Ending the Grudge

Lamia knew her host was nearby, despite being given no sign of his presence. In the two-and-a-half months that she'd spent in the Tintenklopfer's three-floor townhouse she'd slowly grown accustomed to the man's presence.

While he'd spent most of that time in her home city, Nerissa, he'd occasionally pop back in from time to time.

The purpose of the visits varied. Sometimes he'd just show up to check on how she was faring. (And possibly also to confirm that she wasn't snooping through his things.) On a few very rare occasions he'd show up to ask her some details about the Otieno Corp, her life back in Nerissa, and whether she wanted him to use a particular tactic.

From those visits, she'd gradually caught on to the trick of knowing when the tintenklopfer was near. The tip-off was that there was no tip-off. He'd simply appear, with no footsteps, no sound of breathing. No aura. No sign that he was there at all.

Then having failed to notice him, the signs of her own presence were slowly eroded away as well. Till eventually everything was blanketed in a deep, disquieting, stifling, silence.

The feeling of being near the strange being had been a little frightening at first, but for whatever reason, she'd started to get used to it. A small portion of her mind even taking comfort in the sepulchral quiet that emanated from deep within the man's aura.

"Good morning, Lord Midnight," said Lamia. Looking up from the laptop the man had lent her.

"Morning, Miss Otieno." said Desmond.

Her time in the marchen's domicile was a relaxed one. Spent on things that she'd used to do before her mother died, back before work and research were the only ways she could escape the sense that the world had fallen away around her.

Besides starting up a few online projects, she'd resumed playing the games she'd used to love so much, watching her favorite online videos, and reading through the backlog of comics and light novels she'd left abandoned because reading them had felt too childish.

She'd returned to the old online hangouts she'd used to have. Using new usernames so she could lurk and see how the world had gone on without her after her own personal world had ended.

It left her both amused and gratified to find that her three-day return to the things that she'd used to do when she was happier had been greatly extended.

"Well...I'd like to inform you that today is the day," said Desmond.

"....Oh," said Lamia. Feeling a little sad, as she realized that her time enjoying the tintenklopfer's hospitality would soon be coming to an end.

"If you'd like I could create a video stream to let you see how I finish things...Otherwise, I'll just call you, right before the end, and send a picture to confirm that things in Nerissa have been settled."

Lamia thought about it. She thought about what she actually wanted and which would satisfy her more. Her emotions had stabilized, and though the anger she'd felt over Octavio's confession while still present, it was no longer as raw and uncontrolled as it had been before.

"Um….Would it be possible for you to stream it, but maybe only stream the last part?" said Lamia.

Desmond nodded.

"I can do that. Is that what you would like?" said Desmond.

"Y-, yes. Please," said Lamia.

The Marchen didn't say goodbye. He was simply suddenly gone. Nowadays, that was the only thing he did that bothered her. Lamia realized that it was one of her pet peeves. She'd had enough of people simply leaving her without a word.

Desmond returned to Nerissa after checking in with his client. Void-gates were useful for getting to places he'd never been before. However, once he'd been to a place Desmond's identity as a marchen of darkness and light came with some very handy boosts to his ability to play with the laws of space and time.

He could be anywhere on Nishant at will if he was familiar with the area. Sometimes he could even be in multiple places simultaneously, if he didn't mind the killer headaches that came with being in more than one place at a time.

The shadow's beneath Desmond's feet rippled, and he shrank a foot as he went from being Desmond, to being Desmond- 'Octavio.' First-born son of the Smith Household.

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It is said that even demons love their children. The Smith Clan were far from being demons, despite all their faults. Yet the principle held true. While the family might have shown a cold and calculating face to outsiders, they were fairly warm to their own people.

The family's patriarch, Maurice Smith, the current President and CEO of Otieno Corp, even went out of his way to touch base with his family. Making sure to have dinner with them at least once every two months. The dinner requiring his children and their families to come back home from wherever they'd scattered to, for the sake of appeasing their father.

With friends from the other influential clans within the company and within the city coming by. Essentially, it was dinner with everyone who might have been involved in the conspiracy to kill Adriana Otieno. The genius mogul of the kingdom's most powerful company.

Which is why Desmond chose that day as the day to bring his client's request to a close.

All he had to do was attend the dinner and mingle. His shadow would do the rest, imbuing everything it touched with death and ruin.

Wriggling tendrils of darkness and malevolent magic would rise up from the ground burrowing into the flesh of anyone within reach.

A spell of pacification and inconspicuousness would keep the family and staff members present at the dinner from panicking. People would fall dead at their feet and their friends and loved ones wouldn't even notice. Carrying on with their conversations as if nothing had happened.

The people might have been able to resist or flee if their cultivations had been higher, but the strongest person there was the Smith family's security chief. An ex-soldier at the tenth and final stage of the Earthly Realm. Which meant his strength was at the peak of human capability but still unable to rebuff supernatural threats like Desmond's.

It was a massacre, but it was a massacre in the same vein as the goings-on of your average beef processing plant. There was plenty of death, yes, but it was impersonal, automated, and mostly painless, for all involved.

Desmond would then follow up the deaths with a bit of necromancy. Bringing his victims back to life, as empty-eyed ghouls with black blood dripping from their seven orifices.

The only one who suffered was the one person Desmond allowed to notice what was going on. Maurice Smith, Octavio's father, who sat frozen with a look of confusion and horror.

Desmond kept the man pacified with a mixture of hypnotism and paralysis spells. Assuring that all that the man did was sit and gape. Never once thinking to get up and try and do something because at the back of the man's mind he knew he couldn't do anything.

"What?...what is this?" said Maurice. Eyes wide, his face pale with fear.

"What's what, father? Are you okay?" said Desmond-Octavio. Feigning concern.

"I…."

There was a cry of pain and shock from one of Octavio's uncles, as the man lurched over, his eyes, mouth, nose, and ears, erupting with black blood. The man crumpled to the ground like his strings had been cut, shuddering for a few seconds before his body finally stilled.

A minute later Octavio's uncle would clamber to his feet and then head over to the refreshments to get himself a ninth beer for the evening. His drinking habit seemingly unaffected by his own death and subsequent 'resurrection'.

"Huh? What were you going to say, father?" said Desmond-Octavio.

"It's….It's nothing. So anyway, you were telling me how things were going between you and your missus." said Maurice. Shaking his head as the vision of horror slowly returned to being mundane.

"Oh, right...So, me and little Lamia have actually been getting along lately. I think I'm starting to win her over." said Desmond-Octavio. Putting the same saccharine spin to Octavio's attempted-rape of the young woman he was keeping captive, that the real Octavio would have put to things.

"Oh?! Well that's good to hear, my boy. Good news indeed. Your mother and I aren't getting any younger. It'd be nice to see a grandchild sometime soon." said Maurice.

Slapping his son on the shoulder. Forcing a smile as he watched yet another party-goer fall, die, and then stand up again as if nothing had happened.

After a lot of thought Desmond had made up his mind on the appropriate punishment for his client's enemies.

The Smiths and the other family's of Otieno Corp's controlling board would be killed, first by him, and the undead legion that would soon go to kill their former loved ones after the party was finished. Then once more, by the state, their death's mandated by law once all the evidence Desmond had gathered reached the pertinent parties.

Maurice would be the one exception. For now, Maurice would be allowed to live. He would live with the maddening 'delusion' that all his friends, loved ones, and colleagues were really rotting corpses.

Maurice would find himself suddenly afflicted by a degenerative disease, (yet another spell from Desmond sizable collection), that would affect the old man's mind and body, leaving him helpless and reliant on those corpse's ministrations.

He would live to see everything he loved and knew fall apart and then he would spend the rest of his life inside of a jail cell as his own body fell apart as well. His body rotting though his mind still lived.

At which point, at a certain pre-decided date, Maurice Smith would officially expire. His soul locked into his corpse and entombed for a span of ten thousand years. Condemned to spend ten thousand years trapped underground, surrounded by death, and rot, and darkness.

Desmond was surprised to find that for whatever reason he was very good at that kind of magic. His powers seemed to like it, conforming to his intentions like a pen in an artist's hands. The shadows and light inside his core growling in soft appreciation at the thought of condemning the unscrupulous man in front of him, to several millennia of hellish nightmares.

Desmond couldn't help wondering whether this meant he was always meant to punish evil, or whether it was simply a predilection towards tormenting people. He decided not to think too much about either implication and simply did what he needed to do.

Overall it was a nice dinner. As well as a very productive one. Having duly punished his client's enemies, Desmond had just one last thing he had to do before his time in Nerissa came to a close.

After leaving the Smith family manor, Desmond asked his driver to take him over to the Otieno Corp headquarters. Desmond's original plan for the Corporation was to summon a bunch of shadow monsters and turn the inside of the company into a real nightmare carnival.

Letting the creatures loose in the building, while he accessed the company mainframe to set the self-destruct sequences for every headquarter, research lab, and production plant the corporation had inside and outside the city.

Lamia had nixed that plan, explaining that while she didn't want to see her mother's work being exploited and would like to see the company put to rest, her mother had loved the most of the employees of their company, seeing them as a family, and wouldn't want to see them physically harmed.

Plan B was a little less bloody and a little more quiet. As one of the chief executives of the company Desmond-Octavio pretty much had access to everything in the company.

The few things he didn't have access to could be reached by walking tall like he owned the place, going invisible, hypnotising a few guards, and sweet talking the building's security AI. (For whatever reason, machine-minds were putty in the Tintenklopfer's hands.)

Once he was at the core of Otieno Corp's machine network, Desmond summoned a small construct with a camera for a head so he could record and stream the completion of his final task to his client.

Desmond had two jobs to do. The first was to copy the schematics, design specs, and research data and post them on the open web. The worldnet of Nishant was alive and somewhat self-aware.

While it would respect the privacy of private servers, once you put something out for the public it was impossible to take it back. Posting all of the company's secrets out for the public would ensure that within the month's end several of Otieno Corp's tech rivals and a few smaller companies simply looking for market share would shamelessly be creating copycat products.

One could argue about Otieno's legal rights, and its claim to that leaked content but Nishant wasn't so civilized as all that. Intellectual property rights were something that needed to be defended with money, influence, and force of arms.

Even if the company was at its best it would have been hard-pressed to stop the manufacturers on other continents. To put things plainly, Otieno Corp wasn't going to be at its best in the near future, because Desmond was about to gut the giant corporation, as per the desires of the company's original owners.

The second thing Desmond needed to do, was to order the company's network to delete itself and delete all the data stored on the network.

He then physically destroyed the computer he was using and cast a sympathetic spell to ensure all company computers that the Otieno Corps core system had direct access to, (which was basically all of them), suffered the same fate. Taking the possibility of Otieno Corp somehow saving the situation with a network backup, off the table.

"Alright. Guess it's time to go home then," said Desmond. Walking out of the office he was in, as Octavio Smith.

He was forced to pry open the thick sliding doors that had barred the way when he was walking into the office, because a fair number of the company's critical systems, such as its security system, had now either been reverted to manual operation or had gone offline completely.

Desmond walked the corpse of Octavio Smith to the rooftop of the building. Then Desmond walked Octavio over the edge of the rooftop while he himself teleported back to Zeuthen. Satisfied that he'd finished his work in Nerissa.