"So," Wednesday said as she stepped over the broken stone and dead snakes scattered across the floor, "do you actually have a plan for killing this demon, or are we relying entirely on aggressive improvisation again?"
"Don't push me, Wednesday. I'm thinking," Ethan muttered.
His expression stayed irritated as he ran through possibilities in his head. Physical destruction clearly wasn't enough. He could tear demons apart, burn through their vessels, crush their bodies into pieces, and they still found ways to crawl back out of it.
Locking them inside the Blood Realm worked eventually, but that process took time. The realm could destroy them spiritually if it fully trapped them, but demons were slippery bastards. Fast enough to escape before the pull completely sealed around them.
Which made this annoying.
Very annoying.
The irony was that raw power wasn't the issue.
Ethan was powerful enough to flatten entire cities if he stopped holding back.
But enemies like demons were different.
They didn't fight directly.
They twisted around attacks, hid inside hosts, moved through shadows and fear like parasites.
And the biggest problem—
demons were naturally weak against holy power.
His abilities were many things.
Holy was not one of them.
"If you don't have a solution," Wednesday said calmly, "then we search for the Blood of God."
Morticia looked at her immediately. "As in actual divine blood?"
Even for someone raised around occult history, that was not a small statement.
Wednesday nodded once and held up the monastery notes. "According to these records, it was used centuries ago to seal the gates of hell beneath this abbey." Her eyes moved back toward the dark corridors ahead.
"If the documents are accurate, then the relic should still be somewhere inside the monastery."
"And if it's real," Ethan said slowly, following her logic immediately, "it could kill the demons permanently."
"Precisely."
The silence that followed lasted only a second before something clicked in Ethan's head.
Wait.
He suddenly remembered seeing something similar before.
In the system shop.
His expression shifted slightly as the idea formed completely.
If the shop actually had holy-class relics available, then there was a chance he wouldn't need to waste time searching through an entire cursed monastery while demons ran around looking for bodies to possess.
Ethan immediately pulled up the system interface and began scrolling through the endless rows of items. Ancient weapons, cursed artifacts, blood-forged swords, and several things that looked dangerous enough to start wars passed in front of his eyes one after another.
Then he stopped.
[Gloves of Saint Marcus.]
Ethan focused on the description carefully.
[Description: Saint Marcus had once been a vampire, one whose faith in God had supposedly remained so absolute that even the Church could not deny it.
Legends claimed he could wield divine power despite being undead, something considered impossible by almost every doctrine in existence. After his death, high-ranking cardinals had preserved his bones and forged them into holy relics. ]
[Price : 40,000 Blood Points]
The gloves in front of him were apparently made from those remains.
Ethan stared at the description for a few seconds.
"Wow," he muttered under his breath. "Sometimes the Church does genuinely insane things."
Without warning, the entire monastery shook violently.
The walls groaned.
Stone cracked beneath their feet as the floor suddenly split apart, the ancient structure collapsing inward while darkness opened below them like a mouth swallowing the abbey whole. Broken stone and shattered wood disappeared into the void as the three of them dropped with it.
None of them screamed.
"You know," Ethan said while falling through complete darkness, "I kind of expected this."
Wednesday wouldn't scream because she considered it undignified.
And Morticia was Wednesday's mother, which explained enough on its own.
The darkness around them suddenly shifted.
A pale red light appeared below.
Then the void opened completely.
The three of them burst through into another place entirely.
The sky above them burned deep crimson, twisted clouds moving unnaturally across it while the ground below stretched into a dead landscape filled with blackened trees and ruined stone. Distant screams echoed from every direction at once, some human, some very much not.
The air itself felt wrong.
Heavy.
Ancient.
Like the world hated their presence.
"Wow," Ethan muttered as they continued falling toward the cracked wasteland below.
The ground rushed toward them fast enough to kill a normal person instantly.
Wednesday looked at Ethan without a trace of panic.
It was very clearly his problem.
Ethan sighed and snapped his fingers.
The force around them shifted immediately. Their fall slowed violently, the air itself pushing against them before the three of them landed safely onto the scorched earth below.
Morticia slowly turned, taking in the landscape around them with unusual silence.
Even for an Addams, the atmosphere was difficult to ignore.
"…Where are we exactly?" Morticia asked, her voice quieter now, more cautious than frightened.
Wednesday looked out across the scorched land without visible concern. "The place priests dedicate their entire careers warning people about," she said evenly.
"The great moral incentive behind organized religion. Humanity's favorite destination to threaten each other with."
A faint crack of red lightning spread across the burning sky overhead.
Wednesday's expression remained completely calm.
"We're in Hell, mother."
***
A/N: And on Patreon, The Boys arc started.
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