Interlude 4

  Time!

  Time is like a bus. It is never there when you need it to be; it passes you by when you’re not paying attention, and at the most inopportune moment, several arrive at once. That, at least, was how manager Faun felt.

  The corner of Hell in which his office resided was temporally locked to Terra Torus; one hour below was roughly equivalent to one minute above. This was so that they could test any changes to the System with plenty of time to fix mistakes.

  At least, that’s what he had been told; he was not nearly old enough to remember when any real changes had been made to the System. From what he understood, the mortals didn’t even remember a time before the invasive infrastructure wasn’t a part of their lives.

  No, the continuity of time between his present location and the nearest inhabited planet was a good thing. The problem was the Trials.

  They were tucked away into little pockets of space, halfway outside of reality. That way, they would be equally close to any monster in the integrated universe that needed to Evolve. There were even multiple instances of the same Trial overlapping, which was great for efficiency, but it did have one major drawback: time.

  These sections of squiffy space made time flutter awry. Each time Faun stole a moment to check on the Elijah’s progress, he wouldn’t know what to expect. Sometimes, it would be seconds between one check and the next, and in that time the mortal would have cleared several Trials.

  Other times, he would go days without being able to get an opportunity to see how the sixteen-year-old was doing, and when he finally did, the boy would be on the same Trial, not having moved an inch.

  He knew the few opportunities when Tanya the Administrator wasn’t looking over his shoulder would be better spent making preparations, but he couldn’t help but feel nervous. He only had so long before he was given the chop, and not knowing when his plan might need to go into effect was frustrating.

  To help with this, he had hidden a small bit of code in the latest round of fixes that detected when a monster of the Race: Elijah entered the Trial ten from the millionth. It would act as an alarm to tell him that it was time to move.

  Even though Elijah was a long way away from that goal, and even though it was possible that the final ten Trials could take place in accelerated space, giving him no time to react, it did improve his peace of mind. Considering how unpeaceful his mind was at the moment, this was most welcome.

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  Tanya the Administrator, she was his greatest source of frustration at the moment. She had been sent to check on him and see how he was doing as a manager. Usually this meant a quick visit to the office to see if the new demons had mutinied yet.

  If they had, and he wasn’t dead, her job would be to finish the job and then kill the rest of the staff as an example to other young demons who started getting ideas. Luckily for him, his lot were devoid of ideas.

  No, what should have happened was the Administrator stopped by, saw that there wasn’t an active rebellion, and left.

  Unfortunately for the f?ling, Tanya didn’t work like that. For a week before she made her startling appearance, she had been spying on his office. She claimed she had done this to ensure that the office hadn’t secretly been taken over, but Faun thought that she was just being nosey. Though he didn’t dare tell her that.

  She had become curious as to why the new boss was spending so much time away from his desk and had decided to investigate in person.

  On the upside, she hadn’t figured out his actual plans. On the downside, she had caught him with his trousers down staring at her DevilPic profile. He couldn’t even claim ignorance, as she had the account username printed on her baton: wildus95.

  She had taken sadistic glee in parading him around the office with his pants still around his ankles and telling his workforce exactly what she had caught him doing. It was as if she was trying to cause an uprising, the very thing she was here to supposedly prevent.

  Fortunately for Faun the faun, that didn’t happen. Though the demons did look at him differently afterwards. It didn’t matter; none of them mattered. Escape was his only goal. That was what he told himself, but he couldn’t deny the shame he felt.

  Unfortunately for Faun, Tanya had decided to stick around and keep an eye on him. Because of this, the f?ling was constantly on edge. Tanya was bossy, manipulative, and she scared the shit out of him.

  The only upside was that she was a stickler for the rules. Without concrete proof of a rebellion, she wouldn’t snuff him out. That didn’t stop her from trying to incite one.

  When Faun wasn’t correcting his underlings' mistakes or trying to work on his own secret project, he was putting out fires around the office, literally in one case.

  He had tried to explain why he was in that bathroom, that the last boss had poisoned him, but Tanya was having none of it.

  It didn’t help matters that since that incident, whatever Squidulous had given him wore off, and he was no longer rushing to the bog every few minutes; making him look like a liar.

  This left Faun in an untenable position. For now, most of his workers were onside or just too overworked to pose a threat, which was good, but if that meddlesome Administrator kept this up, something would break.

  He didn’t dare send another message to his only hope, asking him to speed up, for fear that it may be detected. The less communication, the more likely his chances of success. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t do anything to help speed things along. Directly interfering would be too risky, but there were other options.

  It was time to call on a friend… Well, less of a friend and more of someone on whom he had dirt and who had dirt on him, ensuring if one of them went down, they both did, but that was the closest thing one could get to a friend in Hell.

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