Paladin of the Spellheart: Chapter Covid (Patreon)

Theo stepped into the dark, damp, dreary confines of Hell for the second time that day. The roots above trickled down thick streams of viscous reddish-black fluid, and Theo pulled the hood of his cloak of concealment.

Sava, in contrast, seemed overjoyed at the sight of the roots. “Look at this stuff! What an incredible alchemy resource! There has to be some use for it...”

“Eww, it’s sticky!” Eltiana said, spreading her fingers and letting the thick gooey stuff spread across her hand. Contrary to her words, she had a smile on her face as she waved the goop in front of Assyrus’ eyes.

“Focus, everyone,” Theo said. “This place is loaded with demons. We have to be ready to fight them at any moment.”

Theo spread his senses out into the earth beneath him. With each pulse of his heart, more of his surroundings were revealed.

Off to his left, there was an imp hiding among some rocks, waiting to ambush them. Ahead, there was a felbeast grazing on some roots dangling down from above. Behind them, a few scant clumps of Demonic Spirits were trying to make their way up the passage they’d entered through and back to the surface world. Theo banished them through a brief expression of will. He commanded the earth zeal around the Demonic Spirits to swallow them up, and it did.

The imp died similarly, as did the felbeast. There was nothing on this layer of Hell strong enough to threaten one of Theo’s women by his side, let alone the man himself. He was a powerful sorcerer realm spirit cultivator and a gold muscle body cultivator. It would take a fifth-order demon to even survive one of his punches.

Rather than search for paths leading deeper down, Theo made his own entrance. The only thing between him and the deeper levels of Hell was a bit of earth, and the earth zeal ley lines ran as thick as rain barrels here. He could dive into any one of them and make his way all the way down to the seventh layer.

But Theo didn’t just want to go deep himself, and he wasn’t sure how strong this Lady of Darkness was. From all accounts, she was the regional hegemon of Hell and incredibly powerful. It would be best to avoid her until he had Sam and Dean with him. For now, though, he would stay out of her sight.

“Everyone stand back,” Theo commanded. He pointed his hand at the earth before him, and it parted like an ancient hidden door long-hidden was now opening for their passage.

Under his will, he crafted a spiral staircase heading down, at least until he broke through to the next layer.

“Hmm... that’s strange,” Theo said.

“What? What’s strange? Theo?” Sava asked, eyes perking up as she hoped for another precious alchemy ingredient.

“We’re upside down. Either that or the layer beneath us is upside down. If we were one layer down, we’d be falling from where we’re standing to the ceiling above us,” Theo explained. “What a peculiar place. It’s a physical location but, at the same time, very metaphysical. Without the peculiar life and death zeal the people around here call Divine and Demonic Aura, this would just be an ordinary hole in the ground. But the presence of so much raw zeal has transformed it into a magical place.

“So... can we harvest it? The death zeal, I mean,” Sava asked hopefully.

Theo shook his head. “Not without collapsing everything. It’s possible we could use a zeal concentration array to manipulate the various concentrations of death zeal within the hells. In fact, I think that’s already happening to some extent with different levels of death zeal stratifying at different layers based on quality.”

“So after we kick this Lady of Darkness out, we could turn the seventh layer into a cultivation and alchemy wonderland for Segolas and other necromancers like him?”

Theo felt Minvera approved of that course of action.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Theo warned. “Some of these demons might be pretty strong.”

Theo and his group headed deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. The empty grassy plains they first encountered soon turned into rocky, mountainous terrain and then finally endless fields under a murky red sky.

The fiends reminded Theo a lot of medieval peasant farmers. They cultivated the land and ate the grain they grew from it. From what he could observe, the wheat had no nutritional benefits, but it pulled an ever so small quantity of Demonic Aura out of the air and into the fiends who ate it. It was a terribly inefficient way to cultivate, but these fiends would eventually get bigger and stronger with a few hundred years of farming.

“Cultivation by farming. How absurd,” Theo chuckled.

“Think of how much time they’d save if they just learned some basic tenants of alchemy!” Sava replied. “I imagine the conversion rate of zeal within the grain and eventually into the bread they eat is terrible!”

While they walked, Theo and his companions made no move to hide. Eventually, the demons on this level spotted them. But these demons were smart enough not to confront Theo and his comrades before alerting everyone else.

Demons were gathering in twos and threes from all the surrounding little hamlets, and a few had run to that big tower in the center of all the small farming villages, clearing, hoping to recruit the aid of whatever powerful fiend lived there.

Not that Theo minded. They’d vastly underestimated his senses while trying to hide from him. The fiends thought a few stalks of uncut wheat were enough to conceal them as they spied on his group a mere hundred meters away. They could have been ten kilometers away, and Theo would still have been able to listen in on their conversation from afar as though he were right on top of them.

“The one in front is definitely a human, but what about the others?”

“I don’t like the look of them. Pointed ears! Only we’re supposed to have pointed ears!”

“They’re unnaturally beautiful as well. It gives me the creeps. Do you think they could be seraph?”

“What would seraph be doing on the third layer? No, this is trouble. Maybe they’re outsiders from beyond the Sacred Seas. You know how strange some of those gods from abroad can get...”

“Heavens above, I didn’t think we’d ever need to deal with invaders from beyond the seas. Don’t the seraph usually take care of those incursions?”

“The seraph wouldn’t lift a finger to help us. If they were quiet enough and made their intentions clear, the seraph might just ignore them, laughing as these invaders try to hack their way through the Seven Hells.”

“Lady of Darkness protect us. Hopefully, the Demon Lord can take care of them.”

Theo was particularly excited to see this Demon Lord that everyone was whispering about. The Demon Lord turned out to be a large and brawny fiend at roughly the latter half of the bronze realm of body cultivation if whatever these demons did instead of cultivation could even be measured by those metrics.

“You came to the wrong part of Hell, human! You and your pretty pointy-eared women there will be--“ His voice was abruptly cut short as Theo’s eyes glowed red, and he turned to stone. Just like that, the fight was done before it could even begin.

“Aww... that was anticlimactic,” Eltiana pouted.

“Sorry, I’ll let you girls get the next one.”

Note:

Hey guys, so I was getting some writing done because I couldn't sleep and it was late at night/early in the morning. I'd taken some Nyquill and had a bit of that covid brain fog, but I figured I could power through it despite the two of them working hand in hand to slow my faculties.

Writing was going rather well until I realized that I'd written the last five paragraphs about Theo, Sava, Eltiana, and Assyrus adventuring in Hell rather than Darren and his companions!

It was a bit of a funny goof on my end, but I figured I'd just write it to the end of the scene. It was flowing much easier than the chapter I was supposed to be writing, and I thought you guys would enjoy it.

I haven't gone crazy yet, even though it might have seemed like it when you started reading this chapter!

This won't count toward the weekly chapter count. It's just something extra I finished for myself for a laugh and figured I'd share to let you all know I'm perfectly healthy and getting better.