God of Hell - Chapter 47 - And So Unified Their Kind Stood (Patreon)

Goddamnit, the mad man did change everything.

The factions had all practically dissolved over the course of three days, all unified under a single man, Nero, the Light Breather, the God of Hell, and it was with that unification that they had marched on the city center.

Klaus hollowed a Knight’s skull, shot another in the knee and pistol whipped the third that came into the ground.

The ‘Unified Front,’ as they were called now, were powerful, but that didn’t mean the Knights had any intention of letting them take the city center easily.

A Hell Gate stood underneath it after all, and Demons loved their Hell Gates.

The world was a world of screaming bodies and dying men, more the enemies’ than his.

Jion put her spear through three men at once, Erlo threw a green explosive into a mass of approaching bodies. Their screams clawed into the air as the blaze ate through their skin.

Mifa caved a man’s face in with one of her many fists.

A Knight cut the distance between Klaus and them through his blindspot, they swung a blade for his neck, far too close for Klaus to dodge.

The enemy was tackled to the ground by a man, The two scattered on impact with the dirt. The Knight scrambled to his feet but Klaus had already shot a chunk out of his neck before he could so much as get to his knees.

He looked up at the man who’d saved him, a stranger, not one he even so much as recognised, just a person who threw himself against a Knight to preserve his life.

The man nodded and dashed back into the battle with the others.

Klaus could count the number of times that had happened to him in a battle and all times it had been a Death Rattle, not a stranger

He had never been one to truly put much bother into which side he was fighting for, but he had to admit that fighting for the guys with a noble cause certainly had its perks.

He dashed back into the thick of the fighting, just in time to see the Prophet blast a man in the face with a gust of wind hard enough to dislocate his jaw.

That wasn’t the draw of the fight however, on the front lines was Nero, moving like a whirlwind, so fast that Klaus could barely keep track of him. His blade wasn't nearly as sharp as Cain’s, but that much Klaus could hardly notice as he cut down crowd upon crowd of men that dared attempt to be the one to claim the Light Breather’s life.

In his other hand erupted a jet of golden fire, washing over enemies and burning them in a bright inferno.

No, fucking way…

Klaus had heard him mention that the Fire Breather had done that, he’d learned how to replicate that in just over a week. 

It seemed that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The men were soon fleeing from the Golden killer, and the day was won.

The army erupted into roars of primal joy, men cried, raised their weapons high and screamed to the Inferno in triumph.

Today they had won and tomorrow they just might again.

Anything was possible.

They chanted for the Damned, Nero, their Light Breather, their God of Hell. 

Nero was huffing, hunched over, panting but grinning.

His brown eyes were glowing golden, they often did when he used that strange magic of his, he wondered if he was aware that happened.

Klaus wouldn’t get the chance to ask right now.

They were heading down towards the Hell Gate.

At the city center was a building made out of stone and kept up by pillars. Nero stepped towards it, the door had nine circles etched into it, he pushed it open and saw stairs that lead into darkness.

“So the Hell Gate is below eh?” Nero asked. Speaking was exhausting, breathing was tedious, but he knew his current state was very temporary.

He had barely taken injuries if at all, he did feel rather low on Light, he hadn’t known projecting his Light as a jet stream of flames would be so magic consuming.

“I’ve never been down here.” The Prophet said.

“Well, at least there’s one thing you didn’t have handed to you.” Erik replied.

The two had been at each other’s throat since they had met. Erik had become a faction leader during the starting stages of the rebellion and he didn’t very much like the elite woman who owned people and used religion to twist them to her side.

I wonder why…

What mattered was whether they were both able to put their differences aside for the greater good, and as it seemed they had, Nero had no business getting in between their feud… For now at least.

He walked down the winding stairs and Nero was beginning to think there was no end in sight when they finally emerged into a spherical room.

Etched into the ground were familiar runes. Where do I remember these from? He wondered and the memory hit him like a truck. It was the symbol he appeared within when he arrived at the tower.

Around it were several other curious symbols, though not ones that Nero recognised at all and these were etched into the walls instead of the ground.

Just outside the circle was a lever, against the walls were shelves.

“Fascinating.” Nero heard himself say. It was , he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, but he couldn’t deny that it was eliciting an idle curiosity within him. “So, I just stand in the circle, you pull the lever, and I appear in a corresponding city below.”

“Yes, that’s about it.” The Prophet confirmed. She made her way to the lever and pulled it down with a click.

“What are you doing?” Nero asked, feeling his panic rise. 

“Locking it.” She explained, seeming almost amused at his terror. “It’s tied to the city of Cavum and the last thing we want is reinforcements coming through here.”

Ah, so that’s how it works.

That made sense, if cities the first and second circle were linked to one another through Hell Gates, then the last thing either would want was for the other to hold unilateral power over what could and could not pass through.

“Relax, either way, you can’t actually be sent there without a summoning item in hand.” Klaus added with a grin. He’d walked to the other side of the circle and inspected it from the outside.

A hopeful thought hit Nero. “So, with it locked, no Demon from the Second can come to Dolore unless they make the trek from another city in the First?”

The Prophet shook her head grimly. “They can still force a gate opening.” She sighed. “It’s less accurate and reliable but it will get you somewhere within the same region as the locked city, the one you left, is connected to. As an aside, just because it’s locked on our end doesn’t mean it’s locked on theirs, we can still make it straight to Cavum unless they lock it from the other side, and judging by the colour of those runes, I’d reckon theire gate is still open.”

Ah, bugger. That meant the chance of a new Demon arriving was still very much a problem.

“Well, that’s just another reason to make sure to get this rebellion over with as quickly as possible.” He grinned, turned to his allies and watched as their resolve tightened at his words.

He made his way to the shelves, opened them to find several scrolls tucked away within them. “What are these?” He asked.

“Scrolls, they’re about the circles.” The Prophet said. “Cities, nations and more.”

“Wait, so all of these shelves detail important information about the Circle?” Nero asked.

“Yes?” The woman replied with a hint of confusion. “This place isn’t just an entrance to Tayalnisyan, it’s a library for visitors to be able to navigate their way around… Well, esteemed visitors at the very least, the masses aren’t allowed to access them.”

Nero barely saw the way she flinched when he picked one up. He nearly laughed. “This is… This is fucking fantastic.”  Finally actual documentation about the Circles, he’d have killed for it, and yet here it was, just sitting on shelves.

Perfect.

There was so much, and such little time, such, such little time. 

“I’ll be spending the night here.” He told them and many looked surprised at that, not Selvas though, and not Ember either, both it seemed, knew how valuable this was to him.

“Okay?” The Prophet said. “We’ll form a perimeter around the Gate while you look at the scrolls, Light.”

Nero barely heard her, he barely even heard them leave, he was already going through the shelves, looking for the topic that interested him the most.

“You’re a dork, you know that?” Selvas grinned.

“Oh, don’t act like you’re not buzzing with excitement at the thought of finally finding out more about this world.” He laughed. “I can practically taste your eagerness Sel.”

Her gaze flicked up to a shelf labelled ‘Beasts of Tayalnisyan’ and her eyes twitched a fraction, which was practically salivation when coming from Selvas.

She reached up and grabbed a scroll from it.

“Aha!” Nero grinned. He’d found what he was looking for, a scroll on the geography of the Inferno. 

Nero read them and there were quite a few to read indeed. Far too much to be able to be consumed within a night’s work, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.

At least I’m getting a better picture of things now.

Tayalnisyan, Luxuria, Miluina, Aviditas, Ira, Ketzerei, Foreigean, Sagi, Khiana. Those were the nine circles, the official names of the circles as decided by the Empire of the Circle itself.

They had all been roughly mapped out, it seemed, with each thought to be smaller than the one before it by half. That made Tayalnisyan the largest and Khiana the smallest circle at under one percent of its size.

Most of the details here were on Tayalnisyan in specific, mostly only giving broad details about the other circles. That was disappointing, but not enough to truly harm his intrigue.

A certain Demon philosopher, named Diavanzis, was featured quite heavily. He had mapped out Tayalnisyan’s size and by his estimations deemed it to be thirty thousand kilometers, that would make it well over twice the size of earth, though the roundness of the number made Nero almost certain he was either under or over estimating by some amount even if he was in the general region of correctness.

Still, that meant Nero was within a truly large world, and that birthed a spark of terror within him.

There were continents, large and small, oceans that seemed could swallow him up if he were to ever find himself trapped within them. The Seas of Supplizio were great, ferocious twisting and turning lanes of water that carved their way through the world as they declared it theirs. Nero felt like none could match it, no Demon, not even the repeatedly mentioned Rex Infernus himself, nothing save from the other ferocious seas and oceans that dominated the waters of Tayalnisyan.

The regions Tayalnisyan were split into were also news. Selvas had told him of the Tattered Lands and the Lands of Burden; it turned out there were two others, The Gardens of Anguish and the Flickering Islands.

Again, most details were on the Tattered lands, further convincing him again that the library was localised. It was the right decision, in a world this stupendously large, one simply could not afford to log everything about it in one room.

Even this, Nero could not manage to completely internalize. What were Veil Piercers, What was an Undiminishable, a Xikalus, and more and more and more.

“So much knowledge, so much, just hidden away from the people…” Nero sighed. No doubt to keep them in the dark, to keep them easier to control. It was sick, cruel and again… Just like back home. Half his earnings were won by fucking people over who were clueless about how the world worked and the other half was won by siding with the people who ruined it.

He’d always told himself he needed to stop thinking this world was some dream of his, and while he had certainly made a fair bit of progress over the past months, today it seemed was the final nail in the coffin.

Hell, Damnation, the Inferno, the Empire of the Circle, whatever one wanted to call it was large, incomprehensibly so at that, and it was a world bustling with people, suffering, dying, wailing and pleading people. And this library, he knew, was just the start of it.

His eyes drifted to find Ember walking along one of the discarded scrolls on the floor. She was hopping from one to the other, perhaps pretending the floor was lava and that she had somehow forgotten how to fly.

“Well, we have them now don’t we.” Selvas said and it took Nero a moment to realise she was replying to his question. His back was on the floor and her head rested on his chest. Silver hair cascading across his stomach and beautiful amethyst eyes staring captivatedly at not her boyfriend, Nero, but a scroll depicting a small creature.

It was rodent-like, black, purple and gold furs, three big eyes, and webbed feet. “See these guys, they’re called vichors.” She said eagerly. “Very rare, very illusive, I killed one of them as a kid, went over to pick up its corpse and it had just vanished, my arrow was still coated with its blood, but the critter itself, just gone…” She said with what looked to be genuine anguish in her eyes. “Turns out, vichors aren’t native to Tayalnisyan, they’re from Luxuria and sometimes shift between realms like corvix’s however they can’t do it for long and end up being shunted back to their original realm.”

She was grinning, so Nero was grinning. “Now you know.”

“And now everyone is going to know.” She told him. “We’re doing good here, a lot of it.”

Nero smiled. He was actually doing good. Idly, he ran his fingers through her hair. It was hard to acknowledge, after all, since he’d gotten here it seemed whatever good he did erupted into a thousand more bad, but this time it was pure and genuine. No double edge, just a positive change.

“I was a bad person…” He finally said it, because it felt like the only natural thing to say. 

Selvas’s eyes flickered to him and sat against his gaze. She said nothing, but waited for him to explain. He could tell she’d been expecting this, but she'd never urged him on it, never forced him to say more than he already had on the matter. Which up until today, had been nothing.

“An evil person to be exact.” He continued. “I lied, I cheated, and I hurt people to get a leg up in life.” He explained, feeling the words fall out of him. “I had convinced myself that it would be somehow hard to explain to you, because you lacked the context. That was a lie, a lie to myself… and My last lie.” He said. “In my world, I wasn’t the Demon, I was the human who helped the Demons, one of the bastards who kept their house of cards from falling apart just to get a sliver of their favour and riches, I waa worm, a leech on society, the kind that weakened prey so that the predator can feast upon it without resistance.” Nero bit his tongue, he wanted to stop, but he had to keep going. “I’m not saying this to minimize my role in everything I did, I’m saying this to highlight the truth, which was that I had very, very little to gain from all the evil I did and yet I did it anyways, and I think… I think that’s much worse than what any of the people I worked for did.”

“So you were like the Prophet?” Selvas asked, seeming to understand suddenly. 

“Much… much worse.” Nero told her.

“But you’re not like that now…” Selvas prodded.

“I don’t think so.”

“Good then.” She said as if noting what she should pick for groceries. “If you do become like that again, I’ll kill you.” She said again with the same tone, and yet Nero knew there was not a hint of jest there.” Selvas leaned up and kissed him below the jaw. “I love you.” She whispered.

“I don’t…” He hesitated. “I don’t think I deserve to be loved.”

“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.” Selvas said. “I can’t tell you the answer to that, I’m not one of the people you killed.” 

The answer left Nero without words to give. His tongue was lead and his guts were a vortex, twisting and squeezing the coherence out of his brain.

Was that what he wanted to hear? No. What he wanted was for someone to tell him that he could redeem himself if he tried hard enough, or that perhaps, just perhaps he already had. 

Again a failure, again, another reminder that he was still the person who did all those terrible things back on earth, different, better, but the same in a number of ways.

But Selvas still loved him, and today that would be more than enough.

“I love you too.” He told her, and she pulled closer.

Klaus was on guard duty, because guard duty was fun, actually, no, it wasn’t, because it had more to do with standing around with other guards than doing anything fun. 

Now, it was safe, but if he had wanted safe then he wouldn’t have become an outlaw in the first place. He was born into this life, by the actions of his grandfather, a thrall who gained freedom, and then his dad who had carried on that legacy with a woman of his choice.

Both had died horribly and agonizingly, but those were really just the shakes in Hell. Klaus would die horribly and agonizingly, but it would be after doing something to make him a household name across the Nine. Not standing guard.

“Fuck, it’s morning already?” Nero asked.

Klaus turned to see the man emerging from the Hell Gate chambers below. “Sorry I kept you guys waiting.”

The other guards seemed absolutely overjoyed to be addressed by the Light Breather himself. Klaus on the other hand… “No, no, I’m sure you had your reasons to stay cooked up down there with your extremely attractive girlfriend while we stand here in the cold.”

Nero winced. “I’m sorry Klaus.” He said.

“It’s whatever.” He shrugged and his eyes flicked over to the Imp who was conversing with the guards. “Now, are we heading back to the manor?”

“Yes.” The Light Breather told him. “Selvas is just gathering up a few scrolls that we can take with us.”

“Good.” Klaus nodded and turned his gaze back to the city.

“And, Klaus…” Nero began hesitantly. “I want to say thank you, for helping, for doing everything you’ve done for us so far. Stradale wouldn’t be here without you; and we couldn't have made the strides we have in Dolore either.”

“It’s a job Nero.” He scoffed. “Just be happy Defrid didn’t seek me out first.”

“I… I see.” He answered with downcast eyes and that made Klaus feel all kinds of guilt. It was wrong of him to say, it was a job, yes, and he wouldn’t be doing that job if Gunther hadn’t paid him a fortune, no. But he would be remiss to say Nero wasn’t perhaps one of the best bosses he’d ever had.

Shit, the cold really is making me a grump huh? He realised he should apologize. Klaus turned to the man. “Nero I-” Something shifted in the dark. Klaus froze. His eyes followed the shape, far away, on a distant building.

Even there he could make it out, the posture, the long limbs, the skeletal frame. Klaus had seen several when he was hunting Summoning Beasts while trying to get to Tayalnisyan. There was a reason the Death Rattle were four in number and not five, and Klaus was looking at the killer responsible.

He pulled out his gun and fired into the shadows, watched the creature vanish and turned around, eyes desperately searching for where the monster might appear next.

Nero and the rest of the guards wore confusion on their faces. Ember as well.

“What’s happening?” The man asked, hands splayed, and certainly a hair’s trigger away from erupting in golden fire.

“Hollow!” Klaus barked out.

The creature appeared behind Nero, soulless eyes set on him.

Klaus fired his second gun and knew he’d made a fatal mistake.

The projectile passed harmlessly through the creature. It wrapped an arm around the Light Breather’s shoulder, and then both him, his imp and the creature vanished from sight.

Selvas ran out a moment later, eyes frantically darting around, yet her body was calm, like a hunter stalking a boar. “What happened, where’s Nero?” She asked and at the lack of an answer asked again. “Where’s Nero?!”

Klaus grit his teeth. “He’s gone.”