Demonworld Read Online Free

muscles. He decided he was not destined to become Haven’s most dangerous badass. Though the civilian self-defense classes were expanded, Sevrik eventually passed the duties on to other less impressive underlings. Wodi dropped the class around the same time.
     
    Wodi wondered if Sevrik had been a little disappointed in all of them. No doubt he was a busy man. If he had been searching for something among the citizens of Haven, he had not found it.
     
    Not yet.
     
    * * *
     
    At the age of nineteen Wodi attended the University in Central Haven. His long incarceration in public school had been so dull and demeaning and traumatizing that he wanted to take a year off, to be away from people if only for a while. But his father pressured him to immediately enroll, and it was a good thing that he did, for Wodi loved the University. He made no friends, he did not party, and he lived in a small single-room apartment which he rarely left because he took nearly half of his classes on the datanet. Still, his time at the University was the most thrilling in all his short life.
     
    He took classes on the history of Haven, on post-structural biology, on “remnant philosophies” which was the second-hand record of the ancient philosophies of dead cultures, on psychology and the history of the perverse misuse of sociology, and several classes on literature and film. Wodi was a sponge. He stood out, and for the first time in his life, standing out and being noteworthy were admirable traits. Even in mathematics, which was Wodi’s weakest subject by far, he still outshone his peers because he got a hot tip on an introductory economics course that half-wits and athletes often took because it was exceedingly easy.
     
    Wodi’s favorite teacher was Professor Korliss Matri, a long-haired, aging firebrand who taught classes on comparative mythology, the literature of Haven, and an advanced class on the philosophies that helped shape the founding of Haven. Professor Matri was obsessed with the subject of heroism: heroic characters in literature, heroic philosophies, heroic decades, heroic historical figures. He also spoke of philosophies which sidetracked nations and mired the intellectual elite in pointless, masturbatory arguments for decades, even centuries; he also gave accounts of history’s little villains, small men who sold what was human in them, or even gave away their humanity, for a goal that was not even worth the advertised price.
     
    Wodi began to get a real sense of Haven’s Founding Fathers. Some were noblemen, some came from poverty, some were fighters, some were writers and inventors, but all of them were born and lived in the wasteland. They had seen demons, disease, superstition and the cruelty of barbaric kings first-hand. They protested and fought against tyranny, then secretly founded a haven for humanity, the last bastion of reason – Wodi’s homeland. Wodi began to overcome the dull and confining nature of his upbringing as Professor Matri fostered in him a new admiration for the human species. Wodi wondered if he would ever be able to inspire his species in the undertaking of something grand, something heroic , that would change the world.
     
    So it was that the last paper Wodi wrote for Professor Matri, a short piece which he had greatly enjoyed writing, was titled “Human Potential: The Great Untapped Resource”. He turned it in, Matri greeted him by name and wished him a good winter break, Wodi thanked him nervously, and then he left the University never to return again.
     
    Wodi learned a great many things in that year and a half, but his time at the University did little to prepare him for the nightmare that followed.
     
    * * *
     
    At the age of twenty, Wodi woke in a strange forest.
     
    With cold earth against his back, he stared through a jagged canopy of black branches and tried to reconstruct the tattered web of his memory. It was nighttime, his blanket and backpack were nowhere in sight, and even