The air here was unbreathable. Clammy, saturated with blood, urine, and fear. The walls oozed a greasy dampness, covered in claw marks, dried blood, and strips of torn flesh.
Moans rose from rusted iron cages—some held children with lifeless eyes, others contained dismembered adults, some still alive.
Their eyes no longer blinked. They wept blood.
The northern wall had exploded, hurling stones and shards of bone across the room. A figure stood in the dust.
Not a human figure.
Something else.
Dante.
His coat, soaked in black blood, dragged behind him like a shroud. On his back, Ginny crawled like a hydra.
The prisoners didn't even dare scream. They looked at the shadow standing in the mist… and thought they saw Death itself.
A guard screamed : — "GET HIM! HE'S A FUCKING HERETIC!"
He raised his sword.
Too slow.
Dante was already on him.
He ripped the man's jaw off with his bare hands. A spray of blood splashed across the wall. The guard tried to scream, but only a grotesque gurgle came from his open throat. He staggered backward, choking on spit, blood, and scraps of tongue hanging from his teeth.
— "Scream again. I dare you," Dante said coldly.
He grabbed the man by the throat, drove his fingers into the flesh, and tore out his spine through his neck, with a sickening noise of suction and cracking. The body collapsed lifelessly in a pool of blackened blood.
The others stepped back.
Too late.
Another guard lunged at him, sword raised. Dante, without even turning his head, lifted one hand.
— "FuneralWave…"
The man's body folded in half with an invisible shockwave. His ribcage burst from within. His heart shot out of his mouth, still beating, and landed on the ground with a wet splat.
— "Filthy demon!" bellowed the commander, a massive man clad in armor made of human skin, stitched together from the hides of captives.
He brandished an axe infused with dark energy.
— "I'm gonna split you in two, bastard!"
Dante smiled.
He opened his arms. — "Go ahead. Try."
The commander leapt.
Dante pivoted, dodged, and drove two fingers into the man's eyes with savage violence. The eyeballs burst. The scream was inhuman. Dante grabbed his head and twisted slowly… very slowly, until each vertebra popped with a drawn-out, awful clack-clack-clack.
He released the body, which convulsed silently.
— "Three," he said, still counting.
A fourth guard screamed and began to pray, invoking a defensive technique.
— "LigaturaDoloris !" Chains erupted from the ground and wrapped around Dante's limbs.
— "Call on the Berlin Wall if you want, it won't stop me from making you pay."
But Ginny, howling with rage, materialized as a black wolf, lunged, and bit deep into the man's throat. She tore out an entire chunk of trachea. Blood sprayed like a fountain. The technique dissolved in a rain of dead chains.
The awakened soldier tried to crawl, choking on his own blood.
Dante approached.
— "You're the one who seals the slaves, aren't you ?"
The man nodded frantically in supplication.
Dante placed his boot on the man's back, slowly pressing down until his ribs cracked against the floor, the shards driven into his lungs. He suffocated slowly, in an endless rattle.
The last one was the overseer, a fat man with a wart-covered face. He wept on his knees, hands clasped.
— "I-I have children, please… I-I'll give you all the gold!"
— "Do you feed your children with the flesh of others' ?"
The fat man shook his head, trembling.
— "No! I-I was forced, it was the others, I-I…"
Dante raised his hand.
A thread of black energy curled around the man's skull.
He screamed in agony until his head exploded like an overripe fruit. His body stood upright for a second, then collapsed like a sack of limp meat.
Dante looked around. He breathed deeply.
The survivors in the cages stared at their liberator. None spoke. They were afraid—not of him, but of what he was.
Their liberator… was worse than their tormentors.
Dante knelt beside a child.
His eye glowed with a dark light. He placed two fingers on the boy's forehead.
— "You will forget. This nightmare. This place. These faces."
A black halo enveloped the child.
He did the same for each of them. A form of mercy.
Then he stood.
— "Go. All of you. And never come back."
The captives ran. Barefoot, bloody. Dead inside—but alive.
Ginny sat at his side, her fur matted with blood.
Dante turned to the desk.
A chest. Jewels. Bags of gold. Damning letters. Human trafficking contracts, mutant sales, and curses for hire.
He made a sign with his hand. A sphere of shadow engulfed everything.
He tucked it into his coat.
— "Ill-gotten gains do not benefit the purchaser in any way."
He turned away.
The smell of blood, the warmth of still-fresh corpses, the utter silence of a place emptied of its evil.
This… was his peace in Hell.