The inferno roared, consuming the obsidian hall in a blinding white torrent. The heat was so intense it didn't just burn; it erased. The very air turned to plasma.
For a moment, Rico Ruban was gone. Hidden behind a wall of primordial fire that defied the logic of the modern world.
Haruki slumped against the pillar, his hand still smoking, his vision blacking out.
"Did... did we get him?" he gasped.
"No," Sol said, his voice urgent. "Haruki, get the hell out of there. Move!"
The fire swirled. It didn't dissipate; it was *sucked in*.
In the center of the destruction, a figure stood.
Rico was still on his feet.
His clothes were gone. His skin was charred black, peeling away in sheets to reveal the raw, pulsating red muscle underneath. The ancient demon was wounded—truly wounded—for the first time in centuries.
But he was not dead.
He twitched. The charred skin cracked as he moved, black ichor oozing from the burns.
"How dare he," Rico whispered. His voice was a dry, scratching sound, like stones grinding together. "How dare he hurt me."
He looked at his hands—or where they used to be. The stumps were cauterized, the flesh cooked.
"I thought you said no one would be able to touch me," he hissed to the empty air, to the memory of the voice that had promised him everything. "I was meant to be unparalleled. UNTOUCHED."
Then, something snapped.
The dungeon blurred. The heat, the pain, the rage—it all melted away, replaced by a sudden, jarring shift in perspective.
*The Netherworld. A long, long time ago.*
The sky wasn't blue or grey. It was a bruised purple, swirling with storms of chaotic mana.
The Netherworld was a harsh place. It was not a kingdom of order, but a landscape of survival. And in this landscape, demons had a hierarchy. The strong ate the weak. The beautiful crushed the ugly.
Rico was small.
He sat at the bottom of a jagged ravine, his body broken. He was a child—thin, pale, with large, frightened eyes.
His father was a nobody. A lowly imp who couldn't hold a shape, never taken seriously by the Demon Lords. And his mother...
She was beautiful. A high-ranking succubus who had briefly dallied with the imp.
She stood at the edge of the cliff, looking down at the small, shivering boy.
"You are too soft," she said. Her voice was like honey laced with poison. "You cry when the wind blows. You hesitate before you bite. You are a flaw in the bloodline."
She didn't kill him with a blade. That would be too much effort.
She simply kicked him.
Rico tumbled down the mountainside, bouncing off the rocks, his small body shattering with every impact. He landed in the ravine, his skull cracking against a boulder. The world spun. A part of his brain—the part that felt empathy, the part that connected to the world like a normal creature—severed.
He lay there for days. The wind howled. The shadows lengthened. He waited to die.
But he didn't die.
He just lay there, broken, his mind a jumbled mess of static and pain.
Then, a shadow fell over him.
It was his father.
The imp looked down at him. But he wasn't pathetic anymore. There was a strange, dark energy swirling around him.
"Found you," the father said.
He scooped the broken child up. He didn't take him to a healer. He took him home.
Rico remembered the house. It was cold. Dark. But something was different now. Something vicious and evil lurked in the corners. It wasn't a pet. It was a presence.
His father changed. The imp who was mocked in the streets suddenly walked with his head high. He became a respected member of the community. Their situation changed. They had food. They had power. They had warmth.
One evening, they sat for dinner.
Rico sat on a crate, his head still throbbing from the injury that never healed right. The severed part of his brain ached—a constant, dull hum of wrongness.
He looked at his father.
"What changed?" Rico asked, his small voice trembling. "Why are we strong now?"
The father didn't answer. He just smiled. It was a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
He reached across the table. His hand was rough, scaled.
He rested his hand on Rico's skull. Right on the crack.
*Sear.*
Rico flinched, but he couldn't pull away.
Darkness flowed from the father's hand into the son. It filled the cracks. It sealed the bone. It burned away the "soft" parts, the parts that the mother had despised.
The part of the head that hurt was gone. The empathy. The fear. The hesitation.
And in its place, something else took root. A command. A truth.
"You are not broken anymore," the father whispered, his voice echoing with the sound of that lurking evil. "I gave in, Rico. I let the house have me. And now, I give it to you."
He leaned close. The grin on his face was wide, stretching too far, too wide.
"You are invincible," the father said. "You are unparalleled. You are meant to rule the world outside. Nothing will ever touch you again. You are the instrument of the Abyss."
Rico looked up at his father. He saw the grin. He felt the cold power settling into his bones.
Maybe he was right.
But then...
*WHY?!*
The memory shattered.
Rico stood in the burning hall, his charred face twisting into a mask of absolute, infantile rage.
He looked at his burned skin. He looked at the stumps where his arms used to be.
A porter. A human. A nothing.
*He touched me. He hurt me.*
The logic of his father's promise fractured. The shield of invincibility cracked.
"Why of all people... A PORTER?!"
Rico threw his head back.
He screamed.
It wasn't a battle cry. It was a wail. The cry of a child thrown from a mountain, realizing that no one was coming to catch him. The cry of a broken mind trying to make sense of the pain.
"FATHER! WHY! FATHER!!!!"
The sound wave exploded outward. It wasn't just sound; it was a shockwave of pure psychic force.
*BOOM.*
The obsidian walls turned to dust. The ceiling began to collapse.
The cry was loud enough to kill. It ruptured the eardrums of the unconscious knights. It cracked the foundations of the dungeon.
"Haruki!" Sol screamed in his mind, breaking the boy out of his stunned paralysis. "GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE! NOW!"
Haruki didn't hesitate. He grabbed Vorian by the collar, dragging the heavy knight with the last of his adrenaline.
He scrambled toward the narrow crevice, the exit, as the world behind him disintegrated.
Rico stood in the center of the ruin, screaming at the sky, screaming at the memory of the father who had made him a monster, yet failed to make him a god.
The dungeon roared, answering his pain with an avalanche of stone.
"RUN!" Rax yelled.
And Haruki ran.
TO BE CONTINUED...