In the quiet hours, the Stranger thought about Thea. The memory was already fading—she felt like a figure from a distant lifetime. But her sheer, stubborn refusal to bend sometimes made him waver. Had he made the right choice?
He had. He must have. Thinking of everything Philip had put him through, the Stranger steeled his resolve. This was all a trial from the Most High.
That conviction lasted precisely until the next morning, when a bone arrow fired from somewhere in the distance punched clean through Philip's throat.
What the— The Stranger gaped in disbelief. He'd been certain Philip was part of the divine plan—a tormentor assigned to him until he'd endured eighty-one tribulations, a constant shadow that would never leave his side. Right up until that arrow buried itself in the demon's windpipe, he'd believed it with every fiber of his being.
Watching Philip's body twitch in a spreading pool of blood, the Stranger wasn't so sure anymore. Maybe this guy hadn't been a test from God after all.
A wave of skeleton soldiers surged out of the dust. At their head rode an undead knight—cobbled together from demon corpses—while a handful of poorly equipped demons rushed to meet them. The two sides crashed together without preamble.
No one so much as glanced at him. Just to be safe, the Stranger crouched beside Philip and checked. The demon who'd tormented him for God-knew-how-long had bled out. Dead.
Something inside the Stranger went cold. So he wasn't my ordained adversary after all. Then what was the point of all those months of suffering?
Where's my cloak? Where's my power? He tried to reclaim the abilities he'd tossed away like garbage—and found, unsurprisingly, that you couldn't un-ring that particular bell.
The skirmish was small. The Stranger had lifetimes of survival experience; he crept and dodged his way clear of the battlefield without trouble.
"Hey! Give me my power back!"
"Please—I need to get my family home!"
He screamed at the sky. No answer. Not even an echo. It was as though he'd never existed at all.
I need help. At the very least, someone who can get my wife and children back to Earth. The demons were out of the question. That left exactly one option: he had to backtrack and find Thea. Whether it was restoring his family's minds or sending them home, the help of a goddess of souls was indispensable.
Finding a single person in Hell's vastness was no small feat. Fortunately, Thea was incapable of keeping a low profile. She was currently waging a spectacular siege, and it took little more than a few casual questions to locate her.
The Stranger's luck held—or perhaps the Most High was simply enjoying the show too much to throw obstacles in his path.
Carrying his family on his back, fighting through checkpoint after checkpoint, the Stranger finally reached the outskirts of Thea's camp. The encampment sprawled across the hellscape: nearly a million demons under arms, with an equal number of undead shambling alongside them.
On the horizon loomed an enormous bronze-colored fortress city. Countless demons fought desperately along its walls, and every so often a high-ranking demon entered the fray to shore up a crumbling section, keeping the attackers from scaling the ramparts.
The area blazed with light. Inside the city, a colossal stone pillar rose into the blood-red sky, magical radiance pulsing across its surface, throwing off waves of sinister energy.
The attackers had lit spectral ghost-lanterns of their own that burned a sickly white, boosting the speed and striking force of every undead in range by a solid ten percent.
The Stranger waited outside the perimeter for three days. He couldn't get in.
"Are you really a divine agent of the Heavenly Father?!" he muttered from behind a boulder, thoroughly miserable.
Thea, for her part, was being careful not to reveal her true nature. Her strategy was simple: throw bodies at the walls, regardless of losses. By day, her demon army stormed the gates. By night, the undead took over. Around the clock, without pause.
Heavy demon casualties? Irrelevant. She could recruit more from the surrounding territory—with one sweep, she could pull in fresh hordes, and the cost was negligible.
Undead losses were even less of a concern. The battlefield was carpeted in corpses, and at her level of necromantic skill, a single gesture raised several thousand new soldiers.
The defenders' morale crumbled fast. The Stranger witnessed it with his own eyes: demons who'd never understood the concept of loyalty leaped from the walls, collected their bounty, and joined the attacking side without breaking stride. Lord Nebiros himself was forced to sortie repeatedly, barely managing to drive the enemy back each time.
But as the numerical gap widened from unfavorable to catastrophic, Nebiros went from occasional sorties to frequent ones, and finally to permanent residence on the front line. His fall was only a matter of time.
A thunderous crash—the gates, weighing dozens of tons, buckled under the Hell siege engine and split apart. Two shattered door panels crashed to either side, as if announcing the city's fall.
Nebiros, his teal skin ghastly as a wraith, couldn't decide where to commit. Enemies swarmed the walls and poured through the breach. Against the tide flooding in, there was precious little he could do.
His strength sat squarely in the middle tier—stronger than most, weaker than the elite. His domain was a forgotten corner of Hell that no one had ever bothered to contest.
"I'll kill you!" The teal-skinned demon spotted a black-robed figure drifting toward him. He lunged, claws slashing like twin swords, intent on tearing this enemy apart.
"Moron." The figure was, naturally, Thea. Neither Raven's power nor her own full strength was appropriate here—at full power, she could swat aside ten demons like him with one hand.
A single finger extended. A torrent of raw magic, laced with a thread of divine soul energy, spiraled forward like a drill bit. It punched through the demon's mental defenses, bored into his psyche, and detonated.
"From today, you're a Bone Guard." Nebiros's flesh dissolved in seconds, converting into the spectral fire that fueled undead constructs. His massive, armored skeleton creaked and popped as soul energy settled into the framework. The former demon lord, now the Bone Guard Nebiros, slowly rose to his feet.
The rest of the battle was a foregone conclusion. With their lord reduced to a literal skeleton on the enemy's side, the surviving demons had zero interest in fighting on his behalf. When they learned there was money involved, they happily set down their weapons. Demons from both sides mingled as though they'd been comrades all along.
"Tuth. Rally the undead army. Sweep the city from east to west. Anyone who won't submit—kill them."
The speaker was clad in full battle armor, eyes burning with malevolent spirit-light, faint wisps of ghosts orbiting his body. This was Tuth—the very first demon Thea had recruited in Hell, the one who'd told her about the supply crisis. His personal combat ability was atrocious; even with good equipment, he'd gotten himself killed in an earlier engagement.
Thea had raised him on a whim, and the results surprised even her. Tuth turned out to have genuine talent as a death knight, and he'd gradually risen to become one of her key commanders. Life was full of surprises.
For the remaining demons—a motley assortment from half a dozen former warbands—she appointed a few leaders, divided up the territory, and left the administrative details to them.
"Big sis Thea, when are we going home?" Raven had been going stir-crazy. The first few days she'd been terrified Trigon would come knocking, but she'd slowly relaxed.
"Heh. We can't leave until we find him." Thea had originally started recruiting just to make her own life easier. But gradually, she'd begun to understand the shape of the play she'd been cast in.
In this whole affair, she was just a backdrop—there to highlight the Stranger's suffering. The better she did, the more it highlighted his misery, and the happier the Most High was with the show.