Devil in a Red Dress

22

Kai had only been guarding the entrance to the underworld for centuries but to him it seemed like he had been doing it for an eternity, it was almost all he could remember. Demons didn't have the perfect memory of the gods of course, but still, they remembered a lot.

After only a decade of standing at the gates of the underworld, performing his duty in Cerberus' stead, Kai really started wishing he had looked less normal and had woken up ugly like most of the other demons in the underworld had when they made their transformation.

If he hadn't looked almost human, he wouldn't have been the one who got picked by the Queen of the underworld to take over the job as the new hellhound. He wasn't even a hellhound for Hades' sake! He was just a demon.

A very unique demon at that, but still a demon. As far as he knew, only Nyx had become a demon in the same way he had and survived. At first he thought he was lucky. He was a higher level demon because of it. At least he thought that was part of the reason why. Over the centuries he noticed that the demons who didn't succumb to the lust of corruption as often tended to develop faster.

They kept their senses about them and kept their most base instincts in check and Kai had noticed they evolved more in the process. They became more powerful, stronger, and they were generally smarter. They tended to have less of the delirium that came with the bloodlust of a demon.

Demons were naturally intoxicated by corruption, they were drawn to watching humans destroy each other and were compelled to create chaos and blood baths between them, to egg them on. The brutal and violent massacres of innocents were the ultimate goal, the ultimate high to sate their sadism.

Lower level demons tended to get lost in that lust, they were the most affected by it and if they weren't powerful enough to handle it, chasing that insatiable high would inevitably corrupt their bodies. It mangled them and sickened them to the point where they looked like grotesque beasts, eventually they would stop communicating altogether. They were considered nothing more than a waste of space, even lower than the lost souls that aimlessly roamed asphodel.

The fledgling demons that had some self control after their transformations had the opposite effect when feeding off of corruption. But only if they were patient, only if they didn't feed more than they could take. Eventually the demon would grow strong enough to handle feeding more, and it gave them more power.

Kai belonged to the second group. He had been one of the lucky few that had strong powers bestowed upon him even from the very beginning, and they only grew with time because he tended not to corrupt humans when he went to the living realm, he let other demons do the work.

He hung behind as the demons whispered vile things into their ears, influencing their thoughts and corrupting them from the inside out until they acted upon those hateful thoughts.

He found it too alien to watch the destruction of innocents when he was the cause of it. He knew he was different. He knew something was wrong with him. Demons shouldn't feel remorse, only desire. Desire for corruption, or desire for power and whichever side they fed determined whether they'd evolve into a high demon or devolve into a low one.

With time he realized Nyx was like him too. He noticed that they both stayed on the fringes, only feeding on specific types of corruption if possible. In the underworld, they both got a steady fix for their bloodlust as demons battled other demons for status and power. It was a constant fix, but in the living realm things were different.

He was observant, and he realized Nyx moved similarly to him in the living realm. Eventually he even noticed that Nyx no longer had that compulsive desire to feed anymore that made demons crazy when they were deprived of it. She had managed to overcome it.