Ashlow was the kind of town that gives up on itself before you even arrive.
It announced this at the gate, where a wooden sign had lost enough letters that "WELCOME TO ASHLOW" now read "ELCOME O SHLOW," which, honestly, felt more truthful. Crooked houses leaned on each other for support. The streets were mud pretending to be roads. Everything smelled of wet firewood, cheap ale, and the specific mildew of a place where the rain gets in and stays.
"Welcome home," said Bruno, with a pride so genuine it hurt a little. I decided, right then, that whatever else happened, I would not let anything happen to Bruno.
Vera led us through back lanes to a room over a tavern called the Split Barrel. The room was one bed, one straw pallet, one water stain shaped vaguely like a screaming face, and a leak that had ambitions of becoming a waterfall. This, apparently, was the entire worldly empire of my new party.
"We owe three months' rent," Vera announced, dropping onto the pallet like her strings had been cut. "The Split Barrel's owner, Marda, is patient right up until she isn't, and we are one bad week from finding out where 'isn't' lives." She threw an arm over her eyes. "We did the ritual because a fixer sold us on it. Said summoning a strong familiar would rank us up fast in the Guild, make us rich. It cost every coin we had. And it got us—" she lifted the arm, looked at me, let it drop again "—a call-center Demon King in pajamas."
"For the record, the pajamas are very comfortable."
"They're going to get us killed."
I sat on the edge of the bed and, for the first time since the noodles, the whole thing landed on me at once. Another world. Two moons. A class that terrified everyone including, increasingly, me. A window of blue light that followed me around narrating my failures.
So I asked the only question that mattered.
"How do I get home?"
The room went quiet. It was Lila who answered, and she'd gone serious again, the way she did when the subject was demon-lore — the one thing she treated as sacred.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"The Demon King class is a road," she said. "The stories all agree on that part, even the ones that agree on nothing else. If you walk it all the way — take the class to its maximum rank — it's supposed to open a door. Between worlds. Between anywhere." She tilted her head. "The stories also say doing that tends to end a kingdom or two. But," she added brightly, "one thing at a time."
The blue pane, ever helpful, confirmed it in writing.
[Class objective (self-derived): Demon King at maximum rank — condition for interdimensional passage.]
There it was. My way home. Sitting at the very top of a mountain of ranks, and me down here at the bottom of it, at the most pathetic F imaginable, in borrowed pajamas.
"Okay," I said, and it surprised me how steady I sounded. "So I climb. How do you climb?"
Vera sat up. And for the first time, she smiled — small, sharp, entirely businesslike. It was, I'd come to learn, her favorite kind of smile: the one she wore when a disaster had just revealed a usable angle.
"Quests," she said. "The Heroes' Guild runs a board in every town. You take a job, you finish it, the System pays you EXP. Enough EXP, you rank up: F, then E, D, C, all the way to S and past it, if you're a monster." She stood, and the businesslike smile widened. "You want to go home? Then we make you the hardest-working Demon King in Valdoria. We start tomorrow. At the very, very bottom."
"And if someone figures out what I actually am?"
The smile died.
"Then the Church of Light sends paladins," she said flatly. "And they don't come to arrest. They come to cleanse. The town burns, and the four of us die together, because—" she tapped her own chest, over the heart, where the Pact sat "—we fall together now. That's the deal. That's every day, from here on." She held my eyes. "So I need you to understand something. Right now your aura is weak. A whisper. Easy to miss. But it grows with your rank — every step up that mountain makes you louder, brighter, harder to hide. Hiding it is a skill, Adrian. A skill you don't have yet. And by the time you need it most, it'll be fighting you the hardest."
I looked at the blue pane. Class Trait: Demonic Aura (uncontrolled.)
"So the stronger I get," I said slowly, "the more dangerous it is for me to be strong."
"Now you're paying attention," said Vera.
That night, while the others slept, the pane blinked one last time, alone, just for me. It scrolled its warning slowly, patiently, as if it wanted to be sure I read every word.
[Passive advisory: Demonic Aura is minimal at Rank F. It will intensify with each rank. Concealment difficulty scales accordingly.]
I lay back on the lumpy bed, under the screaming-face water stain, and stared at the ceiling.
"Great," I whispered, to no one, learning the local dialect. "Great, great, great."