Momo hoisted the Nether Demon over her shoulder like the creature was a drunk girl at a dive bar. It flopped over with a grunt, and black drool dribbled down Momo’s shoulder. It stung slightly when it came in contact with her bare skin, as if it were mildly poisonous.

“Delightful,” she sighed.

With the demon collected, and her goddess paperwork filled out, Momo headed for the exit. It was a pretty obvious find: a tall plastic door with a makeshift sign above it, a doodled picture depicting a stick figure jumping into the black hole of space.

How completely ominous.

As Momo usually did before spectacular mistakes, she thought to herself, here goes nothing, I hope I don’t die, and wrapped her hand around the doorknob. However she realized quite quickly that she had no idea where she was intending to go.

She knew that she wanted to find Valerica, to talk to her and figure out a more appropriate plan of action to take on their little Kyros issue—but as to how to find her, and this so-called Vacant Edge, she still didn’t have the faintest clue.

One of the goblin-journalists working for the Lore Department was slamming his fist on the fax machine to her left, so she took the moment to lean toward him.

She cleared her throat. “Quick question—”

“Goddamn machinery,” he groaned, cutting her off immediately. Grabbing the machine with his leathery red fingers, he opened the top of it, and ripped out the slip of paper he’d been attempting to scan. The contents of it were written in a totally foreign script, one that Momo had never seen on Earth or Alois. “How’s a man supposed to start a decades-long plague when he can’t even send a memo?”

Momo choked on air. “Excuse me?”

His nostrils flared. “The Nether technicians say technology is progress. I say it's a poorly disguised disease. I never had these issues back when we delivered plagues by hand.”

“Oh.”

It appeared that Momo had just encountered the opportunity to prevent some foreign planet from experiencing a completely preventable epidemic.

She really missed when her biggest problem was Viktor Mole.

“I know I’m not a writer,” she ventured, then paused. “But maybe this is a sign to take another direction with the plot? Something less… genocidal?”

The goblin whipped toward her, eyes narrowed in exasperation. She noticed his name tag then— Frezrick Eziroth. It sounded weirdly, reminiscently German.

He huffed. “The maggots on Eziroth are overdue for a little population control. It’s for their own good, really. Future generations will have me to thank when there’s enough crop to go around. Plague always has bad optics, but then suddenly the price of gruel goes down…”

The machine made a beeping noise, and began to finally scan his document.

“Thank goddess,” he muttered.

Feeling a very sudden sense of responsibility, Momo lifted the top of the scanner, reached in, and snagged the paper. Frezrick’s expression was one of pure horror as she tore the sheet to shreds, and then shoved the remnants in her mouth, swallowing them.

“What was— why did you—” he babbled.

It seemed that she would need to find someone else to ask for directions.

“Sorry!”

Spinning on her heel, she yanked open the exit door and came face to face with the rift portal behind it. She stepped through just as Frezrick reached out to tackle her, the goblin falling face first as Momo disappeared into oblivion.

Meanwhile, somewhere on Eziroth, a rather eventful chapter disappeared from the history textbook.

***

In the same way that it was unwise to put an infant behind the steering wheel, tape a leather shoe to the gas pedal, and point the vehicle toward the highway, it seemed that skipping past ten thousand books of onboarding material meant Momo’s Nether navigational skills left something to be desired. And by something, she meant everything.

Luckily, she wasn’t alone.

After escaping through the door, she had been spit out into yet another swirling black abyss. Unlike the more creative domain of Mordecai or the Nether’s many bustling replicant areas, this abyss was a rather generic kind of twilight zone. The room’s only light came from an illuminated orange safety vest worn by an agitated looking figure at the center of the space.

Like the police officers she once faced in Nether New York, this man’s face was invisible to the naked eye. His popped white collar seemed to house only air. However peering at him from different directions revealed faint white glimmers of light bouncing off the crevices of an unseeable face. He was simply painted the color of the Nether, she deduced, making him appear much like a chameleon in an environment like this.

“Hello, nice to meet you,” Momo greeted, ever polite. “I–”

“Wrong way,” he said. One of his nothing-hands was holding a wrong way sign, and when she approached him, he wagged it at her passive aggressively. “Turn around.”

“Sorry. I think— well, no, I know— I’m lost.”

“Yes, you clearly are. Wrong way,” he said again. She did not budge. This must have been the wrong thing to do, because she could practically hear his eyebrows furrow. “Go on now. Get out of here. Your aura is as gigantic as— as— gods, I don’t know. I don’t get out enough for metaphors. Point is, with mana like that, you’re going to attract demons.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Momo’s lips tightened. He apparently hadn’t registered the one hanging like a corpse from her shoulder. Probably because the Nether Demon was also very hard to see in this light.

She peered at his vest and noticed, up close, that he had his own name tag.

Nether Maintenance Crew #0283

Department of Improper Nether Traversal

Crossing Guard

Finally, someone whose job was a little more digestible.

She gave him an apologetic smile. “I see you’re a… crossing guard. I’m trying to get to the Vacant Edge,” she said, hoping the more direct approach would work. He was an employee of the Nether, after all. Obliged to aid all of its citizens. “Would you be able to help me?”

Momo heard a faint rustling sound coming from somewhere. The man inhaled sharply.

“Oh for the love of— you gods and your irresponsible mana spillage,” he hissed, dropping his sign. “There’s no helping either of us now! Goodbye!”

Much to Momo’s chagrin, his soul seemed to leave his body as all his clothes shriveled up at once, condensing into a pile of laundry in the air before flopping shaggily onto the cold black floor. The crossing guard was gone, and to replace him, a sound like a tea kettle whined in the darkness, followed by the hungry lapping of lips.

She sighed. He had warned her.

In the few moments before inevitable chaos ensued, Momo cast [Focus] and hastily shrugged the Demon from her shoulder, bracing herself.

Wolverine-like claws slashed through the darkness. Their metallic sheen was so reflective that Momo could briefly see herself in them, a whisk of white hair and shallow black eyes, before she dodged away, flying backward. As the creature stepped forward into the light of the crossing guard’s forgotten vest, a very new type of Nether Demon revealed itself.

Type: Nether Demon. Level 83.

Gooseflesh prickled up her arms. This one was no clone of hers.

This demon did not resemble any human at all, in fact. It had to be the dark twisted manifestation of a creature from a very foreign planet. A planet like Eziroth, Momo imagined, studying its silhouette, which was curved and prickled, with horns and gills and webbed feet. It stomped along the floor on four legs, black drool dripping from its maw.

It truly made Momo’s demon look like a Happy Meal mascot in comparison.

With a tea kettle hiss, the creature sprang upward, webbed feet once again unfurling blades and aiming for Momo’s innards. She side-stepped, taking advantage of the Dexterity bonus [Focus] gave her, and cast that fluke-spell she had used on her twin, hoping it would work a second time. White mana pulsed from her fingertips.

“[Nether Demon – Purify]!”

The pure-white mana punched a hole straight through the demon. It cried out and scuttled around, looking like a frantic insect as the white aura began to spread like a disease throughout its entire body. It looked less like purification and more like an exorcism then, as the demon writhed and writhed until something finally clicked, or rather had been forcefully expelled, and it halted, seized, then laid flat on the ground.

Momo carefully came to lord above it, feeling a bit guilty for performing what looked tantamount to torture.

“Are you alright?” she whispered.

The creature, which had now developed eyes just as her Nether Demon had, blinked up at her. It did not seem to share her dark clone’s talent for speech, but it nodded.

Purification Complete

Nether Demon (lvl. 83) —> Nether Demon (Purified Variant) (lvl. 83)

Great, she thought, looking back at her still-drowsy clone-demon splayed out on the floor. Now she had two of these things. Purified even as they were, they were mounting up to be a lot of baggage. And she wasn’t any closer to Valerica.

Except— an idea sprung.

“You guys are awfully talented at getting around the Nether,” Momo said, looking toward the now-docile demon. “How do you do it? I sort of skipped out on the course material.”

The demon opened its mouth and made that same tea kettle hissing sound.

“I can’t understand you,” Momo said, pursing her lips. “And as much as I’d love to teach you the English language, I’m kind of on a schedule. Maybe you can just show me?”

The demon nodded again. It wobbled upward, balancing on its strange claws. Momo quickly hurried to hoist up her clone again, feeling like a kid with an unfairly heavy backpack as she watched the foreign demon begin to drag its claws along the surface of the Nether, creating a tear. She had seen this technique before. She could do the same with her hands or with her swords—rupture the Nether briefly to create a rift portal.

“I know how to open the portal, but,” she leaned toward the creature, brushing up against its gills. They felt gross, oily. “I don’t know how to direct its destination.”

After a moment, the creature nodded again, but still it continued with its ongoing action, using its slivers of metal to widen the tear in the Nether before shoving its oblong body through, like a slimy fish swimming between two jagged rocks.

“Wait…” Momo’s mouth went agape. “Where are you—”

Seeing no other option, she grabbed the rapidly disappearing tail of the creature and followed it through the rift.

The fish analogy proved more correct than she could have known, because immediately she was flung into a speeding current. A substance that felt like thick oil rushed by her on all sides, and she was forced to close her eyes, her vision stinging. It was that same stinging sensation that she felt when the Nether Demon’s drool had touched her bare nape— like a raw wound exposed to hand sanitizer. Everything around her felt like numbing pain.

With her mortal eyes forced closed, the pain too overwhelming, she used her third eye to see. It took no more than a mere moment to realize she— rather, they— were not alone in this furious stream. The speedway was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of noisy, groaning, screeching souls, like cars stuck in traffic on the freeway. The purified demon she was hanging onto was a single undulating body in an ocean of other foreign masses.

Type: Nether Demon. Level 63.

Type: Nether Demon. Level 125.

Type: Nether Demon. Level 115.

…

Momo’s chest constricted as her audio courier began to ramble off demon after demon. The realization filled her with equal parts fear and awe; this strange highway wasn’t how typical souls got around the Nether. Which, she realized with a flush of embarrassment, of course it wasn’t— the average soul never left its replicant area. She knew that already. This, instead, was the dark undercurrent of the rapidly deteriorating afterlife. This was a place only demons frequented, a speedline from one ravaged destination to another.

Turning onto her belly, she could see entrances to replicant areas pass above her at one second intervals, blinking like street lights at dusk. The Nether Demons were trying to claw themselves into these bubbles, and some managed, whereas others were repelled by a magical force that blasted them back.

Just as Valerica had described, the sheer volume of demons was overwhelming. It made sense that replicant areas could only keep up their defenses for so long, and their walls had to be so frequently repaired. Claws were constantly digging, devilish nails gnawing into the feeble mana structures separating the safe afterlife from the demonic pests that lay on the periphery. The Nether was being utterly bombarded.

Momo felt dread build in her stomach. Even if she could purify every soul lurching through this liminal chamber, hundreds more were multiplying at the second. The death of the Nether had been no exaggeration. This here— the carnage laid out in front of her— was no slow march toward the demise of the Nether. It was a full-speed car chase.

Her stomach turned. She needed to find Valerica.

With a groan, Momo fought against the current and climbed the soft body of the demon below her, bringing herself to what she hoped was its ear.

“I need you to bring me to the Vacant Edge!”