The Insider System

Chapter 401: The Deal Pt.37

The Demon Lord he had just spoken to was much different than the one he had been dealing with in the past. More hurried, less secretive, overall nothing like how they had felt in the past, but it made sense because the Demon Lord had already won and had him in the palm of their hand.

In the past, he had been trying to trick him into doing something that the Demon Lord could use to get closer to him, but now all the Demon Lord had to do was tell him to do something, and he couldn't resist.

It was nice that there was no longer a reason for the Demon Lord to lie to him since it seemed the quick explanation of what was going to happen to him after this was something he wouldn't mind too much. He was going to be forced to use Unholy Magic it seemed, but as long as the God of Metal was the one he answered to he didn't really care too much because one of the biggest reasons he had never used Unholy Magic was because he felt there were no gods that would let him become a Demigod if he did.

It seemed that would no longer be an issue with the Demon Lord making deals with gods to take Demigods that used his element into their camps. He understood this was probably a plan that made it so the gods wouldn't be able to worry about the Demon Lord ascending because there were loads of other Demigods they couldn't stop that would be introducing similar elements to the world. But he still felt like there had to be more to it that he didn't understand yet because he didn't think this was enough to make everyone forget what the Demon Lord had done up to this point.

...

After a while, Lake had doubled the size of his list, and having gone through the whole book, he went ahead and pulled out the books from the same place he had found Mizzly's Bow. There were only four, and they were all pretty thin, so he could probably read them all in the time he had left before he was going to go out onto his balcony to watch what the Demon Lord was going to do tonight.

He decided to start with the one he found by itself because it had the best chance of being important with how close it had been to Mizzly's body while the others were in a completely different room. Opening it to the first page Lake saw the book was a diary or some type of log as it had short passages with dates above them, but instead of reading right away, he flipped through the rest of the book to see if that was all there was.

About eighty pages in the writing stopped, so Lake flipped to the front and started to read from the first page, which was from over two hundred years ago. Like he expected, it didn't take him long to get through the book since all the entries were pretty short, and not a lot happened with the book being the musings of an old and dying man.

All you needed to know was Mizzly had been severely injured at some point in a way that was hard to fully heal and found the abandoned prison to live out the last of his days. To Lake, the most interesting part was finding out that the place he had found was most likely a prison because he had kind of assumed prisons didn't really exist.

Like he knew they kept some prisoners, but with people having skills from criminal jobs, he didn't see it being very easy to keep them in jail for long periods of time unless you had a way to cripple them, which he couldn't see making sense money-wise.

He knew people who didn't care about how expensive it was to keep the criminals alive since he had met them in his last life a few times, but this world made it harder to think like that, in his opinion, so it had to be rare. "Maybe there's a reason it was located in the Holy Domain."

He had read up on most of the gods at this point from the perspectives of mortals, and from all accounts, the Holy Goddess was a saint, so he could see her trying to find a way to keep troubled people alive until they were rehabilitated, but in his opinion, it was a waste of time because he knew from personal experience how hard it was to change if you liked breaking the law even when you didn't need to.

It had also not seemed to work because the prison had been abandoned when Mizzly found it, and this was long before the Goddess was assassinated, so something had to have happened to make it that way.

Putting the diary down, Lake moved on to the next book, which didn't have a cover with a name, so thinking it might be more interesting because of its secret topic, he started to read but didn't get far because it seemed to just be fairytales or maybe real stories that had been dumbed down a bit for children but either way, he only had around an hour, so this wasn't a good use of his time.

The next two books also ended up being nothing he really cared to read, so it was a bit disappointing. Not knowing what to do with the three books he didn't want, Lake decided to bring them to his room since that was where he was going anyway. He had plenty of shelves that had space, and maybe one day, he would be bored enough to actually read them.

After he made it into his room, Lake sent one of his servants off to get him some food and stepped out onto his balcony so he wouldn't miss anything on the off chance it started a bit early.

...

"Time to go. Is everyone ready?" The guy who had been missing clothes earlier seemed to be the one in charge because when he entered the room and said this everyone stood up and started to line up. Tiff knew this meant she had probably waited too long to switch her face, but maybe she wouldn't need to since all she was here to do was kill the giant.

If she really wanted, she could have probably blended in and gone with this group to wherever they were going, but that wasn't what she was here for, and getting distracted in a place like this was a mistake she didn't want to make.

Stepping outside, Tiff guessed she had been right about the giant not being here in town with the other Demon Worshipers. She was happy that this was the case because it meant the people living here didn't need to worry about being caught up in the fight that would probably break out between her and the other Demon Worshipers after she killed the giant.

A few minutes after they left town, Tiff guessed her original plan to just watch and see what happened would have worked as well as sneaking inside while being much safer since the Demon Worshipers would have eventually come out. All she would have had to do was follow them from there, but she had no way of knowing where the giant was before this, so this wasn't a mistake on her part.

There was no way to be prepared in a situation like this since you couldn't get information out of Demon Worshipers, so it would have been stupid for her to not use such a great opening to go in even if she was going in practically blind with no real knowledge of what she would find inside.

"Who's going to go in this time? I know I haven't been the one recently, but Domela doesn't seem to like me." Tiff didn't like the sound of the question that finally broke the silence the group had been walking in since exiting their base because it implied a level of danger for even the Demon Worshipers when it came to dealing with this Domela.

"I'll do it." One of the smaller Demon Worshipers eventually spoke up, and Tiff moved to walk behind them because wherever they were about to go would be where she needed to go as well.

Eventually, they finally arrived at a forest that was a bit out of the town and without saying anything all the Demon Worshipers except for the one who had volunteered to go talk to Domela stopped walking.

Taking her first few steps into the woods Tiff couldn't help but feel that she was crossing some kind of threshold. Nothing actually happened to her physically, but up until this point the fight between her and the giant was completely theatrical, but she could tell that it was here, which meant this was real now, and it was making her go into a mental crisis.