Chapter 892: Into Hell
It was a land of endless fire and ruin, a place where the screams of the damned never ceased. Rivers of molten rock cut jagged paths across cracked obsidian plains, their currents filled not with water but with liquefied flesh, burning ichor, and the dissolved remnants of souls ground into nothingness. The air itself was poison, a choking miasma of sulfur and despair that clung to the lungs and corroded the spirit. Ash fell like snow, black and heavy, carrying with it the stench of rot and brimstone.
Here, the damned were cast like refuse. Countless souls, once mortal, now little more than husks of suffering, writhed upon the jagged ground. Their forms flickered between flesh and spirit, their bodies unable to decide if they were alive, dead, or something far worse. They screamed with no mouths, clawed at their own faces with no hands, and burned without fire as the Laws of this place tortured them endlessly. Some begged for annihilation, others shrieked for salvation, but none was granted either. They were condemned to eternity in this inferno, and eternity had no mercy.
Among them prowled the lesser devils, creatures birthed from hatred, pain, and ambition. Twisted mockeries of flesh and claw, their bodies were half-formed, dripping with molten blood or fused with jagged shards of obsidian. They tore at the souls, drinking their screams like nectar, ripping fragments of essence from the damned and devouring them to grow stronger. Their existence was a perpetual war: every devil clawed, tricked, or butchered the one beside it. They bit and tore, only to be torn in turn, for here power was everything, and weakness was death.
Entire packs of them hunted across the plain, shrieking as they dismembered each other, fighting not only for sustenance but for the faintest chance of climbing the infernal ladder. Today’s predator would be tomorrow’s carrion, and each kill was celebrated not with triumph but with desperate hunger. Their laughter was shrill, manic, echoing with insanity. The ground was soaked in gore and black ichor, and the screams of devoured souls bled into a chorus of madness.
This was not chaos without purpose—it was cruelty codified into nature itself. Here, torment was creation, and suffering was worship.
And then, without warning, the hordes stilled.
A tremor of terror passed through the lesser fiends. Clawed feet scraped back against the stone, wings folded, and mouths that had never known silence fell quiet. They turned as one, eyes burning with fear, to the group that strode across the plain.
At their head walked a towering fiend, a living abyss in flesh. His skin was obsidian black, cracked with glowing fissures of molten crimson that pulsed like veins of magma. His horns curled high like jagged spires, framing a mane of white that blazed with otherworldly fire. Space itself bent subtly around his form, as though reality sought to flee from his presence. He was chaos given discipline, a singularity bound in the shape of a god of wrath.
Upon his shoulder perched a feline beast of infernal majesty. Its sleek fur shimmered like liquid shadow, streaked with arcs of red lightning that hissed and sparked as it moved. Black horns jutted from its head like crowns, each vein-cracked and glowing faintly with cursed power. Majesty and malice mingled in its gaze, a creature regal and terrible, whispering of secrets stolen from the marrow of Hell itself.
To the fiend’s left walked a warrior maiden of unholy grace. Her eyes, crimson and burning, pierced the shadows like blades. Ritual markings carved across her face and skin told the story of her damnation, painted in the language of curses. Her horns arched cruelly upward, ridged and sharp. Draped in hides and shadows, she radiated the aura of a huntress born from torment and fire. She was beauty sharpened into a weapon, seduction laced with bloodlust, a vision of elegance drowned in savagery.
To the fiend’s right prowled something neither wholly beast nor wholly god. Its flesh was stone-gray, cracked and seared with veins of violet flame that pulsed like poison. A wolf-like maw snarled, baring fangs meant to pierce the bones of gods, while jagged horns jutted like spears from its skull. Armor of black stone grew from its flesh like natural scales, spiked and jagged, and within its chest glowed a core of dark energy pulsing with hunger. Its aura was that of an apex predator of creation, one whose very presence caused courage itself to unravel.
Behind them came a warlord of regal damnation. His skin was black as ash, etched with molten crimson veins that glowed with infernal authority. Four horns curled upward from his skull, and his eyes, icy blue and piercing, radiated both command and cruelty. In his hand, he bore a long black katana, its blade dripping crimson energy. Divine Power flowed through his veins, but it was clearly corrupted, making him seem like the Divine Avatar of some fallen and wicked god.
And last, trailing like the end of a nightmare, came a colossus. A dragon wrought not of flesh but of abyssal flame and void. Its body was a living storm, forged from darkness and violet plasma, a titan whose every step fractured the land beneath it. Wings like torn fragments of night stretched wide, blotting out the hellfire skies, and its eyes glowed with apocalyptic hunger. Each breath it exhaled seared the ground into rivers of molten stone, and the air warped around its form as if reality itself was unwilling to contain its enormity.
The lesser devils stared at the group with naked hunger. Their eyes burned with greed, for instinct told them: to consume such beings would mean power, ascension, immortality. Yet not one dared move. Their bodies trembled, and they crawled backward into the shadows, hiding their twisted forms in cracks and pits, knowing that to be seen was to die.
The group walked on without pause, the plain itself quaking beneath their presence. At last, they stopped before a wall—an endless wall, stretching beyond sight.
And it was no wall of stone.
It was made of faces.
Billions of them, packed together so tightly that flesh merged with flesh, eyes bulged against skin, and mouths twisted in endless screams. These were no carvings, no grotesque decorations. They were living souls, trapped in the surface, fused into eternity. Their mouths opened and closed in silent wails, their eyes rolled in eternal torment, and their cheeks stretched against the prison of the wall. Each face was an agony frozen in time, the essence of damnation made architecture.
The wall breathed. It pulsed. And it screamed.
Despite its horrifying nature, it was here that the first semblance of order—and with it, a cruel form of civilization—finally began to emerge. The periphery of the Third Layer of Hell was nothing but chaos: a wasteland of torment where the damned were cast, to be broken and devoured, their suffering feeding the endless cycle of infernal sustenance. Here, lesser devils prowled and fought without end, chasing, tricking, and slaughtering one another in a frenzy of madness. But beyond the colossal wall of souls, the true hierarchy of Hell began.
Inside those walls, power did not simply consume—it ruled. Within lay the seat of Devil society, where legends were forged in blood and terror, where dynasties of fiends rose and fell in endless struggle. To be born inside was to have a chance—small, brutal, but real—of clawing one’s way up through the abyssal hierarchy. To be born outside, among the chaos of the periphery, was a sentence of despair. Unless touched by miracle or catastrophe, one would remain nothing more than a bottom-feeder—forever condemned to gnaw on souls and filth.
The group stood before the gates that marked the boundary between those two worlds. The gates loomed like monuments to blasphemy, taller than mountains, carved from the screaming wall itself. Yet before they could even draw near, the surface rippled and tore, and three enormous heads forced themselves outward.
They were the heads of a dog, but each maw was large enough to crush a fortress. Their fangs dripped with gore, and in their jaws dangled the broken husks of living souls, torn yet still conscious, shrieking in eternal torment. Their eyes gleamed with cruel intelligence, sharp and cunning, as they fixed their gaze upon the intruders. With a guttural growl, the rest of the creature forced its way through—a colossal beast, a single body bearing three slavering heads, rising hundreds of meters into the sulfur-choked air.
Its voices spoke as one, layered and echoing like thunder.
"Exiles...? Are you wretches from other layers of Hell, fleeing in cowardice and seeking shelter within my domain? Pathetic. You disgust me. Still... if you would sign away your existence in a contract of servitude—say, a few centuries—perhaps I might grant you—"
The beast’s words died in its throat.
The leader of the group blurred from sight, teleporting in an instant. One heartbeat he stood before his companions, the next he was directly before the towering guardian. A single fist struck forward.
The impact was cataclysmic. One of the dog’s heads burst apart in an explosion of gore and shattered bone, reduced to pulp. The colossal body reeled backward, smashed against the monumental gates with such force that they trembled and swung open, revealing the horrors within.