Chapter 17 : Change of Jurisdiction
On a throne of moaning skulls sat a large red demon woman, eyes heavy with judgement piercing through yet another anguished soul. Ever since the monk incident she had been a little extra careful with screening. The man who had just been reformed into flesh and bone pleaded innocence and ignorance.
"Denied.", she rumbled, making a gesture which sealed the man's lips with skin.
A few chain-imps manifested out of the shadows to drag the man away. His eyes shot wide open in absolute panic, nasal wails and snot bursting out his nose. Satan-72 tilted her head and scowled slightly. She felt no sympathy.
This guy had insisted that there must have been some sort of mistake – surely practicing the tooteltrum was not a crime? However, Satan-72 knew the man's nightly sessions had tormented an entire city sector for years. He was a perfect fit for realm seven where she kept the obnoxious ones.
Her mind soon shifted to other affairs. Could she speed up the completion of the pain cradles? When would the maggot fields in third be operational again? Were illusion traps a bad fit for ninth? Would she need to separate the incubus and succubus again? When would the greater portal to that new world finish linking up?
And how was her system ring user doing?
Satan-72 had added a few subquests in just to make it seem less like her only actual concern was getting rid of the unflattering statues. She didn't really have any experience managing worlds – usually that was the domain of the God types.
But, God-72 had essentially dumped the world on her since "she had handled the affair with the orphaned system ring so nicely". Wasn't he the one who owed her one though? Well, now it was two favours owed. She'd definitely call them in, later.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
She imagined the guy was probably just lazing about right now. Gods really don't know how much work goes into managing a nine realm hell – it's not like some fully automatic farm!
She had vented to Satan-60 about it. He had suggested that when it came to managing worlds she could just keep a light touch; there was no need to micromanage. God-3 for example left a world freewheeling for 6000 years, and it did fine, mostly. Well, actually it went pretty badly, but it did run for 6000 years.
However, Satan-72's situation was different. If a rogue god was in play here like she suspected then she'd have to keep an eye open for more shenanigans. She had already found four additional cultist pottery workers making those slanderous statues. The statues even had her old name engraved on the base, in godly eldritch runes.
The system ring user had dispatched three pottery workers in total now. Satan-72 had naturally tried to interrogate them after snatching up the souls, only to discover that the souls had been quite thoroughly scrubbed. Still, after overlaying the souls she had managed to gleam some fragments akin to smudged traces of a finger print.
She might be able to determine to who touched the souls once the two remaining souls are delivered, as per the active quest.
It was Plutarch who had come up with the extra subquests for the system ring user. She had nixed most of his ideas:
Collect 10 mystical mountain herbs. Slay 25 deep bore worms. Deliver a letter to the mountain lich.
Instead they had settled on "Procure a heroic weapon". Plausible, useful, and fairly standard fare for heroes and such, though technically this system ring user was more of a haphazard independent force.
The other quest... well, Plutarch had plucked out one of his nine eyes. The eye turned into glass, and inside the orb visions of the nine realms of hell played. If the system ring user put the orb into some deserving person's eye socket they'd turn into a tormented drone, perhaps useful for some low cost scouting.
Satan 72 thought it was a pretty fun idea so they went with it.