The garden was a battlefield of screams and shattered light. Azazel's pistols clicked empty, the smoke from their blessed barrels curling like incense into the air. Before the demon's claws could rip through him, Aurelius's voice boomed across the night, calm but resonant, like a prayer to a god that was himself.
"Blade that splits the world,
Silence where light is hurled.
Grandmaster of the Ash.
Aurelius of the Rift,
I beg for the shift!"
Two high-ranking demons coming from the left and right were thrown back by the dimensional energy.
The world screamed. Reality itself cracked like glass beneath a hammer. From Aurelius's dagger the fracture widened, jagged teeth of void snapping outward. The surge of black nothingness clamped down on the high-ranking bold snake demon that lunged for Azazel, biting it in half as if the universe itself had decided to consume it. The air tore with the sound of an infinite maw feasting.
Azazel froze. He felt his stomach twist at the sight—this was not holy light, nor steel, nor even sorcery. This was something far greater. Something that broke the laws of creation.
Another demon roared, swinging its flaming weapon downward. Aurelius vanished—stepping between the seams of existence—and reappeared at its side, his trail a jagged scar in the air that hummed like a plucked string of the cosmos. His daggers, wreathed in threads of reality itself, slashed across its chest, and the beast howled as the wound sparked not blood, but a shriek of ruptured dimension.
"LEAVE!" Aurelius barked, his hand sweeping outward. A blast of unseen force shoved Azazel back across the garden, as though the very walls of the world had decided to reject his presence. He landed hard, breathless.
[You better Leave] his grandfather's voice rang like a solemn bell in his skull. [This is not your fight. These are not foes you can face]
Azazel clutched the pistols, his hands trembling.
The old man's voice grew grave, weighted with memory.
[Five… high-ranking lords of Hell. Kimaris, Marquis of the Shadow Tide. Valefar, Duke of Treachery. Raum, the Thief of Thrones. Andras, the Murderer of Angels. And Aim, Serpent of Burning Iron. If they are here together…]
The thought went unfinished.
A sound cut through the night—wrong, alien. The demon Aurelius had halved twitched upon the ground. Its lips moved, not in Latin, not in Hebrew, not in any tongue Azazel had ever read of. The sounds were raw, guttural, carved from the abyss itself. Words not meant for human throats.
Symbols seared themselves into the demon's brow—an inverted pentagram, glowing like molten iron. The sigil burned, and the corpse's bloodless flesh convulsed. Its voice deepened into a bestial chorus, as if ten thousand throats spoke the incantation at once.
The air curdled. The garden filled with the smell of sulfur and burning bone. The bisected torso stretched, distorted, then burst outward in a storm of black snake scales and shadow-flesh. The Aim's true form revealed itself— three heads, one of a viper, the second of a man, and the third of a panther, cloaked in writhing tendrils that bent the moonlight into ash.
One by one, the others followed. Pentagrams blazed upon their heads, summoning forth the shackled power they had kept hidden. Their vessels cracked like shells, spilling nightmare.
Azazel could barely breathe.
This was the unveiling of Hell.