Belphegor III

He was... trying to kill everything?

Well, it made sense. His powers were dark and destructive. Everything around him was unnatural. That spoke simply enough.

But here was this weak thing on a toilet who defended himself with gas, not unlike a skunk, who had the nerve to tell her indirectly that everything she did was pointless because he was going to kill her and everything that she liked.

"What?"

The white-eyed demon stared at her steadily. "What indeed. Why are you still here? I just gave you permission to take over everything arou--"

The sentence was cut off by the dire hyena's teeth sinking into his throat.

The fat monster rolled his eyes and appeared bored, farting again. "You're blocking my view. You could help me, you know. There are many things here that I've reinvented from the old times. You could be rich while spreading my influence."

She only snarled and sunk her teeth deeper, though something about his flesh sickened her. The taint of the city seemed to ooze from his very blood.

[ EXP: 200 ]

At length, she found herself forced to let go by dizziness and the burning feel of the putrid fat in her mouth.

Belphegor shoved the dizzy hyena from his lap and resumed what he had been doing. "I would fight you, but this is very important. If I can get this thing working properly, then information will be able to travel on the air. Won't that be lovely, Mr. Hyena?"

"I'm a female," Iskra growled curtly before up-heaving everything in her stomach.

The kami behind him stirred, her pure white wings twitching before the rest of her body did. She sat up, watching the action through her wide, blue eyes.

"If you really must insist, Ms. Hyena, I'll fight you, but I can assure you that I'll win. I know the powers of darkness... of time and matter. The primordial blackness, if you will. Why, if I study much more, I will become a god."

He raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want to upset the god who's going to recreate this world? It will be green and peaceful, much like my city."

Iskra answered with a renewed attack.

[ EXP: 200 ]

This time, the monster caught her midair, but not with his hand. He simply looked at her, and she found her charge arrested.

"What?"

The demon yawned. "Say what one more motherfucking time. I dare you."

She growled. "What?"

The king on his porcelain throne flung her into one of the straight, stone walls.

She shook her head and prepared another assault, but the devil had morphed into some kind of ugly... brain thing that it hurt her head to look at.

Tentacles covered in filth writhed about his excrement-like form. It was a brown slush, marked with yellow and green that formed and reformed in a confounding manner. She wasn't sure what he was. One minute he looked like that, another a dark cloud, another a bat-winged phallus.

It was hard to attack something like that, but her head hurt only as bad as her body. He seemed to have some elemental ability to simply create pain, unlike her ability of absorbing it and inflicting it on others. And it was far more advanced than her "Malady".

[ EXP: 200 ]

So she was to die here. An eldritch abomination, the god of sewage and technology, was going to kill her and apparently trap her soul in this disgusting city. Forever.

Yet, she was determined that she wouldn't die without protesting such a fate with everything she was, and that determination was the catalyst that transmuted her fear into anger, fury, and a strong fighting spirit. She struck out against the slushy, amorphous thing. She bit into the vile cloud and tore at its essence, which was matter and not matter all at once. It seems he'd invented a totally different class of... existent thing. It wasn't matter as she understood it or spirit as she saw it. It was something far beyond her comprehension, and she tore at it with brute ignorance and fear.

It was only out of the corner of one of her deep blue eyes that she saw, as the sickness once again overtook her, the old man. He crept with his walking stick calmly through the miasma, like the folkloric Moses through the sea.

[ EXP: 200 ]

The strange substance raged on either side of him, but it couldn't rise above his ankles. He slowly but surely made his way to the caged angel, whose eyes filled with hope. A light shone off of them both, brighter the closer they got together.

And finally they kissed. The radiance filled the room, and Iskra could hear the room and the spire falling just as she lost consciousness.

When she awoke, there was no gas. There was no vile city. The only chariots she saw were the relic ones with grass and vines growing over them. The buildings were in their normal state of disrepair, and honestly she couldn't remember them being any other way. She'd forgotten everything except for that final scene... the elemental forces of chaos and death overtaking her, but life itself preservering to save her. A few people around her awoke, confused, and spoke to each other in the humans' odd language before going about their day.

But in the middle of it all, there was an Amaranth bush with a note.

She couldn't read.

And she wandered back to the garden later with the note, looking for the old man to interpret it.

He was nowhere to be found. The only thing she could see at his house were a pair of cranes, who took off together into the sky.

[ EXP: 250 ]

Land Grabbed!

[ Pack Hunter: Killed massively powerful demon with the help of the old man from Amaranth ]