The planar rift opened at the bottom of a dry runoff ditch, two miles outside the gates of Low Ember.
Dante stepped out first, boots hitting the hard, black earth of the ravine. He wore a heavy canvas jacket purchased from a military surplus store in the heart of the human city, tailored loose along the back to avoid outlining the two pale marks across his shoulder blades where the ivory feathers remained retracted. Maria vaulted down from the lip of the embankment right behind him, the force of her two hundred pounds sending fine gravel crunching beneath her heavy leather boots.
The carbon steel bar was strapped diagonally across her back with two strips of industrial belting, its rounded butt nearly brushing the back of her knees.
"Wind is blowing from the north today," Maria remarked, tugging a black bandana over her nose to keep out the grit. "Smells like burnt motor oil."
"That's the outpost foundry," Dante replied, settling the straps of his backpack. "They fire up the scrap furnaces every Monday to melt down monster armor brought in from the plains by hunters."
They climbed the hard-packed dirt embankment to reach the main road.
The road wasn't paved. It was a wide ribbon of volcanic slag compacted beneath the heavy treads of steam tractors and iron crawlers. In the distance, rising against the purple sky of the Ash Wastes, the brick chimneys of Low Ember pumped continuous plumes of gray smoke.
The outpost stood as one of the largest commercial hubs in the Fourth Minor Continent. It boasted no polished stone fortress walls. Instead, the settlement was enclosed by a double perimeter of upright railroad ties driven into the dirt, laced with thick barbed wire, and guarded by corrugated steel watchtowers every hundred yards.
They crossed through the main gate without stopping.
The two guards stationed at the checkpoint were lesser demons of the short-horn line: standing over six and a half feet tall, with coarse, sandpaper-gray hide, wearing greasy leather dusters, bolt-action rifles slung over their shoulders.
One of the sentries eyed Maria's towering frame, took in the width of her shoulders, glanced down at the steel bar on her back, and gave a curt flick with the muzzle of his weapon to wave them through.
Nobody asked for paperwork at the gates of minor outposts. As long as you had the coin to pay trade fees and didn't pick firefights in the thoroughfare, the municipal brass couldn't care less where you had crawled out from.
Market street opened into a sprawling avenue of masonry warehouses and vendor stalls draped in grime-caked black canvas.
The road was stained with grease, muddy puddles, and the peelings of gray tubers tossed aside by merchants. Hundreds of souls bustled between the stalls, and it was there, taking in the crowd jostling before the storage yards, that Maria crossed her arms and glanced over her shoulder at Dante.
"I still find it weird seeing this many people walking around in shirts and pants down here," she murmured, pitching her voice beneath the rumble of machine shops.
"Hell isn't a torture dungeon with boiling cauldrons, Maria," Dante replied in the same low tone, matching her pace. "That's just stories priests on Earth concocted to scare peasants. Hell is a functioning society with an integrated system."
He pointed his chin discreetly toward a crew of gaunt laborers hauling heavy tool chests toward a boiler workshop. Each wore gray coveralls with a red patch stitched over the breast, stamped with six black numbers in indelible ink.
"Those are damned souls," Dante explained. "Humans who died on Earth with heavy records logged in the judgment matrix. The system drops each of them into whichever continent matches the sins they racked up. Violent offenders end up in the iron and blood continents. Thieves, swindlers, and misers land in the trade rings and heavy mining pits to work off their debt in labor."
"Can they die again?"
"If a sledgehammer cracks their skull and zeroes out their hit points, yes. The soul unravels into ether and gets siphoned into the continent's core. Nobody reincarnates twice down here. That's why they clock twelve-hour shifts at the smelters. They need cash to buy food, pay rent on their bunkhouses, and purchase basic rations from the administration."
"What about the others?" Maria gestured toward a stall merchant hawking smoked lizard meat. The fellow had four small eyes set across his forehead, a stubby raw-leather tail, and serrated fangs poking out past closed lips.
"He's a native," Dante said, glancing at the stallkeeper. "Demons aren't dead souls. They're born down here from lineages that have inhabited these continents for hundreds of generations. They're the indigenous population. They hold full civil rights, pay lower tax rates, and run the merchant guilds."
"And what does that make us?"
"We're illegals," Dante offered a dry half-smirk. "Two living humans slipping in and out through rifts without paying soul tolls or registering with the central ministry. If this continent's governor ever catches wind that I have unrestricted passage between here and Earth, he'll send three rifle battalions to take my head off and dissect my planar transit core."
"Let them try," Maria slapped her open palm against the leather grip of the steel bar slung across her back. The metal gave a dull thud. "This bar is properly weighted."
They turned down the third side alley, where food stalls gave way to warehouses stocking hunter supplies and alchemical reagents.
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Dante pulled up before a heavy timber door bearing a bolted cast-iron plaque: Orom's Ores and Salts Repository.
The interior smelled of crushed sulfur, vegetable oil, and quicklime.
Behind a long counter of riveted steel plate, an old man with ashen skin and forearms crisscrossed with old forge burns was using balance scales to weigh amber crystals. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles and bore the brand of the damned inked on the right side of his neck: a string of six black digits denoting his arrival intake.
The merchant looked up as the heavy door bumped shut against the frame. His gaze drifted past Maria's towering frame, then settled on Dante's composed stance.
"Morning, Master Orom," Dante said, stepping up to the counter and sliding his backpack off one shoulder.
"Dante," the old man rasped, his voice rough from decades of breathing stone dust. "Three weeks since you last showed your face. Figured that Scrap Burrower along the rail tracks ground you into axle grease."
"The Burrower ended up as road scrap," Dante placed his palms on the steel counter. "I need raw stock. Four blocks of high-density limestone, five pounds of conductive copper dust, and three vials of distilled basilisk sap."
The merchant furrowed his brow, tugging open a heavy drawer beneath the counter.
"Sap went up. The Third Minor Continent shut down its barge bridges because of a fire-worm outbreak along the border. Eight hundred scrip per two-hundred-milliliter vial."
"Eight hundred?" Maria stepped forward, her broad shoulders throwing a shadow across half the old man's counter. "Last week you charged five hundred for a half-liter bottle, you old crook."
The trader didn't flinch, but nudged his glasses up his hooked nose with a bony knuckle, taking note of the size of the girl's fists.
"Supply and demand, kid. Barges aren't moving, supply dries up. If you don't want to pay, hike down to the Third's marshlands and squeeze the sap out of the gland with your bare hands."
"I'll give you seven hundred," Dante stepped in before Maria's hand drifted toward her steel bar.
He reached into the inside pocket of his canvas coat and pulled out a thick wad of gray banknotes bound by a broad black rubber band. The Fourth Continent bank notes bore the purple seal of authenticity alongside the printed signature of the ash superintendent.
He counted out twenty-five hundred-scrip notes with a flick of his thumb, slapping the paper onto the scale plate with a crisp snap.
"Twenty-one hundred for the three vials, plus four hundred for the limestone and copper. Twenty-five hundred total. Clean bills, no tears."
Old Orom eyed the stack, thumbed the edges to check the rag paper texture of official script, and scooped the money into the drawer with a quick sweep of grime-encrusted nails.
"Hold on."
He ducked through a low doorway at the back of the shop. Two minutes later, he returned carrying a wooden crate packed with three thick glass bottles filled with viscous green liquid, four white blocks of refined limestone the size of building bricks, and a twine-tied burlap pouch containing reddish copper powder.
Dante nested the vials in the center of his pack, shielding the glass with old clothes used as padding, then handed the limestone blocks to Maria's canvas sack.
The girl took the thirty pounds of stone in one hand, slinging the strap over her left shoulder as easily as a folded coat.
They left Orom's warehouse and walked to a corner stall serving hot brews in clay mugs.
Dante paid ten scrip for two mugs of bitter-root tea. The brew was black, thick, and scalded the throat with a taste reminiscent of coffee grounds brewed twice through an old rag filter.
They took seats on a splintered timber bench against the exterior wall of a cobbler shop, watching the flow of traffic down the main street.
"That map you picked up last week," Maria said, blowing across the rim of her clay mug before taking a sip. "It said Hell has nine major continents and fifteen minor ones, right?"
"Right," Dante broke a hard biscuit from his pocket in two, handing the larger half to her.
"We spent seven full years just roaming the fringes of this Fourth Minor Continent and the entry rim of the Plain of Iron Souls," she chewed the biscuit slowly. "The sheer scale of this place makes no sense."
Dante rested his mug on his knee, watching the dark smoke drifting from the chimneys of Low Ember against the purple horizon.
"Earth has roughly two hundred million square miles of total surface area," he began, his gray eyes calculating scales with detached precision. "The Fourth Minor Continent, where we are sitting right now, spans almost the entire landmass of South America. And the system registers it merely as a minor continent."
Maria froze with the biscuit at her lips, staring at him.
"A minor continent?"
"The smallest of the fifteen," Dante confirmed. "The Plain of Iron Souls, the First of the Major Continents, is three times the size of all Eurasia. There are mountain ranges there that take four months of unbroken marching on foot to cross if you don't possess a pass for the armored trains. There are slag deserts in the Fifth Great Continent where ambient surface heat melts standard boot soles within three minutes of walking."
He swallowed a mouthful of the bitter tea, letting it cut through the dust coating his tongue.
"What about the deepest rings? The Eighth and Ninth Continents?"
"Nobody in the frontier settlements has charts for the Eighth or Ninth," Dante answered in a hushed tone. "Guild lore calls them Tier Five and Six domains. That's where the capitals of the archdemons stand alongside the primordial cores of soul administration. Crossing into those lands at Level fifteen or seventeen is suicide. Ambient atmospheric Mana pressure alone will collapse the lungs of anyone whose attributes fall short of fifty."
Maria looked at her own knuckles, where thick calluses marked the base of her fingers from gripping the steel bar. She closed her fist slowly, feeling the dense structure of her bones forged by Sentinel levels.
"So we're still standing on the front porch."
"We're on the sidewalk outside the fence, Maria," Dante corrected, setting his empty mug onto the packed dirt. "Everything we've done up to this point has been culling stray pests along the backyard ditch to bank cash and pay our rent in the human city. The real climb up the system hasn't even begun."
Maria finished the last bite of biscuit, dusted the crumbs off her jeans, and rose from the timber bench with a clean pop of her knees.
She looked down the street filled with branded souls bearing tattooed neck serials, workers hauling ore carts, and demonic sentries hefting heavy rifles.
No trace of fear showed in her brown eyes. Only that same cold, relentless stubbornness forged the night she found a boy bleeding out in the alley mud behind her home.
"Good," she said, adjusting the shoulder strap of her steel bar. "I hate games that end quick.”