Danmachi Familia from Hell

12

- My Lord... Have you... Have you ever seen anything like this before? - Belakher asked, his forehead, back, and hands drenched in cold sweat.

- Not in this universe - Hades replied. - Only in the most wretched depths of my realm.

The King of the Underworld remained as unshaken as ever. Neither his voice, nor his face, nor his body language betrayed any reaction. Yet inside, disgust and contempt raged. Descending into the Lower World, he had hoped he wouldn't have to witness such horrors again-the kind of suffering he once inflicted upon sinful souls before imprisoning them in Tartarus.
From the edge of a forest filled with fallen, dried-out, lifeless trees all the way to the vast black stain on the horizon, a hill crowned by an ancient castle countless corpses were impaled on stakes.
The bodies were dressed in all manner of clothing.
As expected, thousands of Rakians in military armor were among them. Their flesh had rotted beyond imagination, becoming food for the swarming maggots within or for the ravens and crows circling above.
There were also thousands more in different armor sets, much more rusted from the relentless exposure to wind, rain, and cold. These belonged to the soldiers sent here by the authorities of the new Motulio a hundred years ago. Not a single scrap of flesh remained on them stripped clean by insects and birds down to bare bone.
The smallest group wore ragged peasant clothes. They were likely looters who had come to claim the riches of a lord long dead. The thought itself amused Hades. He couldn't fathom how greed could so thoroughly blind mortals. He doubted anyone in this province would have paid well for heirlooms stolen from these lands. In fact, he would have been surprised if anyone accepted them at all, knowing their origins. Especially given the terror the locals lived under.
Yet all the corpses shared one thing in common. None had been pierced in vital areas: the heart, liver, kidneys, or lungs had been deliberately avoided with surgical precision. The impalement was designed not to kill instantly, but to prolong their suffering to the absolute limit.
They had died in agony over days, feeling their bodies weaken from starvation, their own filth running down their legs. In the first hours, they may have had the strength to swat away the scavenger birds, but after a day, they surely had none left. Beaks tore into them, ripping off chunks of flesh again and again. They cried, groaned, cursed, prayed until their spirits finally broke.
They died before death took them. In their last moments, there was only pain and the desperate wish for oblivion.
This place was called the Field of Doom.

- My Lord, do you feel it?

- The stench of rot? Yes, all too well.

- That's not what I meant - the elf replied.

The long-eared one approached a stake piercing through one of the wretches. It was neither wood nor metal. A mere touch from the violet-eyed caused it to crumble into dust, and the body collapsed to the ground.
The rakian armor clattered as it hit the earth, sounding like a pan dropped onto a floor. The soldier's head detached, rolling to a stop at the god's fee. Not that he cared.
Meanwhile, Landgrave raised his blackened fingers to his nose, inhaling the faint scent the dust gave off.

- Do you know what this is? - his patron asked.

- I do. But I hope I'm wrong - the elf responded.

With that, he gathered a few black particles on his tongue and chewed them. After a few seconds, he spat them out in disgust.

- Metallic taste and scent. It's dried blood - violet-eyed stated.

The god remained unfazed by his follower's words, silently analyzing the surroundings.
He approached the fallen rakian soldier just as a raven pecked out a wriggling maggot from the hollow of his empty eye socket.
Reaching out toward the corpse, he was stopped by his servant.

- My Lord, corpse rot is a potent poison. But I possess Abnormal Resistance. Allow me to perform the autopsy.

Hades gave a silent nod of approval. Temporarily borrowing Belakher one of his many names, he chose to call him Eubuleus that fitted him perfectly.