Aron smiled, tired, hollow. "Oh, my dear boy..."
He lifted the blade again, the reflection of his golden eyes glinting off its edge.
"...You really shouldn't have killed your brother....cursing yourself with that nice immortal body...."
The edge came down clean across Cain's chest. Not deep enough to kill. Just enough to split skin and muscle and let the blood run. Cain's body jerked against the restraints bolted into the white floor.
The wound sealed almost instantly, flesh knitting back together with a wet sucking sound. Immortal. Perfect. Useless against pain.
"Haaa... HAAAA... HAAAAAAA!"
Cain's screams tore through the walls, raw, animal, echoing across every white surface of Middle Heaven. The sound bounced off marble, off glass, off the high ceilings that had never been built for anything but hymns. Even Baal, two corridors away, winced at the sound.
"What the fuck is he doing to make even Cain scream like that?" Baal muttered, rubbing his temple. "Glad I was two steps ahead."
He stepped into the hall, the soles of his shoes pressing into the scorched marble. All around him, dark silhouettes of angels were burned into the floor and walls, ashen outlines where wings had once spread in glory.
Some still had the shape of hands raised in defense. Others lay curled like they had tried to shield their faces at the last second. The air smelled of ozone and cooked meat.
Their kind was already dwindling. Now, with this slaughter, the balance was collapsing even faster. Some demons would've rejoiced—but not Baal. He understood what few of his kind did: balance kept the realms alive. War only ever made corpses.
"Haaaa, he is not even hesitant on killing his own...that can only mean one thing...It's time to go back to Hell," he murmured.
He stepped over Gabriel's broken form. The once-mighty Messenger was barely conscious, one wing bent at a wrong angle and twitching like torn fabric. Blood pooled under his cheek and soaked into the marble. Baal paused long enough to look down.
"You'll live. Unfortunately."
He kept walking toward the elevator. He liked it here once. Middle Heaven had been a sanctuary of silence, a place even Lucifer couldn't spy on.
Clean lines, no politics, no screaming. Just quiet deals and quiet power. But now the deal with Gabriel had gone to rot, and Baal wanted no part in what came next. Aron was loose. Cain was immortal and broken. The balance was fucked.
He jabbed the elevator button again and again. "Come on... come on, how the fuck is this still running on divine Windows 95—"
The doors slid open.
Uriel stood inside, smiling. But it wasn't a kind smile. It was the smile of judgment.
"You're in my territory now," she said.
Her fist shot forward. The punch landed square on Baal's nose, shattering cartilage and sending him flying backward into the wall. The impact cracked marble down to the foundation.
Pain exploded behind his eyes. He hit the ground hard, clutching his face. Blood poured between his fingers.
"You, you broke my nose!"
Uriel stepped out of the elevator, her expression cold and terrifyingly calm. She was taller than he remembered, shoulders squared under white armor that didn't have a single scratch.
Her burning blue eyes swept the hall once, taking in the silhouettes, the blood, the broken angel on the floor.
"We already have enough collateral," she said. "So now, we ask questions, of you... and of him."
She turned toward Gabriel, her burning blue eyes heavy with disappointment. "Michael will be very happy to learn about your little arrangement."
Gabriel forced himself upright, blood dripping from his lip. His good wing scraped against the floor as he tried to stand.
"Uriel... listen to me. You don't understand. Michael doesn't understand what we're going through, what all of Heaven is losing—"
His voice cracked under the weight of his own desperation. He sounded small. Pathetic. Not the Messenger who once spoke for the Throne. Just a man who had made one deal too many and watched it burn the place down.
Uriel did not move. She had heard excuses before. She had delivered judgment on worse. Even Michael struggled to contain her fury, and Gabriel was no Michael.
This was exactly why she had been assigned to Aron, the only being chaotic enough to match her.
From thin air, her sword materialized, white fire wrapping around the blade like living wrath. She leveled it at Baal.
Baal's eyes flicked to the glowing steel, and the color drained from his face. He wasn't used to fear, but divinity had a way of humbling even the oldest of demons. The heat coming off that blade already blistered the skin on his cheeks.
"Uriel," he said quickly, backing up a step, "wait, we can talk about this. I gave your partner what he wanted, a lead on Eve! Think for a second before you burn another damn hole in creation."
Uriel's expression didn't change. She swung.
The blade sliced downward. Baal barely had time to raise his clawed hands. The claws met the divine fire, then melted, dripping molten black onto the floor. The pain was immediate and total. It raced up his arms like lightning in his veins.
"AAAAAHHHH!" he screamed, stumbling backward. The scent of scorched flesh filled the air, thick and sweet and wrong in this place of purity.
"I told you!" he shouted between gasps. "If you won't listen, then, then I'll have to pray!"
Uriel blinked, momentarily thrown. "To whom?"
Baal grinned through the blood. His teeth were red. "To the only one who still answers."
He slammed his burning hands together. The stumps where his claws had been sizzled against each other.
"Oh Ruler of Hell," he rasped, "I pray to you and your legions of disgust. In the name of Gluttony, hear me, Lord Beelzebub!"
The temperature dropped instantly. Lights flickered. A low hum filled the air, something ancient and alive.
Then came the flies.
One drifted past Gabriel's face. Then another. Then a dozen. Then a thousand. Wings buzzed like locust storms. The holy air of Middle Heaven filled with decay.
They landed on the scorched silhouettes, on the blood puddles, on Gabriel's torn wing. They crawled across the marble, over Gabriel's feet, over the walls that had never known corruption.
The scent hit next, rot, sulfur, and the unmistakable stench of Hell. It clung to everything. The white glow of the realm started to dim under the sheer mass of bodies.
Gabriel's breath hitched. "No... this shouldn't be possible... this realm is sealed."
Baal laughed, a wet, broken laugh. "You broke the seal when you made the deal, Messenger. You invited me in. And now, I'm just... calling home."
Uriel looked around, eyes wide, her flame flickering against the cloud of wings. The sword in her hand wavered for the first time.
Flies landed on the blade and burned instantly, but more replaced them. They swarmed her armor, her hair, her face. She slapped them away, but they kept coming.
The flies blotted out the white glow of Middle Heaven, turning purity into something suffocating and black.
They poured into the elevator shaft, into the cracks in the walls, into the wounds on Gabriel's body. The scent of Hell had entered Middle Heaven. And the balance between realms had just shattered.
Baal's body began to break.
His spine arched backward with a sound like snapping wood. Skin tore open along his back in long wet strips. Bones cracked and stretched, reshaping themselves as gray hair lengthened, spilling like smoke from his scalp.
His pupils bled outward until they were sickly green, glowing in the dim light. His scream came out half-human, half something far older, raw and wet and hungry.
The sound of meat rearranging filled the air. It was loud. It was constant. Hands, dozens of them, pushed out from his stomach, from his legs, from beneath his skin. Fingers flexed, palms opened, claws scraped against the marble. Flies poured toward him, into him, down his throat in a black tide.
They crawled into the new mouths opening across his chest and shoulders. Their droning filled the hall as Baal's body convulsed, expanding, mutating. His legs thickened. His torso split and resealed around new joints.
Extra arms unfolded from his sides, each one ending in too many fingers. The original arms hung limp now, useless, while the new ones tested the air.
Uriel took one step back. Her sword flared brighter, but the flies swallowed the light. Gabriel tried to crawl away, but the swarm covered him completely. He made a choking sound and went still.
Baal, no, whatever wore Baal now, rose higher. The new body stood almost ten feet tall, hunched, pulsing. Gray hair hung in greasy strands over a face that no longer had one mouth but seven, all of them grinning. Green eyes blinked in pairs across the forehead and cheeks.
The hands, too many to count, opened and closed in slow rhythm, dripping black ichor.
The flies settled. The buzzing dropped to a low, constant drone.
Silence.
Then one of the mouths on the thing's chest opened wider than the others. A voice rolled out, deep and layered, like a hundred throats speaking at once.
"Balance," it said, tasting the word. "You broke it first."
Uriel raised her sword again, but the blade shook in her grip. Gabriel lay motionless under a blanket of flies. Somewhere far down the corridor, Cain's screams had finally stopped. The realm itself seemed to hold its breath.
The thing that had been Baal took one step forward on too many legs. Its shadow stretched across the scorched marble, long and wrong, swallowing the last clean patches of white.
Middle Heaven was no longer quiet.
It was feeding.