It is several days later.

It turns out that his theory about the lizard-demons was correct.

Alleluia stands by the door of their room in the adventurer’s guild, pressing her shoulder against it, as furious fists hammer on it from the other side. “Honey! What are we going to do?!” she asks, as Canta starts to shove a cabinet over.

“Look out!” he says, pressing his foot against the wall and pressing his back against the large piece of furniture. It tips over, Alleluia ducks out of the way. In the second she leaves the spot, the door pushes open, forced from the other side by a green, scaly hand.

The cabinet falls against it, barring it and slamming it back shut on someone’s clawed, reptile digits that had been wedged inside.

“I told you they were evil lizard-demons!” he shouts, his hands ruffling his hair as his wide, paranoid eyes scan their room. Everyone, every single person in this entire city is simply some sort of odd lizard-creature. They’re wearing macabre human skin-suits. Canta only found out after seeing one with a loose meat-seam on their way to the dungeon. Unable to stop himself, he pulled on it, like the little piece of skin that sometimes sticks out next to a fingernail, but starting at someone else’s neck and running all the way down to the waist.

The bloody, gooey suit came apart after that, flopping open like a peeled banana. The lizard-things, realizing that the charade was up, all came after them at once. As if the entire city had turned against them.

“I thought you were just being paranoid!” she exclaims.

“I told you, I have good reasons to be paranoid!” barks Canta. “Come on!” he shouts, grabbing her hand and running to the locked door of the connecting room. Alleluia kicks it open, wood splinters everywhere just as the door behind them to their room is bashed in with a series of axes and tools. Excited lizard hisses fill the air as they communicate in a language he can’t understand.

They break their way into the next room after that, just as Canta turns around and sees the door to their room bursting open, as a particularly large bipedal lizard, with a huge battle-axe in its hand, breaks in.

“This way!” he says, tugging Alleluia’s hand. “The window!” The two of them jump out of the already open first story window. He lets her go first and then jumps down after her a second later. Something whistles in the air, a loud roar fills his ears. His body tingles and feels wet. He doesn’t manage his landing, flopping instead down flat onto his stomach.

Something is wrenched out of his back and a second later, there’s a loud clanking sound as Alleluia tosses the battle-axe down next to him. The lizard had thrown it, cutting it right into his spine.

Hoisting him up onto her shoulder, she runs.

Canta hates this.

There is literally nowhere in the entire world that is safe from the influence of the demon-king. It doesn’t matter if they go west, if they go north, if they go east, if they go south. It doesn’t matter if they walk for days, weeks, months. No matter where they go, no matter what corner of the world looks like it might be safe, like it might be okay, it isn’t. Nothing is okay. Nothing is ever going to be okay.

He hates this world and what it’s become, not even the refuge of adventuring has been left. It’s shit. Everything is shit. The demon-king really is a huge dick.

Canta’s spine pops, his flesh tingling as he regenerates. His gaze rises, looking at the pursuers gathering in the distance. A large, scaly head looks out of the window that they had left, staring after them.

Canta wonders how he couldn’t have smelt any sins here? His legs pop. Alleluia ducks into an alley. It’s a literal city of demonic-lizard-people, surely there had to be a sin here somewhere?

But no, nothing.

“Are you alright?” asks Alleluia, setting him down.

Canta holds himself against the wall. “Yeah, thanks,” he says. “You? Did the fall break anything?”

“It wasn’t that far this time,” she replies, shaking her head. She ducks down, dragging him behind some crates with her as a stampede of hissing ‘people’ run past the alley. “What are we going to do?” she whispers.

“Leave?” suggests Canta.

“How?” she asks, looking around. “We’ll have to fight our way through, but there are way too many of them.” Her eyes open wide. “The dungeon?”

Canta shakes his head, spinning her around and winding up her crank, checking for any damage while he’s there. “There’s no way out from there.”

“There should be!” she whispers to him.

“Yeah, down on level one-hundred, probably. We’re not doing that,” says Canta.

“I liked our time in the dungeon.”

“Yeah, but that was different,” he explains. “This one is clearly evil. Let’s just do the warehouse thing again,” he says, looking around. He doesn’t want to. But he can smell a scent in the air, something that he was looking for, now that his prophecy has become true.

“I don’t know if lizard-people have warehouses,” she says, grabbing his hand as the two of them run down a side-alley. “Why did they even let us stay here so long?” she asks, looking around a corner. “They didn’t get angry until you pulled that one’s disguise off.”

“’Disguise’ is a generous word,” says Canta. “That was real human skin, from a real human,” he explains and she looks back at him. “That’s why I know they have warehouses,” he says, following his nose and running to the next alley. She moves after him. “What do you think they eat?”

“Ew, that’s disgusting.”

“Yeah? It is,” says Canta. “Fucking demon-king,” he says. “The reason they let us stay here is the same reason they wanted us to stay at the cathedral,” explains Canta, nicking his head towards the back door of a large structure. He can smell the odor coming from this place. Alleluia nods and grabs the handle, pressing her weight against it until it cracks open. “We’re being corralled and fattened up,” he explains, stepping inside. “Well, I am, at least.” That’s only a half-truth, there’s more to it. But he spares her that detail.

Alleluia steps in quietly after him as the two of them stare at the lines and lines of cells, full of mangled, skinless human bodies. She covers her mouth, though Canta isn’t sure why. Flies buzz around the air and a rabid screaming can be heard, ringing out from down the smeared, bloody hallway. The two of them run down along it, looking for the drainage room and the further they run, the louder the screams become.

“We’ve got to save them, honey!” says Alleluia, horrified. Canta grabs her, pulling her to the side as a group of five of the creatures walk around the corner, holding a flailing, screaming, clawing creature. A human child, perhaps eight or nine years old with long, unkempt, brown hair. Alleluia squeezes his arm, but Canta doesn’t intervene as they walk past and head down to a room to the left, carrying their desperately fighting cargo. Canta waits.

“Honey!” she hisses, getting up. Canta holds a hand against her chest, stopping her.

“There’s no point,” he explains.

“You can’t just say that!” she says, horrified. But Canta knows that there isn’t a point. There isn’t anything human left to save here. He grabs her hand and the two of them run towards the right, from the direction the creatures had come from. The screams grow louder and louder and the smell becomes more potent, more foul. They reach the end of the corridor and stand out on a walkway.

Down below them is a large, rectangular room with deeply steep walls and a grated metal floor that is barely visible, as it is filled with hundreds of writhing, naked, clawing feral bodies, piled on top of each other, screaming, clawing, biting, mating. A pit of several hundred filthy human-animals, kept down here in the hole, where they have been their entire lives and their fore-bearers likely as well. Generations upon generations of light and space-starved cattle.

Canta clenches his fists, feeling the urge to vomit. The mass never stops screaming, it never stops writhing. There isn’t a sin among them because they, like the lizards, are animals, more or less incapable of something as abstract as sinning. They simply follow their urges until the day they are large enough to be ripped out of the hole by a jagged meat-hook, attached to a rod.

Evil.

There is true evil in this world. Not something abstract like an obscure vision of a demon or a feeling of distrust like the one that he had while in Alleluia’s dungeon. No, this, this is undeniable proof that whatever light had once washed over this world is entirely gone, forever, leaving nothing but a barren hell-scape for as far as the eye can see and all of it, all of it is under the domain of the demon-king.

Now, more than ever, Canta wishes he had a god to complain to. But nobody is listening, they are all long since dead.

And the smell, the smell comes from here. As he stands there, looking over the horror, Canta realizes why the demon-king not only wants to fatten him up, but why his life has been filled with nothing but terror and fear since the first day of his rebirth.

The fear, the adrenaline, it’s meant to flavor the meat.