Watching the pile of ash dirtying her carpet, Dorothy shifted her gaze toward Lief with a unique kind of fascination.
Three movements.
Three flashes of light and a mid-rank demon had been erased from existence.
And that golden light... It was a substance biologically designed to disintegrate demonic essence, and he wielded it with an indifference so... absolute.
Resting her elbows on her knees to prop her chin on her palms and leaning toward him, her lips slowly curved, drawing a smile of delight.
"Darling..." she purred with satisfaction, "Every layer you peel back reveals something more monstrous underneath... I'm starting to think I underestimated the kind of monster I let into my dressing room."
The servant's death was irrelevant to her; the life of a subordinate was currency. What intoxicated her was the implication of violence Lief brought with him.
Shrugging, Lief opened his mouth to reply, but the words died in his throat.
!
The air in the room changed.
And it wasn't a subtle change. The temperature plummeted twenty degrees in a second, freezing the condensation on the windowpanes.
The lamp lights flickered and turned a sickly, greenish hue. While a buzzing, similar to that of a swarm of millions of insects, began to vibrate in the walls, shaking the furniture and resonating in Lief's teeth.
A crushing pressure descended over the stadium, a presence so dense and toxic that the night sky outside the large window seemed to darken.
Lief turned slowly toward the door and raised an eyebrow, maintaining his relaxed posture despite the oppression trying to force him to his knees.
"Looks like the monkey's owner has come to complain."
...
In the darkness of his private room, Beelzebub stood up with such violence that the throne fell apart.
The monarch representing "Gluttony" among the Seven Deadly Sins of Hell, the great Prince Beelzebub.
Feeling his butler's death through the psychic link that was abruptly snapped by a simple mortal...
An acidic humiliation dissolved his control.
"MOR... TAL...!"
His facade collapsed.
His skin rippled as if something were boiling underneath and with a repugnant sound, the human disguise split open. Plates of black chitin, shiny and covered in mucus, sprouted through his pores.
His perfect face split in half, while his jaw unhinged, opening up to his ears to reveal rows of serrated needle teeth and inner jaws dripping with corrosive saliva.
His fly eyes multiplied, fracturing into thousands of hexagonal facets that reflected the distorted room, eliminating any trace of mercy or human intelligence.
With his suit bursting, muscles on his back split into two vertical wounds.
A torrent of black blood and viscous sludge splattered the walls, and from the wounds emerged two pairs of membranous, translucent, and enormous wings, which instantly vibrated at a frequency so high that the sound drilled into eardrums.
The Lord of the Flies had reclaimed his form.
"GRAAAAAAAAAH!"
The sonic roar shattered the bottles in the room.
Without looking for the doors and blinded by rage, he charged directly against the glass wall.
The huge armored window could not withstand the impact of the three-meter beast. The glass was pulverized into a rain of sharp diamonds, and the monstrosity launched itself into the void, flying into the night sky of the Land of the Dead.
Below, in the plaza, the chaos of Ernesto's lynching stopped abruptly.
A colossal shadow blocked the light and thousands of skeletons looked up just in time to see the nightmare.
Beelzebub's pressure fell upon them like increased gravity, a primal terror that froze the marrow of their bones.
Panic quickly flooded the crowd.
The screams of fury transformed into shrieks of terror and they ran off terrified, desperately trying to escape the shadow of the Prince of Hell.
Amidst that anarchy, the control room door opened stealthily.
Héctor came out first, tightly hugging Coco's photo.
"We did it..." he whispered looking at the photo. "Imelda, we did it."
"Put that away and run!" But Imelda didn't give him time to celebrate. Seeing the chaos in the plaza and the monstrosity in the sky, understanding that this was their only window of opportunity.
"Blend in! If that thing looks down, we're dead! Move!"
And Ernesto, who was now reduced to a pile of bones, receiving a brutal rain of blows dealt by a mob of spurned fans using their own torn-off limbs as clubs.
Through the gaps in the lynching crowd, he looked up with panic and saw it.
A monstrosity descending from the sky, a black nightmare with membranous wings nosediving like a missile, with a trajectory that seemed to aim directly at him.
"N-no... No! Get back!" he shrieked covering his head with his arms, convinced that the devil was coming to claim him personally.
But his ego played one last trick on him, for the gigantic shadow of the Lord of the Flies didn't even register his existence, passing right over his head with a turbine-like roar and crashing with seismic violence against the VIP stadium structure that rose just behind the stage.
CRAAAAACK
The impact shook the foundations of the entire plaza and fractured the facade as if it were glass.
Before Ernesto had time to process that he wasn't the target, the massive vibration dislodged a block from the upper load-bearing wall, which plummeted in freefall and landed with precision upon him, crushing his skull, his rib cage, and his history in an explosion of bone dust that scattered across the ground, ending his story not on a high note, but with a crunch.
Up above, in the luxury suite, the outer wall disappeared.
And from amidst the curtain of smoke and debris, Beelzebub's colossal figure rose slowly, unfurling his wings while his multiple eyes ignored the woman on the sofa and locked onto the human standing next to the shattered window frame.
"You... who stink of that filthy light... Do you have any idea of the magnitude of the mistake you just made by touching what is mine?"
On the sofa, which had miraculously survived the collapse, Dorothy remained reclining and with a lazy flick of her wrist, she had deployed a dark translucent barrier that repelled stones and dust, and now observed the confrontation with a look of interest.
She expected to see fear, or at least the natural hesitation of a mortal before a Prince of Hell.
However, Lief, with his trench coat buffeted by the wind entering through the huge hole in the wall, didn't back away a single millimeter before the demon drooling three meters from his face.
On the contrary, an arrogant smile appeared on his face.
"Finally, something worth killing," he murmured rotating his wrists.
In the next second, he used the power of the Rooster Talisman, feeling how an anti-gravitational force wrapped every cell of his body and lifted him gently, allowing him to glide through the gap in the shattered wall to float out into the void of the eternal night, positioning himself in the air at the same height as the insectoid monstrosity.
The sight of the human ascending without wings to challenge a Prince of Hell in his own element froze the thousands of spectators crowding the ruins of the plaza, who, with necks craned and jaws unhinged by astonishment, observed the impossibility of a mortal looking death in the eye without blinking.
Beelzebub's eyes vibrated with disbelief and fury upon seeing the small prey invade his space, a flagrant offense that made his wings beat with greater violence.
"Arrogant mortal! I am going to teach you the meaning of eternal pain, I will liquefy your organs while you still breathe and trap your soul in my hive to feed on your screams for the next ten thousand years!"
"You talk too much for a simple insect," Lief replied, raising a hand to invite him to attack, "Come here, fly, and show me if you can bite as hard as you buzz."
________
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