Chapter 193: Welcome to Hell. Wake up.

Chapter 193: Welcome to Hell. Wake up.

A Devil awoke on the stone of a damp, dark hole.

Where was he? What...what was going on? How long had it been?

The room was small. Or, no, it was actually quite large. It was just that the room had been filled to the brim with other Demons. The Devil himself was closer to the door, so he was actually touching the ground, but there were so many bodies piled up further in, tossed on top of each other, that a couple of the piles actually touched the ceiling of the square room. He had to imagine the ones at the bottom of those piles were crushed beyond recognition, at this point.L1tLagoon witnessed the first publication of this chapter on Ñøv€l--B1n.

He tried to get up, and was confronted with the realization that his entire body felt like it’d been smashed to pieces. He could barely move, and even attempting to do so was like trying to rip his muscles in two.

He also realized that the room had been flooded with the stench of corpse and rot. He hadn’t noticed at first; even though he’d been unconscious, his nose must have acclimated to the smell after being in this place for however long he’d been there.

Once he noticed the smell, he couldn’t ignore it. It was horrible. This entire place smelled horrible. He hated it.

With a grunt of exertion, he tried bringing up his hands to at least cover his nose, but he couldn’t even manage that. Such an extreme feeling of powerlessness was unfamiliar to him. At least, physical powerlessness.

He also realized he was feeling quite a few other things he’d rarely ever felt. Hunger. Thirst. Needing a fucking nap. A Devil of his strength, he rarely ever needed to consume anything, take any sort of a break—much less get to a point where he felt this intensity of those feelings. Once again, he was forced to wonder—how long had he been out? Or perhaps, what had happened to cause his body to come to so much harm?

He could barely remember what’d happened last. He was...What was his name?

Oh, right. It was Xhag’duul...How did it go? Xhag’duulinithar’obaba’iidook...Right. Xhag’duulinithar’obaba’iidook’naisantipoduun’torobaroxhixhonxhaxintep. That was his name. He was a Devil. He worked for the Seventh Circle of the Underworld. And his duties were...

Arlan Nota. That name came to him like an arrow through the eye. And with it, the rest of his memories. The pain. The humiliation. The slow degradation of his position, of his esteem, of his life. All due to that one stupid fucking order. Kill some random Human, or we’re gonna kill you. What the fuck were his superiors thinking?!

He remembered the fight, and he remembered losing. He remembered getting crushed by a fucking rock, dying, and his projected form tearing itself to pieces—and with it, a piece of the Devil’s soul. That was why he felt like this. He’d been ruined.

He was lucky to survive such an event, as extreme as it was. The stronger one was, the more difficult it was to come back from a killed projection; that was one of the reasons his superiors had wanted to use lower-Level Demons to do this job in the first place. Less risk of any real loss. Well, that was, until they decided to risk his life. He was expendable, it seemed, because they’d decided to pin the blame of this failure on him. So now he was here, unable to move, in a pit of corpses. He may as well have been waiting to fucking die.

Fifteen hours passed.

It was quiet, and it smelled horrible, and the sensation of the rough, hard stone underneath the Devil’s flesh got grating after the first thirty minutes. It became tortuous after the first two hours. The next thirteen, he just had to endure it.

He’d just barely found the ability to move in that time. Or, at least, he could slightly wiggle his fingers now, and his jaw had a decent bit of mobility.

But he could hardly even think of that at the moment. His mind wasn’t occupied with wiggling his tongue back and forth. It was deep in his imagination, living through the fantasy of breaking out of this room, running through the fucking office and hallways, and murdering every living being in there. He wanted to put his fist through a Gargoyle’s face. He wanted to stomp on an Ember Mite until it was turned to red mush. He wanted to find a Balor, rip off each of its fingers, string them together into a snake of bleeding flesh, and then shove it down the thing’s throat so the pinkie tickled its stomach, choking it to death. He wanted to punch, kick, burn, maim, fucking blow up a building. Holy shit, he needed to let out some anger.

His teeth were clenched so hard, if he’d had his full strength, they’d have probably shattered by now. If he could move his arm more, he’d have brought it to his mouth so he could bite off all of his fingers and spit them out, just so he could taste some blood. Just so he could hurt someone, even if it had to be him.

Maybe he’d work on being able to wiggle his torso, so he could turn himself around and start ripping those corpses to shreds.

No, actually. They smelled too bad. He just wanted to get away. But he couldn’t do that, either. He just sat.

Twenty-one hours passed.

The Devil had gotten back enough strength that he could speak, now. His first action upon realizing this was to yell out for help. Well, not that he expected to receive any. In fact, he was just about absolutely sure that whoever was in charge of this place knew perfectly well that he was alive, and were perfectly capable of getting him out anytime they wanted. He knew how these recovery holes worked, he knew that they kept close watch on them.

But he yelled regardless.

“Expression of greeting, Devil,” his superior said.

He groaned, holding up a hand to block out her figure in the doorway. “What’s up? You here to kill me, or something?”

He couldn’t see her, but he could still imagine how her face likely flickered with irritation at his refusal to greet her properly.

“Due to my being responsible for overseeing your previous position, it is by rule that I must personally inform you of this news,” she continued. Her voice was calm and practiced, like she was reading from a script.

Which, of course, she was. The Devil had personally said exactly this to plenty of his underlings in the past. He knew where it was going.

“Due to scheduling conflicts, budgetary restrictions, and/or a lack of competence on your part, we have made the decision to terminate your duties, effective thirty-one Underworld days ago. Rest assured that your position has been replaced by someone more competent and capable than you, so your society will not suffer from your absence. I leave you your termination paperwork, each page of which will need to be read and signed by you. Comply.”

The Devil still couldn’t see, holding up his hand to shade his eyes from the light, but he heard the sound of a massive stack of papers being dropped to the ground, followed by the tiny clack of a pen being dropped on them.

“Due to having no position, you now also have no name. You will be addressed as Devil from all Demons in the Seventh Circle. Attempting to illegally gain a name or attempting to coerce others into calling you by a name will be met with swift punishment.”

“No position?” the Devil asked. “I’m not being reassigned?”

“You are being reassigned,” her voice came back. He could just barely see her shoes standing in front of him. “You are simply being reassigned to a job that offers no position.”

“...What?”

“You will be assigned to become a Hall Monitor, Devil. And, apology for the personal statement, but I do hope you understand that those consequences come from your own actions. From your own incompetence. Everything bad that has happened to you, it has happened because you were too foolish to keep it from happening. Your mistakes have caught up to you, Devil. Ideally, you prepared yourself for that.”

The Devil slowly lowered his hand. It was still too bright to see anything other than a dark silhouette in the bright light, but he stared at his superior regardless. Or, technically, she wasn’t his superior anymore. She was a superior. No longer assigned to him, now that he was a Hall Monitor. The lowest of the low, a job assigned purely as a punishment to those who served no purpose. It was a sentence worse than death. A sentence of being forced to live with the fact that your society deemed you useless.

For her to go out of her way to go through the levels of verification just to force the punishment on him...She must have really, really hated him. Arlan Nota was probably still alive, he guessed. If she was so pissed that she did all this, he had to imagine that anger was because she couldn’t force him to do all the work to kill that Human anymore. But he barely even cared if that man was alive or dead. What mattered was the woman standing in front of him. She was the one who did this to him.

“Quinmorada,” the Devil said.

Though he was unable to make out her face, he could still tell her snarl deepened at his cutting her full name short.

He took a breath before continuing. “You’re a bitch. I fucking hate you. I hate all of this bullshit society, and if I could murder every last Demon alive in this hell, I would. And I certainly, certainly, would start with you. In fact, I think I’ll promise you now: I am going to kill you. I will do it. It may not be today, or this week, or this decade. But you’ll die by my hand. And the only reason I haven’t done it already is because you physically overpower me right now. But I really want you to understand. The sole thing keeping you alive right now, is that fact. The moment it’s no longer true—the moment I can physically end your life—I will do it.”

She just stood there, staring at him. She wouldn’t do anything about what he said—couldn’t do anything—because it would’ve been against the rules for her to take his punishment into her own hands. At worst, she could probably write up a report of his having disrespected a superior and sent it in for the thirteen levels of verification, but that would likely amount to nothing, considering he was already to become a Hall Monitor.

The Devil took a labored step forward, cleared his throat for the first time since he’d woken up, hawking up all the spit and phlegm that’d been building up for all this time, and then spat it directly in her face. She stepped back, retching and raising a hand to wipe it off. He could see her shaking with rage.

“Throw me into the halls,” he continued. “Make me a pariah. I don’t care. You say I’m useless? I’m of no use to you? Then fuck it. I’ll be of negative use to you. I won’t work to make life here better, I’ll work to make life here worse. I’ll make you hurt, one day. And I just need you to know that I’m going to make you hurt, so that even in the days when you’re safe, you’ll live with a little bit of fear in your mind. So that you know you’re never actually safe. So that you know, I am going to kill you. Fucking. Cunt.”

She used the hand covered in the Devil’s spit to grab his face, squeezing his features hard.

His scowl didn’t break.

“I will not stoop to petty, Human insults,” she said. “But I will inform you that your spirit will not last as long as you seem to believe it will. And I will wish you a very unhappy eternity, Devil. Now go do your job and suffer.”