03/01/2012, Underworld, Early morning
Deep beneath the Underworld's crust, in a labyrinth of once-sterile corridors now choked with the stench of sulfur and spilled viscera, one of the Old Satan Faction's most clandestine facilities reeked of carnage.
The air hummed with the static of shattered wards, and the walls wept rivulets of blackened blood. In the innermost chamber, a vault lined with cursed scripts and glass tanks holding twitching, half-formed abominations, a shadowy figure stood amid the slaughter.
Its form wavered like smoke, edges bleeding into the darkness, as it surveyed the mangled corpses littering the floor.
Scientists and guards alike lay contorted, their bodies unraveling into tendrils of void that spiraled upward, dissolving into ash soon after.
The figure's grin split its featureless face like a jagged scar, and with each step toward the exit, the ground beneath it rotted, stone crumbling into blackened dust.
A desk splintered under Shalba Beelzebub's fist, its surface spiderwebbing with cracks that glowed faintly with residual green demonic energy.
The Third Satan's voice boomed through the control room, shaking monitors and sending a vial of crimson ichor shattering to the floor.
"What's happening!?" he snarled, his long, greasy brown hair clinging to his gaunt face like serpents. One eye, bloodshot and blazing with violet hellfire, glared from behind the matted curtain of hair, while the other remained shrouded under his dark mantle.
His black coat billowed around him as though alive, its edges frayed into spectral wisps that licked hungrily at the air.
Shalba's subordinate stammered, sweat beading on his ashen face as his fingers darted across a cracked control panel.
"W-we don't know, Lord Beelzebub!" he choked out, the words tinged with mortal terror. "Something... came through the portal. All signals are gone!" A screen flickered to life beside him, casting jagged shadows over the ruined lab.
Shalba's clawed hand slammed down, crushing the panel into a smoking ruin. "Send someone. NOW."
His voice dripped with venom, the air around him warping with heat haze. The subordinate scrambled backward, bowing so low his forehead scraped the blood-slick floor.
On the cavernous wall ahead, a mosaic of screens blinked to life, each displaying static-strewn footage of the facility's carnage. Shalba stalked closer, his coat hissing like a nest of vipers. "Show me the last recording," he growled.
A scientist, trembling so violently his horns clattered, tapped a glyph. The central screen flared, timestamped: 03/01/2012 04:56.
The video crackled, its grainy hues washed in the sickly green of emergency lights. A dozen devil scientists clustered around a pedestal, their long lab coats casting shadows on the walls.
At the center glowed the artifact, a skull carved from cerulean crystal, its hollow eyes pulsing with eldritch light.
"Secure the artifact," ordered the lead scientist, his voice distorted by the recording's buzz.
The hands of one of the scientists, clad in obsidian gloves, lifted the skull from its glass prison, slotting it into a socket lined with glowing, vein-like circuits. The machine hummed to life, its charge station thrumming like a heartbeat.
"Today," the scientist declared, his tongue flicking eagerly. "We harness time itself. A feat even gods fear! Devilkind will rewrite the flow of time."
Two devils gripped levers of grey stone, muscles straining. Scribes hovered nearby, quills poised over their notebooks to document any results. In the corner, a wizard chanted, his hands weaving a teleportation magic circle shimmering with a blood-red sigil.
"Three... two... one... go!"
The levers slammed down.
For a heartbeat, silence.
Then, darkness. Not mere shadow, but a void that devoured light, sound, breath. When the recording stabilized, the chamber was a charnel house.
Bodies lay in heaps, skin sloughed off bones, organs reduced to viscous sludge. The skull was gone.
Shalba's eye twitched. "Replay. Slower this time."
The scientist rewound. Frame by frame, the horror repeated: one moment, anticipation; the next, annihilation.
No flash. No warning. The chronometer ticked 04:56:00 to 04:56:00. No time elapsed; it was literally instantaneous.
"Continue," Shalba rasped, his voice a blade dragged across stone.
The footage stuttered. A figure materialized in the ruined lab, its silhouette wavering like a mirage.
It cradled the blue skull in one shadowy hand, the artifact now crackling with violet energy. Slowly, it turned toward the camera, a face of shifting smoke, save for a lipless grin lined with teeth like shards of ice.
It raised its free hand, wiggling its fingers in a grotesque parody of a wave, before the screen died in a burst of static.
Shalba's roar shook the corridor, veins bulging at his temples as hellfire erupted from his palms, scorching the walls.
"What was that!?" he snarled, spittle flying. His hand dug into the flesh of a nearby scientist, leaving charred furrows. "Who dares mock me in my own domain!?"
He stormed out, his coat billowing like a stormcloud, six-winged guards materializing around him in a flash of magic sigils.
Their obsidian armor gleamed under flickering torches, each devil towering at eight feet, wings bristling with serrated feathers and eyes glowing like molten iron. They marched in lockstep, the floor trembling under their tread, until they reached Lab 77, its reinforced door now a twisted wreck of smoldering metal.
Inside, the darkness was alive. Not mere shadow, but a viscous, swallowing void that devoured the guards' hellfire orbs and halogen lamps alike. Light died at its edges, snuffed like a candle in a hurricane.
"Reveal yourself," Shalba hissed. "And I'll grant you a quick death."
Silence.
He jerked his chin at a guard. "You. Enter."
The devil stepped forward, wings flexed, halberd raised—and vanished into the black. Seconds passed. No scream. No sound.
Shalba's eye twitched. "Coward," he spat, striding into the abyss. His boots sank into the floor as though stepping through tar. The air reeked of ozone and rot, but his senses found nothing—no heat, no magic, no breath. "Gone..." he muttered, turning to leave.
Then, snap.
A sound like bones breaking. Behind him, his elite guards vanished one by one, their armored plates clattering to the floor, empty.
Shalba whirled, violet hellfire erupting from his palms as four layered magic circles, crimson, black, gold, and purple, spun violently around him. "SHOW YOURSELF!"
The darkness laughed, a sound like glass shattering underwater.
Shalba's breath hitched as a voice slithering into his skull, familiar venomous, clawing at memories he'd buried beneath centuries of rage. 'You are weak, Shalba.'
'Uncle,' realized Shalba as fear and anxiety clenched his guts.
The words were a serrated knife twisting in his gut. He saw it again: Bidleid Bashalun Beelzebub's sneer, his hand gripping young Shalba's head, forcing him to kneel in the bloodied sands of the Beelzebub Training Ground.
"Pathetic," the old devil had spat, wings blotting out the light. "You'll never be worthy of our name."
"WHO ARE YOU!?" Shalba roared, hurling a blast of fire magic into the void. The flames guttered out, revealing nothing but his own trembling reflection in the lab's shattered glass.
'He couldn't even fight that Astaroth brat.'
The voice again, his uncle's voice, saccharine and cruel satisfied of his nephew's pain.
Shalba's nails dug into his temples, drawing black blood. "Get out!" he shrieked like a scared child, but the memories surged like a tide: Sirzechs Lucifer's smile as he tore Bidleid apart during the Civil War, Shalba frozen in the shadows, wings locked, terrified.
"I don't deserve my bloodline," a new voice cooed, his voice, warped, wrong. "Boo hoo."
Shalba whirled.
There, in the pooling darkness, stood a mirror image of his own gaunt face, but with eyes like yellow golden moons and a grin stretched too wide, too many teeth.
"H-How dare—!" Shalba's swarm erupted from his pores, a cyclone of flies with razor wings. But the Other raised a hand, and the insects froze, their buzzing harmonizing into a mocking lullaby.
"Don't you dare stain my bloodline," the Other purred, stepping closer. Shalba staggered back, his heel crushing a fallen guard's weapon.
"You're just a scared little maggot. Sirzechs' shadow still chokes you, doesn't it?"
"LIES!" Shalba's voice cracked. He hurled a spear of ice, but it shattered against the Other's chest. "He cheated! Uncle would've—"
"Uncle hated you," the Other crooned, its form rippling. "You think he didn't see your fear? Your weakness?"
"NO! I'M NOT AFRAID OF SIRZECHS GREMORY! YOU ARE NOT ME!" As Shalba said that, the other one stopped laughing and instead just grinned at him.
Shalba's wings twitched, instinct screaming to flee, but the walls pressed closer, the air thickening with the stench of rot. The Other's skin bubbled, limbs elongating, joints cracking backward.
"I am Shadow, the true self."
The thing that was Shalba unfurled, a grotesque amalgam of every nightmarish feature a 'Beelzebub' should be.
His ten bat wings molted into iridescent beetle shells, dripping acidic mucus. Its torso split open, revealing a worm-like core writhing with maggots that chanted in Bidleid's voice.
Twelve spindled legs, black and chitinous, pierced the floor, each tip oozing green sludge that sizzled through steel. Its face was a shifting mosaic of Shalba's failures: Sirzechs' pitying stare, Bidleid's disgust, the sneers of lesser devils who mocked his stutter as a whelp. Two enormous red bulges substituted his eyes.
"N-no..." Shalba whimpered, flies swarming back to cower under his skin. His spells sputtered, fire reduced to embers, ice to mist.
The Shadow lunged, a crab-leg skewering Shalba's thigh. He screamed, the sound echoing Bidleid's laughter. Another leg impaled his wing, pinning him to the floor as the worm-body loomed, maggots cascading onto his chest feasting on the poor Shalba Beelzebub.
"You crave his approval," the Shadow hissed, a talon caressing Shalba's cheek. "Even now. Even in death."
Shalba's screams turned to wet gurgles as the sludge filled his lungs, dissolving him from within. The Shadow watched, its human face resurfacing, a perfect, pitiless mirror, as Shalba's body crumbled like ash.
"Pathetic," it whispered, stepping over the remnants. "But delicious."
"Master Nyarlathotep, Father, I succeeded in your mission! I overwhelmed my false self and imposed your blessing," said Shadow Shalba bowing to a black butterfly who had been witnessing the scene from the first moment.
"Well done my child. Well done. From this moment onwards you shall be Shalba Beelzebub," said the butterfly in a dark and deep voice, flying away.
"Sir! Is everything okay!?" A squad of guards flowed inside the lab that in the meanwhile had gone back to normal. "Yes it is. I fixed the situation. I'm going to update Creusery and Katerea on the research," declared the shadow leaving the guards behind.
"And get back to work. Clean up this place, it's disgusting," said Shalba pointing to the bodies still on the ground of the laboratory.
With this last order he left the lab while the guards bowed obeying their lord's order.
04/01/2012, Tartarus, Morning
Makoto found himself once again inside Tartarus.
He noticed many things had changed. He didn't see any teleporter or mechanical debris left by the Kirijo Group's experiments, but the atmosphere remained exactly the same.
'It looks like an uncontaminated version of the tower,' Makoto thought as he ventured through Tartarus' new form.
He soon arrived at the start of the main stairs where Yukari used to sit waiting for operations to begin. 'The top of Tartarus... I have to go there.' This single thought consumed him as he began climbing the tower as fast as he could.
He passed through the first sections of Thebel and Arqa quickly, relieved to encounter no shadows. But when he reached the first floor of Yabbasha, a wise, fatherly voice stopped him.
"Little one, what is tormenting your heart?" asked the voice. Its owner was an elderly man with a long white beard wearing a conical straw hat and yellow mantle, holding a cane.
"You..." Makoto looked at the old man with initial confusion, but felt a strange connection to the figure before him.
"Kohryu? Why do you look like this?" the boy asked, though he shook his head, refocusing on his goal.
"Not now, I have to reach the top of Tartarus," Makoto said, dismissing Huang Long and turning to run. But the dragon didn't relent, blocking Makoto's path with his cane. "Calm down and breathe, boy. Speak to me," Kohryu said in his deep, measured voice.
Makoto stopped and looked at the old man. "Kohryu... I don't feel Thanatos anymore, but Elizabeth said my bond with Death remains strong in this world." Makoto clenched his fists.
"Ryoji could be here, Kohryu! I have to see him..." Makoto's expression showed deep regret. "This is a trivial matter, boy. Death, or as you know him, Ryoji Mochizuki is indeed here—after all, Tartarus is his domain," the dragon said, pointing toward a Monad door.
"But this is only permitted by the Universe within your soul. Enter the door and cleanse your mind. Don't let regret consume you." Kohryu lowered his cane, freeing Makoto to leave.
"I know... you're right. I shouldn't feel this way, but still... it's hard, Kohryu." Makoto thanked the Chinese dragon, who nodded in understanding. "It's only natural to feel fear, regret or pain, Makoto. Now go," Kohryu said, patting Makoto's shoulder like a grandfather comforting his grandson.
Makoto didn't hesitate and headed straight for the Monad door. Standing before the red entrance, he opened it and stepped into the distorted section of Tartarus. Following Kohryu's guidance, he created a new Monad passage leading to the tower's very peak and began his final ascent.
When he emerged from the Monad, the door crumbled behind him, leaving him standing at Tartarus' summit beneath the full moon.
He looked ahead and saw him. Ryoji, wearing his signature yellow scarf, was gazing at the moon. "You've freed both of us, Makoto," he said with a smile before turning to face his friend. The two locked eyes for a long moment.
"You're alive..." Makoto said, his usually stoic expression breaking as tears threatened to fall. "I'm here, Makoto. I promised I'd always be by your side, and now I'm here," Ryoji reassured him. They stood together in comfortable silence under the moonlight.
"Well, we have work to do, don't we?" Ryoji said with his characteristic wide grin. "You know what my mission is?" Makoto asked, surprised.
"Yes, and I hate it. Even Nyx herself warned me how dangerous Nyarlathotep is - she described him as a rebellious yet cunning child. But I trust you, and this time I won't leave," Ryoji declared.
"You never left me," Makoto replied, smiling with quiet contentment.
"Let's go explore this world," Ryoji said before transforming into Thanatos and merging with Makoto's consciousness. The blue-haired boy then returned to the Velvet Room, where Elizabeth still sat at the counter.
"Has your meeting with Death gone well?" she asked. Makoto nodded with a smile. "Liz, have you found anything about the city we're in?" The Messiah changed subjects, returning to his mission-focused mindset.
"I'm happy you asked! I have indeed found something. This city is called Kuoh Town in the Kanto region," Elizabeth informed him, producing a hand-drawn map.
"Yatagarasu scouted the area and reported back useful information. I drew this map myself - I hope you like it," she said proudly, handing it to Makoto.
"Useful. Thanks, Liz." Makoto briefly studied the map but found nothing unusual - it appeared to be an ordinary city.
"Well, I'm heading out," Makoto announced as he exited the Velvet Room. "I didn't detect any shadow presence in town or the surrounding area, so it should be safe, but—" Elizabeth didn't finish her sentence before Makoto had already left.
"Oh well, I suppose I'll go out too then," Elizabeth said as she stood up. 'Maybe I could try new clothes—I've never actually worn anything besides my uniform,' the woman thought.
"Shopping is a common human activity, and it should help me acquaint myself with the city," she reasoned before following Makoto out of the Velvet Room.