Above the fifth layer of the Endless Abyss, a swirling black-and-red vortex opened with violent speed and the moment it appeared, every abyss creature below turned wild with excitement.
Even the original Devils joined the frenzy, suddenly launching a brutal counterattack. The soldiers of the Magnus Legion didn't have time to react, it rained chaos.
They weren't excited for no reason. They had all felt it—Cillian's gaze. A faint unintentional presence, but enough. In the Endless Abyss, his gaze was everything, it meant His attention. As the will of the abyss, he only thing these creatures truly feared… and obeyed.
Cillian's mind hovered over the battlefield on the fifth floor, but most of his focus was on the lone Magnus soldier kneeling before one of the original Devils. The man looked broken.
"I want to live," he whispered.
As soon as those words left him, something snapped. The old loyalty he once clung to, his belief in the angels, crumbled.
The oath he swore beneath their statues meant nothing now. The light in his soul, now buried by days of fear, poison, and bloodshed, flickered out. He had already betrayed the angels in his heart, and now he did it in full.
"Those promises… I made them for coin and medals," he muttered, voice bitter. He could feel the stares of his former comrades behind him, he felt all of their disgust, their shame, but he didn't care.
The mists had lifted, his treachery was out in the open. And yet, there was no guilt. Only hatred. But not for himself, for the angels.
"Why should they sit in heaven while we're thrown into this hell to die?"
That flicker of rebellion had bloomed into something darker, and now voice, faint and desperate, came from deep within:
"Oh great abyss, I offer myself to you."
Somewhere in Cillian's mind, a spark ignited. The tiniest flame of divine fire.
The soldier had fallen completely given in, body and soul. And something in him changed. The energy in him bent toward the shape of a monster, an abyss-born horror.
Cillian watched closely. That little spark, the soldier's conversion, had added the faintest trace of divine fire to his own reservoir.
"Amazing," Cillian whispered. "So that's how it is."
He studied the transformed soldier like a scientist watching a test subject. The implications hit him all at once.
"If someone carrying belief, any belief, falls to the abyss… their faith is bent into devotion for the abyss. And the power of that belief… it returns to me."
It was a chain reaction. A transfer of divine energy, and the more he thought about it, the clearer the picture became.
Cillian's smile twisted into something cold.
Far below, Magnus erupted in fury.
"Purge him!" he shouted. "Purge that traitor!"
The command rang out across the battlefield like thunder. His voice snapped the warriors out of their daze, and a group of priest-warriors surged forward with their weapons drawn.
One strike is all it took. The traitor's head flew off and spun in the air before landing in the mud, as blood gushed from his neck like a geyser the ground beneath him was instantly swarmed by insects, writhing out of the swamp to devour the blood.
The priests didn't stop there. They turned their blades on the Demon that had lured the soldier in, killing it just as easily.
Cillian didn't even blink, he wasn't interested in those small lives anymore. Their usefulness had ended the moment they gave him what he wanted.
Now his eyes turned to Magnus himself, the strongest among them, a man who stood just short of a demigod. A man truly unshaken in his beliefs.
A thought crept into Cillian's mind.
How much divine fire would it give him? What would a man like that turn into inside the abyss?
"What if I could make him fall?"
He forgot all about his assignment, from the academy to graduation none of it mattered in that moment.
Right now, he just wanted to know.
What happens when a true mans faith breaks?
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Up on the battlefield, Magnus felt the pressure even before he saw the source, his instincts flared and he looked up.
In the center of the swirling vortex above, two black eyes opened and stared straight down at him.
It wasn't mockery this time, it was hate.
All around, the laws of space twisted. One by one, gates to deeper levels of the abyss began opening, each were carved with glowing red numbers, each echoing with growls and shrieks.
From the other side came monsters.
Thousands upon thousands.
Magnus's warriors trembled. The sound from beyond the gates wasn't just noise, it was a promise of pain, suffering and futility.
Magnus's voice was quiet.
"I see it now," he muttered.
"From the very start… we were just toys."