Incubus Hitman

by Jack Porter

  Rise of an Incubus Overlord: Incubus Hitman

  By Jack Porter

  Incubus Hitman: Rise of an Incubus Overlord

  Copyright 2019 Jack Porter, All Rights Reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 1

  “What is it? What have you got?”

  Shit. Just what I didn’t need. Fucking Chad, poking his head through my door at just the wrong moment. I thought the monumental douchebag I called my roommate had left for work already. Apparently, he hadn’t.

  I slid off my bed and lurched to my feet, struggling to block his view of what I was doing while also hoping he wouldn’t get any further in the door.

  “Fuck off,” I told him. “It’s none of your business.”

  I made it to the door, but by then it was too late. Chad had already shoved it open and tried to step past me.

  “Doesn’t look like nothing to me,” he said, a superior smirk on his oh-so-punchable face. The dude had no boundaries and thought nothing of invading my privacy. I couldn’t really complain. The apartment was his, and I was just renting a room. To him, that made me a virtual nonentity while he held all the rights.

  But dammit, I paid for the room, and it was the one place in the apartment I should have been able to call mine.

  It had taken me just a couple of weeks to figure out what kind of guy Chad was, and I would have told him to jam his apartment straight up his ass if it weren’t for one thing.

  It was cheap.

  Or perhaps, it was also about the difference in our comparative status. Because that’s what the world was all about. Status. Everyone lived to improve theirs. Whether legal or otherwise, everyone had a number that described their relative status.

  Chad owned this apartment and had a professional job but was a total dick in the mix. His status had risen to the mid-twenties on the legal side, but because he also liked to do a bit of blow now and then, he also had an illegal status in the single digits.

  That still put him way ahead of me. I made my money as a gamer, accepting contracts from rich clients to teach their spoiled brats how to play so they could improve their status among their friends. I was a slob, a slacker who spent my days moping about in my t-shirt, boxers, and slippers, doing what I could to get by. My legal status number had peaked at nine and stayed there, and my illegal status wasn’t much better. In the world’s eyes as well as Chad’s, I was inconsequential.

  I was a loser. A nothing. A nobody. And that fact pissed me off to no end.

  “You can’t just push your way in here anytime you want!” I protested.

  “Can’t I, though?” Chad replied, and it wasn’t a question. His superior smirk hadn’t moved from his face, and I wanted to hit him so very much. But Chad didn’t just have a higher status than me. He was also taller, naturally athletic, and if I had to admit it, he was better looking than me as well. Basically, he was everything I wasn’t, and I hated him for it.

  He used his height and strength to his advantage and shoved me aside as if that wasn’t the definition of assault.

  “Simon, Simon, Simon,” he said, full of condescension. “Whenever will you learn that in this world of ours, there is no such thing as can’t. Not if you’re strong enough, at any rate. The world might be full of brick walls for you, but for those strong enough to make their own way, there is nothing we cannot do.”

  I wasn’t ready to give in. Not yet. He hadn’t caught me looking at porn or some weird fetish site. He had interrupted me doing something important.

  So I grabbed his shirt as he tried to move past and tried my damnedest to hold him in place.

  He turned on me, and with casual ease, heaved me against the wall. I hit with a crash, and before I could move, I found Chad’s forearm jammed against my throat. If anyone else was to do that, it would have been a sign of real anger. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Chad was a serious douchebag. He didn’t do these things because he was mad. He did them just to show how superior he was.

  Like a bully beating up a kid from a much younger grade, or a high-powered player going after a noob.

  He smiled at me, enjoying himself. “Now, now, now,” he said. “Don’t forget, while you live under my roof, I own your ass. You wouldn’t want to find yourself living out on the street, would you?”

  It was all I could do to seethe at him as my face grew hot, although whether that was from humiliation or because he was starting to block the blood flow to my head, I didn’t know.

  Chad seemed to accept my silence as agreement and eased up the pressure a bit. The he used his free hand to slap me gently on the cheek in the most condescending way ever.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Now, play nice, or I’ll take your internet privileges away.”

  It was an irritating threat. He knew how I made my living and knew I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t online. But even then, he wasn’t done. He looked me up and down and wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  “And you might want to think about putting your clothes into the wash every now and again. You’re starting to smell.”

  With that, he let me go, and I could barely keep myself upright. I drew a deep breath and glared at his back.

  “Fucking asshole,” I muttered, even though I knew he would take that as a sign of victory.

  Chad paused at the edge of my bed. He’d found what I’d been trying to hide. “Now, what have we got here?” he said again. He looked at me over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “Has all your ass bender rubbish finally born fruit? Is that what this is? Or is it something else altogether?”

  Chapter 2

  Ass benders. That’s what douchebags like Chad called people like me. But we call ourselves Ascenders. You know, normal guys and girls who are looking for a leg up to the rarefied heights of the status charts.

  You see, while everyone knew it was possible to get up to the high seventies or eighties by effort alone, if you wanted to get into the nineties, then you almost invariably needed divine intervention. The world’s political leaders, the famous actors, the sports stars. They were all the same. There was only so far anyone could get because of talent alone.

  Taking the last step to becoming an icon al
ways took something more.

  A little guardian angel on your shoulder, for example. Or a demon at your command. Either could give a person a competitive advantage like no other.

  They didn’t even have to be a complete angel or demon. An artifact would do. A feather, for example, plucked from an angel’s wing, or the blood of a demon. Even artifacts known to have just been in contact with the divine on either side contained significant power.

  An entire black market had formed around not just the items themselves, of which there were only a few, but of everything you could imagine associated with it all.

  My room, for example, was a veritable shrine to the pursuit of such knowledge. My bookshelf contained works like the Daemonicon, the Necronomicon, the Angel Ascended, and those were just the tip of the iceberg. There were half-melted candles building up on my dresser, and a multitude of vials filled with all manner of ritualistic ingredients and bodily fluids. I was also a member of every online forum dedicated to the single goal of ascending through finding and using such items.

  Of course, the powers that be had declared all such research and all associated activities illegal (which was why my illegal status was higher than zero), but that just meant Chad had yet another thing to hold over me. Never mind that the greatest of those in power all had their own access to the divine of one sort or another. They sought to prevent others like me from joining their ranks, doing all they could to keep us under their virtual thumbs.

  “It’s nothing,” I said again, even though it was not. I had crafted a series of archaic and powerful runes on the floor, surrounded by candles and encircled by a prayer in ancient Aramaic written in sand that had been thrice cursed by a powerful shaman and had cost more than a week’s commission.

  Others might have sworn by pentagrams, but we true Ascenders all knew those to be nothing but disinformation spread to keep people in their place. The real power was in runes, because they had meaning, and the ones I’d drawn were in the language of the divine beings themselves.

  In the middle of my carefully contrived pattern sat my prized possession. A small tube of powder I’d accepted as partial payment for a job several months before.

  The powder was reputed to be all that was left of an ancient and powerful demon. It was supposed to be the ground-up remains of one of this demon’s horns, and, according to everything I could find out, it was supposedly the only part of this long-lost demon in existence.

  At the time I’d gained it, I had been suspicious. This wouldn’t have been the first time someone ground up their own toenail clippings and claimed divinity. More than one naïve Ascender had been taken in by such a scam, and if I was being totally honest, I would admit that I might have fallen for the odd one or two in my time.

  But this was the genuine article. I had taken it to more than one dealer of the arcane, and the results were conclusive. Divinity detectors were expensive, much too rich for my blood, but I didn’t have to own one to see the results. Many of the dealers offered testing as a service, and while even that was open to dishonest manipulation, that’s why I went to three of them.

  Divinity detected.

  All three had come back with the same result. Not a strong reading, certainly not at the level the aforementioned feather from an angel might show, but real nevertheless.

  “You know, if you didn’t spend all of your money on this rubbish, you might have already leveled up,” Chad said. “Who knows? If you weren’t into all this ass bending crap, you might be able to hold down a real job. You might even be able to get yourself a girlfriend or two.” Then he looked at me again and gave me his best go-fuck-yourself grin. “Then again, I doubt that. I mean, look at you!”

  Just once, I would have liked to kick him hard in the nuts. The trouble was, he was right. I could have made something more of myself if I’d chosen the more well-worn path.

  And as for that crack about getting a girlfriend, well, he wasn’t exactly wrong there, either. I was in my mid-twenties but could have passed for much older. Not only was I short, but my weird-ass metabolism seemed to revel in packing on unnecessary weight in unflattering places.

  My ass was much better padded than I wanted it to be, and I’d developed a fine set of moobs that would have been an even greater source of humiliation than they were if they weren’t balanced by my gut. That, combined with an ongoing tendency to break out in acne, and a serious case of early-onset male pattern baldness, and it was easy to see I was far from a prize.

  “That’s why I’m looking to Ascend, asshole,” I growled at him.

  He had the gall to laugh in my face. Yet he didn’t refute my logic, because it was, at its heart, irrefutable. High status had been known to encourage all sorts of women to ignore all manner of physical defects.

  It was also rumored that, with the power of divine at your side, you could literally negate those defects as well. I mean, all you had to do was look at the famous actors. Sure, some of them could have gained their looks by surgery alone, but I chose to believe something different.

  After all, some of them were ridiculously good looking.

  Ascending was no more than a fantasy for most. People like Chad would go through their lives without ever looking at anything from Heaven or Hell. And, for most of them, it didn’t matter one way or the other.

  But for me, and those like me, it was our only real hope of escaping from a life of misery and disappointment.

  “Seriously, what are you trying to do here?” Chad asked.

  This time, there was no disrespect in his tone, no hint of his usual condescension. Perhaps it was because of this that I grudgingly answered.

  “I’ve been trying to find a way to conjure the demon who is supposed to be buried in that powder. This is the latest in a long series of rituals. I’ve tried everything, but so far, nothing seems to have worked.”

  Chad laughed again, his sneer back in full force. “Of course not,” he said. “Don’t you know enough by now to realize that even if this powder was real, none of the spells in these books will ever work? The people in charge don’t want you to have even a chance of gaining power. That’s why all this,” he gestured around my room, “is such a complete waste of time. Everything you read, from that bullshit Spellbook 42 all the way to your Divinity Compass has been altered. The spells and rituals within won’t work.”

  Chad wasn’t trying to help me out. He wasn’t trying to tell me this out of a desire to set me on a better path. The maliciousness in his grin and the twinkle in his eye told me that his motivation was to destroy.

  He wanted to take a passion of mine and stomp it into the dust. He wanted to see the efforts of years come to nothing. And, if I’d been at an earlier stage in my Ascender journey, he might have succeeded.

  The thing was, I knew all this. It was common knowledge in the Ascender communities online. And we had worked very hard to find the truth in the lies, and to correct the deliberate errors in the rituals.

  But Chad didn’t need to know that.

  “If it’s all such bullshit,” I said. “Why don’t you just fuck off and leave me alone to waste my time with it?”

  Anyone else would have been offended, but this gigantic tool just barked another laugh. He stayed where he was, his appetite for pissing me off not yet exhausted.

  “Anyway, don’t you have work to go to?” I asked him, hoping he was just late.

  But he shook his head. “There’s some sort of IT issue going on,” he replied. “No point in going in until it’s fixed. Looks like I can hang out here aaallll morning,” he said, favoring me with a shit-eating grin.

  Great, I thought. I rolled my eyes and made a noise of irritation.

  As usual, Chad was completely immune to it and turned back to my efforts on the floor. “So, tell me, what were you trying to do that’s different? Why makes you think you can raise your demon now when you couldn’t before?”

  I knew he wouldn’t leave me alone until I told him. “I’m coming at it a different way. You see,
there’s not much left of this demon, and it’s been in a weakened state maybe for centuries. So it may not have the power to become corporeal anymore. If that’s the case, the only option is to give it a physical body.”

  Chad looked slightly confused. “What, you mean yours?” He couldn’t have put more scorn into the word if he tried.

  “Yes,” I said in exasperation. “Mine. The idea is to activate the demon remnants as much as possible, then breathe the powder in. If you do it right, you effectively become the demon, and it becomes you. You end up with all the powers that the demon had when it was alive.”

  Chad’s condescending smile was back. He shook his head at me. “Simon, Simon, Simon,” he said again. “Just how desperate are you?”

  I glared at him. “You have no idea,” I said.

  He snorted and looked at my runic diagram once more. “So, you’re saying you already activated this demon powder?” he said, and I gave him a grunt in reply. “And what were you going to do next? Snort it? Like it was blow?”

  I just wanted him out of my room. “Yes,” I said. “Pretty much. Although, there’s more to it than that…” There were other rituals designed to prepare the body to be a better host for the demon’s essence. Of course, I’d completed all those as well, but Chad had started to move.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. I could do nothing but watch in horror as my asshole roommate step in among my runes, having made no preparations. He didn’t answer me, but instead reached down to the tube of demon powder in the middle and plucked it from the tiny stand it had been sitting on.

  “You can’t–” I started and took a step toward him. Even then, even though I knew what sort of a prick Chad could be, I still couldn’t believe he would do what he seemed to be doing.

  But he was doing it. He turned toward me and smiled his most offensive, ass-holish grin.

  “Stop!” I shouted and hurled myself at him.

  He stopped me with a straight arm to the throat. “Fuck you, you prick!” I said, and I couldn’t help myself. My momentum wasn’t enough to make up for the difference in size or strength, and I found myself sitting on my ass on the floor.