Chaos Hell Travel Guide

"If you are fortunate enough to visit Hell, be sure to remember these three rules:

Never step on the burning gravel. Always keep close to the forest. Always avoid the red stream.

Or you can simply remember this one:

Never go to Hell."

—Chaos Hell Travel Guide

Humanity had all manner of descriptions of Chaos Hell. The above might not have been the most accurate version, but it was the bestselling one.

Nese had, of course, read it too.

At that moment, he lay flat on his back, staring at the sky where sulfur flowed backward, repeatedly reciting those joke-like rules to distract himself—his insides hurt as though someone were pulling them in sixteen different directions.

He tried to recover as he recited them for roughly a thousand heartbeats.

Only when he could feel his butt again did he sit up.

Then he immediately realized that his legs were still completely numb—

Keir lay motionless across his thighs like a not-quite-fresh goose. There was a large hole in the upper right side of his back behind his shoulder blade, and his right wing was mottled with silver blood.

"Angel." Nese wanted to slap him awake, but he could not find anywhere he dared to put his hand.

He bent his own legs with his hands, pushing Keir aside. The angel rolled limply to one side.

The angel lay faceup, his golden eyes wide open and vacant.

Panic flooded Nese's lungs like botfly venom.

Forcing down the terror in his heart, he vigorously shook Keir's other, uninjured shoulder. "Angel!"

When he got no response, he instinctively put his fingers beneath Keir's nose—there was no breath.

It's fine... I nearly forgot... Energy beings don't need to breathe. They hold their breath when they're badly shocked... Nese forced himself to cling to that flimsy thought as though it were a lifeline.

It's okay... Look again...

Though he had only just awakened from unconsciousness and his mind was reeling in waves, he concentrated and activated his energy vision—

Translucent, threadlike strands of static order energy wove a net, outlining Keir's dim silhouette.

The huge hole in his shoulder, which had looked completely empty in ordinary vision, now appeared stuffed with something like minced meat, mixed with numerous black-red fragments resembling shards of glass.

Destruction energy...? Nese identified it awkwardly.

He had already noticed tiny blue-green motes circling the angel's head and neck. They were, naturally, life energy.

He should still be alive... Nese relaxed at once.

He turned to survey his surroundings.

The situation had been urgent, so he had attempted to create a planar rift by directly manipulating energy and escape with Keir.

His intended destination had originally been his own tower on the Prime Material Plane—there was a complete set of carefully maintained receiving formations there, kept running year-round and assigned the highest priority for emergency teleportation.

But the place where they now were was clearly still within the plane of Chaos Hell... perhaps due to an operational error.

Not bad.

Nese felt that an error of this magnitude was still barely acceptable.

This was only his third attempt. The consequences of a major teleportation failure were terrifying and clichéd—like only two legs and a nose arriving at the destination.

He looked up but did not find Yicha's Calamity Stone Floating Island anywhere within his field of view.

As far as he could see, there were no familiar landmarks at all.

I wonder how Teacher is doing... he thought.

Ahead stood a rust-colored mountain that pierced the sky, shaped like a frozen colossal wave. To the right was a bottomless abyss dropping straight down.

To the left was—no, before he could look to the left, something beyond the cliff caught his attention.

How strange.

How had he failed to see it earlier?

Beyond the undulating blocks of obsidian behind and to his right, a red stream flowed quietly. At its end, it unhurriedly spilled into the abyss.

Always avoid the red stream.

He twisted himself around with effort and looked upstream, against the current.

Upstream—that was, behind him—stood a dense forest.

The trees were all shaped strangely, but in Chaos Hell, one could not be too particular about many things, so it could barely be called a forest.

No way... Nese struggled to control his emotions—to be honest, he had been doing that for quite a long time since meeting Yicha.

He turned his gaze to the left.

Sure enough—he had already half expected it—there stretched a vast expanse of sand dotted with ghostly green flames.

Never step on the burning gravel. Always keep close to the forest. He began to suspect that Chaos Hell Travel Guide had some unknown secret behind it.

Nese's gaze returned to Keir.

He had not yet figured out how to return. Yicha had told them to leave for their safety, and rashly attempting another teleportation with such a high chance of error felt somewhat like walking into a trap.

In any case, waking the angel first could not be wrong.

Among human law spells, healing spells were what he was worst at. Directly channeling energy might be more convenient.

After making a few simple preparations, he stirred the scattered life energy emanating from Keir. Like making expensive cotton candy, he cautiously tried to wind together those faintly flickering blue-green sparks.

Sweat dripped into his burning azure eyes, but he did not even blink as he gathered the sparks in one place and slowly sent them toward the angel's mangled shoulder wound.

Sss—

Like pouring a kettle of scalding tea over a red-hot stone, a blinding white jet of steam shot straight from the exposed part of the wound.

Nese had already prepared a simple sealing charm on the ground.

Now, directing the charm with his own mana at Keir's entire shoulder, he sealed that steam inside.

He did not know whether this was right.

Maybe it was not quite right—maybe it was very wrong—

Wrong.

He soon saw Keir swell into a large, round ball like a balloon and float upward.

In the blink of an eye, Keir had drifted beyond his reach—the angel had woken up, though, and was continuously making those signature flustered, holy stammering sounds.

Nese staggered twice before barely managing to stand—his legs were numb beyond belief, and he was practically controlling them through sheer will as he limped into a run.

He chased after the floating, plump white angel balloon, desperately chanting every spell he could think of that might stop this, but none of them had enough effect.

"Think of something!" he finally shouted.

"Yes! Yes!" Keir cried loudly. He had almost just remembered that he was an angel.

"Miracle!" he shouted.

An angel's innate, concrete application of order energy was: miracles.

It was hard to say whether "miracle" counted as a formal spell, though Keir and Yicha had considered standardizing it.

A miracle was a miracle.

Depending on the individual angel, the difficulty to be resolved, the circumstances, and even the mood of those involved, a miracle could produce different effects.

The effect it produced now was this: a mass of gray, writhing things suddenly appeared two feet above Keir's head.

Then those things came crashing down on him, slapping the angel to the ground—flashing and flapping, they were, upon closer inspection by Nese, a huge pile of round, fat fish.

Keir grabbed a protruding rock on the ground to stop himself from floating up again.

No matter what, the situation seemed to have eased for the moment.

Nese let out a long breath.

Then his calves suddenly began to itch terribly.

He looked down and saw that he was standing knee-deep in the red stream.

The stream's name and several details in this section came from Dante's Divine Comedy.