Do demons say 'bless you' when they are cursing each other? No. But they should.

While the druidic blessing failed to melt my face, it apparently didn't agree with my one outwardly demonic trait, namely the wings. I can still move them, but now they look positively ghastly with tattered wing membrane clinging to atrophied limbs.

So, even though I got back to the imperial capital, I am not exactly at the best of the moods right now. Having to be humiliatingly carried by Celica all the way here wasn't exactly fun. And now I have the pleasure of explaining to the council of generals what came of our mission. If only I knew that myself...

"So, you see, until someone unseals the cave, the druids are simultaneously both dead and not dead."

The generals have hard time swallowing my explanation, which at some point turned into 'Schrödinger's druids'. While there is no definite proof that our targets are dead, there has been no word of their return either.

I asked Celica just how many rocks she used to block the entrance and all she said was 'all of them~'. I'd have thought those stubborn old geezers would rise from their grave time and again, but I guess they are still in process of digging themselves out then. If they even can do that... An image of them slowly starving before resorting to cannibalism flashes in my mind just as the general who's compensating something with his gigantic sideburns clears his throat and speaks.

"Let me sum it up... You joined the Hunt, undressed some corpses, impaled a dragon through its arse..."

Those were the part he picked up?

"...and when confronted by the druids, that leery fellow you had with you got banished and you two just turned tail and fled without killing even one of them? Do you have anything to say to that?"

"If you want the very best~... send someone else~."

Thank you Celica. My thoughts exactly.

I'm certain I'd have been discreet like a ninja's fart, but Celica and Azara were rather questionable choices for the mission. Although, that's only if the empire had actually cared about discretion. They may have just planned to unleashed some demons to destabilize the clans - and if the assassination succeeded, all the better.

Yeah, that's the angle I'll use. While the generals are a bit iffy about the conclusion of our mission, the truth is that there has been quite a lot of unrest in the Druidic Clans after the disappearance of their highest leadership during the very important festival. Which means...

"You tried to achieve with us few demons what normally would require full-blown military campaign to do. Even if the nominal objective - which was overreaching anyway - was left unfulfilled, your reports show that the intended effects were achieved anyway with that low low price."

They all begin to object and dispute what I'm saying regardless, but I won't have any of that. I just stare at them and say two words with all the authority of one who has lived for millennia.

"'Kamikaze dwarves'."

The generals shift uncomfortably. They slithered out of the reward part when I and Celica saved them from Dwarven suicide bombers, so now would be a good time for that to come back to haunt them.

In the end they decided to give two thirds of the reward as a compromise. Celica and I unanimously voted that the missing third was Azara's portion, naturally.

***

"Well, that went better than expected."

We're back at my house now that that business is dealt with. The reward for services rendered ought to begin trickling soon. I don't know how exactly it will be carried out - the empire has created some wonderfully abstract ways to give demon her due. I think there are even professional 'victims' for that purpose. Other demons usually think it's a shame for it to be so impersonal, but I don't care about that.

Since my clothes sort of shattered during the druid operation - including the wolf pelt armor, which though magic resistant, couldn't handle coldness of hellrime - I had to return to the flowy silk noble outfit of mine.

I jump onto the chair in my living room, and a dust cloud explodes into every direction. I don't think Celica has ever cleaned these, even though she's technically supposed to be the maid here. She's not about to do so now either; she stretches while yawning like a cat before starting to head out.

"Haaaaah~! Big sis~ has plenty of stuff to do~."

"Aha."

"Gotta remind everyone who's back~, tehe~."

She runs off to do her succubus stuff while I'm feeling déjà vu unusually strongly. She is part of many of my incarnations' memories, more actively in some, more distantly in some. While the exact timing of this and that instance eludes me, I note that she has been the same for at least... thousand years now! Unchanging...

Yes... Your average demon stays the same potentially forever. After all, when one has been doing things the certain way for thousands of years, the habit condenses diamond hard, unshakable by all but the most extreme changes. I, on the other hand... It's fair to say I'm a special case. ...Even more so now that my wings are half dead, I think bitterly.

As for my new old memory bank, I have been trying not to overthink about it. I don't want to recall some weird habits my previous incarnations may have had, for one. And its utility value is rather questionable, for two. I had hoped countless lifetimes' worth of learned skills would have made me an almighty universalist, but no such luck. After all, if you haven't used your skills for a long time, even a demon forgets them. And the parts I do remember? They are, let's say... less than ideal.

After Celica left, I decided to do some magic. Magic is something you need to devote at least a decade into or you won't be able to even begin. So far it has felt like too much of a bother - most demons think so, probably. Therefore I was stoked to remember learning it on more than one occasion. Well, partially remember... Right now I can recall only a few spells. Quantity isn't the problem here though. It's the quality...

There's a spell that would take roughly a whole day to cast that summons the nearest piece of butter to the caster. So, after some ~20 hours of casting the butter would get teleported from some poor bastard's larder only to splat on the floor in front of the caster. Never mind the insanity of the premise, the real head-ache is that technically it doesn't teleport anything, but rather moves the world itself while only the targeted butter piece stays still. Yes, one incarnation of mine came up with a way to shift the universe... to get blobs of butter. I had a small existential crisis after recalling that particular time.

Another one makes everyone in the area vomit blood. Great crowd control spell, if a bit gross, right? Too bad the caster is included in the effect. And then there's a commonly used utility spell that lets you send messages to people who are using corresponding listening spell. It sounds vaguely useful, assuming you'd actually know someone who can cast the listening spell. In practice it's just a magical Chat Roulette though. ...Not that I didn't give it a try. As of now, the mental image of Dick Butt is probably haunting mages and druids around the world. Muahahahah.

So, only a few incarnations had bothered to learn any magic, and only the weird eccentric spells left strong enough impressions to be remembered. I did attempt to reverse engineer more useful spells by mixing spell components from different incarnations' memories, but that didn't work out as well as I had hoped either...

I relocated into the magician Holoster's chamber for some testing. My first attempt at casting a fireball (a true classic) made every candle in the room violently crumble into a ball of wax that levitated in the air. I'm not sure if it was merely a trick of the light, but it looked like some kind of horrible creature was trying to get out of the melted candle wax sphere, only for the whole abomination to explode violently. My second attempt was slightly less disturbing, though it got even further away from being a fireball spell. As I finished casting the readjusted spell, the roof began dripping what I at first thought was blood, but turned out to be merely red liquid explosive.

Was third time the charm? I never got to see it, since Holoster stopped me in anguish. In my own opinion my spells were impressive enough (at least if I could manage to replicate them reliably...), but my casting process seemed to make the stony faced mage cry. I think I could relearn magic in relatively short time... if I experimented a lot. However, the conflicting incomplete memories make it a tad more dangerous than if I had started from a blank state - a complete novice wouldn't even know how to make some of the mistakes I'm doing. I decided to stop with it for now, before I accidentally summon Cthulhu or something...

Still, I'm not complaining. I may have been shooed away from the castle for blowing up Holoster's chamber, but there is plenty of other things to explore here, and I don't even need to move an inch to do so. I will find some useful knowledge here, damn it!

A particularly loud company of drunks passing by my house awakens me from my deep thoughts, and I notice that night has fallen already.

"Right. Here and now..."

Despite trying not to overthink it, I got lost into the swirling abyss of memories. This time I was attempting to find the oldest memory I have, but they get more and more blurry and fragmented the further back in time they happened. Also, the parts that happened before the calendar was invented in the mortal world are really tough to put on timeline, and the hell stays as unchangeable as demons that inhabit it, so that's no help either.

Ughhh... I should take a break from this. Who knows, I might turn catatonic if I do this too much. Since I'm still supposed to be at least try to pass for a human, I decide to go to sleep. It might help me order my thoughts, and I have nothing better to do right now anyway.

***

I wake up to blurrily see Celica peeking at me from open doorway. What's she staring at? Nothing to see here, move along. Just me trying to sleep here on this frozen bed of mine.

...Frozen?

The air is filled with mist and every single surface in my room is covered in rime. And everything within touching distance of me is not just covered in ice, but radiating coldness in scale completely alien to life. Its first victim was my blanket, which shattered into pieces all over the bed and my pale cold naked body.

"Ummm... Ais~..."

I can feel another portion of the Empire's payment for coming and its essence being absorbed... which my body immediately rejects and discharges as a burst hellrime through the skin all over me, giving me a corona of radiating, flaring power like a small inverse sun.

Okay, I think I may have been far too naive and optimistic when I failed to expect the blessing to have more effects than just making my wings die.

Celica says nothing more and just eyes me with... pity?

"Don't look at me like I just wet the bed!"