"Most demons only really like two things: fighting and anything to do with mortal emotions. I, uh, well I found a lot of other things in life to be more interesting? I'm not much of a fighter, I mean, have you seen me?" She tapped her chest, and then waved a hand all over.

  "You did just stab Bael to death with a blade faster than I've seen a squirrel run after bread." Wade deadpanned.

  "I didn't say I wasn't any good at it! Just that it wasn't my favorite." She reached down and picked up the bloody longsword. "Plus, it's not like I need to be great at using this to stab someone in the head while they're on the ground. I'd be pretty embarrassed if I missed that."

  Eri raised two fingers, and repeated his prior movements with them: I'm watching you lady.

  Medy gulped, but Wade spoke before she could say or do anything else. "So you don't like fighting, but if you're forced into it, you know your way around a sword?"

  "Yeah, exactly! I can't really do a field of control well, and I wasn't good at using magic much, but I can make some things work. Alchemy is so much easier to learn and work with, it's a lot more fun too."

  That was fine with Wade, her main job in his company would be to cook up and sell drugs.

  The good kind.

  …

  The good-er kind.

  Alchemy had to have a lot of interesting applications, and even the very basic health and mana potions would be useful to brew up. Having a near infinite tap back on earth would be an excellent investment. Bael was already a windfall with enchanted gear, and he'd be getting the two for one whammy getting her on board.

  All he was missing now was a magic teacher. But all things in good time.

  "Why am I smelling greed off you?" She asked, tilting her head.

  Wade stopped straightaway, "…You can smell greed?"

  "All demons can sense emotions from mortals. Why else do you think demons are interested in you guys? You're food to us, well, not quite food-food, more the byproduct of food? It's complicated."

  "I assumed it was the whole 'eating souls' thing you guys had going on?"

  "Oh, we do eat those too." She giggled. "Not as much anymore today, don't worry, but we still could. We just don't need to as much anymore, regular food and mana did a good enough job to replace it."

  "Wait, hang on. Eat those… too? Medy. What, exactly, do you do with mortal emotions?"

  She tilted her head. "Well, they're also part of our diet. We can't starve to death, technically, we just break apart and respawn again still hungry. And we get very weak and cranky when we don't have anything at all."

  Wade stared at her. "Let me get this straight: You eat emotions."

  That did sound very demon-y to Wade.

  "Yeah? Greed's not quite tasty to me, I prefer fear. That's more my comfort food. Everyone was always afraid while in the mana mines so I never went hungry there. And I got really used to the taste. But I'll eat greed in a pinch, I'm not that picky." She gave him a big smile.

  A drop of blood fell off the tip of the blade, still in the process of fading away.

  Wade watched that hit the mud in slow motion. And he was suddenly acutely aware that Medy wasn't a human with horns, hooves and a tail. This was still a soul-eating demon. Their natural prey was him. The outside appearance here was mimicry from a predator. Built to get past a sense of distrust and sneak within the herd. Just because she was sapient and intelligent didn't mean she wasn't perfectly happy to kill him or anyone else. Humans had known for years now plenty of animals were intelligent and sapient, that didn't stop them from farming and eating them all. Nature was nature.

  What he thought were sensible things might not be sensible things to a demon.

  Only reason he wasn't completely worried was that they had a pact to protect each other down here, and eating emotions didn't sound like protecting him.

  "Oh?" Medy tilted her head. "Ohhhh!" Her smile twisted into something more vicious. "Am I… scaring you mortal? Oh-ho-ho-hoooo~" Medy happily bounced on her hooves, then froze, coughed in her hand, and tried again, stopped and changed the plan. She stabbed her sword dramatically into the mud, walked right up to Wade with that same vicious grin, and folded her arms across her chest, giving him a deep satisfied grin.

  "… Medy, what are you doing?" Wade asked.

  "Looming over you." She said, then frowned. "Why isn't it working?"

  For one, she was looking up at him. Since she was shorter than he was, even accounting for her horns.

  "Wait-wait! Stop that, no-no-no-no!" She lunged out and grabbed his shirt, pulling him in and out. "Go back to being scared please! I haven't had any food for years while I was blackrotten! At least just a nibble, please!"

  She was tearing up at this point.

  Eri walked right behind her, grabbed her by the armpits, lifted her directly up like a child, and took two steps back. He held her there, suspended in the air with her feet dangling down.

  Remembering the last time she'd tried, and miserably failed, to escape his grip, Medy didn't even bother attempting it a second time. Instead, she pouted and crossed her arms, staring daggers at him. Upset.

  Wade returned the glare. It's not his fault she'd rolled a one on intimidation.

  Medy was a demon, but Wade now understood one additional item: Medy was still… Medy.

  "How do you know enough about demonic culture to speak, read and also guess I'm Xan, but not know what demons eat?" She asked, still held up by Eri. "You're a really weird and strange mortal."

  "I'll… explain that part after." He answered, mostly because he got the feeling if he even mentioned being from another world, Medy would latch onto that topic and never let go. He'd be answering questions all day instead of hearing her story. "More importantly: How, exactly, do demons eat emotions? What's all the things demons actually eat?"

  Frankly, he was now more cautious about one aspect: These were soul-eating demons, and they were trying to eat parts of him in ways he didn't yet know or understand.

  That can't be good for his general health. Probably. He should figure out exactly what could go wrong first.

  Knowing how all this worked would help him navigate an HR department and handle any issues related to demon coworkers. "Just assume I have holes in my memory for now when it comes to demons. I promise I'll explain my side of things after."

  She frowned for a moment, still suspended in Eri's grip. Her gaze darted left and right, as if uncertain about something. Smelling something in the air? Whatever it was, she shook her head, deciding to focus. "Okie, fine. Well, demons eat four things. Souls, emotions, mana and other demons. And normal mortal food now. So five things technically. But eating mortal food is pretty new in the past few centuries, so we're still getting the hang of using that to keep our hunger away."

  Wade blinked. "All right. I admit. Did not see the cannibalism angle coming in like this."

  Eri clicked his jaw. He'd never heard much of demons in his era, and all this was brand new information to him.

  Medy frowned again, then twisted her head, horns briefly getting stuck against his skull before she pulled free. She started to scrunch her nose, sniffing the air. Then she sniffed the skeleton. "Oh! I knew I wasn't going crazy!"

  And she sniffed again, deeper this time.

  Eri stared back at her. Then slowly turned his gaze toward Wade.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Boss. Are you seeing this?

  She started wriggling in his grip in order to bury her face in his ribcage and sniff him even further. Then realized she was being held by the armpits and her hands were free to do her bidding. As in trying to pull apart what was left of his snowboarding jacket and sniff the inside of it. Which she partially succeeded at.

  Eri decided all this was way too weird for him, even by his standards, and let her go as though she were a hot potato.

  She landed on her hooves like a cat would and had the same sense of personal space as one, taking immediate steps after him, nose tilted up like a bloodhound.

  Eri did the only logical action when faced with this situation: He turned and ran.

  "Wait- come back!" She called out, "You smell like curiosity and happiness, and that's, like, seriously impossible for a skeleton, I need to study you!"

  Eri was already running over the grass and larger shrubs, which Medy couldn't follow behind because she might step on a blackrotten bug. And she knew it, staring after the skeleton like an orca would stare at a beached seal.

  Wade could almost feel the gears in her head turn, before she turned her head his direction and narrowed her eyes down. "Wade. How do you have a skeleton that can feel things? How is there a skeleton that has any emotion in the first place?"

  "Eri's Eri." Wade said. "But if you want answers, you gotta give them back. We had a deal, you first. What is this cannibalism thing between demons?"

  He did notice she had slightly sharp shark-like teeth now that he gave her a longer look. It was subtle, but it was there.

  She blinked. Then narrowed her eyes at him again in suspicion. "You promise to answer after, right?"

  "Swear on my mom's grave." Wade said.

  "That's… very much not binding and I can feel that all the way here. Don't know who your mother is, but you clearly hate her. Swear on something more important."

  Damn. She got him there.

  "I swear on…" Wade took a breath and gulped. If demons could actually feel emotions and could tell when things are important then… "On all the money in my bank account."

  He was about to say his friends and actual family, but that was something too important to swear on ever.

  But money? Money comes and goes. It's important enough to be valuable, without being important enough to be missable.

  And the demoness seemed to agree. "Oh, that's much more binding. Okie." She nodded, content. "Well back then, if we didn't eat each other, there'd be other problems."

  Problems? "I think eating each other causes more problems than solves?"

  "Uh, no?" She clapped her hands together, trying to get the last of the mud off, before looking back across the large grass, longingly.

  The skeleton remained safe in the distance, only his ribcage and arms visible among the grass.

  If the skeleton could glower at her, Wade was convinced he would. Eri turned to him and clicked his jaws a few times: He had signed up to fight to the death here, not to get sniffed by some demonic weirdo.

  "I don't know man, I'm trying to figure it out same as you are." Wade said, and that was the truth.

  Said demonic weirdo hadn't picked up on any of that subtext, turning back to Wade. "All right, so, Demons don't die of old age or anything, we're immortal. Whenever a new one manifests at the bottom of Hell, that's one more demon that's here forever. Eating each other solves that population issue. So, can you now tell me why your skeleton has emotions??"

  "Wait, wait, what do you mean manifest?"

  She'd mentioned that word once before, and Wade wanted to be certain he knew it meant what he thought it meant.

  She gave him another odd look, paused, sighed, shrugged, and continued. "We don't have families like you do. We don't reproduce at all like mortals do. New demons spawn at the ninth circle. That's what manifest means."

  "… and do we know why or how?"

  Or was it just fantasy world rules and none of it made sense because magic?

  "The smartest Houses tracked it down to infernal essence coalescing downwards through the circles to the bottom of hell, where there's some kind of old divine spell that collects all of that, compresses it into an entity, binds that entity, and spits us out fully formed. There's quite a lot of theories out there over the years, I personally think the gods needed a place to filter bad souls out, and jailers to do the filtering for them. So if you've already got a giant soul-catcher where each circle is smaller than the last like a funnel, why not have it pull double duty, right? It only makes sense."

  Wade nodded solemnly.

  All right. Fantasy world rules where none of it made sense then. "Proceed. How does eating each other fit into all this?"

  "Since demonic population is inherently unsustainable, there had to be an artificial way of limiting it. Basically it was socially acceptable to eat one another, depending on the circumstances. Like a… deep feud. Or a barfight."

  "There really weren't any better ways to handle population expansion?"

  "Probably, but this was very healthy for demon society!"

  Wade blinked slowly. "Cannibalism is not generally known to be examples of a good functional society."

  "Not for mortals, sure. But for us it forced demonkind to band together! We don't have families or any need to pair up, so we never had that drive mortals have. So a lot of smaller less powerful demons would be forced to band together to keep themselves safe from being eaten by a stronger demon, and stronger demons had to make deals with other stronger demons or smaller armies so they could keep eating the smaller demons that did group up. And that's how demon society started forming up into Houses, cities, ranks and-" She stopped, "Uh, I'm getting off track. It's not okay to eat anyone anymore right now, same reasons why: New demons only manifest at the bottom of hell."

  Why would- Oh. "The bottom of hell. Which is now full of blackrot."

  "Yep!" Medy nodded excitedly. "We're quite literally a dying race now, there's no demons coming to replace anyone that dies. Technically, they're still spawning, but none of them are ever making it all the way up here. So mortal food replaced having to eat souls or other demons so far, and mana helped cover the rest of our needs, with eating emotions rounding out the rest."

  "Jesus christ."

  The demoness looked at him weird, "I don't know who that is, am I supposed to?"

  "Something from where I'm from, don't worry about it." Wade waved her away.

  Demonkind was basically being spawn-camped by Blackrot. It wasn't enough that dying threw them into this whole thing, the newborn demons didn't even have a chance at making it out. "But wait, doesn't that mean hell is getting filled up with blackrotten demons over time?"

  She nodded. "Yeah?"

  "And what happens when they spill out of hell?"

  "I suppose that'd be the end of the world, there's probably hundreds of millions by now. But that's why mortals send mages down here to maintain and keep an eye on their sea."

  So. Wade tapped his fingers together, considering.

  All of hell was a completely jank system and the people of Azdrial were all sitting on an impending apocalypse situation. Hoping the prior temporary solution didn't explode in their lifetime.

  As if the whole sun-being-blown-up thing wasn't already bad enough. "The more I learn about Azdrial, the more I understand why everyone wants to leave it."

  "Leave to where?" Medy asked, curious.

  Wade looked over to her. He still hadn't learned who she really was or why she was afraid of being called Xan. Mostly because she'd go into tangents and dragged him along with somehow. But he had a feeling that wouldn't be too bad to deal with.

  He could probably tell her about Earth. And he had sworn all of his bank account into answering her question, so that was riding on the line.

  What he needed to know would be the damage Medy could cause to her coworkers when recruited back to earth. Once he knew it was safe, he'd do his part of the bargain.

  "Medy." Wade asked, trying to be direct and keep things on topic. "What exactly happens to the person when you eat their emotions?"

  "Do you mean eat-eat or just pathosynthesis?"

  Market's blessing of language was doing some heavy lifting for that term. Not only had Wade understood demons were closer to plants that used emotions as their passive energy source, it also translated it into the proper latin wording.

  In demonic, she had literally just said 'food-airborne.'

  And the eat-eat was… Medy being Medy and using terms she liked for it.

  "Uh, explain both."

  "Pathosynthesis would be like licking at food. Or eating a smell out of the air." She stopped. "Yeah, okay, that one probably doesn't make sense. Point is once someone eats the emotion out of the air, other demons can't eat it anymore. So there is something we're eating that can't be shared. It just doesn't affect the mortal at all, the emotion's already outside your body by then. Active eating, we need to be touching our meal skin to skin, like a handshake. That would be enough."

  "And you… eat the emotion within the mortal?"

  "Yep, much more concentrated. It's very tasty, but I don't exactly remember the last time I had a full meal like that."

  "…Do I get those emotions back after, or are they completely gone forever?"

  "I mean, not really? Could be a few hours or a day. It depends on the person how fast it comes back, and umm." She scrunched her brow, thinking through, then lit up. "Oh, I know how to explain it! It's like putting out fire with a bucket of water! Fire's the emotion. After the fire's gone out, the wood is waterlogged for a while, right? So it can't be set on fire anymore. Not until it dries out. Some wood dries out faster, other wood still has some parts that are still dry and can be set on fire, it varies mortal to mortal and what the emotion was. That's why if you're planning on actively consuming an emotion, it's really important to fuel that to the highest possible point before eating, since it won't come back for a few hours after. Or if it does, it's more a trickle at first."

  As in make certain the steak was well prepared and juicy because messing it up meant no do-overs on recooking the steak. Wade did feel a little more relieved at that. "So people recover? There's no permanent damage?"

  "Eating a soul does kill the mortal completely, but eating emotions is sustainable. And… why am I smelling greed on you again?"

  Wade had gone from being afraid he was getting accidentally eaten, to already plotting the best way to make a fortune off of this. "Could you eat away a panic attack? Or depression? Or maybe trauma?"

  "I could eat a panic attack, or anxiety. I don't think I can eat depression? I can eat the immediate sadness though!"

  Two words: Demon. Therapists.

  No wait, if he was going to do this right it would be three words: Licensed. Demon. Therapists.

  Maybe there might need to be a bit of a PR campaign to turn demonic reputation around. But anything could be done.

  "Trauma can't be eaten, I can't eat memories or how someone feels about them each time they think back. But I can eat that bit of emotion when they do think about it!"

  All right, so perhaps not therapists exactly. Therapy is for long term solutions.

  Wait. He had it. The perfect rebrand: Emotional Support Demon.

  Jackpot. Just have them all wear a little vest and nobody would even question it.

  "Wow, this is great stuff." Medy said, humming. "It's rare I get to eat greed, but like I said, I'm not a picky eater! Keep it coming!"

  Wade had an odd thought. What would happen if Medy ate his greed? Not passively eating it, but that active chomp?

  No, he needed that greed. Ambition was what drove him forward to greater heights. It was his rock upon which he was building the core of his enterprise. Giving it up for free would be idiotic, duh.

  He should sell it instead.