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Zeth couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. It wasn’t from fear, though. While he was certainly afraid at the thought of such a powerful entity even having him in its gaze, another emotion had overtaken that one by leaps and bounds. Excitement. The anticipation of that same powerful entity being his to command—to bring his will upon the world, to bring his will upon the people who had long since deserved suffering. A tool that existed to kill anyone and everyone he pointed it in the direction of.

He reached down with trembling hands to grab the bucket of that woman’s blood. This would be the moment of truth—what would the System say about her strength? Was she really the possessor of a powerful Class? Or just an Unclassed liar? Whether or not she was a Blood Mage, he knew the real Blood Mage—the one he wanted—was still out there. And with the help of this demon, he’d find them.

Air escaped Zeth’s lungs in a light chuckle. But slowly, his chuckle grew more and more intense until it eventually broke into full-on maniacal laughter. The blood in the bucket rippled from the quakes in his body as he doubled over, his voice echoing through the clearing.

With a shaky breath, Zeth calmed himself and stood up straight again, a wild grin still stretched across his face. If any reasonable person saw him out in the middle of the forest, clutching a bucket of human blood in his hands as he cackled wickedly, preparing to conduct powerful demonic ritual magic to summon a being from the Thirteenth Realm, there was no doubt in his mind they’d assume he was the most over-the-top evil villain out there. But his motivations weren’t so broad as destroying the world. No, such a thing would bring him no satisfaction at all. He was here to destroy a small set of very specific people. And he would accomplish that goal.

Standing in the middle of the ritual circle, he slowly began to turn the bucket over. The blood slowly flowed toward the bucket’s lip as he turned it further and further, Zeth’s breath growing heavier and heavier, until finally it spilled over the edge and down into the ground.

His eyes grew wide with glee as he saw the completion percentage of the ritual leap upward from just the slow dribble of liquid. No way that woman didn’t have some sort of Class of her own. Typically speaking, with anything System-related that cared about the strength of a person, the difference between someone with a Class and someone without one was like the difference between a mountain and a pebble. It was one of the reasons so many people intentionally forewent obtaining a Class their whole lives—bandits with combat Classes would go out of their way to kill the Classed people whenever they robbed anyone, since doing so would give such massive progress toward their next Levels.

Either way, it seemed like he wasn’t going to even need the whole bucket of this woman’s blood to complete the ritual. As he got to just about a quarter left, a notification entered Zeth’s mind.

[Ritual complete.

Sacrifice given: Moderate amount of moderate-strength human blood.

Circle has been powered. Touch it to send a beacon to the Thirteenth Realm. Once a response has been found, the subject will be summoned and placed under your control. An immutable covenant will be formed between you.]

Zeth looked over the words. So she really did have some sort of Class. I wonder if she was actually a Blood Mage, after all. What was she doing over there, though?

His mind only lingered on that train of thought for a brief moment, however, as the next lines drew his attention to them.

Touch the circle, huh? Seems easy enough.

He knelt down and placed his hands on the lines. The moment his skin made contact with them, the gigantic sigil lit up, painting the entire clearing a bright glowing pink. Electricity arced across the lines and up and down Zeth’s arms, dancing harmlessly across his skin. The loud crackling filled his ears.

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Seconds passed as the pulsating pink light of the circle’s lines continued to burn across Zeth’s retinas. The electricity continued to run across the field. But nothing else happened. He could feel the ritual examining his mind, as if testing to ensure he did, in fact, want to ‘send out a beacon,’ as it had said. He did everything he could to say ‘yes’ to this question, but it didn’t seem to really be asking for a yes-or-no response. It was just looking.

The seconds turned into minutes. Zeth stayed kneeling there, the light and sound never letting up their assault on his senses, but never growing any more intense, either. Was the ritual failing? Was this its way of rejecting him? Just sitting there, making its noise and its light, but never actually summoning anything? It certainly looked like it was working on something, but that something certainly wasn’t summoning a demon like it was supposed to.

Just be patient, Zeth told himself. Maybe it just takes a couple minutes.

But the minutes stretched on. From just a couple to ten, to fifteen, to thirty. His body ached from the unending kneeling, being forced to keep constant contact with the circle in fear that moving away would shut off the ritual and everything would be gone. But he stayed steadfast. He couldn’t accept that he’d simply wasted fifteen entire Skill Points and an entire day’s worth of work and received nothing in return. He would get his demon. And if it took an hour, then he would wait an hour. The ritual could keep shooting out its damn electricity all day, but he’d sit here and force it to keep going until it did what he commanded it to.

And the time did, indeed, stretch into the realm of hours. Zeth couldn’t keep track of how long this was taking, but the sky had turned orange from the sun beginning to set as he kelt there, mentally exhausted from the ritual. It seemed to be slowly dripping mana out of him as he sustained contact with the lines, though he had no idea what for. If this took much longer, he’d be forced to crawl away from the circle or else the mana drain would kill him. But he’d keep going until the brink of death; he knew that much. If the ritual was taking mana from him, it had to be doing something with it. And that something had better have been finding the biggest, baddest demon in the entirety of Hell to personally gift wrap and deliver to Zeth. He wouldn’t accept any less.

It was as his eyes were slowly shutting, his mind barely containing the power to even keep him conscious, that the electricity suddenly shut off. The light went out, and Zeth found that it was dark out, the sudden switch from blazing pink to dark evening light practically blinding him.

He took a heavy breath, rejoicing in the feeling of finally reclaiming mana from the environment rather than having it constantly sucked out of him, and fell back onto his rear, scooting away from the center of the circle. After catching his breath, he raised his dirtied hands and rubbed his eyes, looking around.

The clearing was empty. No sign whatsoever that anything had been summoned.

Zeth’s face fell into his palms. It seriously failed? So the entire day was wasted, after all. Most of that ultra-powerful blood, too. He didn’t have enough to try the ritual a second time even if he wanted to.

After a minute of him staring dejectedly at the dirt, he received a System notification.

[Demonic Covenant’s Rank has increased to 1.

+1 Skill Point. You have 4 Skill Points.]

He scoffed at the delayed notification. What, did it wait so long to tell him just so it could mock him?

But then, he felt the air heat up. All around him, an unfamiliar orange glow spread through the atmosphere. There was no particular source, but the entire clearing was bathed in otherworldly light and the feeling that Zeth was out on the hottest day of summer. And then it grew even hotter, like he was standing next to a roaring bonfire. And then hotter. He kicked back, afraid his clothes may catch alight. The glow grew brighter and brighter, too, until Zeth almost felt like he was in the presence of the sun itself. Only, once again, there was no real source for this light whatsoever. It was just there.

Even as he pushed himself back to the very edge of the clearing, watching the center from behind the trees, Zeth could still feel the heat growing more and more intense by the second. If it kept up, the entire forest may have burned down.

But just as it felt like the heat couldn’t safely increase by a single degree more, it stopped. The heat and the orange glow disappeared instantly, like a candle being blown out. And in the same moment, a new source of light and heat burst out from above the center of the ritual circle.

This time, though, that source was real flame.

A whirlwind of fire blazed out from nothing, like it had simply been placed there by a god and willed to ignite midair. It burned so high it licked the low branches of the trees, crackling loudly in the silent forest. And then, only seconds later, it extinguished, too.

And standing in its place was a being. A red-skinned thing, standing on two feet and with a set of arms and a head that approximated a human body if it had been shredded to perfection by a regimented workout routine. Muscle rippled across its every limb, what little clothing it wore mere scraps of leather that did nothing to hide the beast’s war-torn physique. Scars of a lighter red covered its entire body, some long lines from bladed weapons slicing all the way across its chest, and others starred dots that resembled the tips of hooked arrows.

It turned its face to glance around its location, a permanent scowl etched across its expression, before its slitted eyes eventually landed on Zeth, still sitting back on the ground at the edge of the clearing, dumbfounded at what he was looking at.

He was face-to-face with an honest-to-the-gods demon.