“Anyway, we should get some rest… let’s go inside for now. It’s colder out here towards the border of the flames,” I muttered before staring up into the sky at the cold blue moon wafting moonlight through the air.

“It’s from up there, isn’t it?” Luna muttered as she stood next to me, staring up at the moon with me.

“Yeah… Hades watches during the day and even more intently at night. I wonder what he’s worried about,”

A long silence befell both of us as we were entranced by the moonlight shining down on us like a ray of hope.

“I’m scared,”

Slowly, my head turned towards Luna, whose face slowly began to crumble into something I thought I would never see in my entire life.

,m She bit down hard onto her lip, forcing the tears to stay in her eyes and continuously water like a tortuous procedure attempting to push through.

“I’m scared as well,” I replied, and Luna had the same reaction as me as she slowly turned towards my expressionless face.

“Y-You don’t look like it,” She lightly chuckled with tears slowly flowing from her eyes.

“Of course. Hiding such emotions is what separates the weak from the strong… but not feeling those emotions is what separates humans from non-humans,”

“Like how elves can’t feel angry?”

“Yep… I guess being part human still makes us human… though, I’m sure we’ll have to give up such emotions in the future, so I’ll decide to treasure it,”

“Do what you want… I’m gonna let it all out right here and now and never show it again. You’re the only one I can show this to… so don’t tell anybody….” Luna muttered as she slightly whimpered, with more tears flowing from her eyes.

As she crouched down, I also crouched beside her, slowly rubbing her back as she let all her worries and fear out in the form of tears.

“I wish my family wasn’t such assholes….”

“Mhm… I feel you….”

“I wish somebody from my family actually cared about me….”

“Mhm…”

She poured out more and more of her wishes, but just because she said them didn’t mean they were going to become true, even as a sinner who had fallen into Tartarus.

“Dude… if somebody in this group dies, I don’t think I’ll be able to hold it together anymore. We have to leave this place fast,”

“Don’t worry… all of these thoughts will be gone by tomorrow… Now, come on, you should get some sleep,” I muttered, helping her up and walking her to her tent where Bella had woken up and brought her in.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, slowly rubbing her eyes.

“She was feeling just a bit nauseous, nothing much. Anyway, make sure she actually goes to sleep, okay?”

“I got you… alright, Luna, want to sleep in the same blanket? You can hug me all the way until you fall asleep, okay?” I heard Bella comfort her as they both moved further into the tent, signaling for me to return to my own.

As soon as I returned to the boys tent, I slightly chuckled upon seeing Cy and Findir both sprawled out, sleeping like absolute animals.

“Good night,”

…

It took another week of traveling, but we finally made it to the outskirts of Beezlebub’s territory, and boy, oh boy, was it not a pretty sight.

What seemed to be a natural plague spread throughout the land, polluting trees and creating a thick swamp with every other patch of land.

Various monsters greeted us from the depths of those murky waters, but the thing that caught my eyes the most was the hundreds upon thousands of flies.

They stunk up the air and clouded our vision with each step that we took, making it a torturous process to get through the singular barrier blocking our path.

But, eventually, we passed through the massive cloud of flies and got to the very inside of the swamp, where a massive kingdom of diseased demi-humans went about their lives.

“It’s… much bigger than I thought,” Cy muttered, expecting the same thing we were expecting.

From the outside, we expected a small village, but right in front of us was a dark mountain with massive castles and homes being built, lived, and used on it.

You could see pretty much the entire city from here it had a few tiers of houses that gradually got more grand the further you went up, eventually ascending into literal castles that fought off a few undead birds that flocked to them.

From our position, we saw the entrance to the city, which had a massive wall lining the mountain, and so we made our way towards it, killing any of the fodder that got in our way.

Everything within the swamp was so miserably weak that even Luna could take care of them in one fell swoop.

One monster was a frog with hundreds of eyes littered across its body, while one was a fish that attempted to nip at our ankles with its comically large mouth.

The strongest one would probably be the black sharks that would leap out of the water and attempt to chomp your head off, but with a quick and easy punch to their noses, they were paralyzed in just a second.

All of these monsters weren’t even a challenge so getting to the border of what seemed to be the capital wasn’t any problem in the slightest.

And eventually, once we reached our destination, we were stopped by two demi-humans who had puss-filled sores all over their body.

They attempted to search us for anything suspicious, but we didn’t want what they had, so I coated everybody in a thin layer of the dark-red aura.

But all of a sudden, I felt something attempt to stick inside of me, like a blunt pole attempting to pierce straight through my gut.

I expanded my bloodlust quickly and for a split second, I saw my status flicker with,

Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error

The number of error bars that I encountered was enough to fill up my entire vision, leaving me standing there, speechless.

All of a sudden, a fly landed on my nose, and its swirling black eyes sucked me into it, causing me to appear in a room of darkness.

From there, I saw my friends appear next to me one at a time, and a flash of errors stretched across my vision.

Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error Error

“Oomph…”

I threw up into the darkness, only for it to fall past the invisible floor and fall deep into the abyss below us.

We waited there for what seemed hours until a single young man with short and wavy white hair and a pair of white kaleidoscope eyes stepped out from the darkness and into our abyssal prison.

“I’m disappointed in you all. I thought you would have a more sense of reasoning than to enter my territory without permission. That wall of flies is meant to serve as a warning… as all who enter here never leave alive. They’re disposed of as a pile of bones,”

The man’s voice was raspy yet sliced through the air like a hot knife cutting through a piece of styrofoam.

None of us were able to talk as the demon lord greeted us without mercy, unleashing so much pressure that our bones had already begun to break.

“Oh, did Lucifer hold back in his introduction? I’m one of the weakest ones, yet your body is still crumbling under my natural pressure… he really has taken a liking to you. It would be a shame if-” All of a sudden, he stepped into a portal of darkness and appeared from behind me, his presence not even appearing as his face crept next to me, each individual cell of his eyes staring towards me. “It would be a shame if you died,”

All of a sudden, I felt a threat approach my back just like earlier, but it was a fake as the real attack, which had no presence, stabbed straight through me, sucking out almost all of my power.

The stats in my status began to drain like a hole in a drainage pipe, leaking out all of the precious power that I had been building up over this life.

“I can now see why Lucifer took a liking to you… This potential… oh~ this potential! You’ll be strong… though, it’s shame your journey ends here, boy. No reincarnation or deathly rebirths within my territory… even your daddy can’t save you down here,”