"Wait, hold on." Wade was having a few whammy reveals. "That giant string of names you have - are those all demons you've eaten?"

  "Uh, yes, but no?" Medy frowned, trying to figure out how to explain demonic names to a mortal. "They're a mix of actual names, titles, and jobs. It's a little hard to explain since demonic names are linked to our essence and used in summoning us. It's more than just what we ate, it's all about who we are, you know? They're deeper rooted than mortal names, they kinda have to be in order to summon us. It's similar to divinities who have a name that touches their aspect." She hummed, looking up to the roof of the mini-cave as she thought. "It's like a record of our history?"

  "uh, okay." Wade filed that under 'I have no idea what she's talking about, but I'll go with it for now.'

  Even Market's blessing wasn't helping with the demonic names, they just sounded like names to Wade.

  "So… you won against Xan and then ate her?"

  "The eating part was more something I had to do, she was a really sore loser and it was self-defense! My potions ripped hers apart, and there was no way she could bribe any judge enough to outright give her any wins on that. I mean, not a single one of her potions actually remained standing or overpowered my own. She got some of the judges to claim I cheated, and she tried to hand off bad ingredients or rotten ones, but each rematch always ended the same way because I was just better at drawing essences from the ingredients and knew more than she did." Medy stopped, flinched, then slowly opened an eye back to watch Wade and Eri, realizing once more they hadn't made any move to slap her horns or shoot her death glares at her rambling.

  Frankly, they didn't even know they could have been doing that. If anything, Medy started getting a feeling Wade was… actually interested in hearing her talk?

  It was a little surreal, but she couldn't sense any emotions of frustration or anger anywhere in the mortal, or the… skeleton. Which meant they really didn't have a problem at all with her.

  "Uh, not to say she didn't know what she was doing!" She said, still feeling herself pathologically compelled to try and stem any future issues. "I liked her work, some of it was clever and I added it to what I knew about alchemy, so she was a great teacher! Maybe she had a bit of a sadistic streak and liked to torture mortals and other demons for a few weeks longer than would be polite, I don't really know who she was herself beside second-hand rumors, but her Alchemy did last a few seconds longer than anyone else I'd met so that part was the real deal. Anyhow, since she lost, she had to hand over her name, I was titled the new Xan, the archdemon of Alchemy. She went on a rampage, tried to order her guards to jail me, and a few other things I don't think were really sporting of her."

  "And that's how you ate her?"

  "She tried to have all that happen while I was in front of a cauldron with every regent I could possibly want around me. I mean, that's more her problem, don't you think? She could have waited until I wasn't near anything at all, and then ordered me captured and had my limbs cut off and all that. But she was so angry about everything she didn't really think it through. It's not my fault she got killed like that." Medy stopped. "Okay, maybe it is my fault, but only the killing part!"

  "It's fine, all good." Wade said. He wasn't certain why the Demoness seemed so twitchy about this subject. But maybe it was a demonic culture thing that he couldn't quite understand yet? "Why is it a bad thing that you ate her in the first place?"

  She opened her mouth to answer, then went silent, and looked over him. "You… don't think it's a bad thing I ate her?"

  "I don't have any reference at all about demonkind or your cultural quirks Medy, I literally don't have any horses in this race."

  That idiom was translated in a very strange way, but it mostly made sense to Medy when she heard it in Demonic.

  "Ah. Okie. Uh. Well, she's an archdemon and had been for a really long time. Like centuries. She'd challenged and beaten a lot of others, and it had been a really long time that she's built up a social circle around her. A lot of people had her in debt, and if she died, her debt is wiped out since I don't inherit that. So they got real mad at me. Because they'd basically lost a bunch of money they were slowly collecting back with interest. That and she had a lot of friends and they all patted each other on the back. So when she died, if the others didn't have her back, then they'd prove to the other archdemons they weren't trustworthy as allies, and it would cause a lot of problems there. So me killing and eating her came kind of out of nowhere? Nobody planned for it, nobody had any stakes, and nobody had put any money or backing behind me."

  Wade considered how that would work. If Archdemons were like high powerful political entities, then this would be a random upstart showing up out of nowhere, with zero warning, and sweeping the elections in under an hour from first appearance.

  "… but you still got the title and by rules became the archdemon of alchemy?"

  "Yeah. Technically. They stalled my coronation for a long time, trying to wiggle out money and stuff out of anyone who hadn't yet heard or knew Xan was replaced. I, uh, well I didn't really press to have it done. I thought it was all over, and after I'd eaten the guards and Xan and a few of the judges that had a lot of stakes in all this, I made an escape back to the fifth circle and went back to making potions. Eventually a few Archdemons came down to visit and got up to date with the story. They told me to just sit tight, that they'd sort it all out, and a few years passed like that without any mention of Xan being dethroned or anything like that. I just continued to go by Medea, everything was okay and I was only living life like I usually did. I don't like change, I like it when things are the same and really predictable."

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  Wade was more surprised by how well her lungs worked to say all that. She barely took breaths in between. Like she was terrified if she stopped speaking, she'd never get another chance to speak. Until she hit the last bits here and curled up in a ball, as if expecting judgement back now.

  "So… every demon out there that hears you as Xan remembers the upstart alchemist that kicked out the original one? Why do they want to kill you for that?"

  "It's because…" Medy gave a choked squeak of some kind and started really fidgeting with her hair. "It's my fault. I never pressed the other Archdemons to make it public. And then the blackrot invasion happened."

  Wade blinked. "The blackrot invasion happened… before you got it out in public that you're the new Xan?"

  "Yeah. There was a lot of money and something about shorts and puts being done behind the scenes, I don't know what any of that means, but the Archdemons kept talking about it and each time they'd visit, they'd tell me to keep quiet for a little bit longer."

  Shorts and Puts. Market's blessing of translation hit those terms as the closest to what Medy was saying in demonic, but it wasn't quite that. It was still some kind of gambling on success or failure, and had some kind of addition to influence. Not just money.

  "Medy… did they ever release publically that Xan was replaced?"

  She shook her head, still curled up in a ball. "No. Blackrot hit hell and the Archdemons all ran off to leave everyone else to die fighting off the waves down here. And now they're all in hiding and hated, so even if we found out and had them tell the world I'm not the old Xan, nobody would believe that since it's too convenient and the old Archdemons don't have their reputation anymore."

  Not the old Xan…

  "You inherited the reputation of the old Xan... And that combined with Archdemons in general being hated?"

  "Yeah. Xan was… well, she wasn't very nice. She'd been really rich, old and bored and liked to torture a lot of people, both physically and emotionally, so she didn't have a great reputation among demonkind or mortalkind, but was untouchable because of her Alchemy skills and the people she knew. Now that it's okay to stab and kill Archdemons if we find them, Xan's basically the most sought out archdemon to kill that there is. She's ruined a lot of lives out there. Like, a lot. To the point even demons that aren't part of anything she did feel morally obligated to kill me on sight. I would too if I were in their hooves. So you can't tell Bael, please."

  Her eyes went wide for a moment and she lunged out to Wade, holding his shirt and staring him face to face. "Please, please, please don't tell Bael who I am, he'll kill me for sure. I don't think he'll make it hurt all too much, he seems really nice in that do-what-needs-to-be-done way but no chance he doesn't try to kill me for it. Everyone tries to stab me or kill me in other ways when they learn!"

  "Uh, too close, too close!" Wade said, trying to back himself against the edge of the cave here and finding no room to back further away. She was right in front of him, and it was extremely distracting.

  She stopped, looked down at his shirt for a moment, then slowly let go of it and scooted away, back to her side.

  "I won't tell Bael, you have my word on it. Not unless you're okay with it. And I'm sure we can discuss it with Bael eventually with what I have planned."

  She looked a lot less panicked about that, then frowned. "Wait, you promised last time and then you went all over the details of that up and down to avoid answering. How do I know I can trust you?"

  "That's a fair point, but you can. If I wanted to kill you, I would have just had Eri do it already for me. And I wouldn't have waited for you to come back."

  "Yes, but what if you're trying to sell me off to other demons? Xan has a huge price on her head you know? Demons that had their Houses or close friends tortured by her, or were directly tortured by her would pay a lot to do the same thing back. They hold grudges for centuries you know?"

  "Wouldn't they be able to see your face and know you're not Xa- oh. Oh shit. I see."

  Shapeshifters. Visual identification wasn't how they recognized each other by default. It was all in their names.

  "So… how did you manage to hide away from being Xan?"

  "Well, everywhere hates me just on hearing my name so it wasn't hard to find out why they were killing me all the time like that. Like they really really hate me the moment they find out I'm Xan. I just go by my base name as Medea'Vee for summonings. And because of that, I kept getting sent to the mana mines since I technically had no other skills or history to my name and nobody ever gave me a chance to start over again with alchemy!"

  If anything, she looked ready to start crying.

  "Why not just… give yourself a new name, or not tell the rest of your name? Just cut out the Xan part?"

  She shook her names. "It doesn't work like that. Having Xan in my name changed every other part of my name to show that history, all except for my base name, you can't really change that ever. I started as Medea'Vee, and then earned Yetti, so my name was Yetti'Medea'Vee. And so on down the line until I earned Xan, which is an Archdemon's name so it modified Yetti with the 'th' part, along with the rest. So even if I gave a few names past my base name, any demon knows I'm at least an Archdemon of some kind. Problem is that also tells Warlocks I don't have any kind of achievement or skill under my name if I'm only using Medea, so they just instantly throw me anywhere they need bodies. I always end up in the mines."

  She actually was tearing up now.

  "And I keep dying over there. No matter how hard I tried learning to fight or mine, there's always something that kills me there! Either the mana pressure kills me because my equipment was terrible or broke, or the monsters there eat me, or pirates and raiders. I even once did nothing wrong, just resting in the base and all I heard was a creaking sound then it imploded inwards and I was crushed inside it! I didn't even do anything wrong, I'm just not good at doing anything other than Alchemy. And each time I died, I get sent back here, and have to escape or stay alive long enough for the warlocks to realize I went missing, and summon me back, and half the time they don't so I'm back to a few months or years shambling around down here until I get free and try to get summoned out back to the mortal realm. But I'm so tired of having to go back into the mines, it's been years since I got to actually make even a single potion."

  She took a deep breath, and wiped her eyes clear, then curled back in a ball, head staring straight down to the ground, horns now aimed right at Wade by default.

  "So when I saw you were a mortal and not any warlock like I was used to seeing, I decided to just try my luck at what demoness usually were supposed to do. I read the books, I had friends tell me what shapes humans like best, I figured I'd take a good shot at it, like how hard could it be? But Bael was right there and threw everything off before I even had a chance! And now we're h-"

  Both heard something in the distance.

  A massive thud.

  He tried to look outside to see what was making that noise, but Medy was far faster, grabbing him wholesale and throwing him into the back of the cave, falling right on top of him, one hand on his mouth to gag him, while she stared outside. "Be very quiet." She hissed.

  "What is it outside?"

  There was another thud. Rhythmic even. Like… footsteps.

  Medy turned her gaze back down at him, and there was fear in her eyes.

  "It's what happens when too much blackrot starts collecting in one host - it grows."