Page 24 of The Dark Lord Awakens (Dark Service #1)

Lucien/Beau

I ’d thought the castle was bad, but the city was a whole new level of medieval dystopia.

We passed through the massive outer gates—which, by the way, were decorated with actual skulls, because apparently subtlety wasn’t in the dark lord design handbook—and entered what my tour guides proudly called “The Midnight City.” I would have gone with “Health Code Violation: The Experience.”

The streets were narrow, winding affairs paved with uneven black cobblestones where they were paved at all.

The rest was just packed dirt mixed with something dark and sticky that I desperately hoped wasn’t what it smelled like.

Buildings leaned against each other like drunk college students at two a.m., as if they’d collapse without their neighbor’s support.

Everything was built from the same black stone as the castle, though here it was cracked, chipped, and covered in a film of grime.

“This is the main thoroughfare, my lord,” Azrael announced with completely unwarranted pride. “The Avenue of Endless Torment.”

“Charming name,” I said. “Let me guess—the side streets are called things like ‘Disembowelment Lane’ and ‘Screaming in Agony Boulevard’?”

“Indeed, my lord,” Azrael replied, missing my sarcasm entirely. “Though Screaming in Agony Boulevard was renamed Shrieking in Agony Boulevard after the Great Semantic Dispute of the fourteenth century. Three noble houses were exterminated in the conflict.”

Over a synonym. Fantastic.

We were attracting quite the crowd as we walked.

Demons of all shapes and sizes pressed against the buildings to let us pass, bowing so low I worried some of the more fragile-looking ones might snap in half.

Most were humanoid, but with the usual demonic accessories—horns, tails, extra limbs, skin in colors not found in human dermatology textbooks.

They wore simple clothing, mostly in dark colors, much of it patched and worn.

What struck me most was how thin they all looked. Not the aesthetic, runway model kind of thin, but the “when’s the last time you had a proper meal” kind of thin. Even the children—and yes, there were demon children, which was both adorable and terrifying—had hollow cheeks and spindly limbs.

A sickening wave of dismay crashed over me.

This wasn’t how I’d designed Iferona in the game.

Sure, it had been a dark realm, but there had been functioning markets, proper housing districts, even basic sanitation.

Three centuries of neglect had transformed what should have been a functioning dark kingdom into… this. A wasteland of suffering.

Mr. Snuggles sensed my distress and nuzzled against my cheek, but even his warmth couldn’t dispel the cold horror settling in my stomach.

“Azrael,” I said quietly, fighting to keep my voice steady, “what’s the food situation here?”

“Most citizens receive one meal per day, my lord,” he replied with clinical detachment. “The higher demons require less sustenance, of course, as they can draw upon magical energies. The lower classes are more… physically dependent.”

One meal a day. And from the way he said it, this wasn’t some recent crisis—this was normal. This had become their reality while Lucien slept. While I was busy living my ordinary life on Earth, completely unaware that this world I’d created had become real and fallen into ruin.

A small demon child, no higher than my knee, peered out from behind her mother’s skirts. Her eyes were too large for her gaunt face, and her skin had an unhealthy gray pallor. When she noticed me looking, she ducked back into hiding, trembling visibly.

These people were terrified of me. Of course they were—I was the Dark Lord, their ruler, the one who’d been absent for centuries while they suffered.

Even if it wasn’t technically my fault, I couldn’t help feeling responsible.

I’d woken up in this body, in this role. That made their welfare my problem now.

“Who’s in charge of the city itself?” I asked, struggling to focus on practical matters. “Is there a mayor or something?”

“Sir Formalitee oversees daily operations,” Azrael replied. “He awaits your pleasure in the city square ahead.”

Sir Formalitee? I vaguely remembered creating that character during a particularly mind-numbing staff meeting at work.

My boss had been droning on about “adhering to proper formalities in customer interactions,” and I’d zoned out, designing a demon bureaucrat whose entire personality was following procedures.

I’d thought I was being clever with the spelling.

Now that clever joke was a living person who’d been managing a dying city for who knows how long. The disconnect between my game design and this grim reality was dizzying.

The city square was less of a square and more of an irregular polygon, with a dried-up fountain in the center.

A small platform had been erected beside it, where a demon in an absurdly elaborate uniform stood waiting.

He had gray skin, small spectacles perched on a long nose, and a clipboard with at least five hundred sheets of paper attached to it.

As we approached, he dropped to one knee, somehow managing to keep his spine perfectly straight in the process.

“Dark Lord Lucien! Sir Formalitee, City Administrator, at your service! As per Protocol 7B, Section 12, Paragraph 3, I hereby formally welcome you to your Midnight City and present myself for your inspection and/or disembowelment, whichever you deem appropriate per Appendix J of the Dark Lordship Visitation Guidelines!”

He said all this in one breath, which was impressive.

Less impressive was the implication that my standard greeting might include disemboweling people.

Was that what Lucien had been like before?

Was that the kind of ruler he’d been—someone who casually eviscerated city officials as a form of greeting?

“Thank you, Sir Formalitee,” I replied, trying to keep the horror from my voice. “I’ll pass on the disembowelment today. Please stand and tell me about the state of the city.”

He rose, looking slightly disappointed about keeping his intestines. “Of course, my lord. As required by Administrative Code 15.4, I have prepared a seventeen-part presentation on the city’s current status, beginning with a ninety-minute overview of tax collection procedures, followed by?—”

“Perhaps a more condensed version,” I interrupted, seeing my life flash before my eyes. “What are the biggest challenges facing the city right now?”

Sir Formalitee blinked rapidly, as if the concept of summarizing information was foreign to him. “Well, without the proper forms being filed in triplicate, I couldn’t officially?—”

“Unofficially,” I pressed.

He glanced around nervously, then leaned slightly closer. “Food shortages. Housing decay. Sanitation issues. And the, er, plumbing situation.”

“Plumbing situation?”

“There isn’t any, my lord.”

Ah. That explained the smell.

But that didn’t make sense. I distinctly remembered including basic infrastructure in my game design. Not modern plumbing, obviously, but at least medieval-level sewage systems and water distribution. Something had gone terribly wrong during those three centuries.

“Show me the worst areas,” I commanded, bracing myself for what I knew would be a nightmare tour of a kingdom fallen into ruin.

Sir Formalitee looked like he might faint. “But my lord, the itinerary clearly states that you are to be shown only the Noble Quarter and the refurbished marketplace! As per Visitation Protocol?—”

“New protocol,” I interrupted. “Show me what needs fixing.”

Azrael stiffened beside me, the temperature dropping several degrees. “My lord, perhaps it would be more appropriate to?—”

“The worst areas,” I repeated firmly. I needed to see exactly how bad things had gotten. I needed to understand the full extent of the decline that had happened in Lucien’s absence.

Sir Formalitee swallowed hard, then nodded. “As you command, Dark Lord.”

The “worst areas” turned out to be about ninety percent of the city.

We walked through narrow alleys where waste ran in open gutters.

Past housing blocks where dozens of families were crammed into spaces meant for five.

Through markets where vendors sold items that looked more like props from a horror movie than food—“screaming fungi,” “despair roots,” and something called “sorrow meat” that I refused to further inquire about.

The demons we passed stared at me with a mixture of terror and desperate hope. Many had sores on their skin from what Sir Formalitee delicately called “sanitation-related ailments.” Children with distended bellies played with toys made from what appeared to be bones.

This wasn’t just a medieval slum crossed with a haunted house.

This was a kingdom in collapse. Whatever functioning systems had once existed had clearly broken down long ago.

Three centuries of absent leadership had resulted in corruption, neglect, and suffering on a scale I could barely comprehend.

“Who lives here?” I asked, gesturing to a particularly dilapidated block, my voice thick with emotion I was struggling to control.

“Those would be Citizens 1200 through 1500, my lord,” Sir Formalitee replied, consulting his clipboard.

Great. Apparently, the numbering system I’d used as a placeholder in the game had become their actual identities. That explained the strange looks I got when I smiled at a small demon child and asked her name.

“Citizen 1347, my lord!” she’d replied proudly, as if having a number instead of a name was the greatest honor imaginable.

I’d intended to give them proper names eventually.

It had been on my to-do list for the game, but I’d never gotten around to it.

And now these children identified themselves by those numbers with pride.

It was like some dystopian nightmare I’d read about in high school, except this wasn’t fiction anymore.