Molten Plains, 9th Circle of Hell

Dorian flopped about, gasping, feeling like a slab of meat left too long on the grill. Beneath him lay a vast stretch of molten coal veined with fissures, shifting uneasily atop a sea of churning magma. Hunks of the stuff jutted up everywhere, clumping into hills, gently rising and falling with the currents. A floating wasteland spurting with lava, stretching far as the eye could see.

His stumped arms throbbed. His stumped waist leaked. His intestines oozed slowly out of him. Even the air hurt to breathe! Its sandpaper smog grated his lungs, brought up coughs flecked with blood. His skin was cooked red and tiny sparks of qi singed his hairs.

His weak human body couldn’t cope! It simply didn’t belong here. He groaned.

First things first! He needed a new body, and fast. A dragonform, like Houyi said. What else had his blasted brother blabbered about? Something about Infinity Hearts, was it? The source of Houyi’s power?

A dizzy spell struck; the insides of his head rattled like a gong. He fell over, hacking up a gout of blood. He groaned, flopping to his back, breathing heavy, trying his best not to throw up what was left of his lungs.

He was reminded of how he started this run, back in the desert tribes. Poisoned. Dying, underground, in a scorpion’s hive. There had been some fun to it, way back then! Survival had been a game. A fresh challenge.

That was before his soul got cut off, of course. Before he was left stranded here.

Now his death would be painfully permanent. That stark fact sucked most of the whimsy out of it, truth be told.

He glanced down at his stumped self. An image came to mind: of himself wriggling furiously as some gargoyle sauntered up to him, bent over, and swallowed him in a gulp. …At least it’d make for a funny way to go?

Not much comfort, but you took all the scraps you could get in a time like this. Laughing at his own plight was still laughing. And if he didn’t even have a little laughter left in him he was done. What else did he have?

He looked back down at himself. Not limbs, certainly. His bottom half was slowly sealing, sparking with Darkness and Fire, whatever little qi he had left trying furiously to sew him back up. Trying and failing spectacularly. It was like a very fat man trying to squeeze into pants a few sizes too small. Despite his best efforts body parts kept spilling out. Dorian stared at it. He felt for his qi reserves. Empty. He glanced at his stumped arm. It had once had a hand, a hand that’d wore an Interspatial Ring full of all sorts of goodies that would’ve been quite handy right about now.

Alas, also gone.

He wiggled his left stump. He wiggled his right stump. He frowned.

…It seems I’m fucked.

…

Well. He’d died before, and it wasn’t so bad. Wasn’t like life was so much better. The only way he could bear living was by doing these runs! Over and over and over. Up, down, up, down… all that running…maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to let himself relax, close his eyes, sink into that warm blackness…

Bleh! Who am I kidding? Wheezing, he propped himself up to his elbows. He was godsdamned Dorian, renowned trickster, Godking of Time! Sure, he’d been… rather horribly beaten… but despair? Utterly ridiculous! He refused it on principle. He’d made it through worse before—

He paused. He wiggled his stumps again. He frowned. …Have I? It was rather hard to conjure up any examples. He had been in worse situations than this, of course. Those he could think of quite easily. But they all ended up with his (usually gruesome) death. Half the time he went out while shitting himself.

At least I haven’t got enough intestines left in me to shit myself. Another scrap of comfort, he supposed. Now he had two. A few more and he could start a collection.

He shook his head. He was getting delirious. Maybe it was the blood loss. Or maybe it was the painfully recent loss of everything he held dear. Which was to say, himself. All his bodies, cut off like that! And his entire estate too, his many mounds of treasures, his servant...

It was a lot in one go, even for him.

He giggled. He giggled some more. Then he burst out in hysterical, shuddering, hacking laughter. He suspected he was in shock, a least a little. He suspected he was spiraling, quite a lot. He frowned. Maybe it was the blood loss.

Enough nonsense. He forced himself to think. Think. Think, or die. That much was plain. All this—this—gunk of the mind, this loss of his bodies, this loss of his brother—all a very unfunny joke. A joke he resolved to laugh at later. For now—Something actionable, moron! How do I fix this?!

He wracked his brain. A long, weighty pause. He wracked some more. …

There was one tiny bright spot. He clung to it.

He knew this place. Hell. Knew it like the back of his severed hand. He knew, too, of a thousand items that’d fix him up in a flash. There were the Swamps of the Damned, for instance, with their juicy Blood-Boiling Fruits: devilish things that’d have him healed in minutes (at the cost of taking on a few curses.) There were the Twilight Caverns, studded with their thousands of crystals—each of which was enough to boost an untrained mortal to the peak of Sky!

The problem, of course, was that he had no way of getting there. Or not dying along the way, for that matter!

If only I was at full strength! He groaned. Then he at least stood some minuscule chance.

He was so drained of qi that he scarcely had an idea of how to move. Obviously limbs were out of the question. As for shadow-walking? In Hell? Even Gods would be foolish to try that. This was not the lower realms; in Hell’s shadow-realm lurked creatures stripped from children’s nightmares. Obscenely powerful wraiths with lots and lots of teeth, eager to seize any hapless interloper.

At least he could ride the Javelin. It wasn’t nothing, he supposed…

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

This… this is somehow even worse than the start of my last run! Forget living to see tomorrow. It’ll be a minor miracle if I last ten minutes! What the hells am I supposed to do?!

Nothing for it. He’d have to be in stump form until he scrounged up some other way to heal, somehow. And he suspected his lifespan in this form was on the order of days. Maybe hours…

Sharp grating noises filtered to him, a background hum. It was the theme song of this realm: all kinds of horrid shrieks and screeches and howls, ground up in one uniquely noxious concoction. It was ear-splitting at first, every time. You got used to it after a while. It brought to mind another stark fact. This place had among the highest monster densities in all the Multiverse…

The ground shifted beneath him. His eyes went wide.

Sheer instinct saved his life.

His Javelin was there in a spasm of shadows. He clung onto its long chain best he could with his arm-stumps. Then he shot straight up.

Just as the ground beneath him erupted. The stone layer bulged up like a red-black tumor, then violently tore apart. A great big head rammed through—a rocky craggy thing, jaws flared wide, two beady yellow eyes burning, geysers of magma splashing all about it as it arched for him. Hellwhale!

The Javelin shot up fast as it could, Dorian in tow. The jaws rose around it, farther still, and Dorian saw four long fins broach the surface. Its whole body seemed forged from ash and brimstone and obsidian, the base elements of Hell.

The jaws snapped shut, body hanging at the peak of its leap. Then gravity wrestled it down. The beast bellowed, furious at the loss as it sank back into the depths, leaving nought but an upset pool of magma in its wake.

Dorian started a sigh of relief.

The sigh cut off before he finished it. He realized just how high up he’d gone. There were no clouds here in Hell. The closest thing were the endless streams of ghosts churning high above. He saw them a stone’s throw away, a layer stretching horizon-to-horizon, an endless sea of swirling gray whirlpools, of ghastly, moaning faces coursing by.

In a panic he tried to arrest to Javelin’s motion, send it arching back down.

It wasn’t the ghosts that scared him! It was what lay above. The air up here was infested with creatures he had no business tangling with. And he was getting awful close.

Shitshitshit! With luck he’d pull out of this before—

A screech from up high. A shadow, blotted dark gray against the ghostly stream. Dorian shoved his Javelin to go! with as much mental force as he could muster.

Just as a great feathery head burst through the cloud layer, beak flared wide. Its whole body was some shifting molten silver, feathers like plate-metal lining its comically wide wings. Quicksilver Roc!

It came so close he saw his watery, terrified reflection on its shining feathers. Then it dove past, making a slow loop.

The grounds erupted again. This time in two places: two Hellwhales breached the surface like mountains rising out of the ocean, jaws unhinged. One clamped a Roc wing as it passed. The other spewed out a great big glut of smoldering Fire Laws. The Roc thrashed, twisted, slashed at the Hellwhale clamping it with its other wing, edged with shining silver qi. Geysers of gold blood spewed out from the whale’s side. It held firm—

Even as the other whale’s Technique engulfed the Roc’s head, and did its horrible work. The Roc thrashed, howling, choking, melting. Then went limp. The Technique sludged off it. What had once been a proud, sleek head was now a sagging mess.

The whales dragged it under. That was that.

Fucking Hell!

From up here Dorian got a good eyeful of the place. Demons everywhere, swarming under the lands, clogging up the skies, always hidden just out of sight—if they bothered to hide at all! And that wasn’t even counting the things on the land itself. Motes of crimson light were everywhere—prickling the shadows of volcanic ranges in the distance, dancing atop the broken coal-plains before him. Little sprites of fiery hateful qi, scarcely sentient. Each one of them was more than enough to end him! And these were the lowliest creatures Hell had to offer.

Dorian hung low in the air, breathing hard. This was the only thing he could still do: cling onto his Javelin and flee! Hardly a plan…

Then the grounds just below him started boiling and trembling again.

FUUUUU—

He bolted.

A third scrap of comfort: he was small, which meant he was very mobile!

He whipped over a rocky ledge, taking care not to go too high, went over the other side—

Where two gangs of stone-skinned gargoyles were busy tearing each other apart, limbs flying, blood splattering everywhere. Screeches clawed at his ears. Godly Laws shivered the air. Nope!

He made a quick left-turn, skirted a long spine of coal—then veered up as he almost whizzed straight into a crowd of cackling Hellspawn. He went up mid-way to the clouds, trying to get a breather.

The land below was mostly flat, fissured like it was the dry skin of some slumbering giant, studded with hunks of rock, and—from his vantage up here—festering with beasts! He tried scouting out a direction to run. Any direction.

And wherever he looked was a battleground.

Demons. Demons everywhere. Creatures made of dripping oily qi, slick and black, white bones peeking out, each one more bizarre than the last. To his left wolf-bear hybrids tore at eagles with human faces. To his right a two-headed feathered serpent lay waste to a horde of Hellspawn. A massive gorilla with elephant’s tusks was busy nailing a baby Hellwhale to a slab of coal. Chaos!

This was Hell. Overrun all over with demons. And where there weren’t demons, there were Spirit Beasts waiting to make a meal of you. For those at the bottom of the food chain there was place to rest—or even so much as take a breath.

At least he was also very weak and very small. These beasts were all at least peak Sky. Most radiated the aura of a demigod. With luck, he wouldn’t be paid too much attention—

Two gray beaks broke the ghost layer above him, leaking green slime. Baby Rocs. Hungry baby Rocs, staring straight at him. They dove.

FUCK!

He gunned the Javelin and sped on through the Multiverse’s most deadly obstacle course, screaming as he went, weaving between warring monsters, dodging juts of coal, hanging on for dear life.