Minute Mage: A Time-Traveling LitRPG Progression Fantasy

Chapter 193: Welcome to Hell. Wake up.

A Devil awoke on the stone of a damp, dark hole.

Where was he? What…what was going on? How long had it been?

The room was small. Or, no, it was actually quite large. It was just that the room had been filled to the brim with other Demons. The Devil himself was closer to the door, so he was actually touching the ground, but there were so many bodies piled up further in, tossed on top of each other, that a couple of the piles actually touched the ceiling of the square room. He had to imagine the ones at the bottom of those piles were crushed beyond recognition, at this point.

He tried to get up, and was confronted with the realization that his entire body felt like it’d been smashed to pieces. He could barely move, and even attempting to do so was like trying to rip his muscles in two.

He also realized that the room had been flooded with the stench of corpse and rot. He hadn’t noticed at first; even though he’d been unconscious, his nose must have acclimated to the smell after being in this place for however long he’d been there.

Once he noticed the smell, he couldn’t ignore it. It was horrible. This entire place smelled horrible. He hated it.

With a grunt of exertion, he tried bringing up his hands to at least cover his nose, but he couldn’t even manage that. Such an extreme feeling of powerlessness was unfamiliar to him. At least, physical powerlessness.

He also realized he was feeling quite a few other things he’d rarely ever felt. Hunger. Thirst. Needing a fucking nap. A Devil of his strength, he rarely ever needed to consume anything, take any sort of a break—much less get to a point where he felt this intensity of those feelings. Once again, he was forced to wonder—how long had he been out? Or perhaps, what had happened to cause his body to come to so much harm?

He could barely remember what’d happened last. He was…What was his name?

Oh, right. It was Xhag’duul…How did it go? Xhag’duulinithar’obaba’iidook…Right. Xhag’duulinithar’obaba’iidook’naisantipoduun’torobaroxhixhonxhaxintep. That was his name. He was a Devil. He worked for the Seventh Circle of the Underworld. And his duties were…

Arlan Nota. That name came to him like an arrow through the eye. And with it, the rest of his memories. The pain. The humiliation. The slow degradation of his position, of his esteem, of his life. All due to that one stupid fucking order. Kill some random Human, or we’re gonna kill you. What the fuck were his superiors thinking?!

He remembered the fight, and he remembered losing. He remembered getting crushed by a fucking rock, dying, and his projected form tearing itself to pieces—and with it, a piece of the Devil’s soul. That was why he felt like this. He’d been ruined.

He was lucky to survive such an event, as extreme as it was. The stronger one was, the more difficult it was to come back from a killed projection; that was one of the reasons his superiors had wanted to use lower-Level Demons to do this job in the first place. Less risk of any real loss. Well, that was, until they decided to risk his life. He was expendable, it seemed, because they’d decided to pin the blame of this failure on him. So now he was here, unable to move, in a pit of corpses. He may as well have been waiting to fucking die.

Fifteen hours passed.

It was quiet, and it smelled horrible, and the sensation of the rough, hard stone underneath the Devil’s flesh got grating after the first thirty minutes. It became tortuous after the first two hours. The next thirteen, he just had to endure it.

He’d just barely found the ability to move in that time. Or, at least, he could slightly wiggle his fingers now, and his jaw had a decent bit of mobility.

But he could hardly even think of that at the moment. His mind wasn’t occupied with wiggling his tongue back and forth. It was deep in his imagination, living through the fantasy of breaking out of this room, running through the fucking office and hallways, and murdering every living being in there. He wanted to put his fist through a Gargoyle’s face. He wanted to stomp on an Ember Mite until it was turned to red mush. He wanted to find a Balor, rip off each of its fingers, string them together into a snake of bleeding flesh, and then shove it down the thing’s throat so the pinkie tickled its stomach, choking it to death. He wanted to punch, kick, burn, maim, fucking blow up a building. Holy shit, he needed to let out some anger.

His teeth were clenched so hard, if he’d had his full strength, they’d have probably shattered by now. If he could move his arm more, he’d have brought it to his mouth so he could bite off all of his fingers and spit them out, just so he could taste some blood. Just so he could hurt someone, even if it had to be him.

Maybe he’d work on being able to wiggle his torso, so he could turn himself around and start ripping those corpses to shreds.

No, actually. They smelled too bad. He just wanted to get away. But he couldn’t do that, either. He just sat.

Twenty-one hours passed.

The Devil had gotten back enough strength that he could speak, now. His first action upon realizing this was to yell out for help. Well, not that he expected to receive any. In fact, he was just about absolutely sure that whoever was in charge of this place knew perfectly well that he was alive, and were perfectly capable of getting him out anytime they wanted. He knew how these recovery holes worked, he knew that they kept close watch on them.

But he yelled regardless.

“Hey!” His voice was hoarse, throat full of phlegm. He didn’t bother clearing it. “Let me out. Let me out now. I’m—I’m alive. Don’t know about the others, but I’m alive. I’m recovered, I’m good to leave. So come here and let me out.”

Nobody came.

“Motherfuckers,” he muttered. “Who’s out there? Who’s monitoring me? It’s, uh…Abbadons, right? That’s the Race that takes care of recovery holes? Fucking Abbadons. You’re all lazy, arrogant, worthless pieces of shit.”

There was no sign anyone heard what he said.

“Just let me out,” the Devil said, his voice an exhale. “I just wanna get out of here. Get back on my feet. Please.”

Thirty-six hours passed.

The Devil began to wonder if this was how he’d die. He’d been left for dead before, and that time they’d come to save him last minute. Or, well, not “save.” His superior certainly hadn’t saved him. She’d decided she had a use for him after all, and come to temporarily delay his death. Now that he’d been used up…maybe this was her way of ensuring he fulfilled that fate, in the end. He hated it.

At least back before, he could’ve died with a beautiful view above his head. He’d been in a barren wasteland, but it didn’t smell so fucking awful then. It wasn’t so dark, so claustrophobic, so miserable to exist in that place. Here? It was worse. He should’ve just stayed back, refused to work with his superior when she gave him that offer. Though, she would’ve forced him to take it either way.

If this was going to be how he died…The Devil just wanted to kill himself now and get it over with. He wanted to smash his head against a wall until it was perfectly flat, to punch his fist through his own chest, rip out his still-beating heart, and crush it between his fingers. He wanted to take a blade and stab it through his cheek, to feel the blood running down his own neck.

He wanted to walk through door 999, go back to the surface of the Underworld, so he could see the sun and the stars, and then leap out into that cold vaccuum, drifting infinitely in the empty space, so that at least then his corpse wouldn’t have to share a resting place with these fucks.

At least Humans had graveyards. The corpses there could get buried in the earth, given their own little boxes and ceremonies, little plaques with their names on them. The Devil would be tossed in a pile so his body could decompose and become easier to handle, then his skeleton would be ground up into dust and that dust would be dumped into a barrel along with the skeleton dust of at least a hundred other dead Demons, and that barrel would then be dumped into a river of lava so it didn’t take up valuable space. That was the fate that awaited him.

He’d been deemed a failure, a fuck-up, he contributed too little to the higher-ups for them to justify spending the few resources needed to keep him alive.

Now he just had to wait until it ended.

One hundred and forty-nine hours passed.

At some point during that time, the Devil regained the ability to move. He was weak and tired, but he finally had the capability to move his body. He stood, shakily, and tried the door. It was locked, though, so there wasn’t much to do other than sit right back down in a slightly more comfortable position than he’d been paralyzed before. He certainly wasn’t going to go climbing into any of those piles of corpses.

He decided against killing himself. Really, he’d decided against killing himself about eleven times, by now. Each time he decided not to, it only took a few hours before the concept crept back into his mind and he began to ponder it once more. For now, he felt like he may as well see what was going to happen.

So he sat, eyes unfocused and entire body still aching, that horrible stench in his nostrils, for hour after hour after hour.

“This fucking sucks,” he said to himself for the thousandth time. He’d been keeping track, and it had, in fact, been the thousandth. He said it so much because it was true. It fucking sucked.

His thoughts didn’t go very far past that.

Some number of hours passed. The Devil stopped keeping track of time, so he really had no idea how long it’d been. But after those hours, he heard the first sound that hadn’t come from himself.

It was a footstep. Faintly—very faintly—through the door, there was the sound of a boot on the stone. It clacked against it in a way that made the Devil somehow instantly recognize who it was. Maybe she had a distinct way of walking and he only realized it just now, or maybe he just wanted it to be her so bad, he forced himself to believe it definitely was. Either way, he was completely certain.

The door clicked unlocked and then swung open. Even in the Underworld where light was scarce, since the Devil had sat in the pitch-black room for so long, the miniscule amount of light in the room that’d just been opened up to him was enough to just about blind him.

Standing in the brilliant dim light was the woman the Devil wanted to see so badly, while simultaneously wishing he’d never met her in the first place.

“Expression of greeting, Devil,” his superior said.

He groaned, holding up a hand to block out her figure in the doorway. “What’s up? You here to kill me, or something?”

He couldn’t see her, but he could still imagine how her face likely flickered with irritation at his refusal to greet her properly.

“Due to my being responsible for overseeing your previous position, it is by rule that I must personally inform you of this news,” she continued. Her voice was calm and practiced, like she was reading from a script.

Which, of course, she was. The Devil had personally said exactly this to plenty of his underlings in the past. He knew where it was going.

“Due to scheduling conflicts, budgetary restrictions, and/or a lack of competence on your part, we have made the decision to terminate your duties, effective thirty-one Underworld days ago. Rest assured that your position has been replaced by someone more competent and capable than you, so your society will not suffer from your absence. I leave you your termination paperwork, each page of which will need to be read and signed by you. Comply.”

The Devil still couldn’t see, holding up his hand to shade his eyes from the light, but he heard the sound of a massive stack of papers being dropped to the ground, followed by the tiny clack of a pen being dropped on them.

“Due to having no position, you now also have no name. You will be addressed as Devil from all Demons in the Seventh Circle. Attempting to illegally gain a name or attempting to coerce others into calling you by a name will be met with swift punishment.”

“No position?” the Devil asked. “I’m not being reassigned?”

“You are being reassigned,” her voice came back. He could just barely see her shoes standing in front of him. “You are simply being reassigned to a job that offers no position.”

“...What?”

“You will be assigned to become a Hall Monitor, Devil. And, apology for the personal statement, but I do hope you understand that those consequences come from your own actions. From your own incompetence. Everything bad that has happened to you, it has happened because you were too foolish to keep it from happening. Your mistakes have caught up to you, Devil. Ideally, you prepared yourself for that.”

The Devil slowly lowered his hand. It was still too bright to see anything other than a dark silhouette in the bright light, but he stared at his superior regardless. Or, technically, she wasn’t his superior anymore. She was a superior. No longer assigned to him, now that he was a Hall Monitor. The lowest of the low, a job assigned purely as a punishment to those who served no purpose. It was a sentence worse than death. A sentence of being forced to live with the fact that your society deemed you useless.

For her to go out of her way to go through the levels of verification just to force the punishment on him…She must have really, really hated him. Arlan Nota was probably still alive, he guessed. If she was so pissed that she did all this, he had to imagine that anger was because she couldn’t force him to do all the work to kill that Human anymore. But he barely even cared if that man was alive or dead. What mattered was the woman standing in front of him. She was the one who did this to him.

“Quinmorada,” the Devil said.

Though he was unable to make out her face, he could still tell her snarl deepened at his cutting her full name short.

He took a breath before continuing. “You’re a bitch. I fucking hate you. I hate all of this bullshit society, and if I could murder every last Demon alive in this hell, I would. And I certainly, certainly, would start with you. In fact, I think I’ll promise you now: I am going to kill you. I will do it. It may not be today, or this week, or this decade. But you’ll die by my hand. And the only reason I haven’t done it already is because you physically overpower me right now. But I really want you to understand. The sole thing keeping you alive right now, is that fact. The moment it’s no longer true—the moment I can physically end your life—I will do it.”

She just stood there, staring at him. She wouldn’t do anything about what he said—couldn’t do anything—because it would’ve been against the rules for her to take his punishment into her own hands. At worst, she could probably write up a report of his having disrespected a superior and sent it in for the thirteen levels of verification, but that would likely amount to nothing, considering he was already to become a Hall Monitor.

The Devil took a labored step forward, cleared his throat for the first time since he’d woken up, hawking up all the spit and phlegm that’d been building up for all this time, and then spat it directly in her face. She stepped back, retching and raising a hand to wipe it off. He could see her shaking with rage.

“Throw me into the halls,” he continued. “Make me a pariah. I don’t care. You say I’m useless? I’m of no use to you? Then fuck it. I’ll be of negative use to you. I won’t work to make life here better, I’ll work to make life here worse. I’ll make you hurt, one day. And I just need you to know that I’m going to make you hurt, so that even in the days when you’re safe, you’ll live with a little bit of fear in your mind. So that you know you’re never actually safe. So that you know, I am going to kill you. Fucking. Cunt.”

She used the hand covered in the Devil’s spit to grab his face, squeezing his features hard.

His scowl didn’t break.

“I will not stoop to petty, Human insults,” she said. “But I will inform you that your spirit will not last as long as you seem to believe it will. And I will wish you a very unhappy eternity, Devil. Now go do your job and suffer.”