The Deities of Hell

As Ritsu climbed the stairs, the staircase shook violently.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the Pig Bastard crashing into the staircase.

“Tsk! Is it mad because I made fun of it?”

Ritsu said and hurried to go up the rest of the stairs.

While holding the wooden sword, he made it fly once again to go up using it.

However, losing his footing on the moss, he fell down instead.

“Ouch! I slipped on the moss! Because I made fun of the Pig Bastard!? Is that it!? Hahaha!”

“Oh no! It’s coming! Hurry and get up!”

Ritsu’s words and facial expression were mismatched.

He would joke around, but he didn’t smile at all and instead looked like he was breaking out in a cold sweat.

Standing up in haste, he finished climbing the collapsing staircase.

“Pant... Pant... I really got flustered there.”

Reaching the top of the stairs, he ran to the other end for the time being.

Confirming that the Pig Bastard didn’t come up after him, he collapsed on the spot, out of breath.

“Damn, my jersey is drenched, and most of the things in my bag are ruined. My favorite cotton candy is dirty now.”

“H-heavy. Because of the water, my body’s become so heavy,”

Pomkichi said as he emerged from the backpack and walked with stiff limbs.

Ritsu lifted him and wrung him like a dust cloth.

“Ahh.”

“How is it?”

“I’m healed.”

When his body wasn’t soaked with water anymore, he returned to the normal Pomkichi again.

Ritsu also organized the things in his backpack and wrung his jersey.

Putting his jersey in the backpack, he wore only a t-shirt.

“This is the worst. I hate being wet.”

Finishing drying the wooden sword, he hurried up to the second floor with Pomkichi.

“Let’s look for the rooftop.”

“What’s this room? Rooftop?”

“I don’t know if we can go there. Let’s go.”

While on guard, they opened the rusty door to the room.

Behind the door was quite a view that astonished both Ritsu and Pomkichi.

“No way… What is this…”

“H-how cruel.”

There were a lot of people inside.

However, they weren’t alive, but dead—they were corpses.

The corpses were hung in order, and in the back of the room was a pile of them.

The wall of the room was destroyed, connecting the two rooms together.

Because of this, there was a lot of room.

The people were slaughtered like pigs and cows, so the devils were slaughtering humans, too.

You could call it a human slaughterhouse.

“I see. This is a storage for people being used as food. I can hear the air conditioning, and it smells like blood. Still, who’s managing this? That Pig Bastard shouldn’t be able to enter this room.”

“No way, this is too brutal.”

“The essence of this world is cruelty. People might be more wicked than devils, actually. Despite that, I act on my humanity. It all depends on if you know about the devils,”

Ritsu said and observed their surroundings.

His tone and wording were cocky as ever, but his expression was sorrowful as he emptily stared at the hanging corpses.

Although it seemed like he would avert his gaze, he desperately kept his presence of mind.

“Something’s coming… A presence different from the Pig Bastard,”

Pomkichi said.

However, Ritsu couldn’t hear or sense anything.

“Presence? I can’t hear anything.”

“But something is definitely heading for this room.”

“Got it. I believe you,”

Ritsu said and turned his gaze toward the pile of corpses furthest back in the room.

The corpses stunk, but Ritsu crawled under the corpses, anyway.

“Piii.”

As Pomkichi had said, squirrels entered the room after several seconds through the gap.

However, they didn’t look like ordinary squirrels.

Their heads were of pigs like the Pig Bastard’s head, and insect wings sprouted from their backs.

“What’s that?”

It wasn’t a couple of them.

Squirrel after squirrel entered the room through the gap.

They approached the pile of corpses where Ritsu was and carried the corpses in buckets like professionals.

They began hanging corpses in the place they had brought them, then took the hanged corpses out of the room.

It was like they were employees doing their work.

(Did they come to do management? If that’s the case, then they’ll notice me in the corpse.

Ritsu was lost in his doubt and trembled in panic.

However, when he emerged from the pile of corpses, the moment he was mistaken as a corpse by the squirrels and carried away, he struck one of the squirrels with his wooden sword.

“We’re running away, Pomkichi!”

“Alright!”

“Biii!”

Ritsu exited the room with Pomkichi and ran up to the second floor.

Behind them, a flock of squirrels came after them.

If there were squirrels running on the ground, there were squirrels jumping in the air and spreading their wings.

“We did it! Stairs leading up are up there!”

Climbing the stairs further into the room, they found the door seemingly leading to the rooftop.

However, a door chain was fastened to the door.

On top of that, it wasn’t on Ritsu’s side of the door, but on the outside.

“Moron! Why is there a chain attached from the outside!? Who did this useless thing!?”

Ritsu impatiently struck the door with the wooden sword.

However, because the door was made of iron, it didn’t budge an inch.

“It’s no use! I can’t reach the chain through this small gap!”

Being driven into a corner, Ritsu attacked the several squirrels.