CH737 Demon’s Perspective

The future it wanted refused to arrive.

It was a problem the demon hadn’t faced since it had been nothing more than a beast. No matter what it did, no matter how it approached the issue or what branch it tried to zero in on, it couldn’t bring its desires to reality, with them consistently left just beyond any path it could see.

Its target, the resident of the world it had come to claim, had kept avoiding capture no matter what path the demon tried to herd it onto, even splitting probabilities once more in the few times it felt like it was close, continuing to gain some new way to escape each time as mortal limits were pushed, making it feel like reality itself was on that creature’s side.

If the demon wanted to take it for itself then it needed to be able to push past limits of its own but every time the thing it wanted created more futures, the demon was stalled in a way that couldn’t help but enrage it, even if it continued to tell itself it was nothing but a matter of time. If the creature was able to break the thread of itself the demon sent out while it was conscious then it just needed to wait for it to not be, either once it fell asleep or once it was beaten into submission, with the second feeling like the preferred option by the minute.

But no matter how much the demon ground its teeth in frustration, it couldn’t deny that things weren’t all negative. Its fightful prize may have been avoiding it until that point but it was going deeper into the heart of its territory, slowly surrounding itself with the waiting limbs, and just as important, it seemed to be weakening as well.

It was no longer breaking off as many limbs in the paths that the demon saw, meaning it didn’t need to move them away before it arrived and spoke of a potential growing limitation to how long it would be able to keep doing that in general. There was even a chance that it would only be a little while longer until it was too weak to save itself should it come down to it, letting the demon take it over without having to risk anything in the end.

For weakened it seemed, and not insignificantly so. After a previously failed surprise attack, it had one of its more powerful companions carry it forward afterwards while the other two vanished. It was a result that created questions of course but seeing as it hadn’t saved itself it couldn’t have been sending them to safety either.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

So then what had happened? Was it some waiting trap sitting outside of the range it could see? The demon’s instincts said that wasn’t so but it couldn’t understand what other option there could be, leaving it to accept that no matter how infuriating, it would just have to wait for them to appear on its paths again.