[Location: Unknown Land, Hell Realm]
Puchi!
Sprut~
"Useless shits!"
Blood flowed like spilled wine across scorched obsidian plains. Limbs, wings, and horns littered the cracked black soil as ash rained from a sky split by crimson lightning. A scorched banner trembled in the hot winds—bearing no sigil, only the half-charred remnants of what might have once been an elite detachment.
Now? Just corpses.
The demon who stood above the carnage was tall, brutal, and barely humanoid—more beast than man. His skin, armored in organic obsidian scales, shimmered with runes etched by fire itself. His maw split open in a jagged grin of serrated fangs as he drove his fist through the skull of the last survivor—a crimson-robed tactician demon who tried to flee.
CRACK!
The skull imploded like a ripe fruit under pressure.
With a flick of his wrist, the corpse was flung aside like garbage, crashing into a pillar of basalt with enough force to split the rock in two.
"A scouting legion from Satan Beelzebub...?" the beast rumbled, voice like magma bubbling beneath the ground. "And this was the best they could muster?"
He spat on the ground, where the blood boiled instantly.
Then came the voice. Cold. Feminine. Amused.
"Careful, Zareth. If you insult her spawn too loudly, the sea witch might send her 'daughters' after you next."
Zareth turned, growling. A woman stepped out from the smoking mist, heels clicking softly against charred stone. Pale-blue flames curled at her fingertips, dancing with serpentine grace. She was dressed in high-collared, black ceremonial robes—thick with stitched runes and charms that defied age and decay. Her face was veiled, but her eyes glowed like aquamarine hellfire.
"Ashira the Occult," Zareth muttered. "Still creeping around the frontlines?"
"I go where the winds whisper secrets," she replied smoothly. "And today, they whisper something... odd."
Zareth snorted, stalking over to a broken pillar and slumping down like a resting beast. The air around him shimmered with demonic pressure.
"Odd doesn't concern me. Blood and war do."
Ashira stepped delicately over a corpse, crouching beside it and pressing two fingers into its ruined chest. Magic pulsed faintly—only for a brief second.
She froze.
"…You feel it too, don't you?" she said quietly.
Zareth's eyes narrowed.
"…The ripple?"
Ashira slowly rose. "Aether shifted last night. Something ancient… woke."
A silence.
Zareth's jaw clenched. "Another one of the old bastards?"
"No," Ashira said, shaking her head. "Something worse. Something forbidden."
She raised her hand, and a spectral map of the Hell Realm flared to life midair. It pulsed softly—until one region blinked crimson. A zone long forgotten. Sealed. Shrouded.
"The Sanctuary of the Seven Vows."
Zareth blinked. Then he laughed—a deep, guttural bark of disbelief.
"That place? The ruins? I thought it was obliterated after the purge."
Ashira's voice dropped a note, like frost creeping into a warm room. "No one could ever confirm it. The Satans abandoned it. The Archons sealed it in every dimensional layer."
Zareth's expression darkened.
"...Who the hell would dare set foot in that cursed grave?"
Ashira turned to him slowly.
"Who else?"
"Stop speaking in riddles, bitch!"
Zareth's molten eyes narrowed to slits, burning with a predator's focus.
Ashira, the Occult Flame Witch, said nothing—only raised a finger, and the crimson blinking zone on the map surged with a faint pulse. For a brief instant, the phantom image of the Lucifer Sigil—wreathed in ouroboric fire and pierced by seven chains—flashed across it before vanishing.
Zareth stiffened. His entire body rippled with tension.
"…No," he said, standing slowly. "He's dead. Obliterated. That cursed bloodline was extinguished—every record, every trace, gone!"
Ashira's voice was cold steel wrapped in silk. "Not all traces were wiped, brute. Some of us remember. Some of us watched. And some of us… waited."
Zareth growled, smoke curling from his nostrils. "Even if it's true, you expect me to believe he woke up after a millennium of silence?"
Ashira tilted her veiled face. "He wasn't sleeping. He was sealed… by his maid."
A silence fell.
Zareth blinked. "…The Silver-Haired Queen?"
Ashira nodded once. "The Queen of Annihilation herself. The only demoness capable of preserving that much concentrated ruin… without burning the world around her."
Zareth looked down at the blood pooling near his feet. "And now he's awake."
"That and well," Ashira continued, her voice a whisper curling like smoke, "she must be tending to him as we speak."
Zareth ran a clawed hand over his face, leaving behind scorched streaks of ash where sweat should've been. "Tch. Of course she is. That silver bitch always worshipped him like a god wrapped in mortal skin. Even back then."
Ashira didn't correct him.
Didn't need to.
Everyone knew Grayfia Lucifuge was many things—executioner, gatekeeper, war priestess—but above all, she had been his. His shadow, his guardian, and perhaps the only being in all thirteen layers of Hell who had refused to betray him.
Even when the world did.
"She sealed him," Ashira said softly, almost reverently, "in the one place no one would dare look. The sanctuary forged by the vows of Seven Hellbloods, fueled by infernal lineage and bound by oaths that make even death blink."
Zareth cracked his neck, already pacing again, horns crackling with heat. "If that bastard really is alive… if Dominic Nocturne von Morningstar has returned…" His voice faded, overtaken by the low rumble of an earthquake that wasn't coming from the ground but his body.
"…Satans and her spawns will tremble."
Zareth's claws flexed, cracking the basalt beneath his feet. The mention of that name—Dominic Nocturne von Morningstar—soured the air with memories and warnings long buried.
Ashira watched him with her ever-burning eyes, the aquamarine flames flickering like dying stars. She didn't respond. She didn't need to. Her silence confirmed what they both feared... or perhaps, what they both hoped.
He was back.
The last heir of a bloodline they had tried so desperately to erase. The one who should never have survived.
"It's impossible," Zareth muttered, though his voice lacked conviction. "Dominic wasn't just betrayed. He was devoured. Drained of sin affinity, cursed by the Seven Satans' daughters, stripped to the bone."
Ashira raised her gaze slowly. "And yet… someone's echo just caused an Aether Shift across the Hell Realm, the Mortal Veil, and the Astral Cradle simultaneously. Do you know how many forces are capable of that?"
Zareth didn't reply.
Ashira whispered, "One."
"Only one is capable of such a ripple," Ashira finished, her voice as soft as shadow yet sharp enough to carve stone. "And if you listen—if you feel—you'll know it too, Zareth. He's not just back."
She paused.
"He's ascending."
Zareth snarled, fists clenching, wings unfurling with a snap like breaking steel. "And what are we supposed to do? Run like rats? Kneel like worms? We swore oaths under the Sigils of the Seven Satans. You know what that means, witch!"
Ashira tilted her head again, veil shifting just enough to expose a sliver of her cheek—pale as powdered ash, glowing with faint ritual runes etched into her flesh.
"I did not swear to the Satans," she said, voice like a cold wind through ancient crypts. "I merely played along."
Zareth froze. His nostrils flared.
"You're a traitor, then."
Ashira's laugh was quiet and cruel. "Perhaps. But so are you. You would not have come this far from your war-posts otherwise. You feel it in your marrow. That ancient name, sealed under blood and betrayal, has returned—and no matter what they claim, no one who ever knew him can stay still."
Zareth's tail lashed behind him. He gritted his jagged fangs, but the truth clung to his expression like soot.
"…What now?" he asked eventually.
Ashira turned her gaze back to the spectral map. It still pulsed, faint but insistent, like the heartbeat of something long forgotten.
"We watch. We wait. And if we're smart… we don't interfere."
Zareth growled. "And if we're not?"
Ashira smiled beneath the veil, the flicker of madness dancing in her aquamarine eyes. "Then we die. Loudly. Spectacularly. As sacrifices to a god who no longer has mercy in his veins."
"It isn't set in stone, he is but a husk drained of all his talents. What can a dried mummy do against Seven Satan and him?"
Zareth's claws scraped against basalt, lips peeling back to bare his fangs.
"Mark my words, he will grovel before the new lords of Hell. Just like before. A prince without a crown is still just meat."
Tch~ Tch~ Tch~
"Still in denial, I see~" Ashira clicked her tongue as her mocking gaze bored holes into the brute's pride. "You speak with such confidence, Zareth. But your trembling wings tell a different tale."
Zareth's muscles flexed involuntarily, his tail snapping at the air like a whip. The obsidian-scaled warrior glared at her, but she stood her ground, regal and unflinching.
"I fear no whelp born of ruin," he snarled.
Ashira took a languid step forward, letting her blue hellfire dance across her robes. "No. But you fear the past. You fear the day when all the sins we buried claw their way out from the grave."
Another step.
"You fear him… because he was never supposed to return."
Zareth bared his teeth, jaw twitching.
Ashira's flames shifted color—from tranquil blue to a spectral white, flickering with suppressed heat. Her voice dropped low.
"You remember what happened the last time he lost control. The Veil between the Mortal Cradle and Hell tore open like wet cloth. The rivers of Styx boiled in reverse. Even the Archons flinched."
Zareth finally looked away. "He was a child."
"A child who shattered realms without knowing it." Her words were a whisper. "And now? He is no longer a child."
The silence that followed was different from before. Not tension. Not rage.
Fear.
Even for demons like them, it was a heavy word.
Zareth stood, shoulders squared, but his molten eyes avoided hers. "The Satans will not allow this. They'll silence him. Again."
Ashira chuckled softly. "Like they did the first time?"
She pressed. "Like how they used their useless daughters to strip him of his sin affinities? As if power stolen could ever replace the source?"
Zareth's molten glare flared again. "Don't speak of the Seven."
Ashira's smile was veiled and venomous. "Why not? They're your patrons, aren't they? The same ones who sacrificed one of their own kin—like lambs to the Pit—to fuel a ritual even they couldn't control."
She stepped forward again, her presence almost spectral now. "Do you even remember what happened after? The Demon King's corpse was never recovered. The Queen of Sin fell into an eternal slumber. The heir was devoured, cursed, and erased from all records. And yet—here we stand."
Zareth's knuckles cracked. "If you believe he'll rise again and challenge them, then you're as mad as the cultists who pray to the old blood under the ruined moons."
"I wonder where the Zareth—The Bold, who used to follow our toddler prince like a shadow with reverence go~"