Solomon craned his neck to look at the ceiling that was now just above him. He wished that he had brought sunglasses because the light from the fungi that clung to the ceiling was blinding.

He reached out to touch the roof above him. It felt pretty good to be the first soul ever to touch this ceiling. To be the first person ever to do something felt, well, pretty great actually.

Not that he was planning to stop at just touching the ceiling. No, he was going to pillage it of all the resources it had.

It had taken him half a day to reach where he was now and time was precious. Solomon could feel the threat of war breathing down his neck. Without any time to spare, Solomon took out his knives and dug them into the wall as high up as he could.

Since he started climbing he had gained much greater control of his tail and could move it with finesse now. Using his newfound control, he stretched out his tail towards the ceiling and burrowed into the rockface.

The ceiling itself was even harder than the rock wall he had just climbed. This wasn't really much of a problem with how sharp his tail was.

Slowly, he burrowed into the rock and when he felt like it was safe, he pulled out his knives from the rock. Carefully, he place his feet against the wall and with a push, he swung up towards the ceiling.

Stabbing the knives into the ceiling, he was now hanging above the whole cavern. with his back facing the ground and his tail buried into the ceiling.

While crawling along the ceiling he felt like he was playing a game of operation. With each movement he made, his life was on the line.

By using the knives and tail, in turn, to move along he searched for a mineral deposit. He was waiting for his tail to react to any metal he could find.

The advantage he had was that he didn't actually need to mine any of it out. All he had to do was insert the hook into a mineral deposit and absorb the mineral essence from it.

With each deposit he absorbed, His tail grew stronger and absorbed the metal even quicker. The ceiling of the cavern was abundant with metal so he would come across new metal every few metres he went.

Time passed as he crawled along the ceiling towards the town. His plan was to make it back to the town along the ceiling.

Beneath him, the demons that walked along the ground looked like ants. He was at least 300 metres up and could see almost 30 kilometres in any direction.

As he got closer and closer to the town he found the density of the metals he came across grew. The quality of them improved as well.

...

Sweat dripped down from his forehead falling 100s of metres before hitting the ground. Solomons's arms were constantly shaking as his muscles spasmed every time he removed one of the knives from the rock.

The knives were getting harder and harder to drive back into the rock. They had become blunted by the constant impacts against the rock.

He hadn't really thought through how he was going to take a rest and was too far from the cavern wall to turn back.

All he could do was continue desperately forward, with one mechanical movement after the other. His lips were bleeding because he was biting down so hard until...

With a crash, the knife he had meant to drive through the ceiling broke clean through along with his whole arm. The rock he had just hit was hollow and behind it was empty space.

Solomon swung himself up and kicked through the shattered rocks, flying up into an empty space. Above him was a tunnel that led up into the unknown, a harrowing darkness filled the tunnel.

Digging his knives into the tunnel he climbed up into the darkness while perplexed. He hadn't had much room for thought recently, because every morsel of attention he could summon was laser-focused on not falling to his death.

A weird atmosphere pervaded the tunnel above him and any other time, Solomon would have stopped and turned back. The problem was that he desperately needed to rest.

Persevering and going deeper into the tunnel, Solomon was soon unable to see anything at all. Gritting his teeth, he went back down and grabbed a fistful of the glowing fungus to use as a light. He would rather climb the extra distance than lose his footing in the darkness.

He tied the fungus that glowed a soft yellow onto his bag and climbed back into the darkness. The light from the fungus illuminated the tunnel that had never seen light before. Shadows danced above him and sweat dripped down below him.

Blood began flowing down the handles of the knives. He was gripping them so tightly that his hands started to bleed. The skin between his fingers was split open as blood trickled out.

Solomon swore due to the pain and increased his speed. Trying to get into some sort of safe haven before his body gave out on him.

The glow from the fungus brought hope with it as he desperately clung on. Hope was the most important thing in cases like this because despair would lead to him giving up.

One step at a time. One arm at a time. One more push. Anything past that was too much. There was no future outside the most basic of movements he could muster. If he thought too much he would remember what would happen if he let go.

Suddenly, his arm found nothing but open space. He had made it! With a grunt, he dragged himself up into the empty space. His blood ran cold as he saw what lay in front of him.

A twisted and warped fragment of white metal had hollowed out the endlessly long rock tunnel he had just climbed up and embedded into the ceiling, only coming to a stop when it met with bedrock.

However, if Solomon was crazy and took it in his head to jump straight down from where he was now. He would hit the ground and keep falling. Because beneath the hollowed-out ground was a similar tunnel descending deep into the abyss.

In the soft glow of the fungus, the white metal twinkled brilliantly. Something about the metal felt alluring and frighteningly pure.

"Is this a fragment of a weapon?" questioned Solomon. His logic was that tunnels leading to twisted pieces of metal didn't just pop out of nowhere. Something must have thrown this metal up here and nobody would just do that randomly.

His tail was throbbing and screaming at him crazily to absorb whatever that material was. So Solomon walked up to it and touched its surface softly.

From what he could tell from its twisted appearance, the metal had originally been In the shape of a spike. As Solomon gently pressed a finger against it his mind went blank.

Splintered memories of an apocalyptic battle amongst gods flashed in his mind. His mind could barely handle the strain of just these sparse images and he couldn't understand any of it, except for one word.

Morningstar.

With his head throbbing just as hard as his tail was, he made up his mind. "Immortals be damned. I'm absorbing this for myself.

...

As Solomon was delirious from exhaustion, making the riskiest decision of his life. 100s of metres below him, Hyde and Fike were also making a risky decision.

Hyde had come up with an ingenious plan. This plan spawned from the fact that they had 2 fishing rods and had caught 7 monsters in the last day.

Correction, Fike had caught 7 monsters in the last day. Hyde hadn't caught a single one and had ended up on killing duty.

With every monster they caught, the pair would get slightly stronger. Hyde would eat the hearts of the monsters and Fike would become better at fishing with each catch.

Apparently, Fike's harpoon hand was part of his path and would get a bit stronger whenever Fike succeeded in catching a fish. Fike explained that killing the fish was also part of fishing not just catching it.

Anyway, Hyde's lack of success in catching anything at all had spurred his mind into motion. The plan he came up with was to make Fike duel wield the fishing rods for both of them while he slept off the side.

Honestly, Fike wasn't angry with this plan because he was able to fish twice as fast. Strangely, it was Hyde who started getting angry when they more than doubled the monsters caught the next day.

Partially, he was annoyed that he was nothing but deadweight whenever it came to fishing. But, mostly it was due to the fact that he had needed to fight 18 monsters in a single day.

It wasn't even that hard but he had started getting bored of their tastes. To supplement this, whenever Fike was fishing he would pretend to be sleeping and sneak off to find some wild herbs or rock salts. Even mushrooms would do.

Just because he was a glutton didn't mean that he liked the taste of everything. And, the food in Hell was very hit or miss. To counter this he was planning to expand into the territory of Chefdom.

While he was poking under rocks looking for shellfish, which he was disappointingly yet to find, he heard Fike yell out in panic.

Hyde dropped the mushrooms he was holding and ran along the molten shore towards the direction of the shout.

Fike swore at the useless Hyde. He was supposed to help him kill the monsters but when This one was pulled out of the lava Fike turned around to see absolutely fucking nobody.

"He couldn't have picked a worse possible time to go off on a walk." Swore Fike.

Just a few seconds earlier, Fike had felt both of his fishing rods catch at the same time and was nearly yanked off his feet and pulled into the magma.

If it wasn't for the authority he gained from the path of the fisherman he might have died right then. The ability he gained was that once he had something hooked, it wasn't able to get the hook out unless it was willing to sacrifice a limb or two.

Fike roared and pulled on the rods with his only good hand. Rather uncomfortably, he was duel wielding the fishing rods but only had one hand to hold them both in.

Beneath the roiling magma, a monster thrashed desperately. This was the biggest one he had seen yet and had taken the bait on both of his hooks at once.

A light pierced out through the magma followed by the head of a monstrous snake. The Snake had a light hanging from a fleshy protrusion in front of its head which bobbed hypnotically.

Realising it couldn't get away from the hooks trapping it, the snake decided to take the initiative and attacked Fike first.

Originally, this was where Hyde was meant to take over, but he wasn't even there. Desperate not to be constricted to death by the monstrous snake, Fike pointed his harpoon at the snakes tail and fired it into the scaly flesh.

With its tail pinned down, the snake hissed in rage and thrashed recklessly against its restraints. Desperate to get at Fike, the snake started to tear apart the piece of the tail that was pinned.

Fike swore and tried to run away. But he couldn't. For some reason, after he had looked at the bobbing light that swayed hypnotically above the snake's gaping mouth, he couldn't move.

Right as the snake ripped off the tip of its tail and launched itself toward the frozen Fike, Hyde barreled into its side like a truck.

Both Hyde and the Snake clung to each other as they rolled about along the edge of the flaming cliff. Seeing that Hyde wasn't a pushover the snake tried to wriggle free and slither towards the safety of the magma ocean.

Hyde growled at this and grabbed the fleeing snakes tail and let out a dragons roar. Flames burst out of his mouth and scorched the torn flesh of the tail.

Hissing in pain and anger, the snake turned around and snapped at Hyde who was still pinning it down. Hyde barely managed to duck under the snapping jaws that came for his head.

Fike scrambled over to his harpoon that was still stuck into the ground and pulled it out with ease before shoving it back into the elbow of his arm with no hand. He took aim and waited for an opening.

Hyde was struggling to pin the writhing snake down. He had to keep it in place so that it wouldn't crawl back into the magma so all he could do was hold onto it or block it.

The serpents vertical pupils narrowed in pain as it tried to get past Hyde with increasing desperation. It was that same desperation that brought about its ruin.

When Hyde presented a false opening, the monster easily bought it and burst towards the lava. As it slithered past Hyde, its path became predictable. Due to this moment of carelessness, Fike, who had been waiting patiently, got a clean shot.

The last thing it ever saw was a steel harpoon heading towards its eye.