With one hand held to his face, Cobalt forced his way through the pink miasma that had flooded the school building, nearly sickening on its sickly-sweet stench and cloying taste. He had borne witness to many of his own mother's failed creations in the past - often results of poor-quality ingredients or the intoxication of Jezebel herself - but he had never encountered something as bad as this. For the mix to have vapourised like this, and for there to be so much of it...

"What the Hell are you doing, Cobalt?!" Lilith cried in the back of his mind.

Squinting through the vapour, he could see the indistinct forms of demons all around, laughing and wailing as they ran through the halls like headless chickens or lay on the floor, rocking back and forth. The gas must be playing havoc with their synapses; if left exposed for too long, serious damage could occur.

"You're gonna end up like the rest of them like this!"

He shook his head.

"I'm a Fesserite boy, for better or for worse. You don't come out of that town without building up a little tolerance," he murmured, keeping his voice low to conserve his breath.

On his next intake, however, he coughed and spluttered as his vision began to swim. Previously-built tolerance or no, whatever was in this miasma would addle him soon if he didn't act fast.

"... What's your plan, then?" Lilith asked, realising the futility in talking Cobalt out of anything.

"Science storeroom. They should have respirators in there. Then find the source of this and cut it off."

With that goal in mind, the Incubus took off down the hall towards the closest Science classroom, taking care to avoid any drugged teachers or students in his path. It was an absolutely chaotic scene; people were in complete disarray. Some were acting like children, laughing and playing with one another in empty classrooms while others brawled mercilessly in the halls. A few people stood around talking to the air around them, and at one point the Incubus was forced to leap over a pair of third-years on the floor, who had both decided that to be the best place for their first romantic foray. Pink residue was building up on the walls and floor, and with every step he could feel his own sanity slipping.

"Shit..." he muttered to himself, keeping a hand clamped over his mouth as he turned a corner.

"You still with me?"

"Yeah, I-"

Cobalt stopped dead in his tracks as he gazed at the figure up ahead.

A Succubus stood in the very centre of the hallway, silently observing the commotion all around her. She was stripped down to her bare skin; wings spread wide and tail rhythmically flicking, smiling softly as she met Cobalt's gaze. Thick, pink honey clung to her, slowly oozing down her legs and forming puddles beneath her bare feet that bubbles and faded into nothingness.

His breath caught in his throat. Karazelle. She caught his gaze, and with a sultry wink, she ran a finger through the honey coating her chest and pressed it too her lips. She made a seductive display of licking it clean before blowing him a kiss, whereupon she turned on her heel and disappeared into the fog.

"... What that... Did she just-?" Lilith asked, dumbfounded.

"That's not her," Cobalt said resolutely, clenching his fists.

"What do you mean? I saw her right there."

He shook his head.

"This stuff is getting to me," he sighed, pushing open the door to one of the Science classrooms.

He knew those rooms well. Around a dozen desks, each fitted with a sink and a gas tap. But beyond the doorway, Cobalt found himself somewhere eerily familiar. A hot, humid swamp, surrounded by gnarled trees and illuminated by the light of a red moon. He took a few steps in, looking down to find oversweet honey clinging to his legs, dragging his movement speed down to a crawl.

"Fucking Hell, if even you're tripping this hard already..." Lilith breathed, her voice filled with equal parts awe and apprehension.

A horrible sensation welled in the Incubus' stomach. It all felt real.

"This... This isn't right... Cherry's psychflensing, it..."

"Stay calm. Do you remember the floorplan of the room?"

Of course. He was still physically in the classroom. He just had to walk to the storage room from memory. Taking a step forward, began to carefully navigate through the claggy swamp, reaching out to touch the edges of the desks to help guide his way. As he reached the teacher's desk at the head of the room, however, he heard soft, wet footsteps from behind him. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, prompting Cobalt to swallow hard and try to ignore them, lest he got disoriented. But before he could try to remember how many steps it took to get to the storeroom, he heard a whisper in his ear.

"Welcome back, sugar," it breathed, tinged by the ghost of a giggle.

He whipped around defensively, holding a hand to his ear as he glared at the spectre before him. Karazelle stood there, gently swaying back and forth with her arms held innocently behind her back.

"How is this happening? You're just... You're just one of Cherry's twisted little visions made to screw with me," he breathed, narrowing his eyes at her.

She tutted dramatically and wagged her finger.

"C'mon, give yourself a little credit, sugar! Cherry could tug at your brainstem and tickle your synapses in all the right places, but me? This place?" Karazelle said, gesturing to the swamp all around her.

Her mouth twisted into a lurid grin.

"We've always been a part of you. And you know it."

The honey around his feet began to bubble, but the Incubus felt paralysed in place. Arms slowly rose from the mire, grasping at his legs with hand and hook alike. Looking down, the Incubus saw the half-formed simulacrums of his students rising from below, clinging to him in an effort to drag him down. They all bore the same wide, delirious smiles.

"Wh- What the-?!" Lilith cried, clearly alarmed.

"You've got plenty of dirty~ little secrets, sugar. Nobody's that good without practice," Karazelle pressed, stepping closer to him.

Cobalt bit his lip and dug his fingernails into his thighs - a last-ditch attempt to keep him grounded - but whatever the air had been polluted with had already seeped deep into his mind. The spectres clinging to his body felt so real, and the woman before him even more so.

"I wanna hear it from you straight," the Succubus said, pressing herself against him as she stuck her lip out in a faux-pout, "do you want to fuck me?"

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"I'm not answering that," he responded through gritted teeth, struggling to keep his focus.

"Oh come on, enough with the self-sabotage already! You want this, sugar. I can feel it. After all, I'm inside your head, right?"

"This isn't real!"

"Right now, maybe not. But it can be. It almost was! But you got scared, didn't you sugar?"

There was a slight mocking tone to her voice.

"Shut the Hell up!" Cobalt cried, lunging for the spectre.

But the honey-soaked beings grabbed his arms and held them back, their incomprehensible warbles and coos growing louder as they threaded their fingers through his and needily clung to his forearms. He could feel his entire body beginning to overheat as Karazelle peered deep into his eyes.

"Quite the temper, sugar! Makes me wonder just how bestial you'd get, once you finally get rid of those pesky inhibitions of yours," the spectral Succubus continued, playfully poking his forehead.

Reaching forward with both hands, she ran her fingers from his chest all the way up to his neck. Cobalt knew that she was nothing more than a hallucination, but he couldn't deny the tingles all across his skin.

"Give in, Cobalt. It would be so easy," she said, her smile fading away.

"Leave me alone," he hissed in response.

"You don't mean that. I wouldn't be saying this otherwise. Deep down, you want this. Because why else would I be here?"

"Shut up...!"

Her hands clasped around his neck, causing Cobalt's throat to close up. His eyes went wide as he stumbled, allowing the others to begin to crawl all over him, weighing the Incubus down.

"Time's already short. Don't you wanna go out with a bang? If you've been holding off for this long, then why not spend your last days indulging?"

His blood began to boil, igniting the veins beneath his skin. All around him, the honey began to bubble and steam as Cobalt's frustration reached its limits. Karazelle's grip only grew stronger, as though she were fixing to choke the life right out of the Incubus.

"Just be a good boy and give in, okay?" she said, releasing one hand to gently stroke Cobalt's hair.

The Succubus leaned in close to whisper in his ear.

"That's a good doggy~"

That word rang through Cobalt's skull like nails across a chalkboard. At once, all of Cherry Lattess' digs and insults came rushing back to him, kicking his heart into overdrive and boiling his blood hotter than ever before. It burst out of his vessels and through his skin, spraying the room with caustic red mist as the Incubus released a feral, enraged roar. As fangs pierced through his hands, he shook the spectral mockeries of his students off and lunged at Karazelle, tackling to the floor. Blinded by rage, he wasted no time in pinning her down and sinking his teeth right into her neck. The taste was atrociously sweet, but with a twist and a jerk, he tore her throat right out. The blood spraying from his wounds filled his vision, turning everything a burning red as an incessant, high-pitched whine build up in the back of his head.

It took some time for his vision to clear. When the red mist finally abated, Cobalt found himself kneeling on the floor of the empty classroom, surrounded by the swirling clouds of pink. A fine spray of blood covered every surface around him, and the Incubus himself was completely soaked. There were open wounds all over his body, but they refused to heal quickly. Swallowing hard, he looked down at his hands to find fragments of bone still jutting from his flesh.

"Cobalt! What the Hell was that?!" Lilith cried.

His head was pounding. Every inch of his body stung. But at least he had shaken off the gas' influence; he must have burned it right out of his body.

"R- Respirator," he murmured, stumbling to his feet.

"We're just gonna ignore that?!"

"Yes."

Booting open the door to the storeroom, he swiped a respirator off a shelf and quickly put it on. Considering that he didn't know exactly what made up the composition of the chemical in the air, he couldn't rely on the filters lasting as long as they ought to, so he would need to act quickly.

"Where's this stuff coming from?" he breathed, his voice muffled by the mask.

"Cobalt, wait a second."

"Has to be somewhere."

Ignoring the Devil's words, he squinted at the vapour as it swirled all around him. It was leaving stains everywhere, but the ceiling seemed to be getting the worst of it. Frowning, he stepped over to one of the windows and pushed it open, watching silently as the miasma gradually began to flow outside, whereupon it lazily drifted upwards.

"Lighter than air... it must have come from further down," he reasoned.

"Can we just stop for a second and figure out just what the Hell-?!"

Cobalt snapped his fingers as the answer suddenly struck him like a bolt from the blue.

"Lilith, remember when we were down in the underschool?!" he said frantically, rushing to leave the Science classroom.

"What? What now?" she responded.

"The alchemy lab we found down there!"

He heard the Devil gasp as he skidded out into the hall.

"The one with the clogged-up... shit, you think all this is coming from there?"

"It would make sense, wouldn't it?! We head down there, we find the source, and we can cut it off!"

"And just how do we do that, exactly?!"

"We'll figure that out when we get there!"

Though now clear of the airborne toxin, Cobalt still felt weak from the blood loss, causing him to stumble and almost crash into the delirious demons all around him as he made his way towards the basement stairwell. He could already hear sirens, and if he squinted he could see some of the more clear-minded staff carrying people out of the building to safety, but he was already laser-focused on finding the source of this chemical attack.

On the way down to the basement, his legs almost gave out entirely, but he forced himself onwards. The miasma was thicker down there, but Cobalt kept his breaths regular and kept going, pushing on towards the entrance to the underschool. The plywood boards that had once been nailed over it simply rested against the doorway as thick plumes of purple smoke billowed from beyond it. Tearing the boards aside, he began his descent.

"Why don't you just board over the door? Block it down here?" Lilith asked as he ran down the steps two at a time.

"The underschool has other entrances leading to other buildings. Quicker to cut this all off at the source."

"Cobalt, is this really your job? You're bleeding out, for fucks sake. This stuff is probably getting back in through the wounds."

"Then we'd better get a move on, shouldn't we?"

"What the Hell's gotten into you?"

He didn't answer her.

Down in the dark, stuffy tunnels, the vapour was damn-near impenetrable. It swirled around him almost hypnotically, glimmering with a slight iridescence that threatened to confuse and disorient him. Reaching out to touch the wall, Cobalt pushed forward, thinking back to the first time he was down here. He remembered seeing pink sticky notes guiding the way, but he couldn't feel them on the walls, and it was impossible to see anything regardless.

"Down this hall, second left, then a right," Lilith said, sensing the Incubus confusion.

"You remember the way?" he asked, picking up the pace now that he had a heading.

"I'm an architect. I've a head for this sort of thing."

Of course. Cobalt remembered from everything he witnessed from Lilith's memories. He would have liked to have seen what she was capable of creating, back when that was feasible.

With Lilith's instructions at the forefront of his mind, the Incubus kept going until he found the door to the old alchemy lab. It was lying ajar, and an ungodly volume of alchemical gas was flowing from beyond it. He could see glimmers of light and hear the thrumming of a diesel generator, but when he stepped inside he found his vision completely obscured. Beneath his feet, he could hear the splashing of liquid, and when he stooped down, the Incubus felt a large amount of alchemical liquid coating the floor, swirling about as it gradually turned to vapour in contact with the air.

"Ground zero," he murmured, squinting up at the ceiling.

"Don't think shutting the door will fix this. Think the duct still works?"

After groping through the miasma, the Incubus located one of the benches and climbed up onto it, taking care to avoid all the stick residue and broken glass covering it. Reaching up, he brought his face close to the ventilation shaft in the ceiling. Every inch of the protective grating was clogged up with alchemical fouling, with some spots older than others. Gritting his teeth, the Incubus unceremoniously shoved his claws through metal and filth alike, ripping the whole thing off and exposing a wide vertical shaft that extended far up into the darkness. The low drone of airflow rumbled from above as the gas was sucked up into the duct, clearing Cobalt's vision in less than a minute. He wasn't sure if that would clear out the school above, but at least that was the source mostly dealt with.

"Wait, kid. There's someone here."

Eyes widening, Cobalt hopped off the bench and looked down at the lake of spilled chemicals and broken glass to find a figure lying unconscious in the pink mire. A Succubus, her uniform stained pink by the fluid she was lying unceremoniously splayed out in. A thin layer of blood trickled down from her nose, bleeding into the-

Wait. Was that...?

"Karazelle...!" the Incubus cried, diving to his knees.

Despite the bony barbs jutting from his hands, he carefully hoisted her off the floor and into his arms. She was breathing and her heart was pumping strong, but the Succubus was completely limp, knocked out by a full-dosage of whatever had been cooked up down here. Peering around the lab, he looked from the broken beakers on the floor to the stolen school science equipment that had been used to make the concoction.

"This was all your doing? Why...?"

The Incubus shook his head. This was no time for speculation. She was in danger. Pulling the respirator off, he carefully affixed it to Karazelle's face, deigning to keep his breaths low and shallow until he reached the surface.

Cobalt held Karazelle close. His blood seeped into her clothes, staining them further.

"Let's get you out of here."