As it turned out, Charlene had been right. Victor did end up in Hell after all.

It was a horrible place, but not for the reasons Victor had expected.

Hell was a fiery, brimstone cave, like the religions of Earth foretold; but they had moved away from burning souls and into new, more inventive forms of punishment. On one side, Victor noticed row after row of captive humans bound to chairs in front of a large mirror, forced to watch some kind of horribly acted, medieval reality TV show. On the other side, other damned souls fashioned tiny, hand-held mirrors reminding the adventurer of mobile phones’ screens, while being whipped by imps.

Victor would have loved nothing more than free those poor souls from their eternal torment, had he not been surrounded by insectoid fiends. Three dozen of the creatures looking like thinner, moth-like cousins of Malfy pointed sharp, poisoned spears at him.

One figure, however, differed from the others and looked at Victor with pupilless blue eyes. A hybrid creature between a woman and an insect with greyish skin, she had two large, golden moth wings with a skull motif growing out of her back. A black, skintight dress covered her entire body, except for sharp claws where the fingers ended, and a mink-jacket like ring of white fur around the neck. She was eerily beautiful and elegant, in a creepy ice queen sort of way. Only two horn-like antennae growing out of her long, silver hair betrayed her demonic nature.

Her face looked a bit too much like Brandon Maure’s to Victor’s liking, though.

“A new sacrifice.” Much to Victor’s amazement, the female demon sounded remarkably soft-spoken. “You are not a virgin maiden.”

“Neither have I been mistaken for one,” the adventurer replied, tightening his hold on his scythe with one hand and looking under his cowl for the Agarthan Warp Stone with the other. He had no idea if it could teleport him out of Hell, but he saw no other escape route.

The bug fiends raised their blades against his chin and his hands, stopping him dead in his tracks.

However, the demoness leader raised an eyebrow at him, more confused than anything. “You can understand High Infernal?”

He wasn’t supposed to? Thank the twelve gods for that Perk, maybe he could talk his way out the way he did with the Moon Beast. Victor immediately used Monster Insight on the fiends’ leader, desperate for a morsel of information.

Isabelle Maure

Archdevil of Vanity and Mindless Entertainment (Demon/Insect)

Strong against: Light, Darkness, Drain, Mind-Control effects, Insta-death, all negative status effects, Frost, Lightning, Unholy, Fire, Acid, Screens.

Weak against: Holy, Wind, Demonslayer, and Bugslayer.

The mistress of blades, and one of Hell’s corporate overlords. The fiendish mind who invented procrastination, gladiator fights, and Outremonde’s equivalent of reality TV. Owns many businesses dedicated to enslaving souls through the power of screens, such as Infernal Cable and Helltube, but secretly regrets sacrificing her golden years for her career.