Chthon, the ancient god of black magic, was one of the most dangerous beings in existence. He was old enough to make history look like a sketch, powerful enough to poison entire worlds, and so deeply tied to dark sorcery that even ti itself seed to lose its grip on him. If there was a true throne of evil in this universe, he was the kind of monster that could claim it without asking permission.
The sky above this place was a lid of black cloud, heavy and suffocating. Blood-red lightning ripped through the storm overhead, splitting the darkness open in violent flashes and washing the land in a scarlet rain.
A thick fog of crimson mist drifted in every direction, carrying the sour stink of blood and brimstone.
From above, the land below looked like a world that had been burned clean and then torn apart. Cracks webbed across the scorched earth. Rivers of molten rock moved like living veins through the continent, and the heat rising from them warped the air in shimring waves. Sulfur hung everywhere, sharp enough to sting the nose and sit bitter on the tongue.
Countless human-shaped wraiths drifted with the lava, their howls cutting straight into the soul. Everywhere Drex looked, there was only wasteland and the occasional pulse of red light.
The air was blazing hot, but the place still gave off a bone-deep coldness. The entire dinsion felt wrong, polluted by a chill that had no business existing in a world so full of fire.
Flas roared up into the sky. The sll of sulfur never faded. All around them, demons and devils of every shape and size threw their arms up and howled, filling the broken highlands with savage noise. Now and then, stronger creatures tore weaker ones apart and devoured them on the spot.
This place was the purest expression of the law of the jungle.
No rcy. No sympathy. No justice. Only strength.
"So this is hell," Drex said.
Between this life and the one before it, this was his first ti ever stepping into the underworld.
Back on Krypton, that was not even worth comparing. In the DC world, Heaven and Hell were two of the ugliest powers in existence. If he had gone there once, there was a decent chance he would never have co back.
Marvel's version of Hell was different. Whether it had been shattered by so monster, broken from the beginning, or simply broken in the process of existing, no one seed to agree.
And "Satan" in Marvel was not one single being. It was a title held by rulers of various hell dinsions. Plenty of demons had claid the na in public, but if one of them stood up at a summit and declared himself Satan, he had better be ready to be ripped apart by every other lord in the room.
Countless small fragnts of hell had been seized by those rulers. Each one called himself a demon king, each one searched for the largest surviving shard of the underworld, and each one dread of becoming master of all hell dinsions, the true Satan.
In the DC universe, Satan was on a level comparable to Marvel's omniversal transcendent beings, maybe even higher.
But in Marvel, the Satan throne was only a multiversal prize.
That said, Drex still wanted it.
"You should be fine," the Ancient One said at his side. "With your Father Tier strength, this should be manageable."
The two living intruders had already drawn the attention of the demons and devils roaming the fragnt of hell.
"Ancient One," Drex asked, his electromagnetic force surging around him, "how long do you need?"
The mont he had sensed that this hell fragnt had no magnetic field, his expression had changed.
Not just the fragnt itself. The demons and devils had no magnetic field either.
Fortunately, they still had atomic structures. If they had not, then Drex would have had no choice but to carve a path through hell with his fists alone.
"I do not know," the Ancient One said honestly. "This fragnt is unfamiliar. I need ti to understand it before I can hide it properly and keep the hell lords from finding it."
She spoke openly about classified matters, apparently unconcerned that Drex knew.
Of course, he already knew most of it.
"So you've already hidden a lot of hell fragnts?" Drex asked, mildly surprised.
"Not only hell fragnts. Other dinsions as well." She glanced at him. "Are you interested?"
"I have no interest in giving up my body to beco a dinsional demon," Drex said calmly. "My body cos first. Everything else is second."
The demons rushed them.
Drex stepped in front of the Ancient One.
A subtle but rciless magnetic force spread outward. It shifted the magnetic field around the demons and devils, changing the binding between their atoms in microscopic ways. The alteration was too small to see directly, but in reality it produced a violent twisting force.
The demons and devils all warped into a single mass of contorted flesh.
Then the scorched ground began to tremble.
Rumble.
Rumble-rumble.
The lava rivers churned violently. Horned creatures clawed their way out of the molten rock, their eye sockets hollow and black, their bodies reduced to skin stretched over bone, as if hunger had gnawed them hollow for thousands of years.
They crawled free from the burning lava stream and opened and closed their mouths with hideous clicking sounds. One of them casually scooped an angry spirit out of the lava and swallowed it in three or five bites like it was fruit.
Across the wasteland, cracks split open and swarms of bat-winged imps poured out, mixed with monsters of wildly varying sizes.
Bone, rotten flesh, rusted iron, severed limbs, and every other dark material imaginable had been piled together into creatures that looked like nightmares given shape. Their designs were grotesque, creative, and endless. If you could imagine it, hell had probably already grown it.
But on closer inspection, there was one thing they all lacked.
Blood.
They had none.
And that was why they craved it.
Hellfire roared into the sky. Sulfur burned in the air so thickly it clawed at the back of the throat. Beneath the black sky, red light blazed everywhere, and the screams of battle thundered across the dinsion.
Between the jagged mountain ridges and the seas of fla, the demons and devils rushed together in a chaotic army. The battlefield was grotesquely brutal. Limbs flew. Flesh splattered. Every now and then, the sound of chewing followed the carnage, as if the battlefield itself was eating the dead.
It was hell in every sense of the word.
Then ca the blast.
The demons and devils erupted into chaos as Drex's entire body was wrapped in the power of the dragon. For creatures tied to magic, his attacks were lethal.
A deep blue dragon shadow coiled around him. He threw a punch.
The dragon shadow surged out with the strike, and everything in its path was ground to dust as if it had been run through superheated plasma.
Drex did not even stop there.
He gathered hundreds of blue dragon shadows at once.
"Hundred Dragons of Mount Lu!"
The blue dragons tore across the battlefield in a devastating sweep. Nothing stood in their way. Demons and devils alike scattered in panic, fleeing for their lives.
When Drex returned to the Ancient One's side, he felt the dragon power inside him swelling again.
The more he used it, the stronger it seed to beco.
And more than that, it was quietly reshaping his body.
He did not know yet whether that change was good or bad, but one thing was obvious.
He was getting stronger.
The Ancient One sat nearby with her eyes closed, unmoving, showing no reaction at all.
By now, five days had passed.
At the beginning, Drex had even been curious enough to study the hell creatures themselves.
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