Imp ichor dripped down the sides of Erich’s face. He took another bite, trying his hardest to fight back a grimace. The meat tasted awful. Unappetizing didn’t do it any justice. He was pretty sure that the monsters were actually toxic. Creature’s just didn’t taste that bad on their own.

  It was like he was reliving his worst experiences eating bad berries and meat that had been left out in the sun just a bit too long all over again. Of course, the constant heat and foul smell didn’t help anything. Even if Erich had eaten a nice dinner, the environment itself would have turned his stomach on its own.

  Erich ripped off another chunk of meat. There wasn’t any dry wood to start a fire so he was forced to eat the animal raw. Bile rose in the back of his throat with each mouthful, and Erich’s gut churned as he chewed.

  Finally, unable to eat anymore, he set the imp’s leg aside. The infernal creatures didn’t taste any better today than they had before bed last night. He snorted to himself, reaching up to wipe the smeared blood and viscera from his face. His fingers touched the bristle of his growing beard, still sticky from the unpleasant meal that Erich had just forced down.

  It wasn’t like there was any real morning or night anyway. Erich had found a cave and snuck into it, counting on a pile of loose rubble to wake him up if any monsters tried to ambush him. There he spent a fitful night, nursing stomach cramps brought on from the combination of imp flesh and sour, sulfurous water.

  At times, Erich found himself wondering if the fruit from the giant purple flowers was a better bet. The plant might try to take over his mind, and purging it from his system had been painful bordering on fatal, but at least it didn’t taste as miserable as the imp meat.

  The bodies of the imps themselves were almost as concerning. Erich was hardly unfamiliar with gutting and dressing game, but hell’s denizens were completely alien. They didn’t have organs. There wasn’t much inside the small bodies but muscle, an esophagus and a stomach. He couldn’t find lungs, genitals, kidneys, or anything approaching an intestinal tract. It was like the monsters only lived to kill and eat. Every other aspect of their existence was managed by raw aether.

  It had taken him a while, but Erich finally managed to get some sleep. A bed of rocks and a stomach full of spoiled meat later, he emerged into the dull red light that seemed to come from everywhere in hell.

  He stretched, wincing at the pops and soreness in his limbs. After his ‘breakfast,’ Erich wasn’t hungry anymore, nausea from the meal had solved that problem nicely, but he was thirsty and his entire body felt from dried sweat and ichor.

  Briefly, he weighed the pros and cons of continuing on his journey immediately before finally settling on a detour into the jungle. Erich moved slowly, looking under practically every bush and leaf for the slug and gecko imps that he had fought earlier as he hacked his way toward the river.

  His earlier confidence had disappeared after his brief fight with the quartet of flying imps. Erich’s enhanced body had let him survive the fight, but the battle had demonstrated his limitations in no uncertain terms. Even if he was stronger and faster than most opponents, he only had one sword, and that sword could get lodged in bone or torn from his grasp.

  For now, Erich was content to slowly absorb the rich aether of hell while finishing his flight from the war. He could worry about honing his new techniques later. For now, his goal was simply to survive.

  Erich dropped down to his knees in the river water, squinting up at the red light for a second to make sure there were no imps in the air before scooping up a double handful of water and splashing it across his face. A fish imp lingered in the river nearby, and he kept an eye on it as he quickly finished scrubbing the blood and grime off of his body.

  He reached down and filled one of his empty canteens. The fish monster swam closer to him. It was about as long as Erich’s forearm, its long snout a snarl of needle sharp teeth. A second canteen went into the water, held by his left hand as Erich drew his sword with his right.

  The imp swam closer, its teeth glinting dangerously in the red light. Erich slapped his sword down, the flat of his weapon hitting the water with enough force to splash the trees behind him. The imp bolted away, its upper fin cutting a line through the burbling surface of the river.

  Some forty or fifty feet up stream, the fin circled around, turning toward Erich before dipping back under the water. Quickly, he finished filling his canteen as the scared imp approached him a second time.

  Another three or four fish had joined the first, and Erich backed out of the water, unwilling to try his luck any further. The monsters swam closer to the shore, circling the spot where he had been bathing.

  Erich took a couple more steps backward, only stopping when his back was against one of the nearby trees. He took a drink from the warm, foul water. The shade from the tree overhead didn’t help. Without a sun, day or night, basically everything was the same temperature. Hot, humid, and vile.

  He took another drink from the water. As rough as the rotten egg taste of sulfur was, it was better than the imps he had been eating. Contemplatively, he swished the liquid around in his mouth a bit before spitting it back into the river.

  The scent of blood had stirred the fish into a frenzy, and another half dozen zipped through toward where he had taken his brief bath, their fins cutting lines through the gurgling water. Scales flashed ruby and silver as they began to attack each other, needle-like teeth ripping through flesh and spilling even more blood.

  Erich turned around to walk back out of the forest, a brief prick of pain on his arm the only warning that he had strayed too close to one of the thorny vines.

  He cursed quietly, grabbing ineffectually onto his forearm as he looked at the line of blood drawn by the poisonous barb, as if the pressure would stop the fever and numbness from spreading. Almost immediately, his upgraded physique identified the burning darkness of the poison.

  Erich took a deep breath, mentally trying to plot out how quickly he could get back into the cave where he had spent the ‘night.’ He had survived the vines’ poison several times, albeit with the help of the flowers, but a single prick probably wasn’t enough to kill him, especially with his newly strengthened body.

  If he was careful, the trip back to the cave might take twenty minutes, most of that time being devoted to avoiding another incident with the vines that lingered around the borders of the path he had hacked in the forest. Still, his unnamed second technique should keep the symptoms from getting too bad before he made it back to the safety of his hiding space.

  Then, in a wash of light and life magic, the dark angry sensation of poison simply disappeared, and the shallow cut on Erich’s arm began closing before his very eyes.

  “Huh,” he remarked, flummoxed. Experimentally, he extended his arm, swinging it once or twice. There was nothing wrong with his limb. The scratch didn’t even sting.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  “Poison Tempered Body it is,” Erich said to himself with a chuckle. “If I can handle eating imps and poisoning myself with whatever is in those vines without many side effects, that’s certainly as good a name for it as anything.”

  He cut himself off, looking frantically around the small forest. There didn’t seem to be any of the geckos, but that wasn’t much reassurance given how good the nefarious creatures were at blending into their surroundings.

  Noise was a luxury, and one that he couldn’t spare given hell’s danger. Erich hurried out of the jungle before any of the creatures could sneak up on him, scratching himself on the thorns twice more.

  Like he thought, the poison from the cuts disappeared before it had any real chance to damage him. Each wound took more mana than a normal cut should have, but a borderline immunity to toxins on top of a general increase in stamina and the thickness of his skin was a combination that he’d happily accept.

  Erich suspected that Sathis might be a bit disappointed in him for ‘only’ gaining a life magic technique despite his high affinities in fire and lighting, but survival was a priority, and Erich doubted that he would’ve been able to survive hell without the Poison Tempered Body.

  He bit his lower lip, eyes flickering from the empty red skies to the rather suspicious looking boulders that dotted the rocky desert outside of the forest. All he was worried about right now was survival, but was that all there was to his life? Was Erich only supposed to stumble from one catastrophe to the next, the agent in everyone else’s schemes rather than living for himself?

  That wasn’t really living. Erich needed a purpose. Fulfilling his family’s expectations? Meaningless. Honor and duty to Hollendil? A corrupt rump state that had betrayed him just as assuredly as his family. His relationship to his friends? All dead due to the schemes of Hollendil and Cothleer. His relationship to Sathis?

  Erich’s thoughts paused as he pursed his lips. There was something there.

  Cinderborn concepts of honor and duty were alien to him, but Erich could see the appeal. They layered a sense of purpose and meaning over the world that he couldn’t seem to find on his own. It was true that the meaning in question seemed a bit silly, traditions for the sake of traditions that he couldn’t really make heads or tails of, but none of that changed the fact that Sathis had saved his life.

  He had offered the old man kindness in the form of a canteen full of water, and Sathis had responded in kind. It didn’t matter that the water was stolen, and it didn’t matter that the cinderborn martial artist was dying. Ultimately, he had helped an enemy and the enemy had helped him.

  There was something genuine there. An obligation that Erich didn’t terribly mind shouldering. He owed Sathis, and he couldn’t really imagine how much pain the warrior had gone through to teach him the basics of martial arts theory over the course of a week without food or water as his aether slowly dwindled.

  Erich had agreed to the rite of Mathliss, not entirely knowing what it entailed. Once he arrived in the cinderborn camp, he could probably weasel out of it by pleading ignorance. What he had gleaned from his conversation with Sathis made it sound like the task would be arduous after all.

  But he didn’t want to.

  Sathis had done so much for him, it only felt right that Erich did something back for the old man, even if he was already dead. Erich wasn’t entirely sure what his purpose or direction in life was, but abandoning a promise like that didn’t fit with who he wanted to be.

  Erich bit down gently on his lower lip, chewing it as he mulled over his predicament. Ultimately, that was all a problem for the future. He might only be surviving, but surviving his journey through hell was enough of a problem on its own.

  The landscape didn’t really change as he walked. There were still flowers, heavy with their sickly corpse scent, in the jungle and patches of cyan rock around breeding pools on the cliffside.

  His eyes jumped from one rock to another as he trekked along the smuggler’s path. At least one seemed to shift, but before Erich could investigate it, the buzzing of a flying patrol interrupted him.

  He hacked a hiding spot into the forest and crouched there until the imps passed. This time, Erich wasn’t interrupted by geckos, but he didn’t want to push his luck any more than necessary.

  As soon as the flyers were gone, he jogged back out into the open and began following the markers once again. He didn’t stop to eat, drinking as he walked. Erich wasn’t even sweating really. Despite the heat and choking humidity that suffused everything, his new body treated it like nothing more than a stroll on a hot summer day.

  The hours blended together. Caution and paranoia were almost commonplace in hell as the oppressive heat and dull red light so his movement speed was fairly slow, but Erich just found himself not growing tired. Without sunset to mark the end of the day, he had no idea how long he had walked. It certainly seemed longer than six or even eight hours, but that could just be a function of his perception being stretched to its limit by his surroundings.

  Finally, Erich spotted one of the smuggler markers diverging from the rocky desert that bordered the jungle. Ahead, the small pillars came at shorter intervals, leading up one of the valley’s walls and up a dry creek bed into a narrow, winding canyon. A quick glance upward revealed a spire, pushing up into the sky past the edge of the valley.

  He squinted slightly, worry speeding his steps as he made out what looked like nests carved into the edges of the stone cylinder that marked the transition between hell, the bridge between worlds, and heaven. Unless he missed his guess, the residents of those nests were the six-legged flying imps that had dogged him during most of his voyage through the valley.

  They didn’t leave their perches, instead content to scamper up and down the rock face and chatter at each other. At least once, Erich saw a fight between the imps as he approached, ichor spattering downward as two of the monsters ambushed and ate a companion.

  His sword was in his hand as he walked into the narrow canyon. One of the imps looked at him, making eye contact with Erich for a second. It cocked its head to the side and chattered insensibly before clambering along the rock face toward a next.

  Nothing happened. It didn’t take to the air. It didn’t call for help. There wasn’t a surge of mana and aether as the denizens of hell sought to destroy and consume the intruder. Nothing.

  Somehow that was worse. Erich’s heart was pounding in his chest. Imps were supposed to be dumber than ordinary predators. A wolf could be trained. A bear would avoid a rival’s territory. Imps were manifestations of hunger and greed. They attacked and they ate almost everything, including their own kind.

  Those rumors and stories didn’t appear to be wrong. He’d only been in hell for a couple of days, but he’d seen imps eating their own kind more than once. The feral critters would only hold themselves back long enough to lie in ambush.

  For one to simply ignore him, especially as Erich was in a hard to defend spot like the canyon, that meant something strange was going on, and strange worried him. Erich chewed on his lower lip, nervous energy creeping into his body as he walked through the canyon.

  Already he could see the cave at the base of the spire. At least a dozen of the flying imps nesting in the rock were looking at him, tracking Erich’s progress with unblinking eyes. They chattered at each other, hopping back and forth on the face of the stone pillar, but still, none of them made a move.

  Erich felt gooseflesh prickling the back of his neck and arms. Part of him was wondering why they were even on the spire. Sathis had said that the cinderborn would periodically sweep the valley in order to make sure that nothing too powerful set up camp there. The flyers might not be powerful individually, but Erich was sure that there were at least a hundred roosting on the rocks above him, easily enough to make trouble for a higher level smuggling team. Still, if the imps were going to let him pass, he wasn’t going to second guess the opportunity.

  Finally, Erich stepped into the mouth of the cave. Hell’s sulfurous heat still beat down on him, but at last he was away from the peering eyes of the flyers. Just as he was about to heave a sigh of relief, a large shadow near the back of the cave stirred, sending a spike of adrenaline rushing through his body.