Chapter 238 Fake.

Chapter 238: 238 Fake.

"I am Legion!" the demon hissed, her voice overlapping in a dozen echoing, guttural tones. "Master of true evil! Destroyer of ancient nations! Corrupter of the countless masses! I am all, and I am everything. And I will have the Horadrix Cube!"

I sat perfectly still, staring at her from across the boardroom table.

"You... what?" I asked.

"The Cube!" Legion barked. Thick, noxious tongues of flame crackled from her mouth with every syllable.

She slammed her clawed fist down onto the mahogany, cratering the wood and buckling the steel sub-frame beneath it. "Do not attempt to toy with me, mortal! Your little streetwalker stole it from the museum. My agent witnessed the theft with their own eyes! I will have it! Such a dark artifact will multiply my influence tenfold! The surface world shall bend to my whim! For I am Legion! And I shall rule all!"

Psyren and I exchanged a completely baffled look. I turned my visor back to the demon.

"What? But... but it’s fake."

"Lies!" Legion snapped.

She widened her stance, her boots blowing out at the seams as her feet mutated into heavy, cloven hooves that gouged deep into my hardwood floor.

A pair of leathery, flaming wings violently sprouted from her shoulder blades, tearing through the back of her pilgrim dress.

"I have seen it!" the demon roared, sulfur pouring from her nostrils. "The dark glow of its markings illuminating at the touch of flesh. The signs were obvious to any student of the dark arts! A lesser demon of the pit summoned to battle a local hero! You cannot fool me, Polaris. I know an artifact of supreme demonic power when I see it!"

"It’s a block of ballistic resin!" I yelled, still struggling to come to grips with the absolute absurdity of the situation. "It’s a prop! Rhea printed it in the basement! The glowing veins are just a heat-reactive polymer mix! It runs on a double-A battery!"

"Fool! I am Legion! I feel the dark resonance of artifacts. You will hand it over to me, or I will peel the flesh from your bones and take it!"

Legion inhaled deeply, her chest swelling massively beyond human proportions as a terrifying, white-hot glow began to build deep in the back of her throat.

That was enticing to look at, I wasn’t going to lie, but it was also a guaranteed fire hazard, and I was not about to let her torch my conference room.

I didn’t wait for her to exhale. As her jaws unhinged to unleash the fire, I violently engaged my magnetic field.

I locked onto the heavy steel bolts and structural crossbeams reinforcing the underside of the table.

With a brutal, upward jerk of my wrist, I ripped her end of the mahogany table straight off the floor.

The heavy edge snapped up like a massive wooden springboard. It clocked her directly under the jaw with the force of a swinging bank vault.

Legion’s mouth slammed shut with a sickening crunch. Her cheeks instantly swelled outward, her yellow eyes bulging as the pressurized, fiery breath found itself with absolutely no place to go but backward.

She gagged violently, her mouth falling open as a thick plume of acrid, black smoke escaped her lips, nose, and tear ducts.

I raised both my hands, taking total command of the heavy metal frame. The table shrieked, the steel supports bending and twisting under my magnetic grip as it suddenly reared up and wrapped itself completely around Legion like a massive, crushing iron fist.

The demon gasped, her fangs grinding together as she strained against the metal binding her arms to her sides. She was tough, I’d give her that.

Easily as physically powerful as any A-list bruiser hero on the global circuit. But flesh and bone eventually yield, and magnetism trumps muscle every time.

"Listen to me very closely," I said, walking around the desk and tightening my magnetic grasp, compressing the steel tighter around her ribs. "I do not have a real demonic artifact. The entire museum heist was staged theater. The cube is fake!"

"Your deceptions fall flat, Polaris!" Legion snarled, her voice distorted and bubbling with rage inside the metal cocoon. "I will have the cube eventually! You cannot stop the multitudes within me! And I... will... take you down to the pit with me!"

Aw, fuck. That is never a good line.

Her horned head began to violently distort, the flesh bubbling and expanding.

I felt the physical mass of the body trapped within the steel begin to rapidly swell, building up impossible levels of internal pressure.

Uh oh.

I moved my hands in a frantic, sweeping motion. The metal binding Legion groaned as I magnetically stretched it, dragging the steel plating up over her head and down around her hooves, cocooning her entirely in an airtight sphere.

I pressed my palms together, compacting the metal shell as tightly as physics would allow, reinforcing the seams with raw magnetic pressure.

WHUMPH!

The muffled, concussive explosion inside the sphere nearly bucked the steel open anyway. A few jagged cracks split the welded seams of the cocoon, but the structural integrity held.

Thick, foul-smelling smoke hissed and steamed from the fissures, filling the room with the distinct odor of burning garbage and rotten eggs.

Warily, keeping my guard up, I slowly unwound the metal shell, peeling the steel back like the petals of a dead flower.

Ash poured out.

"Ugh," I muttered, taking a step back as a massive pile of gray, greasy dust spilled onto the floorboards with a soft hiss. The interior of the metal cocoon was completely blackened and scorched. "Gross."

"Fucking hell, boss," Psyren coughed, waving a hand in front of her face to clear the smoke. "That was totally nutso."

Over on the remaining half of the table, the ruggedized tablet chimed. Rhea-Search’s screen blinked to life, displaying a bright yellow thumbs-up emoji.

"It sure was," I said, kicking a pile of the greasy ash with my boot. I looked back at the telepath. "Did you catch any of that? Did you know she was a demon before the horns popped out?"

Psyren shrugged, offering a blank, bewildered look. "Not at all, bossman. I was trying to read her mind the whole time, but it was just a wall of static. She just kept broadcasting the word ’Legion’ over and over again, mixed in with a bunch of weird, backwards chanting."

Hmm. That didn’t sound good.

I didn’t have a huge amount of professional experience dealing with infernal powers. Not that I didn’t know demons existed, of course.

Some surprisingly tolerable people I knew were demons. But they were only tolerable so long as you kept in mind that five hundred years ago, they were probably busy spreading the bubonic plague across Europe, corrupting isolated monasteries, and laughing while villages burned to the ground. And frankly, most of them still did that kind of stuff on the weekends.

See, the fundamental problem with demons is that they hate humans.

No, I mean that. They genuinely, passionately, obsessively hate humanity.

Most demons are not fun, quirky monster-girls with a penchant for cosplay.

They are some of the most malicious, vindictive entities in existence, and they absolutely love their work.

They exist to torture, maim, and corrupt mortals in any way they can. Individuals like Lilith were very much the exception to the rule, and even she got up to dark, unspeakable things out of sight that I was smart enough to never ask about.

Demons liked being evil. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice; it was their biological imperative. It’s what they were made of.

And even if you managed to bind one with proper archaic magic or a blood contract, they would twist your wording worse than a basket full of cursed monkey paws.

Which was exactly why I went out of my way to avoid doing business with them. Demons always did their absolute best to be awful.

If they weren’t completely indifferent to human suffering, they were actively reveling in it.

Usually, they only popped up in the material plane because some idiot cultist summoned them to wreak havoc, and they executed the job with a gleeful cruelty that would make your stomach turn.

Many were literally distilled from human vices, which meant every single time humanity invented a brand-new way to be terrible to each other, the demonic ranks updated their playbook.

Being a blue-collar freelance villain meant I really didn’t want to deal with something so genuinely, unapologetically malicious at the best of times.

The return on investment was always terrible, and the collateral damage ruined your bottom line. But apparently, avoiding the underworld wasn’t going to be an option today.

I was going to need some reliable intel, and I needed it fast.

Lucky for me, I had an expert living under my roof.

I left the ruined conference room for Rhea’s automated cleaning bots to scrub down, pulling out my comms. I sent Glacia a quick, encrypted message giving her the cliff-notes version of the assassination attempt.

Needless to say, the rest of the afternoon’s interviews were officially canceled. I had a much more urgent meeting to attend to.

Without delay, I marched down the hallway and headed straight for the guest wing.

"Lilith!" I called out, rapping my knuckles loudly against her heavy bedroom door. "I need to talk to you. Right now!"

"Come in, Milesy!" sang the bubbly, impossibly cheerful voice on the other side.