"Well, forestalling or outright avoiding bad is good in my books."

"True enough. It will be an uphill battle, but demons conflate Good with Right as much as practitioners do. Using them for good is merely difficult."

"Yeah," she says, beaming. "We'll do good. Thank you very much for—all your help."

"You're very welcome. Good luck– is unreliable, so I'll simply say I'm sure you'll use it well."

"Now I should find a place to stay for the next two days until the other me disappears."

"It would probably be unwise to stay here. Did you have anything in mind when you planned to come back early?"

"Deal with the fossilised goblin in the woods."

"Fossilized goblin?"

"Didn't I mention it? When I was investigating the Charybdis—" And she explains the whole situation there.

"That oath was foolish. But yes, it definitely justifies returning early regardless of the inconvenience."

"It was foolish but I was facing the very real prospect that I'd die right there and then, I needed any boost I could get my hands on."

"If you make a habit of it, in only a few iterations the slight benefit will not be enough. If anyone inherits your karma the broken oath comes back to haunt them, and if not then being dead might not protect you."

Blink. "There's an afterlife, then?"

"I couldn't say; I've never been there. I have heard it stated directly by unrelated entities, usually as a threat."

"And would they be punished for stating it if it was untrue but they really confidently believed it, or if it was impossible to challenge them?"

"No to the first, yes to the second. Well spotted."

"But the possibility is still not minuscule as it was before I figured all of this out about magic, seems to be the basic conclusion I'd already reached. Anyway, I'm gonna go ensure my oath isn't broken and in the future endeavour to be powerful enough not to need such anymore."

"Good luck." (It's plausible for the first part, at least.)

"Thank you."

She takes her leave and, after finding a spot to change faces so no one will recognise her, makes her way back to that terrible spot.

That terrible spot is a mostly treeless clearing in the middle of nowhere. Her completely unjust adjective use unsurprisingly failed to hurt its lack of feelings.

The creature is there, its ring of teeth slightly smaller than she remembers it. Fossilized remains of some of its prey. No goblins, though; they haven't arrived yet.

"...so are you sealed yet? I don't know how time works for you."

It still doesn't talk, but it looks the same. Solomon's seal has the weight behind it to always be obvious; since the new version implies the old that probably suggests that it isn't.

Sigh. Whatever. She wants to set up a trap here... maybe... hmm...

She'll go find Johannes.

His demesne is as hidden as usual. But not more. She knows where the entrance is.

As long as she leaves the glasses on, the rare few occupants look like helpless humans being pursued by misshapen scary-looking and non-helpless humans. If she looks around the frames, it's mostly realistic vestiges with animal spirits filling in the cracks, being hunted by monsters. Hard to say which looks more unsettling.

Yeah she knows about that.

"It's Sadde," she says out loud.