Part of me missed the early days of struggle. Just enter Hell and fight my way through, trying to avoid annihilation. Wight had pushed me hard then, trying to break the seal. Pop open the blister pack of the ascended Eric. Now everything seemed to be mystery and questions when I had been used to writing the answers with an itchy trigger finger. There was a void, a space intentionally left blank, but I craved to scratch through it and leave my mark before the clock ran out.

“Keeping this place in your back pocket, huh?” I glared over the ledge at what looked like a temple. Almost like a pyramid in design but covered with spikes and skull motifs. An occasional fiend passed by this side of the foul building. A demon of ruddy browns and greys with a skull-shaped head and luminous blue eye sockets. Blue was an odd color for Hell.

[The day was not rainy, but I felt this would be a distraction from… everything.]

Wight was perched to my right, peering over the edge with his crimson eyes in mimicry of me. He turned his beaked face to look at me, and I wasn’t sure how to read his expression for a change.

“Thank you.” I did need some unabated ultraviolence to settle my mind. All the different feelings about everything that had gone on were crunchy in my mouth. There was a need to connect the dots, but Wight had all my markers.

We waited for a moment for the patrols to move around. Then, as best as I could, I swung from our ledge and slid down the brief decline - straight toward a lone demon.

His skull-head turned to me on hearing my approach, and he went to withdraw a blade that was more just a twisted shard of metal than anything. My momentum was too great, and I body slammed into him, pinning him briefly to the temple wall.

My arm swung around, and I jammed the dagger into his neck, twisting it through his windpipe and spraying blood across the deep gray bricks of the building. The demon slumped to the floor, gurgling, trying to clutch at his neck as if he could fix it. After a couple of seconds, the light in his eyes dimmed, then ceased.

Wight slid down beside me, slightly hovering so as not to trip or slam into me. He plodded along and kneeled beside the corpse.

[Korc was the name of the demon?]

“The gang? Yeah.” I watched as my patron scooped a handful of blood and gore from the gashed neck of the fallen and placed it into his open beak.

He then stood and looked up to the amber skies, emitting a low hiss for a few seconds. Wight then spat the gore back to the floor.

[It is done. War on the pigmen has begun.]

I hadn’t necessarily declared war on the pigmen, but if it upped the infighting of demons, then it wasn’t skin off my back. Until it was, of course.

“This place only has the one entrance?” I looked around at the sloped and spiked architecture - it was almost Aztecan in design but without the handy stairs to the boss room. Just overcompensating demonic tat.

[We have a brief reprieve if you would like me to explain the lore before they know something is up.]

I shrugged and gave him a nod. A little breather before being sent to the angry Eric place wouldn’t go amiss.

[These demons have a higher ascension rate than most, and it is in part due to the artifacts they host within these temples.]

“So, we’ll go break that, huh?” Seemed like a fun plan, and Wight nodded his approval.

[They are a violent agendered demon in this plane, but after accession, they become gendered and are proficient corporate workers.]

“Oh.” That was… well, I hadn’t really imagined Hell had corporations - but it made sense on some level. Just not the Lower one. I was used to expansive plains and ruthless but simple demons. The Mids had functioning cities - so why wouldn’t there be demon office workers, lawyers, and accountants?

[Are you okay, Eric?]

“Yeah. Think I just had a bad taste of the future.” I didn’t even pay taxes in the real world. Was I behind on my demon taxes too?

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[Let us kill all demons.]

The one sobering thought to take me out of the spinning wheel that had fallen off the runaway truck. I withdrew the revolver, and it spun in my hand. Obsidian covered my face, leaving only eyes of bright crimson beneath my leather hat. I felt my power, and Wight's, course through my body and into the gun. There was something else - the hint of Rat God’s power.

I shuddered at the name again. Entropy was one thing, but there was something else - like it wasn’t meant to work that way, or I only had half the puzzle. Much like any good deal, I was sure the answer would come to me when I was broken and bloodied and needed a get-out-of-eternal-jail card. Simple and cliche.

My boots ground the dust rock beneath me as I set off to the front of the building, Wight behind me. As I rounded the corner, the entrance lay set into the slope - an archway of skulls and carved symbols I did not care to read. There was also a guard standing, idly picking at his elbow, while a barbaric-looking battleaxe hung limply in his hand.

As my darkened shape loomed in his peripheral, he turned, startled.

Straight through his forehead, blowing his brains across the floor several feet back. With the light falling from his eyes, he dropped away from the crimson after-image of the beam skill.

//Hey Eric? I’m back - thought I’d catch you in the act.

I smiled and held my hands up. “Guilty.”

//Audio and visual clear. I can confirm twelve hostiles on the ground floor.

Now this was living. I was going to ruminate on how long it had been since we had a proper gang mission on the go - but the Nightclub was supposed to be that, so that was more my fault for evaporating the whole thing.

//Two hostiles coming to the door.

The revolver flicked back down, and I approached, ready to catch them in the act. Thankfully, they didn’t have the foresight to use the cover the building had granted them, and they immediately exited to see what happened to the guard.

I emptied the chamber into them as I approached, spurts of crimson bursting into the air. They dropped to the ground, and the revolver span in my hand as I reloaded. Knifed one in the throat that hadn’t been finished off by the shots yet. It almost felt calming to me.

//Group of six approaching.

The door was wide open, almost beckoning me to enter and become the fox in the henhouse. My boots did the walking so that my gun could do the talking. They clamored towards me, anger in their bright blue eyes, weapons of sharpened metal in their hands.

One day, demons would learn not to stack up. The beam scoured the air, bursting the heads of two and wounding the shoulders and upper arms of two others. The first one upon me received a shot to the gut, the pain causing his attack to falter. I spun around him, circling the dagger across his throat as I leveled a second shot at the chest of another demon. Heart. A third received a spray from the rest of the chamber, rending crimson holes up his torso before he dropped from the damage.

The last standing skull-demon swung forth with a spiked mace. With the revolver, I blocked, my silver weapon screaming with sparks from the impact. As the demon relented, my gun spun thrice and snuggly sat back into my grip, fully loaded again. One tap to his shoulder to waylay the backswing of the mace and then one to the face.

I span the gun as the empty chambers filled. It was now a simple process. Wight’s power combined with my own to both empower and speed up the process.

//All hostiles neutralized. The remainder have ascended. Twenty hostiles next floor.

“How many floors?” I exhaled and shrugged out my muscles.

//Four, including current.

“Thanks,” I gave a thumbs up with my dagger hand. “What was the epiphany you had?”

//Oh, do you have time for it?

I looked back to my patron, who had been idly hanging back by the entrance and prodding at one of the dead bodies. He looked up at me and shrugged.

[This is your adventure, Eric.]

Nice. A little bit of bloodshed purely for my benefit. If all else failed, I could probably just wham a True Hell Cannon up the middle of the chambers and possibly break the magic bit Wight had mentioned.

“Proceed.” I nodded, keeping my eyes ready for the shadowed recesses ahead that I assumed led to the next floor.

//It’s about the eldritch being you had seen.

“Rat God.” Damnit.

//Sure. Well, something about the skill name lingered with me - after the meditation cleared my head, I went to look some things up. I think I found who it may be.

“No shit.” I bit my lip beneath my obsidian mask. Half hoping that it wasn’t anything dire that I had signed my soul up with. Half knowing that it could be nothing but trouble for me either way.

//There are a few names, but essentially they’re a neutral power…

I briefly sighed with relief.

//…a god outside of our little pyramids - but they’re essentially about balance.

“Balance?” I furrowed my brow. They had asked me to restore the balance, but vaporizing a building didn’t seem like it fit that bill. Rat God hadn’t asked me to kill all demons, but with the balance of demonic and divine energy out of place - perhaps they wanted that fixing.

//Do with that what you will, but- oh, four hostiles approaching, left side alcove.

More questions without answers. Why me? Did that mean the empty space I had felt was the ability not yet come to fruition? If it was the opposite of Entropy, could I start growing trees or something? Maybe Entropy was balancing in and of itself and didn’t have an opposite skill.

“Here,” I tossed the dagger towards Wight and was briefly surprised he caught it deftly. “Ready for another reality-shattering last-ditch ability to save me from the brink of death?”

[Wouldn’t have it any other way, Eric.]

Rodney sighed down the connection as my patron spun the blade in his clawed hand.