"Your collection?"
Lief raised an eyebrow, feeling that she wasn't joking.
"Your interest flatters me, but I don't have that hobby," he replied with a shrug, maintaining a facade of absolute indifference. "Besides... I don't have time to be one either."
While he spoke he concentrated on stabilizing his breathing.
The last attack had drained his reserves leaving them at a dangerous thirty percent. Although on the outside he projected an image of total control, his energy was arid and if she decided to attack in that instant, his chances of survival were practically nil.
"Fufufu~..."
Laughing, Dorothy looked Lief up and down, piercing through his lie with ease.
"Relax, a museum piece requires preparation," she purred, taking a step back. "I won't touch you until I have the finest velvet prepared to wrap you in."
Satisfied with the chaos sown, she arched her back in a slow and feline stretch that tightened the fabric of her dress, deliberately enhancing the curve of her breasts and the line of her hips under the twilight light.
"I had fun today. This boring wasteland needed a bit of disaster."
Upon hearing this Lief felt his shoulders relax.
"So... goodbye?"
"No, no, no..." whispered Dorothy, and a predatory glint lit up her pupils. "See you later."
The distance between them closed before Lief could process the threat and Dorothy pounced on him and stamped her lips against his.
!
Lief's eyes snapped open.
And there was no trace of romance in the kiss. It was an aggressive kiss full of possessiveness.
She didn't seem to be kissing him, it seemed like she was marking him like a stamp of ownership.
Without asking for permission, her tongue forced open Lief's mouth, separating his teeth with a pressure that bordered on a bite.
She invaded his mouth with voracity, exploring his palate and entangling herself with his tongue in a moist and suffocating dance.
Lief felt her sweet taste filling his senses, but along with the saliva, something else began to flow.
A current cold as liquid ice transferred from Dorothy's mouth toward his throat.
It was an overwhelming sensation.
This cold spilled down his esophagus and expanded toward his limbs, flooding his veins like a torrent of icy water in a desert.
The relief was so pleasurable that, intoxicated by the sudden recharge, he lost the will to push her away.
His hands acted out of pure animal instinct and went down with urgency to cling to the curves of her waist with possessiveness, anchoring her body against his body to eliminate any distance.
He deepened the kiss with a wild voracity and sucked Dorothy's tongue with force, intertwining it with his to extract every last drop of that electric ambrosia and responding to the invasion of his mouth with an insatiable hunger.
The sepulchral silence was filled exclusively with the wet and lewd sound of their mouths devouring each other without inhibitions, an incessant splashing of saliva mixing and breaths while her magic penetrated his system and restored every worn fiber of him with waves of pleasure.
When the transfer reached its climax, Dorothy pulled away millimeter by millimeter without breaking eye contact for even an instant, while a shiny thread of saliva connected their open mouths, tensing in the air for an eternal second before breaking and falling heavily down Lief's chin.
She observed the trail of fluids with fascination and extended her own tongue slowly to trace her own lips that looked swollen from the aggressive friction, tasting the shared saliva with a shameless lewdness, licking her lips with gusto.
"A parting gift," she whispered while her dilated eyes shone with the desire to continue. "Do you like it?"
"..."
Touching his lips, Lief looked at her with a complex expression.
Dorothy observed his reaction with an arched eyebrow,
"I thought..." she said with a mocking tone, "You would use your purification to push me away."
Sighing, Lief wiped away a trace of carmine she had left at the corner of his lips with his thumb.
He looked at the red stain on his finger and then locked his eyes directly onto hers.
"It depends... Besides, I rarely reject something I consider beautiful, even if it is dangerous."
"Fufufu~"
Satisfied, Dorothy laughed seductively.
"So now you find me beautiful?" Her eyes swept over Lief one last time with intensity, "Then we will see each other soon, my 'beautiful' collection..."
With her words her figure vanished, leaving behind nothing more than her scent and with it, the atmosphere that was suffocating the Land of the Dead dissipated.
"..."
Lief remained motionless for a moment, making sure that she was really gone.
"What a diabolical woman..." he murmured, shaking his head.
Soon he shifted his gaze toward the smoking crater and the ruins of the stage, wondering how the hell he would get out of there, but instantly he got an answer.
!
A familiar sensation of weightlessness enveloped him, while the landscape distorted, stretching like an oil painting under the rain, and the darkness was replaced by a familiar light.
When his boots touched firm ground again, he was already standing in the center of his bedroom.
Outside the window, the afternoon sun shone brightly, the birds were singing and the air brought the aroma of the garden flowers, a vast difference from the stench of a few seconds ago.
If it weren't for the exhaustion weighing on his bones, he would have believed the battle had been a hallucination.
He walked toward the full-length mirror and assessed the damage.
Physically he was intact, retaining everything he had carried, but his trench coat was covered in a layer of dust.
But suddenly, he wrinkled his nose upon noticing something worse than the dirt.
A penetrating stench of rot emanated from his clothes and his skin.
"Damn it..." Grunting with a grimace of genuine disgust, he snapped his fingers impatiently.
A wave of bluish light swept his body from head to toe, disintegrating the dust and neutralizing the smell instantly, restoring a presentable appearance to him.
However, the sensation of filth persisted under his skin.
Although he was clean, he felt he needed something more "physical" to wash the experience off.
He took off his clothes and entered the bathroom.
He turned the faucet on to the max.
Boiling water gushed from the shower, hitting his tense muscles and enveloping the room in steam.
Soon he closed his eyes and let the torrent scald his skin, washing away the last trace of fatigue and the tactile sensation of combat.
"Monarch of Hell..." he whispered, remembering Dorothy's warning about the projection.
Only when he stepped out of the shower, with his body clean and dressed in comfortable home clothes, did he feel that he had truly returned to the world of the living.
Opening his bedroom door, he descended the stairs, immersing himself again in the atmosphere of his house.
In the living room, Lillith occupied the sofa in solitude.
She held a cushion against her chest and kept her gaze locked on the television, where a family sitcom with canned laughter was playing.
The house was plunged in absolute calm with Esther and Emma secluded in their own rooms.
Lief walked with a calm step toward the kitchen with the intention of looking for something cold to drink. However, just when his shadow crossed the perimeter of the sofa, Lillith's relaxed posture tensed.
Her eyes left the screen instantly and locked onto Lief's back. She put down the cushion and stood up in an urgent movement, shortening the distance between them with silent steps.
Dilating her nostrils, catching the invisible particles in the air, and an expression of absolute confusion deformed her features.
"You..."
Stopping right behind him, she reached a hand toward his back, but her fingers stopped centimeters from his clothes.
She simply tracked the residual aura that enveloped him.
Lief opened the refrigerator door and the cold light bathed his face. He took a can of Coca-Cola and pulled the tab.
The metallic sound of the escaping gas broke the silence of the kitchen and he drank a long sip before turning his head to look at her.
"What is happening? Do I have something on me?"
"On your body... there is a smell," she murmured, unable to look away from him.
"I just showered and used Mom's favorite shampoo, so I should smell pretty good," Lief replied, downplaying it while taking another drink, leaning relaxed against the counter.
"N-Not that kind of smell!" Lillith's voice rose sharply. "It is a stench... repulsive, dirty, and it is loaded with despair."
She began to walk in circles around him, analyzing every trace like a hound.
"Although it is very faint and has been almost completely cleaned, that trace is unmistakable... This scent belongs to the deepest pits of hell..."
Her steps stopped dead and her pupils contracted upon catching a second note.
"No... There is something else."
Stepping back, her face lost its color quickly.
"This smell... is sweet, dark, and dominant... It is like... as if hell itself had descended upon you..."
She said looking at Lief with terror.
Both auras belonged to existences that were hierarchically far above her, entities before which her instinct screamed at her to kneel or flee.
And now, both presences emanated simultaneously from the skin of the person standing in front of her.
"Tell me the truth..." uncertainty devoured her composure, "Who exactly did you go see in the underworld?"
Seeing her astonished expression, Lief had to repress a smile.
He took another long drink of his beverage, before responding calmly.
"What an enviable sense of smell you have," he conceded, lowering the can. "But it was nothing important. I just went down to the Land of the Dead for a walk, saw a rather peculiar Christmas play, and, while I was at it, took care of a small pest problem."
He walked toward the sofa and dropped onto the cushions with languor, leaving the Coca-Cola on the coffee table.
"A giant insect that called himself the King of the Flies. He was too annoying, so I had to silence him."
"The King of the Flies...?"
Lillith stood petrified for an instant and suddenly, a forbidden name emerged from the depths of her memory, freezing her blood.
"D-Do you mean... Beelzebub?"
Lief raised an eyebrow in surprise.
"Yes, that was his name and by your face, I gather he is a pretty famous celebrity in hell, right?"
Reality hit Lillith with the force of a physical sledgehammer.
Beelzebub!
The Monarch of Gluttony!
One of the Seven Princes of Hell!
Supreme ruler who sat at the pinnacle of the demonic hierarchy, an entity on the same level as Lucifer, Mammon, or Asmodeus.
And for a demon like her, Beelzebub was a force of nature, a deity before whom she didn't even have the right to look up without permission.
And Lief was saying that he had met him? And even worse, that he had "silenced" him!?
"You... you..." Her lips trembled, unable to articulate the chaos reigning in her mind. "Are you sure... that it was really Beelzebub?"
"It was him, although technically it was just a projection of his power," Lief clarified with a gesture of disdain, leaning further back on the sofa. "And a pretty weak one, to be honest. It broke too easily."
"..."
Lillith looked at him feeling absolute vertigo.
________
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