Chapter 121: Welcome to Hell. You’ve Been Terminated.
A Devil sat at a desk in a damp, dark room. He was, in a turn of character, actually doing the copying work he’d been neglecting for so long now. Though it wasn’t because he suddenly felt remorseful about forcing his co-workers to pick up his slack, or anything along those lines.
No, it was because he was terrified.
He’d just gotten word back. Arlan Nota was confirmed alive. And the wall was destroyed. The soldiers were all either dead, retreating, or deserted, leaving the Devil with absolutely nobody left to kill the fugitive.
He’d lost, plain and simple.
The war against Arlan Nota wasn’t over—far from it—but the Devil knew that his superiors wouldn’t be looking at this with a charitable view. They wouldn’t be considering it as a simple temporary setback that the Devil could still save if he got some more time.
He’d proven himself, time after time, to simply not be good enough for the job.
And so he had no doubt he’d lose that job.
Some may think he’d have been ecstatic about that. The Arlan Nota case was what caused him so many problems in the first place—wouldn’t it be great if he didn’t have to worry about that anymore? But he knew what it’d mean if he proved himself useless to the Demons.
In the massive common room he worked in—hundreds of paces long and wide, filled wall-to-wall with desks—the walls were lined with doors. Most of those doors led to hallways, where one would be taken through a series of rooms with Hall Monitors in them to guide Demons to their destinations. The life of a Hall Monitor was seen as the lowest of the low—sitting around, doing absolutely nothing for hours upon hours upon hours on end except for maybe giving one or two Demons directions on where the nearest office complex was, or something.
The life of a Hall Monitor was effectively being condemned to a death of boredom. A mind-numbing existence of nothingness.
But there were some doors that didn’t lead to hallways. Some led to private offices, like the Devil’s old office, located through door 214.6b, that was now occupied by his replacement, Plindakin’porbindoplandimoni’aasiindorkaanpondindindodondi’papossin. All of the 214 doors led to offices.
But some of the doors led to other things. Door 999, for example.
That door led to the execution room.
When an underling misbehaved, refused to follow orders, or underperformed to such an extreme degree that they proved themselves useless in all circumstances, the Seventh Circle of the Underworld decided that they had no more use for that Demon. And they were dealt with thusly.
The Devil had, in effect, done all three of those things. He’d acted in an extraordinarily impolite fashion toward his superiors, he’d failed to uphold his copying work deadlines several times, and now he’d failed to uphold his most important duty: kill Arlan Nota.
So he was working as hard as he could to try and prove his worth in some other fashion. Namely, his ability to copy. It was low, tedious, boring, humiliating work, but at this point, it didn’t matter. He didn’t want to die, and if this was what it’d take, he’d do it.
So he worked as quickly as he could, writing down the same documents over and over. This eleven page document needed nine copies so it could go out to the nine general officer second class secretaries in order to get confirmation on an order for new materials being used in the pins some army colonels wore on their shirts. This fifteen page document needed twenty-one copies so it could go out to all newly-assigned employees at a manufacturing plant to show them the exact guidelines and regulations for assembling said pins.
He had about three hundred more documents like those to copy over, and they were due in not enough time for him to actually get them done. Not even close. But perhaps, he thought, he could get enough done that his superiors would understand he could at least be of basic use as a copier. It would be a meek, worthless existence, but an existence nonetheless.
It didn’t take long for him to be interrupted.
As he worked, scribbling as quickly as he could on a sheet of paper, he heard a series of stomps coming up from behind him. He almost didn’t want to look back out of pure fear, but curiosity won him over, and he glanced back.
A Devil woman—his direct superior—and a security detail of a half-dozen Nefariors approached down the narrow hallway. Nefariors were the direct evolution past Infernals, and their bodies showed it well. They were taller, beefier, and looked even more misshapen and deformed. Their muscled bodies bulged out so much that they almost didn’t have necks at all, their massive shoulders taking its place, and their thighs and calves shifted and flexed with each movement so much that it looked like they’d explode at any moment.
These were the soldiers used as front-linesmen in the wars the Seventh Circle fought against the other circles. The regular Infernals were effectively trainees, borderline civilians still moving through the equivalent of boot camp before they could really get some action in the constant wars with the other Circles of the Underworld. That was why it was so easy for the Devil to get his hands on such a large contingent of them for the Overworld invasion—something that, by comparison, was of very little importance.
The “boot camp” of the Underworld was very different from the military training Humans got in the Overworld, which the Devil had, of course, researched while planning his assault against their military. Where the Humans seemed to operate under the strange idea of preserving the lives of their fellow men during training, the Demons operated under another idea: if you died during training, you were too weak to fight in the main conflict anyway.
And so, Demon boot camps typically sported a mortality rate of around 97.63%. Of course, that number varied—acceptable rates fell between 97.61% and 97.65%—but that was the general rate. And it was set at that number so as to weed out any and all weaklings from the pack.
It wasn’t as though the Demons killed all of these young Infernals for fun, of course—that would simply be inefficient—but rather it was out of necessity. It wasn’t common for a Demon’s species to change like that, from one to another. This was because, unlike most monsters of the Overworld, they didn’t evolve through Level-ups. Instead, specific species had the ability to, through consumption of a specific substance, change into another.
Some of them were like the Flameling, which evolved into its next form—the Ashlocke—through consuming something relatively common—for the Flameling, it was a charred corpse. Or the Zelus, which evolved into a Salvite through consumption of another Zelus. Infernals were quite different, however. Because what they needed to consume was much, much rarer.
To become a Nefarior, an Infernal needed to drink a God’s blood.
That was, of course, not something the Seventh Circle had an infinite amount of. In fact, they’d only ever acquired a single piece of a God’s corpse, and had been using it to sustain their battle efforts for millenia. They were just lucky that Lunae’s ring finger was large enough to contain so much blood.
So it made sense for them to be so careful in who, exactly, they gave that limited supply of God blood to. Any time a new Infernal spawned, it was thrown straight into the Demon’s military training camp to ensure it was of good mettle.
What did that training camp consist of? Well, the Devil didn’t know the fine details, but he was aware of the general idea. Newborn Infernals were tossed into the Ten-Million-Pace River of Lava, which ran for long enough for them to spend around their first year in. After about eighty percent of the Infernals were culled through that method, the surviving ones were thrown off a cliff, then got all of their extremities amputated in order to test their regeneration, then they’d be asked to stab themselves in the heart to test their willpower.
And then, once they’d been cut down to around six percent of their original numbers, the Infernals would begin actual combat training. They’d do that for some more years, until the very end, where they’d be asked to each spar against a partner to the death. That cut the survivors down to the appropriate figure. After living through all of that, the Infernals were given one drop of Lunae’s blood to drink.
And those Infernals turned into what was standing in front of the Devil now.
Six of them. Their skin was technically red, but their blue-blooded veins ran so thick, all across their bodies, that they almost seemed purple. They all approached, stomping along and knocking aside desks, workers, and anything else that happened to get in their way.
And they flanked the Devil’s superior, who spoke to him in a curt, official voice. “Greeting, Xhag. You will come with me, now.”
“A, a, a most formal expression of greeting, Superior Quinmorada’qualticularoohdodonmi’asmomonomomonminmi’oohdoohdimyuumyuuquanquimi’jinndarrqyuqyakwuquoquanki’miminanmujardinmani’quokinwukanquokokanki,” the Devil hurriedly stood from his seat and gave a bow to his superior. “As you can see, I was just working very hard on my copying work. You can see that I’ve gotten quite a bit of it done in just the past few hours. In fact, if you look here—”
“With me. Now.”
The Devil’s face paled.
“Nefarior number four. Grab him and take him with me.”
One of the Nefariors stepped forward and wrapped its massive hand around the Devil’s shoulder, dragging him along as the superior turned and walked away. The Nefarior followed, pulling the Devil along with them.
“L-listen,” the Devil begged as they walked, “I offer my sincerest, most formal expression of apology for my failure with the Arlan Nota project. But please, I can offer my uses in some other way. You—you saw how I was copying back there, right? I could be one of them! Please! Just let me—”
His superior stopped and looked back, up at the Nefarior that had him detained. “Take him through Door 999.”
The Devil’s eyes widened. “No, no, please, you can’t do that. I’m not some Gargoyle, you can’t just execute me! I’m a Devil! A fucking Devil! You can’t just execute someone of your own kind! Do you understand me?!”
She stayed turned away from the screaming Devil as he was dragged toward the door. He pushed and clawed at the Nefarior’s hands and arms, trying his damndest to pry himself from the thing’s invulnerable grip. He used his magic, despite knowing fully well that they had resistance to it. He tried screaming, punching, biting, anything, to get away from that door.
But despite it all, he was dragged, pace after pace, to his death. Nothing he did even slowed the Nefarior down.
“Please,” the Devil cried, tears falling down his face, “don’t. Have mercy. I know I messed up. I know I did. But I’ll do better. I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t ever—”
He was cut off by the Nefarior putting its hand over his mouth and opening Door 999. He had his head forcibly turned toward the door as the Nefarior reached its other hand forward to turn the knob and open the stone slab.
The funny thing about Door 999 was that nobody knew what was through it. Because if you went through, you died. And you couldn’t see through it, either. It wasn’t really a “door” at all. Well, there was a physical door there, but through the door was actually a teleporter that took you someplace else. A rectangle of space that linked up to some mystery location.
The Devil had heard what felt like an infinite number of theories about what was through that door. Some said it took you to the bottom of a lake of lava, where you’d either burn to death, or if you had the heat resistance to survive it, suffocate. Some said it took you to the top of some massive cliff, where you’d fall straight down for a full year before reaching the bottom of the pit and dying on impact. Some said it was actually a grid of tiny teleporters, and each little square of your body would be teleported someplace else, neatly dividing your entire body into chunks of meat.
He’d never taken part in that theorycrafting, instead wanting to focus on his work. But now, he regretted it. It wouldn’t have done anything to save him, but at the very least, all he wanted was some sort of certainty. Some sort of knowledge of what kind of fate he’d meet.
The Nefarior opened the door, and the Devil saw the familiar black void of a teleporter. It was what all of the Seventh Circle’s teleporters looked like—void-black squares in space that connected to some other teleporter, somewhere else in the Underworld.
He’d gone through teleporters thousands—or maybe even millions—of times in his life, but this time it felt completely different. It was like he could feel a cosmic coldness of death radiating off of this one, the air being sucked out of his lungs in real time as he was pushed toward it.
“Please!” he shouted one last time, voice muffled by the Nefarior’s hand. “I don’t want to die—”
The Nefarior gave him one last shove, he flew straight through the teleporter of Door 999, and—
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