“Ehem,” Azrael cleared his throat. “Who the hell am I speaking to?”

She had been put on hold for two entire hours before he finally picked up, her solitude accompanied only by the sound of that dreaded Nether elevator music. The music reminded Momo of those songs you’d hear in the Sims: pop hits sung in an unintelligible language, nearly English but then… not. Like an uncanny valley Katy Perry, or a chorus of alien sopranos.

The song looped and looped, and she feverishly looked for ways to entertain herself. Unfortunately, nothing was as sweet and saccharine as the endless scroll of the internet. It was a drug she missed dearly. Nothing had managed to soothe her ADHD-rattled brain quite like the neverending YouTube Recommended feed, an IV drip of content straight to her brainstem.

But, tragically, Viktor’s Chicken Electricity was far from enabling such a platform, so she settled on the second best thing: tossing mostly-edible objects at Dusk and watching her devour them. First crackers, then worms, and finally more fish bones. Bones devouring bones—it was an odd sight, no matter how many times she witnessed it.

Finally, just as she neared the brink of insanity, the music stopped, and Azrael picked up. His voice was temperamental and impatient, as if he had been the one waiting all that time.

“Mr. Azrael,” she said quickly, in a flutter of breath. She didn’t want him to hang up like last time. “It’s—um—hi. It’s Momo.”

“Momo?” he said. “Like… Valerica’s pet, Momo?”

“Yes! That one,” she said, jolting upright in bed. She held the bracelet right up to her mouth, nearly pressing her lips to it in excitement. “Please don’t hang up. I really need to talk to you.”

“Ah, I’m glad you said something. I was just about to hang up. I keep getting these delirium-inducing calls from Nether entrepreneurs. It’s infuriating—it’s like, for the last time, I do not want my rug cleaned, nor my lawn mowed. Gods, there is nothing I hate more than a person who makes a business out of mowing lawns. They are so presumptive. Momo, do I seem like someone who owns a lawn?”

“I…” Momo stalled. “No?”

“Of course not. One look at me, and you’d know that I’d never subject nature to something so disrespectful. Mowed lawns are torture upon grass. Iron-clad subjugations of nature. Just as the precious weed is about to grow into its full form—to reach towards the sun and proclaim its adulthood, to say hello world, it is I, the lowest and most forgettable plant amongst you, but beautiful still! For I am the great painter of fields, great artist of jungles and rolling hills. It is at that very moment that we cut it down, chop its head off like a degenerate dictator. Humble it into nonexistence.”

Azrael took a deep breath in.

“In fact, yards are an excellent metaphor for the current situation we find ourselves in.”

The line went silent, and Momo got the sense that he was waiting for her to ask him to elaborate. It was the same sort of pointed silence that teachers engaged in after asking the classroom a question, and receiving not a single hand in the air.

“...Yeah?”

“Yes, dear, a very suitable metaphor. Because—picture this. I think of mortals quite like weeds. Most of them wither before they reach their full potential, but their undoing is always their own. Death plucks them like the seasons, but death does not mow. She never mows. Because to mow down all of mortaldom—to suck every soul up in a chamber and let it rot—would be quite cruel. No, it would be hideous.”

Do all of Valerica’s friends talk like this?

“Are you talking about Sera’s Wraith Box?”

“Precisely,” he said, then laughed. “I knew Valerica chose the right one. You’re very bright, dear. So much wisdom stuffed inside such a tiny vessel. Anyway, proceeding on. While I haven’t the faintest idea how you’ve contacted me, I’m glad you did. I’ve been trying to reach you for quite a while. But all of my attempts have been in vain.”

“Wait, you have?” Momo said. “I didn’t notice any… attempts.”

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He groaned, displeased. “Every body I have sent your way has met an unusual demise before reaching you. Sometimes by lightning, or by drowning, or by food poisoning. I sent one of my bodies just two weeks before, floating on a small boat towards your pirate ship, but the sea literally rose up around it and swallowed it. It was no ordinary sea-thrashing, either—it was Nerida herself, her own fist taking my body in her hands and clenching it.”

Nerida. That was Sumire’s deity. The janitor of the seas. To think she was in on Sera’s ploy too… it made Momo’s heart sting. But the pain was relieved, in a small way, at the hilarious imagery of Azrael getting utterly destroyed ten times over by every single deity in the pantheon.

“Valerica has been trying to reach you, naturally, but she can no longer leave the Nether. Morgana has locked down the place. No one is allowed out.”

A flicker of hope sprouted in Momo’s chest. “Does that mean they’ve located Sera?”

Azrael laughed.

“Wouldn’t I have led with that?”

Momo frowned.

“Right…” she mumbled, but truthfully—she did not think he would have led with that. Valerica never leads with the vital topic sentence. She leads with the fourth tangential paragraph in the middle of the long, droning, irrelevant essay. And if he was anything like Valerica, he would have given the whole monologue about lawns regardless. “But how is it that Morgana hasn’t been able to locate her? Can’t she travel anywhere in the Nether? Especially now that Valerica has fixed up the wiring and everything.”

“Yes, she can travel anywhere, quite so,” Azrael hummed. “But think of it like this—even if you have an unlimited train pass, you still must know which station to stop at. Sera is in hiding. Morgana has employed nearly every god in the pantheon to look for her, but they’ve come up empty. It’s not surprising. After all, the Nether is a wide, wide place. Easy for things to get lost.”

Momo clenched her fists. “But the other gods aren’t—”

As the words were about to leave her mouth, she felt a jolting bolt in the middle of her stomach. A punch with the precision of a needle. The promise I made to Kami. That spell he cast. The [Thief’s Promise]. She had nearly forgotten the implications. She couldn’t tell anyone about Mordecai, or about any of the other gods, it seemed.

“What was that? This connection is just terrible. I should really try and go analog…”

“It’s nothing,” she swallowed. “But what should I do? I have the box, and so far it’s been dormant, but as far as I can tell there’s no way to destroy it. Not without unleashing hell.”

“Isn’t the answer obvious?”

Momo blinked. The man’s voice had gone from floaty to terse. Impatient.

“The skill I created for you,” he continued. “Have you not tried it yet?”

She stilled, goosebumps running up her arms.

“....[Soul Cannibal]?”

“Precisely,” he whispered. “See, I suspected Sera’s whole endeavor far before she actually went ahead and did it. One of my many ears overheard her discussing the plans for the box with her little mortal pets. I skipped right past shock, angst, bargaining—and went to work on prevention. The result was this skill, [Soul Cannibal]. It is the only way. How should I put this politically…You must mow a small portion of the lawn in order to save the rest.”

Momo stared at the bracelet, her heart beating.

“B–but if I absorb these souls. Wouldn’t that mean I’d be killing them? Trapping them in my body just like they’re trapped in the Wraith Box right now? How would that be any better?”

Azrael scoffed.

“For those souls? It wouldn’t be any better a fate, no. But you’d be saving many more than you’d be sacrificing. And it’d be a wondrous thing for you, too. Imagine the amount of experience you’d get from absorbing that many souls in one feasting. You’d grow in power like no mortal ever has. Ascend almost immediately to the status of a Lesser Goddess, or perhaps more.”

“What?”

Her heartbeat nearly came to a screeching halt. It can’t be that easy. It was exactly what she needed—a cheat code to bypass Excalibur and knock her way right into the heavens. Not to mention it’d solve two problems with one hefty stone. The Wraith Box would be eliminated, and she’d be powerful enough to stand toe to toe with Sera and end the revolution where it stood.

But…

It wasn’t a cheat code. It was a choice. A choice to continually torture thousands of souls.

Her own words echoed in her head—what’s a little torture for a good cause?

“No,” she said, frantically shaking her head. “I can’t do that. I can’t sacrifice thousands of people and have them living inside of me like a bunch of screaming bees. I need to find another way of dealing with this. Another way to ascend to Lesser Goddess and take down Sera myself.”

“There is no other way, darling. If there was, I would have thought of it.”

“There has to be.” She clenched her hands into fists, her body shaking. “What if I knocked down King Jarva? And every single Knight of the Sun? That’d have to take me at the very least to Excalibur. And then if I take down the remaining members of the Holy Resistance, too…”

Azrael chuckled. “Oh, I really do get why Valerica likes you. Now, just one moment. I might suggest covering your eyes and ears.”

The line went quiet for a moment.

Then, without warning, Momo’s bedroom window burst open like a demolition site. Shards of glass flew everywhere. Dusk hissed, arching her tail and burrowing under the bed. Momo jumped up, padding in her slippers over to the window and lurching her head out of it.

Just below, gripping tensely to the window sill, was a man. A man with a face Momo recognized—the first face she ever saw in Alois, back down in that grimy, cavernous dungeon.

“Well, well, well,” the man grinned, his rotted teeth shining. “Hello again.”