Experimentation

5/15 late morning

It was finally time to test a few things out. Since the first time I'd summoned Mezzo and realized that he was fully captured, I'd wanted to know if I could exploit this to summon a bunch of demons and rapidly expand my retinue that way. Now that I'd had it confirmed that demons who died in my service would be back by close of business the next day, I wanted it even more. A strike force of intelligent semi-disposable demons would be hugely beneficial to me, so to make that happen Mezzo was going to be my lab rat.

"Now. Tell me if your bond to me feels any different after this." I put a new necklace on him and transformed him into a satyr, his form seeming to liquify and expand. As a satyr, Mezzo became tall and muscular, but his posture was still hunched over and he looked a bit confused. "So? How does it feel? Has the bond changed?"

"What the hell kind of question is that? Everything feels different ya numbskull!" Ok, fair. I had Drusilla go up into the house and come back with some trash from the kitchen and a few pigeons from Ursula's coop.

I was still able to immolate the small pile of food scraps and eggshells, but it was definitely more of a struggle to draw out the fire. Mezzo, in contrast, couldn't use his firebolt spell at all. I noted that down; innate abilities were locked by species. Not surprising, but important. Despite his size and physique, I was all too aware of how little that would matter if he was thrown against someone with more martial skill. Especially in this world, where extensive physical training was often sufficient to fight things a dozen times your size.

Very few humans from my homeworld would have a snowball's chance in hell fighting a grizzly bear in melee, but I was pretty sure it would be at least a plausible matchup if I told Tessa to fight one. Tessa, who was a fairly typical soldier, well trained but unexceptional. Probably had something to do with the fact that all humans in Azeroth were actually descended from Viking android supersoldiers intended to fight the minions of the old gods with axes.

They'd be pretty overpowered if their rivals and allies didn't include the descendants of living mountains, the descendants of somewhat shorter golem Viking construction workers, the chosen people of the primal gods, semi-immortal Amazon warriors, a whole kingdom's worth of zombies that declared independence from the zombie apocalypse, full sized bipedal cows, and the R&D department of the gods. And that's just the core races in Classic.

"Alright. Good start. Promising. So, Drusilla, I need you to bring over one of those pigeons." I went through the process of binding another imp using the little birdie as my sacrifice. It was just as easy as last time. No additional resistance to the binding or summoning at all. I turned this one into a satyr too, and kept going, passing the necklace around. The process of summoning an imp was meticulous, but not difficult with soul and everlasting talent guiding my hands. It took about half an hour per conjuration. After the fourth ritual, I started on the fifth and hit a wall.

The tendril of arcane energy reaching out towards the twisting nether searching for an imp simply… didn't find one. It flailed around randomly, growing larger and larger, drawing more and more energy from me, burning through my body and mind, and killing me.

••••••••••

Luckily for me, I found myself in a nearby graveyard. To my mild surprise there was a spirit healer, an angelic blue woman with beautiful wings of light, fiddling with a small crystal that I could sense was in some way similar to my jewels.

"Uh. Can I get a revive?" I had been expecting to be dead when I died, it was almost a letdown if I could just request a resurrection or do a corpse run like a PC in the game. A part of me wondered if I could capture her; she was ethereal, but damn hot. Why the hell do I think with my dick so much? I was dead, she was a shepherd of lost souls and I was seriously wondering whether or not she'd be a good lay? Definitely worth capturing, but not for that reason. 

"Huh? Wait what? How did you die?" The blue skinned woman looked up at me, standing up from the gravestone she was sitting on. "Did you seriously just botch a ritual? With soul talent active?"

"No! I did it perfectly. It just didn't work! Wait, you know about…"

She interrupted me. "Alright. Wait here, I'll check the logs." She snapped her finger and shifted position a few feet to the left, with a slightly changed posture. "Alright. I figured it out. Your little stunt with the transformations bypassed the in-universe resistance that you'd normally encounter, so when you hit the hard cap on summons we have in the code you didn't get any feedback until it killed you. I'll put in a ticket to patch that out. Don't fuck with any demon summoning tricks like that for at least the next few days. Uh. Normal rituals are probably fine."

"Wait… are you a GM?"

"What was your first clue?" She snorted. "Yeah, call me Auriel. We try to stay hands off, but if your run gets terminated because you were actually trying to test the system we implemented creatively, that's some bullshit. If you ask me you should get a fruit basket for finding actual holes in the system, but we'll see. For now, I have the authority to resurrect you if I think your death was caused by something on our end. Hopefully nobody overrules me; that's normally for texture glitches causing a fall into the center of the earth in early alpha worlds. Try not to break anything else, eh?"

••••••••••

I was placed right back in the moment before my death, my body seared and blistering but still intact, and my ritual's effects were cut off abruptly. My companions were naturally very concerned, but I was a pretty good healer. Once I could open my mouth, Drusilla fed me a cheap healing potion. That primed the pump, and I could croak out a bit of healing magic. A few renews and a weak trollsblood potion would heal me up within a few hours.

"Wait. Shit. I didn't ask how to contact her again!" I wasn't expecting Auriel to be my guardian angel, but I'd like to have someone I could clear stuff like this with beforehand. From the sounds of it she thought that stress testing the magic was part of my job, so she might be willing to facilitate that or at least point out potential pitfalls I couldn't see.

"Uh. Who?" Drusilla asked nervously. It seemed that all of my summoned demons had been banished when I'd died. I quickly checked my amulet and confirmed they were still captured.

"An angel. One of the ones who gave me my powers." I coughed painfully. "She saved me from death because she liked that I was playing with them creatively." I looked over the fruits of my labor in the app: four more satyrs, three male and one female. Not exactly a king's ransom, but I'd definitely profited off of this.

I scratched off an outer layer of crispy dead skin, seeing the black scales beneath, and considered how I might use them. Until they got better at fighting or their special Satyr powers manifested, they'd probably be more useful in combat as scampering imps throwing fireballs. In the name of hotness and to serve as a control group, I was inclined to keep the one girl, Pryzhum, as a satyr. She had a more reddish skin tone and worse posture than Zelena, but a fairly similar build. Once I got to the point where I didn't need it, hopefully within a day or two, I'd give her my sword and torch skill chip. That was enough to make a complete incompetent into a passable warrior. I could attest to that.

Pryzhum

"Can you teach me how to summon a voidwalker? A succubus? A Felhunter? I don't think I'll be doing it today, but I want them all eventually." One of each of the standard demons would give me a pretty decent strike force; a ranged combatant, a fairly effective tank, a generalist fighter who could overwhelm people with desire, and a specialized mage hunter. To cap it off, I could change around what these four extras were as much as I wanted. All that was missing was a healer.

"Good to know being roasted doesn't dissuade you." Drusilla said, deadpan. "I could teach you how to summon a voidwalker and a succubus, but only if we can get a hold on appropriate lures. The voidwalker is relatively easy apparently, we just need an item infused with the power of shadow and then you need to subdue them with your own magic."

"Not too bad. I can't imagine shadow magic items are too terribly rare."

"They aren't all that common, but I think those amulets you were gathering qualify. A bit on the weak side, but we could use multiple. Did you need to do anything with them, or is it enough to just have them?"

"I just needed to collect them. I've got 20… somewhere. I kinda lost track of them after the mission was completed. Probably in a box in Lakeshire somewhere."

"Well they should still be easier to find than a symbol of true love. Mutual and pure. Succubi love to collect such things as trophies, so that is the best lure for them."

"Huh. I'll keep an eye out, I guess. Anyway, I'm going to take a nap. I need to be ready for the dragon fight in a couple hours, and I don't feel up to wrestling a voidwalker right now." I set an alarm and teleported back to my apartment. Hopefully I'll be fully recovered in time.

••••••••••

Gilnid looked over his "army" as it marched through the woods, shaking his head with disappointment. Oh sure, they were dangerous enough, but this was never the intention of the design. Harvest golems were sentries, not infantry. They didn't coordinate. Their attacks were wild and flailing, prone to harming their fellows in mass combat unless they spaced themselves out. Not to mention the sheer cost; these things weren't cheap.

It seemed like a waste, but if VanCleef says jump, you ask how high. No one else was going to fund Gilnid's research, and it wasn't his gold that was being wasted. He'd been given orders to take them to the deepest part of the forest, set them to aggressive, and activate their network awareness. Then clear out. He'd even borrowed a shredder to make sure he wouldn't be killed by some random spiders. This whole situation was madness, but whatever keeps the funding coming his way.