Gen reached over and flicked Ozin on the forehead.
“HEY!” Ozin stumbled back a step, one hand flying up to the red mark already forming above his eyebrow.
“What was that for?!”
Gen ignored him and turned to Nyobin, who was still hovering in the doorway with his tail wrapped around his own leg.
“Keep an eye on him. I’m not above killing a now human former panther. Even former cat. Even former demon lord, honestly. Former anything, it doesn’t matter, all three of those are things I would kill if they tried something.”
Nyobin nodded so fast his whole upper body moved with it.
“Ok, nya! I will watch master very closely, nya! I will not let him do anything stupid, nya! Master is always doing something stupid, nya, so this will be a full time job, nya!”
“I resent that,” Ozin said.
“You literally just announced your plan to take over the continent out loud, nya,” Nyobin said.
“In a room full of people, nya. With your eyes closed, nya.”
Ozin opened his mouth, closed it, and looked away.
That one landed.
Behind them, Groova was still crouched against the wall with her head jammed into the rafters, and Asp was folded into a low squat by the door, both of them waiting with the patience of creatures who had already decided the situation was handled and were now just waiting for permission to be bored.
Gen looked at them, looked at the cabin he was standing in, and made a mental note to come back and raise this ceiling at some point.
Tomorrow, maybe.
He was getting tired of watching his own housemates fold themselves in half to enter a building.
“Welp,” he said, clapping his hands together.
“My job here is over.”
He walked out the door, ducked under the low frame, and straightened up in the cool night air.
The clearing smelled incredible.
Roasted fish, all of it, the whole yard thick with the smell of meat that had been cooked through with a controlled blast of dragon fire, and his stomach made a noise that was loud enough for Nyobin to hear it from ten feet away.
“Come on,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Both of you. Out here. It’s time to eat.”
They came out.
Groova unfolded to her full 10 feet and stretched her arms above her head with a sound of relief.
Gen led them across the clearing to the fire, where the others were already gathered.
Nøx had dragged a log over and was lounging on it, one leg crossed over the other, his golden eyes bright in the firelight.
Vyxia sat on the opposite side with her knees drawn up and her arms folded, still sulking about her hand.
The cooked fish was laid out on the flat stone slab Gen had set up weeks ago for exactly this purpose, and the meat had already been broken into portions by whoever got there first.
Baegun and Heugun flanked the slab.
The wolves had claimed a huge 50 pound chunk between them and were working through it from opposite ends, Baegun with his tail going the whole time and Heugun with the grim dedication of a creature performing an obligation.
Gen sat down, pulled off a piece of fish, and ate.
It was good.
It was really good.
The fire had cooked it evenly, the meat still holding juice, the outside crisp where Vyxia’s initial blast had charred it.
He took another bite, then another, and for a couple of minutes the only sounds in the clearing were chewing and the crackle of the fire.
Then Groova started on her portion.
Gen watched her eat the first 50 pounds with mild interest.
He watched her eat the second 50 pounds with growing concern.
By the time she was 200 pounds in and reaching for more, he had stopped eating entirely and was just watching, his piece of fish forgotten in his hand.
She was 300 pounds deep when he finally leaned over and put a hand on her arm.
“Okay. That’s enough.”
“But Groova is still hungry,” she whined, her cheeks stuffed, her red eyes wide and pleading.
“Groova, you just ate 300 pounds of fish. That’s more than the entire rest of us have eaten combined. Do you even need the calories to live? Like, physically need them?”
“Groova does not need food to live. Groova gets food from sun and water. Groova does not need to eat at all.” She swallowed, and her face fell into the most tragic expression Gen had seen on her.
“But Groova loves food sooo much. Groova loves the taste. Groova loves the chewing. Groova loves how warm it feels in Groova’s belly after.”
“Then why are you eating like you’re going into hibernation?”
“Because Groova loves it!” she wailed.
Asp, sitting on the other side of the fire with a modest portion in her hands, did not look up from her food.
“Fat.”
“ASP!” Groova scrambled to her feet, nearly knocking Gen over.
“GROOVA IS NOT FAT! GROOVA TOLD YOU THIS ALREADY! GROOVA IS STRONG!”
Asp chewed slowly, swallowed, and said nothing.
Her silence did more damage than any insult could have.
Groova turned to Gen with her arms spread wide, gesturing at her own torso.
“Tell her! Tell her Groova is strong and beautiful and not fat!”
Gen looked at her stomach, at the faint muscle under the gray skin, and then at the 300 pounds of fish she had just put away.
“You’re beautiful,” he said carefully.
“And you’re built like a bear. A very strong bear. That’s just the truth.”
“See?” Groova spun back to Asp, triumphant.
“Gen said bear! Strong!”
Asp took another bite and said nothing, which somehow read as a loss anyway.
Across the fire, Nøx laughed into his fish.
“She’s got you both figured out. It’s honestly impressive.”
“Nobody asked you,” Groova snapped, and Nøx laughed harder.
Nyobin had settled on the far end of the slab with a small chunk of raw fish, and he was eating it slowly, the way someone ate something they wanted to make last.
He took a bite, and his eyes went wide, and he let out a long moan of pure happiness.
“Mortal world food tastes so much better than the scary hell sharks, nya!” He took another bite, bigger this time, chewing with his whole face.
“Do you know what we ate in the demon realm, nya? Hell sharks, nya! Raw, because there is no fire down there that is safe to cook on, nya! Just hot rock and lava, nya, and sharks that are angry all the time! And they taste like burnt metal! This tastes like… like something that was happy when it was alive, nya!”
Gen chewed his own fish and considered that.
Then he set it down and looked across the fire at Ozin.
“Alright. Earlier, before we got sidetracked by the whole takeover speech. You said the gods sealed you a million years ago. What did you mean by that? What actually happened?”
Ozin was eating his own portion with small, precise bites, still adjusting to having hands.
He stopped chewing, thought about it, and set the fish down.
“For the better part of sentient life, 20 to 40 million years ago, demons were the smartest and most advanced creatures in existence,” he said.
His voice was still that cracked adolescent rasp, which made the history lesson accidentally hilarious, but nobody was going to point that out again.
“We had cities. We had engineering. We had something you would call civilization. And the gods, who had watched us grow and watched us overtake them, decided we were a problem.”
“Overtake them?”
“In knowledge,” Ozin said.
“In ambition. We wanted their seats, and we were close enough to reaching for them that it frightened them. So they sealed every single demon into a realm of our own. One door, one world, shut behind us. No way out.”
He picked his fish back up.
“The realm is large. Do not misunderstand, there is land enough to hold mountains. But the habitable part of it is small, and there are hundreds of trillions of us packed into that small part. Most of the world is not survivable. Lava rivers, ash plains, heat that melts stone. So the population keeps growing and the space does not, and over a million years of that pressure, the lesser demons, the imps, the bottom of the pile, they have devolved.”
“Devolved,” Gen repeated.
“Intelligence is expensive to maintain,” Ozin said.
“There is no schooling down there. There is no need for language when everyone around you is also an imp who only wants what you have. So they lost it. They became creatures that live day to day and want only three things. Kill, fuck, eat. They cannibalize each other. They breed until the tunnels cannot hold them and then they eat the ones that do not fit. That is the life of the average imp in the demon realm. A million years of it.”
The clearing was quiet for a moment.
Baegun licked his chops.
Nøx had stopped laughing.
Gen stared into the flames, chewing slowly, and then he said the thing that nobody expected.
“So have any of you tried Soviet style apartments?”
Ozin blinked at him.
“What?”
“Soviet style apartments. Khrushchyovkas. The Soviet Union had the same problem you have, huge population, harsh climate, not enough housing, and they solved it by mass producing cheap 5 to 7 floor concrete blocks. Same design over and over, fast to build, cheap materials, and they put them up everywhere. Millions of units. If your imps are packed into tunnels and canyons, why aren’t you putting them in stacked housing? The materials have to still be down there somewhere. Concrete, steel, whatever you had before the seal. You can rebuild a production line.”
Ozin stared at him with the blank expression of a man who had been handed a page of writing in a completely unknown language.
Gen kept going.
“Or build inside the mountains. The Mongols did it, the Middle Eastern empires did it, you carve cities into rock and the rock holds the temperature for you. You have lava plains and ash, right? Underground is where you want to be anyway. No heat, no weather, no lava. You said you have mountains.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Ozin said slowly.
Gen leaned forward.
“What did you build your houses out of before the seal? Before everything got bad. What were your cities made of?”
Ozin thought about it.
“Beast skin, stretched over sticks.”
Gen nearly dropped his fish.
“YOU’RE STILL USING TENTS AFTER A MILLION YEARS?!”
“I do not know what a tent is,” Ozin said.
“But I assume yes.”
“At least tell me you use adobe to fight the heat! Mud brick, dried in the sun, thick walls, it holds out the hottest part of the day, that’s ancient technology, humans figured that out before we had writing!”
Ozin shifted uncomfortably.
“That is… not something I have thought about.”
“Or underground! Please tell me someone down there has dug down instead of building up!”
“I have not really thought about that either,” Ozin admitted.
Gen took a deep breath and let it out slowly, pressing his palms together in front of his face.
“Okay. Okay. Let me ask this a different way. Your population. Was it spread evenly, or was it concentrated?”
Ozin shook his head.
“Not evenly. The circles are not the same size, and they are not equally livable. The highest circle, the one you would call purgatory, holds about 305 trillion imps. My last count was a few centuries out of date, so it may be more now. The lower circles are smaller, so the 9th layer, where I ruled, holds only a few hundred thousand. That is why the 9th is where the nobility lives. Fewer of us, more room.”
Gen set his fish down very slowly and looked at Ozin across the fire.
“You classist fucker.”
Ozin’s eyebrows went up.
“Pardon?”
“Your first thing as king!” Gen stood up.
“Your first thing as a king, before housing, before food, before anything, was what? Military? Court politics? Building a bigger palace on a floor that already had room to spare? You didn’t do a one child policy like China, you didn’t build underground like ants, you didn’t even out the population through migration, you just left 300 trillion imps jammed into one floor while the nobles sat on empty land and called it tradition!” He jabbed a finger at Ozin.
“You had a million years and the best you came up with was beast skin and sticks!”
Ozin leaned toward Nyobin and lowered his voice to what he probably thought was a whisper.
“What is this human talking about?”
Nyobin shrugged helplessly.
“I do not know, nya. But he seems very angry about houses, nya.”
“The moment we get to the demon realm,” Gen said, sitting back down and pointing at Ozin with his piece of fish, “we’re going. We’re going there, and I’m fixing your housing crisis, and I’m doing it faster than any political rival of yours is going to die for disagreeing with me. I have built more structures in this clearing in a month than your civilization has in a year. You people have been doing it wrong for a million years.”
Ozin looked at Nyobin again.
Nyobin looked back.
Neither of them said anything.