Chapter 30
It had been a very long time since Zeth had last slept, and his body had long since begun feeling the cost of such a thing. The twenty-four Endurance he’d gotten from Leveling up helped with his exhaustion quite a bit, but not nearly enough to fully counteract the negative effects of not only the sleep deprivation, but also the physical toll of all the running and drawing he’d been doing. Really, in any other situation, he’d have dropped everything and passed out right on the ground.
But he had his father's killers right in front of him. And that not only meant he had an opportunity for vengeance, it also meant that for the first time since acquiring this Class, Zeth had more blood and bodies than he knew what to do with. And he was not about to waste that boon by sleeping and letting them escape or get eaten by some monster.
Unfortunately, Zeth wouldn’t be able to keep his living prisoners protected from wild animals inside of a Hellfire Circle like he had with monster corpses in the past. There was no way to selectively protect some people from activating one when they touched it, which meant his usual method of simply drawing a particularly wide circle and putting what he wanted to protect in the middle of it would just kill them.
Instead, what Zeth wanted was some sort of structure he could keep them in. If he had a home base that he could just trap the entrance of, it’d solve all of his problems. Not just with his storage issues, but also his issues of staying safe when being chased like he had been before. He’d been forced to throw off his pursuers, which had fortunately worked in that instance, but he wouldn’t always be so lucky.
He needed a location he knew would be safe, defensible, and, most importantly, hidden. At least, more hidden than a clearing in the middle of the woods. Right now, all that was preventing people from finding this place was the fact that nobody knew to look out here. But they’d likely start searching now, after the jailbreak. This clearing was on the entire other side of town than where he’d fled into—he had circled all the way back around to get here—so hopefully it’d take them a while to try looking in this area, but it was only a matter of time.
So, he thought, he suddenly found himself with access to quite a bit of demon labor, with all of these prisoners waiting to be killed. And if demons were so adept at digging, there was one obvious option when it came to bases.
An underground complex. Systems of tunnels and rooms, all defended to the maximum to repel anyone foolish enough to enter. With a place like that, keeping himself and his possessions safe would be trivial.
But to dig out such a massive area, he’d need demons. And if he wanted demons, he’d have to conduct more rituals to summon them.
So he bent down and got to work.