I looked up at Acedia in confusion.

“What do you mean by a deal?”

He began to stretch as he proposed his deal.

“I want you to use the summoning skill given to you to help me establish my power base.”

At my questioning gaze he offered some further explanation.

”As one of my sin’s affinities summoning is an easy avenue for me to establish myself in this planet.”

“As you saw during your initial summoning of me the others decided to contest for the power of my avatar. They failed but managed to implant some essence which I need to spend a large amount of time removing. Therefore I cannot withstand the trial which the skill will impose on me.”

““I want you to use the summoning skill given to you to create some servants for me.”As the avatar of Sloth I seem to have restricted access to my sin’s system of power.”

Ok… what is that supposed to mean.

“I am able to use system identification to help you determine the necessary requirements to evolve your skill to a certain tier depending on your path.”

“Do the rest of the avatars have system identification?”

“Yes”

“I think I’m ready then.”

“So access to my Identification in exchange for helping me to establish my power here?”

“Yes”

“It’s a Deal then.”

We shook with my good hand.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Can you tell me some more about this?”

We had just finished negotiating the deal before I drew attention to the flashing blue box which displayed my new skill.

“I am assuming you are referring to the skill as I am unable to see your interface without it being displayed to me.”

Nodding my head yes he sighed and told me to wait a moment.

He lazily waved his hand in the air again before opening a grey portal the size of a large dish plate to his left.

Sighing he reached into the portal with much perceived difficulty. I thought it was resistant to his advancements for a second before realizing that guy is supposed to represent Sloth, and was probably just being lazy about having to explain why he just put a shard of the dot into my body.

Sure enough a few seconds later he had a thin Manila folder. He put on a small pair of silver glasses and started to leaf through the papers within.

He began to read the paper in an agonizingly slow fashion. Ignoring the twitching pain I started going through as the area surrounding the crystal inside of me started to heat up.

“Under the Systems Authority; Summoning Has been classified as an evolutionary type skill with a high number of system paths. The requirements to evolve this skill are unique to the user and reveal themselves after the initial Attunement. Given the difficulty to acquire and rarity of this skill higher tier evolutions are generalized in system descriptions.

A skill with high growth potential and development cost.”

“System has altered skill usage to be non-detectable by beings ranked lower than-“

He shut the folder abruptly and took a small pause before putting the systems assessment folder back through the portal.

I was overheated by this point and on the verge of heatstroke. He finally seemed to notice the state I was in before laying his hand on my head.

Heat started to leave my body through my pores and I had probably passed the internal heat tolerance that humans possess, however the hand remained still on my head and helped me to somehow retain consciousness.

Several minutes passed like this before the heat died down and I tried to take Acedia’s hand off my head.

He gripped my head. Hard.

A column of energy seemed to launch itself up from my core towards my brain.

It set of all my nerve endings in the instant it made contact with the gray wall surrounding my consciousness.

The energy fizzled out and the wall was removed.

His hand no longer propped me up and I crumpled to the ground face forward off my chair.

Acedia laid back down on the bed before he started to doze off.

I was stuck there ruminating if making a deal with the devil was really the best thing I could have done.