Ran didn't believe this day was ever going to end. Nothing was a bigger warning to beware adventuring in Naraku that day.
He'd have called it a hellish day if he was already in hell.
His problem started when Mukoku refused to stop telling him the story of the shaman.
When the Wraithwagon had approached the city he'd thought the excitement was finally over.
And then he'd heard the noises.
He'd looked up into the sky, driven by instinct, to see a familiar sight that had shaken him to his core.
And now he found himself again in a situation that was his worst nightmare.
The City of Souls, which also happened to be the City of Blazes and Torment, was a burning realm sculpted from every form of flame imaginable.
It was a vision of pure, undying fire. Buildings formed from seething lava rose like temples of molten bone.
Roads gleamed with solidified blue fire, crackling with each step. The air above shimmered with clouds of drifting gas-fire, casting pulsing glows like miniature auroras and rainbows.
Nothing in the city stood still; flames danced even in the shadows. The heat was beyond measure, a roaring furnace that should have incinerated any mortal body.
But it didn't burn him.
Ran sprinted barefoot across the glasslike floor of solid fire, his strange, half-metallic skin showing forth and glinting like forged steel under the blazing sky—a scary resemblance to that of the creature up above.
A damning confirmation.
The spirits of a dozen mortals damned to hell ran beside him. None of them questioned why the fire did not consume him. Neither did he. Not now.
Above them, the sky was breaking.
A Lagarakei had come.
It fell from the heavens like a sin cast out of time. A massive, tentacled horror of pure shadow and decay, its body larger than a continent, coiling endlessly through the sky like a blind god searching for purchase.
Where its limbs struck, entire towers of flame imploded into embers. Demon strongholds vaporized. Entire flocks of winged fiends were torn from the air, flung into the endless firestorms below.
Ran didn't look back. He didn't need to.
The ground quaked with every movement of the beast. Cracks ruptured through streets of sapphire fire, vomiting geysers of green blaze.
The atmosphere dimmed as the shadow of the Lagarakei eclipsed the burning clouds. Tentacles the size of cathedrals smashed into the City of Souls, folding layers of the city into rubble and hurling flaming debris like meteors.
And still, Rad did nothing else but run.
Around him, spirits screamed as their ethereal bodies were pulled into the vortex of chaos. Some vanished under the crushing weight of collapsing flame-structures. Others were whipped into the air by windstorms of boiling heat.
Above the Lagarakei, upon its very back, a full demon army fought with suicidal fury. They stood atop its hide, small as insects compared to its vast, ink-black back, and struck it with war lances, breathing infernal fire, detonating hell bombs that burst like suns. The Lagarakei didn't flinch. Each step it took ground the landscape beneath it into flickering ash.
A new tentacle came down like a hammer.
Ran dove fast just as the building ahead collapsed in a cyclone of plasma. He crashed into a sheet of burning mist, rolled, and burst through a veil of red-hot smoke, sparks flying off his half-metal skin. The solid fire beneath him rippled and shattered, but he kept running, unburnt, eyes stinging.
"Keep up," he shouted at a spirit that was lagging behind.
The man, European in appearance, hurried up to keep pace with him. "I can't find my daughter."
Ran didn't know what about that statement to be baffled by or if he even had the time to be baffled by anything in this situation.
"You have a daughter here in hell?"
A look of shake crossed the man's face. "I was killed by a bomb launched by terrorists on a vacation in the Mideast. A vacation wi...with my daughter. That was how we ended up in hell."
Ran was panting but had curiosity burning inside him now. "What's so bad about having a vacation that made you end up here?"
"We committed several abominable acts that should not be made amongst family," he said.
Ran bit his lips and decided this was not the time for this. He was shocked, completely taken off guard and had even gasped. But to not sound unethical, this man's story wasn't entirely uncommon in his part of the world.
some of the tribes of the orient people had strange traditions.
"You can find your daughter later, mister, now you need to keep running. You need to survive in order to search for her later," he said, not adding that it would be so if only his daughter survived.
People who die for a second time in hell face a horrible existence. After a person dies naturally, they only burn for as many years as they'd lived. With the Blazes, that could be felt as a month or two weeks. But should they die again, that time would exponentially increase seven thousand, seven hundred and seven fold.
No spirit certainly wanted to die in hell, and that fully explained the crowd running along with him to any place capable of providing safety.
Hopefully they don't run into the fields of punishment.
To his left, a demon general was torn in half.
To his right, a burning tower leaned over as the Lagarakei dragged a limb across it, demolishing half the city district like a careless god tearing paper.
Still—he ran.
The spirits that survived followed, moaning, some crawling.
"Come on, move! MOVE!!" He shouted for them to keep moving.
His own breath steamed as if he were breathing molten vapor, and yet, he endured. Something inside him—maybe the organo-metallic mutation, maybe something older—kept the inferno at bay.
In the distance, a mental echoing bell rang across the city, resonating through the soul, summoning the retreat. The Lagarakei had proven too vast, too ancient, too unstoppable.
Ran was not surprised that they were retreating. He doubted a place like this had a pure mortal to deal with this.
He reached a cracked fissure in the flame-floor and leapt across, barely catching the other side. Behind him, kilometers too close, the Lagarakei roared—not with a mouth, but through every part of its being. The sound bent the flames of the city and the thoughts of the mind alike.
The city of fire was dying.
But he was still running.
And something inside him was awakening.