Chapter 487: Heads Getting Broken

Tiamat and Sariel really did break each other's heads.

And in the most literal sense, at that.

The moment Tiamat heard the staggering difference in the numbers, she lost all control and erupted into her true form, a five-headed dragon.

All five heads came crashing down on Sariel in a frenzy of snapping jaws. Violent flames instantly engulfed the entire space.

Tiamat was only a lesser divinity, but the raw physical power of a five-headed dragon more than compensated for her shortcomings. She could swallow a lesser divinity whole with a single bite.

Sariel panicked, flailing her blazing sword this way and that, barely managing to deflect Tiamat's killing blows. In one unguarded moment, half of one of her flaming wings was torn straight off.

The agony sent Sariel into a frenzy of her own.

"Damn you! Tiamat, do you really think you can beat me?!"

Sariel let out a roar. The entire palace was instantly annihilated in a pillar of fire, with the furious howling of countless devils following in its wake.

Spatial gates tore open all around Sariel. The elite forces she'd been cultivating for years poured through, unleashing their own roars at the five-headed dragon.

Tiamat didn't let up either. All five heads bellowed in unison, summoning a sky-blotting horde of red dragons in return.

Even the githark red dragons couldn't hold a candle to this army.

The two forces collided in midair like two tidal waves crashing into each other, sending countless sprays through the air.

Blood, sulfur, and molten rock erupted every which way as countless lives were snuffed out with every passing second.

If Mammon hadn't stepped in at a critical moment to shield the magic mirror, the fragile tool would have been shattered from the shockwave of the collision alone.

Sariel and Tiamat both swelled to enormous size, like heroes and monsters wrestling atop crashing waves. The battle raged with such ferocity that the heavens themselves seemed to dim.

The entire first layer of Hell shook.

A single breath from Tiamat could spread across a hundred miles, carving a river of lava into the earth below. Sariel's sword could cleave through space, leaving trails across the sky as brilliant as fireworks—except these fireworks never faded, and instead became permanent scars across the heavens.

Power on this scale, if unleashed in the material plane, would have been enough to destroy the world outright.

How long the battle went on was anyone's guess. By the time the carcasses of devils and dragons had piled up into mountain ranges, Sariel finally let out a roar. "Tiamat! Don't push me! I am the lord of the first layer of Hell!"

A vast conceptual force answered Sariel's call, taking on physical form. Billions upon billions of chains coiled around Tiamat's massive body and bound it fast.

This was the power of a planar lord.

The first layer of Hell wasn't Sariel's divine realm, but it was the plane entrusted to her by the Lord of the Nine Hells, which meant Sariel could draw on the entire plane's power at will.

Using it in a brawl like this was, admittedly, a bit below the belt, like pulling out a cheat code the moment you started losing.

Powerful as Tiamat was, even she couldn't resist the full weight of an entire layer of Hell bearing down on her. The chains grew tighter and tighter, wrapping around all five of her dragon heads.

But Tiamat only seemed to go completely berserk. She roared at Sariel in fury. "Sariel, you think Hell's power can make me submit?! If you've got the guts, kill me! Otherwise, I will devour you!"

The dragon thrashed wildly, wrenching at the cosmic chains, and the entire first layer of Hell began to tremble.

Mammon could see exactly where this was heading. If this kept up, the Lord of the Nine Hells himself was going to be woken up.

He was Mammon's former father-in-law—and though Mammon had earned his recognition and been granted rulership of Hell's third layer as a result, Mammon despised the man with fervor. It was his interference, after all, that had torn him away from his beloved Glacia, leaving him with nothing to do but chase after wealth for the rest of eternity.

Personal hatred aside, Mammon understood perfectly well just how terrifying he was. Under no circumstances could he be allowed to wake up—because if he did, all three of them would be in for a punishment, no matter whose fault it was.

So Mammon threw himself directly into the thick of the battle, seizing Sariel's sword arm with one hand and pressing down on a dragon head with the other.

"Both of you, stop!" Mammon said, his voice strained with urgency. "You're devils! Devils above all else respect contracts, and pride themselves on wisdom!"

Mammon, miser though he was, actually had some genuine ability. He would hardly have the right to govern the third layer of Hell without it. Holding both infernal lords in check with one hand each, he pressed on. "Tiamat, isn't it the most natural thing in the world for devils to manipulate contracts? The fact that you didn't notice reflects on your own ability, not hers. What's there to be angry about? Haven't you tricked mortals into signing unfair contracts yourself?!

"And you, Sariel, you've been a fallen angel long enough. Getting your scheme exposed and then throwing a tantrum over it is not worthy of an Archduchess of Hell! When you lose, you concede: that is the nature of the devil. Are you two actually going to wake the Lord of the Nine Hells over this? If you want to die, don't take me down with you!"

The moment Mammon brought up the Lord of the Nine Hells, both Sariel and Tiamat visibly sobered.

Though Asmodeus was only the ruler of the ninth layer of Hell in name, he was the master of the entire infernal realm in reality.

Asmodeus had divided up his own authority, granting Sariel and the others lordship over one layer each, but reclaiming that authority would take him no more than a single thought.

Asmodeus was no merciful being. If roused from his rest, he would deal with all three of them regardless of cause, reason, or circumstance.

Especially Sariel, who had refused to yield in the beginning. Only when Asmodeus personally intervened did she finally become a devil.

The cosmic chains vanished. Tiamat regained her freedom, but chose not to continue the assault. Instead, she shifted back into her half-dragon humanoid form.

Sariel sheathed her blazing sword and folded her flaming wings, gnashing her teeth.

Mammon breathed out in relief. At last, these two idiots had calmed down.

"Alright. At the end of the day, it's just a story about tricking and being tricked. After all these years in Hell, haven't you seen enough of those? When you can't outmaneuver someone, you admit defeat and move on. We have eternity to get back at one another."

Mammon had nothing but contempt for Tiamat and Sariel, two outsiders who weren't true devils at heart. Win or lose, devils were supposed to maintain their composure. Going straight for the jugular at every turn—who did they think they were, demons from the Abyss?

On the magic mirror's side of things, the Goddess of Wealth watched the three lords of Hell grinding their teeth and undercutting each other while competing for a spot in the deal, and felt a deep, almost glowing sense of satisfaction. 𝚏𝗋ℯⅇ

She hadn't expected that her very first move after so long in the shadows would leave three lords of Hell literally going for each other's heads.

The Goddess of Wealth could even feel her own divine power ticking steadily upward, though she couldn't quite tell whether it was because the soul bank was drawing ever closer to becoming a reality, or because three lords of Hell were currently haggling with her in person.

Such was the nature of conceptual gods. Even they couldn't always fully untangle the workings of the concepts they embodied.

There was a legend that the Lord of Knowledge had once considered banning most of the world's trashy pulp fiction, only to discover that books like those decisively outsold proper, rigorous scholarship, and spread knowledge in a way that lodged itself in people's memories whether they wanted it to or not.

This was the limitation of even the most powerful conceptual gods.

Being more than a pure abstraction—having emotions and opinions, and thus the capacity to make errors—meant that even the mightiest conceptual deity could bring about his own downfall through a single miscalculation.

The Goddess of Wealth had lived through a great deal, which was why she was now extraordinarily careful and measured in everything she did. Even with three lords of Hell already having literally beaten each other bloody right in front of her, the Goddess of Wealth held her composure, and continued to negotiate for ever better terms.

The now-calmer devils accepted the Goddess of Wealth's proposal and began the grimly reluctant process of submitting bids.

After a round of negotiation, Mammon successfully secured his place in the soul bank venture, and agreed to take part in the operation to bring pressure on the kouto goddess as well.

Under the final terms, Ambrose needed to pay only eight million soul-coins as Mammon's fee, which would then be invested into the soul bank's initial operations, giving Mammon a twenty percent stake.

Tiamat's fee came to ten million soul-coins, likewise to be invested into the bank, but at only a ten percent stake.

Tiamat was not satisfied. In her view, once Sariel's deception had been laid bare, she was owed at least forty million soul-coins and no less than sixty percent of the bank's equity.

But the Goddess of Wealth wasn't about to give her what she wanted.

The kouto goddess had already been weakened almost to the threshold of a lesser divinity. Tiamat wasn't strictly necessary for this operation.

With Mammon throwing a wrench into everything as well, Tiamat ultimately chose to accept a reduced ownership stake, keeping six million soul-coins outright and investing the remaining four million into the bank as her equity.

As for Sariel, her fee came to only six million soul-coins. It should have been eight million, but two million had been carved out as compensation for Tiamat. Her equity was also capped at ten percent. The Goddess of Wealth refused to allow Sariel to invest all of it into the bank, so she too ended up investing four million for her ten percent share.

The three infernal lords combined thus held a forty percent stake, with a total investment of sixteen million soul-coins. The remaining stake was temporarily held by the "God of Alchemy," to be put up for competitive bidding at a later stage.

There were numerous lords of Hell, and the soul bank would have tremendous reach. Once it officially opened, countless infernal lords would be circling this particular prize.

Both Ambrose and the Goddess of Wealth understood clearly that the lords of Hell couldn't be allowed too large a share.

Ten percent was already about the maximum sustainable. Push it any further, and the lords of Hell could easily band together to expel the outsiders. If it came to that, they'd absorb the tens of millions of soul-coins already invested, revert to their old feudal and backward economic arrangements, and still come out ahead by any calculation.

So the soul bank was always going to be a project that looked impressive from the outside but wouldn't actually be all that profitable on the surface.

The real moneymaker was Ambrose's ability to print money. His soul-coins would gradually crowd out the genuine currency currently circulating in Hell, replacing good currency with bad.

When that day came, the Lord of the Nine Hells would almost certainly have something to say about it.