Chapter 331: Hell (2)

Together, the Saintess of the Sun God, the Tower Master, and the barbarian of the White Snowfield descended into Hell.

The realization struck at once: the air itself was poison. Acrid fumes gathered in the lungs like rot, and the simple act of breathing promised to spoil the viscera from the inside out. Helia lifted two fingers and traced a small arc in the air. Radiance bloomed and flowed over them, a clean tide that burned the venom out of the wind around their bodies.

Even so, Ketal drew a breath and frowned. “My lungs are not filling.”

He drank deeper, but nothing changed. There was air in his mouth and throat, yet his chest found no satisfaction. The Tower Master watched with a scholar’s pleasure that never quite overrode caution.

“The composition of the air here is vastly different from that of the Mortal Realm. Its very elements have changed,” he said, and the judgement clicked into place behind his eyes. “Composition Change.”

Symbols rippled across his hands and sank into the atmosphere. The ambient gases shivered, shed a few invisible skins, and settled into a ratio a human chest could use. Ketal breathed again and felt his lungs catch the air and keep it.

“That is a useful trick,” Ketal said. “Thank you. I was beginning to feel caged.”

“You did not look caged,” the Tower Master said dryly. “But I will accept the compliment. I did not expect even breathing to fail.”

That, too, belonged to Hell. It was not simply another land at a different latitude. It was another order of place. Ketal’s mouth curved despite himself.

“If we have arrived,” Helia said, eyes narrowing as she let her senses spread, “then it is time.”

Demons would have guessed that the Mortal Realm would send scouts the moment the path opened. They would have laid surprise upon surprise and waited for footsteps. The three of them set their strength within easy reach and Auras close to the skin. They stretched attention in every direction. However, nothing came.

The Tower Master let his hand fall an inch. “What is this?”

Not only did no ambush come sweeping out of the fog, but nothing moved at all. The plain, if one could call it that, lay open on every side. No horns, no wings, no crawling things. Just the steady stain of demonic energy and the slow drift of smoke. The quiet felt wrong. It sat on the tongue like bitterness.

“I do not think they intend to move,” Ketal said after a moment. “Shall we walk?”

“Agreed,” the Tower Master said.

They began to move through Hell. Helia and the Tower Master kept themselves coiled to answer violence without warning. Ketal glanced around with open curiosity, the corners of his mouth tilting into a faint smile that made Helia’s expression grow complicated. He looked less like a man on a battlefield and more like a traveler in a market district he had wanted to see since childhood.

They had been walking for half an hour across ground that looked like burnt clay glazed with ash, yet nothing changed. There was no ambush, no clatter of hooves, no hiss of scales— not even the faintest wail in the distance. Ketal rubbed his jaw with the back of his knuckles.

“They are letting us be,” he said. “Unexpected.”

“We planned to pull a few attackers apart and make them talk,” the Tower Master said. “That plan appears to have fallen down a well.”

They stood a moment in the silence, and as Helia and the Tower Master were contemplating, Ketal spoke first.

“Then let us scout.”

“Scout?” Helia echoed.

“We do not know what comes next. That alone is reason enough to learn what we can. This is their home. No map exists. Every piece of ground is new,” Ketal explained.

Hell carried the weight of legend. It was the dwelling place of demons, where their children were born, where the Demon King slumbered, and where the Four Pillars reigned. For those of the Mortal Realm, it had always been a myth—an idea spoken of in fear and reverence. But now, that legend had taken form, becoming sky and soil before their eyes. They knew nothing of its weather, its beasts, its cities, its snares, or its endless hunger. Everything that could be named would have to be named for the first time.

“We gain more by reading the land than by bracing against an enemy that refuses to show itself,” Ketal said. “Do you agree?”

The Tower Master considered, then hummed. Helia sighed once through her nose.

“You are right,” she said.

A low chuckle ran along Ketal’s spine. The Abomination’s voice sounded amused. “So you wish to sightsee.”

Ketal did not answer him.

“If the two of you travel together,” he said aloud, “I will go alone. For real scouting, it is better to open three lines instead of one.”

“You want to wander without being scolded,” the Abomination murmured. Ketal ignored him again. The Tower Master nodded.

“Very well. One hour. Return here.”

“Understood.”

Ketal smiled as if let off a chain, stepped forward, and broke the horizon in three breaths. His speed made the Tower Master huff a laugh despite the place they stood.

“He was impatient,” he said.

“He looked happy,” Helia answered, watching the direction Ketal had gone. “Happy to be in Hell itself.”

“Such is his way,” the Tower Master said. “He moves where his interest points. Most reasons matter less. He wanted to come to Hell because he wanted to look at it.”

“To sightsee...,” Helia repeated, this time with a ghost of disbelief. Such a thought would never occur to anyone from the Mortal Realm. “This is dangerous...”

“Are you afraid that Ketal will fall in love with Hell?” the Tower Master asked her.

“If a man like that has no fixed sense of good and evil, then he belongs to his curiosity,” she said. “If his curiosity is better fed here, he might decide to remain.”

The Tower Master shook his head. “He will not. He honors the ties he has made. He would not betray those ties to choose Hell. If he had started here as a child, perhaps we would speak differently, but he did not. He stepped onto the Mortal Realm first. There is no cause to worry.”

“That helps,” Helia said, and a real breath loosened her posture. “I have been waiting for him to strike me in the back of the head for months now.”

The Tower Master’s mouth twitched. “Then let us look.”

Hell did not care for humans, and it did not hide its distaste. Even with Helia’s holy power and the Tower Master’s reforms to the air, the place pressed on the skin and slid under the nails. The poison in the wind wanted to eat, the heat wanted to dry them to husks, and the light itself felt off, as if it had been reflected from a blade before it reached the eye.

Also, it was hot—not the humid swelter of a jungle or the baking flat of a summer road, but a dry, steady heat that promised to strip every drop of water from a normal body in minutes. Only their strength made it an inconvenience rather than a danger.

“What are these?” the Tower Master asked her, and he pointed at the trees that were not trees.

Rot-black trunks stood everywhere, as if someone had planted a forest and then taught it to decay without falling down. The sight of them shaped the whole landscape. He stepped toward one with the rapt focus of a man who had been given a new alphabet and wanted to write his name with it. He reached and touched the bark with the tip of a finger.

The world tried to answer with fire. The trunk detonated with a roar and threw a curtain of heat across the ground. A breath later, the blast chained from trunk to trunk. A dozen, two dozen, three dozen went off at once. The ground shook with a long, rolling growl as if a great beast had chosen to turn over in its sleep.

When the field finally died, Helia and the Tower Master stood inside two thin domes, one of light, one of force. Neither bore a mark.

Helia grimaced. “What was that?”

“An explosive response to contact,” the Tower Master said, face bright with discovery even as he dismissed the smoke with a gesture. “The yield is immense. Even a Transcendent would have trouble shielding those nearby.”

Those trees grew everywhere, but they moved on. Before long, they came to a stretch of ground where demonic energy seeped up from below like fumes from a sulfur vent. At first, the fog lay like a stain. Then it flowed together, rose, and loped at them in a rush.

“Do not come closer,” Helia said, and her voice was soft and absolute.

Holy power swept out and met the oncoming fog. It burned the demonic energy until even the scent thinned, then pressed a hand across the vent. The seeping paused like a held breath.

“Are they attacking?” the Tower Master asked her.

“I do not think so,” Helia said. “It looks like a natural feeding. It absorbs what approaches and uses it as fuel.”

“Hell makes odd things,” he muttered.

It did not stop. They came upon a spring whose waters shimmered with a soft, inviting light. But when Helia placed her palm above its surface, they saw the truth beneath the reflection—countless mouths waiting just below, eager for anything that touched the water. Overhead, a storm gathered in an otherwise clear sky and broke with single-minded malice, loosing flashes of lightning and sharp, knife-like rain. From a crack between two stones, a centipede as long as a man’s forearm slithered out and lunged for Helia’s neck. Its venom hissed as it met the Tower Master’s barrier, leaving a faint scar on the spell—as if proud to have marked it.

Everything was strange, and most things wanted to kill the first thing they could reach. When the hour closed, they returned to the meeting point without a scratch. Ketal arrived first, bright-eyed. The Tower Master gave him a look that acknowledged the obvious.

“It looks like you enjoyed yourself,” he said.

“I did,” Ketal answered, and he did not bother to hide it.

They exchanged notes. Within minutes, the rough picture clarified. The parts of Hell they had each seen wore the same face: a wasteland of poisonous wind, explosive flora, predatory geography, and hungry phenomena.

“A hateful world,” the Tower Master said at last.

It deserved the name Hell. It felt bent and wrong in ways their bodies understood without their minds.

“Anyone below the level of a Transcendent would struggle to live a week,” the Tower Master added.

He fell quiet for a long breath and then looked at Ketal with a question he had been holding back since they arrived.

“You grew up in the White Snowfield,” he said. “What do you think when you lay it against this place?”

The White Snowfield was the name spoken when people in taverns tried to measure fear against greed. It was a Demon Realm where storms came from under your feet and not only from the sky. Men entered the outer band from time to time and came back thin and quiet. Few had ever stood in the center. Fewer had survived. The last man known to have lived there for any length was an emperor whose name had faded into legend. No one knew what the heart of it contained.

However, Ketal did.

“There are great monsters,” the Tower Master said. “We have heard the stories. What of the land?”

Helia leaned in the way a listener does when the right voice starts telling the right tale. Ketal thought about the black-red sky above them and the smell of smoke and iron.

“I think they are similar,” he said finally.

“Excuse me...?” Helia said, dumbfounded.

“They’re... similar?” the Tower Master echoed, more curious than offended.

𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Hell offered a hundred ways to die, and half of them did not require an enemy. One could strike the wrong trunk, breathe too hard, step into the wrong fog, or drink from a pool that smiled at you and never see daylight again. Even a Transcendent couldn’t survive in here.

The Tower Master pointed idly toward the nearest charred trunk. “These explode when touched. Do you have the like in the White Snowfield?”

“At least here you can see them,” Ketal said. “In the White Snowfield, some ice looks like any other. Step once and it freezes you from the soles up. There is no way to tell safe from fatal with your eyes. You move by the sense that lives in your bones.”

Those who never learned that sense never learned anything else again. It was the price of entrance.

“How about lightning storms fall here without warning?” the Tower Master said.

“In there, thunder is rare,” Ketal replied. “Instead, there is hail. The storm hates life. Every stone falls with intent. Tens of thousands come down at once. If you answer the wrong way, you do not even leave a body behind.”

“I found a centipede that chewed at my shield,” the Tower Master said.

“There are scorpions in the White Snowfield whose venom kills even Hero barbarians,” Ketal replied. “Only I lived. The others tried to follow what I did and died because they could not, and that created trouble for a while.”

“How about the smoke that eats the living?” the Tower Master said, thinking of the vent.

“There are too many things like that for me to choose one,” Ketal said, and for the first time, he sounded genuinely uncertain about language.

Helia looked between the two men and found her composure fraying a little.

“How have you survived at all?” she asked Ketal, and the question came out half prayer, half accusation.