conversation: how to take a stand. Taking an inventory of everything at your disposal, you have the support of Blythe and Lia, the clothes on your back, and Blythe’s rapier. That’s it. That is, until Blythe pulls out your rucksack and recounts the tale of how she dove for it the second she saw Alicia/Neró kneeling in front of your erect manhood. Inside the bag is everything you remember, from your Earthly possessions, to the How-to-Magic book, to the loot you picked up in the Trials. You’re relieved to see the stuff again, since you thought you’d lost it forever, but none of it can really help you in this situation. What you need is a base of operations, and an army to support you. {if BKnowsUrDL = 1}Blythe once told you that{else}According to Blythe,{endif} the Demon Lords of legend always commanded armies of monsters or other demons. You’re a human, so the thought of convincing demons to fight for you seems unlikely. As for monsters, well, you haven’t had very cordial interactions with any of them so far. First, there were the griffins and dire wolves that attacked you and Blythe. Then, there was the lamia who captured and almost **** you. In the wizard’s trials, you fought against a shadow tentacle beast, a giant rock golem, ghosts, a legendary sea monster, and half-man, half-crab hybrids. So far, Cady is the only monster who hasn’t wanted to kill you, and she has expressed no interest in joining your cause. In fact, now that she’s heard the story of your run through half of the Trials of Hesperos, she’s made it pretty clear that she’s kicking you out of her cave once you recover from your injuries.

Cady herself is another topic of discussion. She is a spider monster called an arachne, who has poor eye sight and relies on the sensory input of her webs to ‘see.’ She is also a named monster, which is explained to you as a sort of ritual that causes monsters to evolve. Before Cady’s evolution, she was all spider from the waist down. Back then, she strung her webs in a small area around her cave. Once she evolved, Cady’s web manipulation skills improved so much that she was able to place invisible threads throughout the entire forest. By activating certain chemicals in the webbing, she also found that she can paralyze any living thing that they touch. Unfortunately, her evolution also came with the drawbacks of a more humanoid anatomy: warm blood and walking on two legs.

Becoming bipedal was a struggle, but losing a spider’s natural resistance to the cold was far worse. In order to keep warm, Cady took to stripping the clothes off of dead or paralyzed adventurers, which eventually resulted in the piles now littering her cave. Dresses, tunics, scarfs, shoes, hats, skirts, pants, bras, panties, boxers: she had no sense of what she might need, so she grabbed whatever she could find. At some point, she started to admire the designs of the clothing she collected. As an arachne, she found the weaving of plant and animal fibers into fabrics fascinating. Nowadays, that admiration has led her to take up knitting as a hobby. Whenever she’s not out gathering food for herself and your party, she’s sitting at the wooden table working on a project of some kind.

…

Now that you’ve recovered, you can’t afford to waste any time. You, Blythe, Lia, and Cady all make your way to the entrance of the cave. You have a plan, albeit a crazy one. If your quest is now one of **** for Lia, then it should start off with a little **** of your own. You intend to pay that lamia another visit. You’re stronger now, so it’s time for the domme to become the dominated. The village of monsters is less than a day’s walk through the forest, using the path that you had Cady describe for you. If you can get to the village without being spotted, you’ll be putting all of your training until now to the test. You either subjugate the village, or die trying.

Cady presents each member of your party with a parting gift: the knitting projects you’ve watched her work on for the last three days. To you, she gives a reddish brown pouch that she modeled after your leather wallet. For Blythe, she knits a forest green scrunchie, noting how the elf tends to wear her hair in a ponytail. Finally, Lia receives an eye patch with a purple and black stripe pattern. “I won’t wish you good luck in conquering my brothers and sisters, Mr. Human Demon Lord,” says Cady. “But, at the very least, I hope you don’t die after all the time you spent on my floor.” She doesn’t offer you a smile, but you still give her one in return.

“Once I have their support, I hope you’ll reconsider joining us.”

“One human in my life was enough, thank you,” she says, referring to the wizard. “But… we’ll see what happens.”

You turn your attention to Lia. At the catkin’s request, and with special permission from Cady, Lia will be staying behind until you have the village under your control. She has no weapon, nor the confidence to use one yet with her visual impairment. That being the case, she opted to sit this fight out rather than hold you back. Blythe hugs Lia, and whispers something in the woman’s cat-like ear that eases her depressed expression to a degree. Neither you nor the elf want to leave her like this, but these are **** times. The catkin looks to you, wearing a weak smile.

“Kick their asses for me,” she says.