When Angus heard the reports and replayed his own death, the surface felt wrong, like a sky hung at a crooked angle.

“Did no one bother to gather intel on the surface?” he asked the werewolf, voice flat as winter stone. In war, intel is breath. He’d died because he had none, snuffed by a god like a candle in the wind.

Without Hell’s support, that god on the surface could scythe through the underground coalition like wheat before a storm.

The werewolf scratched his scalp, nails rasping like thorns. “I heard the goblins in charge of intel rebelled…”

Angus questioned his way down the road toward his dungeon. He cast questions like nets, and facts wriggled in. A week had slipped by like sand since he died above, and in that week’s clashes…

The surface hadn’t fielded a Demigod yet. The underground’s Demigods were stalled by a turncoat goblin. The Goblin King—Taboo Mage Barakala—wiped out one dungeon’s elite alone, and goblins flocked to him like migratory crows.

No one had ever counted all the goblins. You could tally a city’s, sure. Count them all across the underground world? Like counting shadows in a cave.

They survive like weeds in cracks. They breed like summer locusts.

Before war, goblins did the bitter, backbreaking jobs: laying stone, sweeping roads, hauling loads. Their pay was a half-full belly, a hunger with edges. Then a rumor rose like smoke: a fellow goblin thrived on the surface. So bands of them decided to burst from the underground and follow the one who’d made it.

“Goblin King” began with a feast. The first goblins who joined Barakala were met with steaming dishes, fragrances rising like incense. Full-bellied, they crowned him their king without a second thought.

The story spread ten to a hundred, a prairie fire in dry grass. Even goblins tucked in nameless crannies heard the name Barakala, Goblin King.

“Goblins” is a banner term. Some are thinkers. They figured surrendering en masse earns no favor. They hid underground, stole the coalition’s plans like mice in granaries, and sent them to the surface. To the Goblin King, that would be high merit.

The surface’s main army, they said, was sent from allied worlds millennia ago. With goblins turning their cloaks, the surface coalition learned the underground’s moves in time to seed traps like pits under leaves.

Meanwhile, the few Demigods on the underground’s side were pinned by the Goblin King, tight as a lid on a pot.

That’s what Angus confirmed. But his gut churned darker water.

“Something’s off…” Faced with invasion, the surface didn’t feel like a nation with spears at its throat. In that small village he’d met a human Demigod, but no report mentioned human Demigods. Calm ruled the surface—calm enough that high-end fighters watched kids at home like shepherds in shade.

Think on that, and the omen sours. It seems the natives of the surface haven’t even moved. A single traitor goblin and a clutch of otherworld “allies” already bled the underground badly. In every known clash with surface dwellers, the underground died before they even raised a blade.

For example, Angus himself tried to stir trouble in a village—and died on the spot, as neat as a guillotine fall. Or a hydra led its dungeon guard to cross a river by night, and never reached shore—the fish ate them midstream, silver knives from below. Or the Blood Kin turned to bats and climbed the sky, only to be shot down by humans racing on brooms, wind-split like swallows; the racers swatted bats as mere obstacles.

Angus’s mood knotted into a hard fist. Forget the rebel Goblin King and the “otherworld coalition.” The god he met in that village alone meant the underground was finished unless a miracle fell like rain.

“My grand revenge, gone just like that?” The soul-flame in his skull guttered and leapt, an ember in a draft. He was not willing. “To deal with that god…”

His first thought was Hell.

Millennia ago, the Hell Gate briefly linked to the underground world. Devils surged up and fought angels on the surface; then angels and devils vanished like sparks in snow. Hell’s creatures seemed to sense something. They withdrew beyond the Gate, and the Gate clanged shut, iron-cold and silent for ages.

—

Elsewhere, the goofball trio reappeared after a long absence. They still swept an obsidian road, black as ice, brooms whispering like rain.

“Saya, how’s it look over there?” Ouyang swept and asked the air, tone light as a leaf. A heartbeat later, a small girl rippled into view like heat mirage. Green hair like willow, ice-blue eyes, and a porcelain-doll face.

He used to call her Azure Bird. At her insistent request, he called her Saya now. In her words, it was the memory of their first meeting, a thread tied in spring.

“All normal. But there may be a twist in the underground,” Saya said. Her body wavered, moonlight on water. Her true body rested in the Other Shore; this was only an avatar. With her vast computation—an abacus of stars—she had already located the Hell Gate below. If Hell’s brood came out to make trouble, mortals would feel the quake like thunder. But they’d only hop for a short while. Ouyang’s lot didn’t worry. Their eyes were on the Sealed Land.

From Barakala’s reports, millennia ago angels and devils dragged their battle into the Sealed Land, woke a sleeping horror, and were wiped out like lamps in a gale. Hell sensed doom, withdrew, and slammed the door.

Now, even Saya, with the Other Shore’s strongest computing might, couldn’t parse the Sealed Land’s structure, nor scan what slept within. It was a monolith wrapped in fog.

“Hell? If I recall, Hell always got bullied by the Underworld…” Ouyang’s smile tilted; a spark leapt. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If they could pull Hell into their camp, that’d be a tidy knot.

Not long ago, Ouyang sweet-talked Barakala into working with those weakling “reinforcements.” The trio quietly pinged the others from the Source world: don’t meddle with the underground. They wanted to watch the show, tea in hand.

On a surface where Demigods walk like cranes in a marsh, if the idle heavy-hitters swarmed and erased the underground army, there’d be no show. Surface creatures were barred from acting—within limits. Around the tunnel mouths, surface beings squatted shoulder to shoulder like sparrows on a line.

As for the Blood Kin who turned to bats and rose high, those humans weren’t passing by. They were lying in wait. Once the bats climbed beyond the zone marked by the Demon Kings, the ambushers struck, clean as a bell note.

The fish that ate the river-crossers were the same. That river was the edge line set by the Demon Kings. Try to cross, and the river’s spears had already bristled below.

Besides, Saya watched, able to resolve every particle like a jeweler counting dust. The underground army was living on borrowed time, a lamp low on oil.

The calm trio kept sweeping, strokes steady as breathing.

“Huh… picking up a Hell aura.”

Saya’s words made Ouyang pause. A three-headed dog padded into view, sulfur on its breath like a hot wind. “Hell Three-Dog!” Ouyang exclaimed, more surprised than scared; such beasts were rare as comets.

The so‑called Hell Three-Dog was just a three-headed hound. Ouyang just liked calling it “Three-Dog.”

No more talk. The glove on Ouyang’s right hand manifested a massive bone, white as a winter branch.

“Doggie, look—bone!”

He hurled it. The Three-Dog lunged on instinct, all three heads snapping like traps.

“Ou. Yang.” Saya’s face went dark as storm glass. Ouyang finally saw the problem. The bone was conjured by his right-hand glove. His right-hand glove was… Youwen.

Saya had fully awakened, her Azure Bird memories whole. But Youwen being her brother still weighed on her heart like a jade pendant. Watching Ouyang toss Youwen around as a chew toy would, of course, make her angry.

In the distance, the Three-Dog clamped the bone. All three heads froze for a beat. Something felt off. It hadn’t come here to chew on a bone.