All the demons were saying, “Our lord has arrived. Our demon lord Diablo has been resurrected.” Ren sat on the throne, trying to understand what was going on and what he was doing here. “Who the hell is Diablo?” he said to himself. Then, from the crowd of demons, Rias walked toward him and said, “Welcome, my king. We are here to do your bidding.” Ren was quiet for a few minutes. When Rias looked at him, she saw that Ren had already turned red, staring at her chest. Rias said, “Is that what you want? I am here to do your bidding.” Ren snapped back to reality and said, “Yes. I have been reborn, and I have come back to rule this realm.” The whole crowd of demons shouted in response. After the meeting, he told everyone to leave except Rias and said to her, “It’s been so long, I can’t remember much of what happened.” He lied to her. Rias said, “My lord, you can just use your power to take all the information you want from me.” She said this genuinely. “Really, I can?” he screamed, then

Elenya did not run from the cracking glass. She had spent ninety three years learning that fear made scholars sloppy, and sloppiness got people killed faster than any demon blade. So she knelt very still, pressed her palm flat against the fractured ground, and listened.Beneath the sound of splitting stone, something breathed.It was not a sound she recognized from any bestiary in Malgorath’s archive, and she had read every one of them twice. It was slow, wet, patient, the breathing of something that had been waiting so long it no longer measured time the way living things did. She rose, snatched up the lantern Yoichi had carried across the Veil, and followed the widening crack toward the base of the Cinder Throne.She was not alone for long.“You should not be down here,” said a voice behind her, and Elenya spun with her knife already drawn.The speaker was a demon boy, perhaps sixteen by human reckoning, with ash grey skin and eyes the pale gold of Diablo’s own bloodline. He wore th

Tamsin Vale did not lower her blade, even as the creature wearing Yoichi’s face began to laugh.“A hunter,” it said, tilting its borrowed head. “How quaint. Do you know how many hunters have come for me over the years, little huntress. Wearing scholar’s charms and grandmother’s warnings and a whole lot of misplaced confidence.”“None of them were me,” Tamsin said.She was younger than her armor suggested, no older than Yoichi had been, with dark hair braided tight against her skull and a scar along her jaw that looked recent, weeks old rather than years. The silver symbols etched into her armor pulsed faintly with each word she spoke, as though the metal itself were listening.Elenya seized the moment of the creature’s distraction to pull Reiko and the still shaking crowd back from the square’s center. Kesh stayed pressed to her side, eyes fixed on Tamsin with the particular hunger of someone who had spent his whole short life surrounded by secrets and had just found one bigger than a

Diablo called Rias and said to her, “I will be leaving Malgorath for Velmoor. I want you to oversee everything that happens here.” Then he left.He got there using instant teleportation. He entered, and the sky looked clear. He walked for a moment, then saw a little girl being bullied by a blacksmith.“You should do what you’re told, you piece of shit,” he said, whipping her with a whip.Diablo held his hand and said, “Don’t you dare hit her. What has she done?”The blacksmith said, “How is that any of your concern?”Diablo thought for a while, then left. “Oh well, this is not the reason why I am here,” he said to himself.He went to an adventurer’s guild and said he would like to register. He was taken to a special room to test his abilities.“Sir, please touch the orb,” the receptionist said. “We would like to check how much MP you possess.”When he touched it, the orb broke, and she said, “Something like this has never happened before.” She went to call the guild master, and he rus

Diablo walked into the guild, and every eye in the room turned toward him. Whispers spread through the hall faster than he could cross it. Wasn't this the man the Roaring Lions guild claimed had assaulted them the day before?Isyrae approached him before he had taken more than a few steps inside."The guild master would like to see you," she said.He followed her to the office. Once inside, Vasryn Kael'dathor looked up from his desk."Do you know why I called you here?" he asked."I don't know," Diablo said."It's about what you did to the Roaring Lions guild yesterday. Their party leader came to report you. He claims you tailed them and assaulted them. That's why you're here today.""I did no such thing," Diablo said. "I was on my way to the tavern when I noticed them following me. I had to defend myself. They were greedy. They wanted to force me out of the guild, claiming I took their spot, even though I only joined a few days ago."Vasryn studied him for a moment, then nodded slowl