To Michael, the demons he had arranged to guard each level of the Abyss had all been chosen by him according to their different strengths, as far as possible.
But he had forgotten that those guards, now called demons, had once been high-rank angels of Heaven as well.
And the opponents these former high-rank angels now faced in the clearing-the-levels game were their former colleagues.
For both sides, this so-called game was no different from having them kill each other.
Mammon raised his head and looked at the floating spheres of light, each reflecting the situation of a different level’s guards and challengers in the Abyss.
As the guard of the Eighth Level, he did not need to perform his duty for the moment. Whatever else, even if his opponent was Lucifer, there was no way for him to skip the seven earlier levels and appear directly before him.
Michael’s so-called game still seemed somewhat cruel to Mammon.
He asked Michael: “What exactly are you planning to do?”
The black-haired god turned his head, a trace of puzzlement surfacing on his face, as if weighing something, and after hesitating for a moment asked: “Mammon, is your head all right?”
Michael didn’t understand what Mammon was thinking, and only found his question funny.
“Even the angels of Heaven can understand from just reading those words what I want to do and what they need to do.”
Mammon did not miss the flash of mockery in the other’s eyes as he said this.
No, of course he knew that Michael had arranged for them, the demons, to take the roles of guards, and as for the angels from Heaven, such as Gabriel and Lucifer, he wondered why they had agreed to Michael’s request.
“After they clear the levels, then what? Do you plan to let them go back?”
Michael: Oh, so that’s what he’s worried about.
Come to think of it, compared with him, an Archangel who had popped up halfway, the angels of Heaven were obviously closer to Mammon and the other fallen angels.
Michael had no complaint about this.
It was only that he felt Mammon thought of him as a bit too wicked.
Although his identity now was God of the Abyss, in the eyes of the demons other than Bael, he was undoubtedly Hell’s Demon King. As for Hell being renamed and the Demon King being given another title, they couldn’t accept it at all.
Michael couldn’t understand their insistence on that title, but had no intention of correcting it; anyway, in the eyes of outsiders they would still obey him, and that was enough.
Now, having heard Mammon’s worry directly from him, Michael gave an answer.
“If they clear the levels, they can naturally leave the Abyss; otherwise they’ll be trapped here.”
As the former God of Light, Michael was still very confident in his barriers. Whatever else, his barriers had been approved by Raziel himself, the barrier angel.
He had led the demons to attack Heaven for two reasons. One was to give these subjects of the Abyss some exercise so they wouldn’t be cooped up too long and feel unwell in body and mind. The other was to cover for himself. He was after all not Lucifer, and had no interest in power at all.
If not for being reborn for no reason, he would be wandering through various worlds right now.
Michael thought the answer settled it, but in Mammon’s view this was even more unbelievable than watching Michael fall with his own eyes.
Seeing the demon’s shocked look, Michael only shrugged: “I have no grudge against them either, so there’s no need to press them to death here.”
Mammon: “That’s what you say, but if you let them keep fighting when they can’t win, the level lords will have opinions, won’t they?”
He felt this was a bad move by Michael, which could easily push away the subordinates he had finally gotten.
“And what will you do if Lucifer and the others turn some other demons?”
Michael showed a look of sudden realization: “You’re right, that is possible.”
Before Mammon could breathe a sigh of relief, he heard his superior say: “But it doesn’t matter, at most a few level lords get replaced. It’s not such a big deal, is it? Worth you being so frightened.”
Mammon: “…”
Oh, he remembered, this one’s slacking was the kind that knew no place or time.
Thinking of the negative opinions Heaven’s angels had of Michael, Mammon said nothing more. The person concerned didn’t take it seriously, so what was he agonizing over here alone?
【You really don’t care about this kind of thing?】
The voice that sounded in his head gave Michael a bit of a headache.
He had forgotten that at this point in time, there was one very bored god who would drag him through a stretch of role-playing.
Only unlike his previous life, the other was still the god who wanted to destroy the world, while he was no longer the Michael of back then.
Until he found a definite means of stopping the world from restarting itself, Michael decided to play along with this god’s act.
【Who are you?】
Having been through it once, Michael was quite sure that when communicating in the mind, the other could not hear his tone. And this meant that this so-called role-playing could be kept up for a while.
He wasn’t good at acting and was unwilling to do things against his will, otherwise he wouldn’t have been criticized by Lucifer, back when he was obsessed with hymns, with words like “all technique and no feeling.”
As he expected, the other still used that false name, and if he hadn’t known this one’s true identity, Michael would truly have thought this god really could bend and stretch.
The Chaos god, Chaos?
Michael was truly curious why the other thought he would believe this name. Just because he had been human and come to a world of gods and angels, did he assume other mythological worlds must exist too? Like in the myths?
He had to say, this god trying to destroy the world wasn’t lacking in intelligence, only that his fake name made Michael suspicious.
Chaos and God were gods of two entirely different systems; how could they appear in one place?
In the previous life, it was for this very reason that Michael had been on guard from the start against the so-called Chaos god Chaos. And the god calling himself Chaos had never known, until his death, that the beginning of it all was precisely the identity he had imitated.
This time, however, Michael guessed wrong.
The other answered him this way.
【I am the Moon God.】
Michael: Damn!
Was he bullying him for having no memory, or did he think that switching to a god of another world with a changed gender was reasonable, and so just did away with the Moon Goddess and turned her into a Moon God?
Twitching the corner of his lips hard, Michael’s mood at that moment was truly hard to put into words.
He had thought the other’s impersonating the Chaos god Chaos was outrageous enough, never expecting that this time, because of his falling, the other would change the god he imitated as well.
So a question was now before him: in the previous life, he had been fooled into believing the Sun God was dead and that he needed to fill the vacancy of that god. If it was the same this time, did he have to be brothers with this fake god?
【You were meant to replace my elder brother who had fallen, to become the new Sun God, and were sent to another world. I never thought that, passing through this world, you would be detained by this world’s god.】
The heart Michael had been holding up finally died.
Okay, he had really gotten a brother out of nowhere, and the brother was a fake.
He shut his eyes hard, not wanting to look at this world anymore.
What kind of garbage was this!
Suppressing the urge to wipe out the counterfeit god, Michael gave the other some reaction, very unwillingly.
Because he remembered that although this guy was a fake, he was indeed a god, and extremely suspicious. Before everything was clear, he still had to put up a pretense with the other to gain part of the initiative.
【But I remember that I’m clearly of the light attribute?】
To prove he was truly surprised, Michael even used a rhetorical question; see how considerate he was.
The fake Moon God continued to spin his lies.
【The Sun God is also light; one can say he governs the sun, or also light. You are a special existence yourself, and it’s fine to call you the God of Light if you want.】
At this point, Michael was certain how deep this god’s obsession with the God of Light was; even when deceiving the other, he wouldn’t allow the divine office’s name to be changed.
Seeing that Michael was not very indignant, he asked a question.
【Because of this world’s god’s selfishness, you were not only sealed of your divine power but forced to become his subordinate… don’t you feel angry?】
Searching his heart, when Michael first learned of it he really had been very angry, so much so that he wanted to fight this world’s god directly. Later, learning the truth, he found that this god was the real scapegoat; it was clearly his own decision to abandon his memories and past, yet he made the god take the blame.
Michael decided he would sympathize with this world’s god for a few seconds.
He touched his nonexistent conscience, feeling great emotion.
【Very angry. See, as soon as I recovered my memories, didn’t I fall straight to Hell and become king there?】
The other: 【…】
Wait, he had no way to answer that. Angry, so fall? What kind of thinking led to this conclusion?
While Michael was matching wits with the other god, in the other levels of the Abyss, apart from Lucifer and Gabriel, who had already broken through to the Fifth Level, the other angels were all trapped on the Third Level.
It wasn’t that the guard of this Third Level was so strong, only that…
“In the Divine Era year 1111, what was the name of the archangel who led the angel armies?”
The angel armies: …Nobody said clearing the levels also meant answering questions!
For this group of angels who had been trained as warriors from the start, academic classes were really not attended much. Never mind asking them about those very ancient histories; they didn’t even remember much of recent history.
Lucifer and Gabriel had not expected this level’s test either. After beating up several demons guarding the Abyss and reaching the Third Level, they had been dumbfounded for a while too.
Fortunately, this question wasn’t hard. If asked why, it was only that those battles had been handled by him and Gabriel, and his memory of them was still clear.
On the Seventh Level, Lucifer was almost stumped.
The demon guarding the Seventh Level was skilled in illusions.
“Long time no see, Your Highness Lucifer.”
Lucifer’s face twisted: “It’s you.”