Demon Among Devils

Chapter 19: "Fifty Shades Of Nephilim"

Rias was the one who suggested that since the house was connected to the Underworld, they might as well take him on a tour of its expanses. That proposal did not sit well with him at first. He had no wish to pry into their daily lives, believing that he had already intruded enough.

But as time passed, his curiosity began to get the better of him. They were devils, not demons, so naturally that concept must apply to where they lived as well. Interestingly enough, he had never heard Rias and the others refer to home as Hell or any variation of the word. It was just the Underworld.

For that reason he found himself getting up bright and early one day and preparing himself for what he suspected would be an eventful trip.

Despite himself, he still had his reservations. They might only be devils, but their ancestors had once been demons, and thus he found it hard for him to separate them from their past. He expected their territory to reflect that.

Their Underworld. Perhaps not the blasted, desolate wasteland the myths and tales portrayed Hell to be, but something close. It was his bias showing, his partiality leaking through, and he freely admitted it. The human mind sometimes clung stubbornly to old notions even when it knew better, and he was no exception.

Those notions disappeared when he stepped out of the portal and beheld the scene they had brought him to see.

A city. They had taken him to a city.

Blocks of apartment buildings loomed in the distance, and behind them high-rises for the more affluent and wealthy. Towering skyscrapers dotted the horizon, and below their creeping shadow, sprawled shopping malls and retail stores in startling abundance. The refined forms of hotels could also be seen, and with them auditoriums, stadiums, theaters and public schools. He even caught what seemed to be the beginnings of an amusement park in the periphery of his vision.

It was as though someone had taken a picture of a normal human city and plastered it perfectly into the Underworld. More than perfectly. An exact copy.

None of these things inherently bothered him. The buildings nor the city. None of them. What bothered him was that they existed in what should have been this world's equivalent of Hell. That something so normal, so ordinary could be the replacement of something that had been engraved in the minds of men since the dawn of time as a place filled with tormented fire and shrieks of tortured souls. It was reality and preconceived notions clashing in his mind, fighting a war for dominance, and reality was steadily winning.

That had been half an hour ago, and in that time, as Rias and her peerage guided him through winding streets filled with pleasant-looking houses and family-owned stores, his initial incredulity had subsided into something along the lines of bemused disbelief. That time was also spent explaining, spent illuminating, and at the end of those thirty minutes he was far more enlightened than before.

This city was just one among dozens, possibly hundreds located around the Underworld. It was built on the fringes of Gremory territory, which itself was large enough to encompass a land mass the size of Japan. Similar patches of claimed territory existed throughout the Underworld, governed by Pillar heads and their relatives. The size of the territory corresponded directly to the power and the influence of the family. The larger it was the more powerful the clan, which meant more retainers, more resources, and more prestige. The Gremory clan was one of the more influential ones within the seventy-two Pillars, and the sheer scope of their holdings reflected that. Next to them was territory held by the Phenex family, a chunk of land just slightly less large.