Grrk.
Grrk.
The sound of something hard scraping across a stone floor echoed through the air.
Something like a massive boulder was moving.
No—on closer inspection, it had eyes, a nose, a mouth.
Grrk.
It was the severed head of a high-ranking demon that had once ruled this entire region.
Its body, larger than a mountain, lay tumbling somewhere far in the distance.
Tap.
Tap.
The one dragging the head was a woman.
Hair bleached snow-white cascaded down the nape of her neck.
A white suit, spotless despite the blood pooling all around her.
Eyes and a dress shirt the color of blood.
A necktie dark as pitch.
Two horns curving boldly from her head—large and razor-sharp.
Her face was beautiful in a way that seemed utterly incompatible with this hellscape.
Balanced features, skin without a single blemish.
She looked like a finely carved statue.
But her eyes told a different story.
Eerie eyes stained the color of blood.
Those unfocused eyes held nothing at all.
No rage, no sorrow.
Not even boredom.
Holding nothing whatsoever, they simply stared into empty space with a vacant, hollow gaze.
Like a taxidermied thing.
Grrk.
Thud.
She stopped dragging the head.
Then her head slowly turned.
From between the cracks in the rocks, from behind pools of lava, from behind crumbled stone pillars, from within the shadows—hundreds of pairs of eyes that had been watching her vanished all at once.
The white demon stood motionless where she had stopped.
She didn’t know how long she’d been standing there.
She’d never had much of a sense of time to begin with.
How many years it had been.
Or rather, how many hundreds of years—she didn’t know that either.
She’d tried counting at first, but at some point she’d forgotten and given up.
Maybe it had been thousands of years.
The sky without a sun was always red.
This place.
Hell.
“…”
A very long time ago.
The day she’d been swept up in a Gate.
She had fallen here.
At first, she’d apparently hidden and run just to survive.
When she was hungry, she tore at the corpses of nameless things.
When night came, she tried to sleep through her terror.
But that was ancient history now.
The more she adapted to this place, the more her body had slowly changed.
From black hair to white.
From male to female.
From human to demon.
“…Hah.”
The white demon let out a sigh.
There was no sign of anything around her anymore.
How dull.
“I want to go home…”
She stretched her hand up toward the sky.
She didn’t know what she was reaching for.
There was nothing in the empty air.
Ah.
She wanted to eat something good.
No, even instant noodles would do.
But what were instant noodles again.
She knew.
She definitely knew.
Curly strands of noodles, and hot broth… right, there was broth.
Was it red?
Or yellow?
She thought it might have been both.
The smell….
What did it smell like.
She thought she’d missed it.
She was certain she had missed it.
But the exact smell—she couldn’t remember it anymore.
It seemed to hover at the tip of her nose, only to slip away before she could catch it.
Given how many years she’d spent in this place, there was nothing to be done about it.
That was when it happened.
Far in the distance, she felt a dimension twist.
She turned her head.
It was a sensation she had never felt before.
An unfamiliar feeling she hadn’t experienced in a very, very long time.
Like being tugged by a thread from somewhere far away—a strange, faintly ticklish sensation.
She flew toward it.
Fear of the unknown was something she had forgotten long ago.
***
How far had she flown.
There was a gap.
A thin crack that had formed between spaces.
A low-ranking demon was trying to poke its head through the gap, so she reached out.
Flames rose without a sound.
No scream.
Not even ash remained of the demon.
Tap.
The white demon landed where the ash had been.
Too small to call a rift, too crude to call a door.
But it was undeniably there.
“…”
It hadn’t formed naturally.
She peered into the gap.
It was a kind of summoning circle.
Crudely made, but the intent was clear.
Someone had been trying to draw something through to the other side.
And the direction it connected to was….
‘Earth.’
She held her breath for a moment.
It was an old word.
So old it felt almost foreign.
A place with a sun, with wind, with instant noodles.
And….
“Where I came from.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, she leapt into the crack.
Whoosh!
Her body was immediately engulfed in flames.