The demon who had dragged Kairo here was a colossus wrapped in chains, his skin stitched with brands that glowed like dying embers. His claws bit into Kairo's shoulder as he hauled him across a bridge of black bone, each step sending hollow groans through the abyss below.
Hell spread out beneath them — not as a pit, but as an endless continent of ruin. Towers rose like jagged teeth from mountains carved into screaming faces. Rivers of molten glass slithered between rust-red plains, their banks littered with the corpses of gods too proud to beg for mercy. The sky was no sky at all, but a great ceiling of writhing shadows, lightning flickering inside as if some monstrous heart beat above.
They entered through gates taller than mountains — The Gate of Knelt Kings. Along its frame, severed heads stared eternally downward, their crowns nailed to their skulls. Inside was a city of silence, where demons knelt in rows, heads pressed to the ground. Not one dared to lift their gaze as Kairo passed.
At the center of it all rose the Throne of Obsidian.
Hades sat upon it, a figure draped in robes that drank the light, his eyes like black holes drawing thought itself into their depths. His voice was not loud, but when it came, it was the grinding of tectonic plates, the echo of creation folding in on itself.
> "Kairo…"
The sound made the marrow in his bones ache.
> "Do you wonder how you came here? Or… do you wonder why you were spared when the others burned?"
Kairo's jaw tightened. His mind still reeled from the fall, from the chaos in Heaven — the cries of demigods, the soldiers of the new gods tearing through them like wolves among sheep. He remembered the weightless drop, the searing light… then fire. Always fire.
Hades leaned forward slightly, and a thin smile crept across his lips.
> "Ashbel still screams your name. Even now."
The words struck deeper than any blade. Kairo's eyes flickered crimson, but before he could move, a shadow swept over the hall.
From behind the throne, something shifted. Chains dragged across the floor. A gaunt figure in armor blacker than oil emerged for only a moment — a single glowing eye staring at Kairo with inhuman hunger — then it vanished back into the dark.
> "Not yet, Xerathis," Hades murmured, almost playfully. "He has not earned the right to be devoured."
The demon general at Kairo's side snarled and shoved him forward.
> "The Pits of Agony await. Survive, and perhaps… you will see her again."
The floor beneath them split open, and Kairo was cast into a spiral of screaming wind. He fell into darkness once more — this time, not into fire, but into the stench of blood and rust. Shapes moved in the gloom, their eyes gleaming like wet knives. The sound of chains rattled somewhere deep in the black.
The trial had begun.