After I heard that awful noise, I was no longer on 17th street. I had gone somewhere completely different. It was a place that was stuffy, hot, and humid. I couldn’t escape the feeling of claustrophobia. It looked like a cavern of gray in front of me, with red haze obscuring view in any particular direction. It felt tight. I struggled and tried to wriggle my way out of the restrains, until I realized I wasn’t restrained at all. I was standing, and somehow, the walls were wide enough for me to walk through. In fact, they were infinitely wide, because this was in hell. But the way the plane was shaped, or maybe something about the way its physics worked, or maybe just because I was existing in a dimension I wasn’t designed to—every single inch of my body felt like it was being compressed to pieces. I couldn’t breathe without reminding myself to take a gasp. I felt a demon’s hot breath on my face. I couldn’t see it, I just knew it was there. Inches away from my face, but always moving away before I could do anything. One was drooling on my leg, and another was wriggling around under my skin.

  Demons were everywhere in hell.

  Everywhere. Without exaggeration.

  I don’t think there could have been more than a cubic inch of space that wasn’t being occupied by an ashy gray beast. They squirmed and skittered through the tunnels like a mass of worms.

  “NEARLY THERE, M’LORD.”

  There was a demon that was pushing me through the wall of writhing demon mass. I was parting it like Moses parted the sea, except this was way bigger than a sea. (It was also demons instead of water.) I couldn’t say anything back, I didn’t have the energy. It took 100% of my focus and concentration to just… keep thinking.

  Suddenly, we were in front of a massive black slab. It was a shocking sight, everything else on some spectrum of gray to ashy red. The dark color cut through like a knife. It was about the size of a skyscraper, though I wasn’t sure how far it went up.

  “YOU MAY PROCEED INSIDE, M’LORD.”

  At the bottom of the slab was a small, square hole, about 12 inches on each side. I wanted to say, “you’re going to have to make that bigger.” There was no way I could get it out of my mouth, though. My parched throat was dryer than sandpaper, even taking a breath felt like inhaling razor blades.

  “AH, YOU ARE STILL SICK FROM YOUR TRAVELS. ALLOW ME TO ASSIST YOU.”

  My eyes instinctively shut as I reeled back in pain. My face and chest hit the slab, which I now discovered was hot like searing metal. I choked and gagged, as I felt the demon grab me by the head, and shove it down onto the ground. My bones snapped and caved, and my whole body fell like a marionette with cut strings. The demons’ hands crushed, gnashed, and ground my body into a pulp.

  After I was sufficiently “loose”, it began to push me through the small hole on the ground.

  The tiny walls I was being pushed into scalded and seared my exposed flesh, like I was being fried on a pan from all sides. I assumed the small square opening was like an archway into the inside of whatever this place was. I was mostly correct, but more so than an arch, it was a tunnel.

  About ten feet away was the inside of the “building”, meaning my entire, melting body was shoved through ten feet of melting-hot metal, crunched into a space a bowling ball would hardly fit in. But all the same, the demon pushed my burnt, cooking flesh all the way through, with its extending hands.

  At some point, I lost my emotions.

  When I spilled out the other side, I was in the form of not much more than burnt, loose entrails. But soon after that, I was back to normal.

  “THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE, M’LORD, BUT I MAY NO LONGER ASSIST YOU. I AM TOO SMALL A DEMON TO ENTER FARTHER IN THIS PLACE. YOU MAY GO FORWARD TO CHORONZON.”

  The inside of the “building” was bigger than the “entrance” was, but I still had to make myself small as possible to make it through the winding corridors. I was crawling on my hands and knees, feeling the skin endlessly rip off and grow back. Masses of demons wriggled around my body on the way through. The entire place gave the sensation of an overcrowded elevator.

  Choronzon wasn’t hard to find. I’m pretty sure all paths lead to its chamber, just with varying levels of suffering and torment. Unlike everywhere else I had seen in hell, the chamber was large. It was also completely, entirely, black. I couldn’t see a thing, it was like staring into a night sky, without the comfort of the stars or the moon.

  Until, suddenly, In front of me was Choronzon.

  I thought Choronzon was going to be some sort of eldrich horror that would melt my face off.

  No, he was just a guy. Well, not “just” a guy, he looked pretty… anime? He had long, bright red hair that draped down his bare chest, his figure clad only by some sort of edgy black robes with studded spikes. A little bit Shadow the Hedgehog-esque.

  “In case you were wondering, my appearance takes the form of whatever you perceive to be ‘devilish’” he said in his impressively normal-sounding voice.

  Oh, so it’s my fault. God dammit.

  “Welcome, Mina. I’ve been expecting you. Actually, to tell the truth, I’ve been excited for your arrival. I could hardly sit still for the last few hours.”

  “HE’S TELLING THE TRUTH,” one of the guard demons said.

  “HE GOT YOU A PRESENT, TOO!”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Shut up! Don’t spoil it!”

  I’m glad it isn’t just me that thinks these guys are generally more annoying than threatening.

  “Anyways, Mina, I feel like you’re owed an explanation.”

  “God, finally.”

  “It’s always a rough journey to hell. You can’t even get down here without being sinful. And here’s the thing about sin: It isn’t a problem. It’s a solution. That means everyone who wanders down here has something they want to fix.”

  “You know, I’ve never really seen myself as the sinful type. I don’t really do much.”

  “Right, yeah. That’s kinda the point. Hold on, let me introduce you to the circles. Things might start making a little more sense after that”

  He stood up dramatically, and formed a circular portal in between us. I was literally looking into another world.

  “The first circle is pride. People with big egos end up here, naturally. The kind of person who worries people look down on them, or underestimate their abilities. People who are actually confident in themselves tend to not be so prideful, because they don’t feel the need to claw onto their achievements for emotional support.”

  Inside the portal looked like some kind of labyrinth of opulence. Diamonds and gold plating decorated the winding tunnels and shapes.

  “The people in here are sinners, so we have to punish them. That’s the job of a devil. So what we do is give them what they want, but it’s never satisfying enough. The people here endlessly gain wealth, money, power. But no matter how much they get, they still need more. The castle you’re looking at right now is over two million square miles. You’d think that would be more than enough to satisfy someone, right? Not the kind of person who ends up here.”

  Before I could ask any questions, the scenery in the portal changed to one that appeared to be something like a cross between a stock market and a casino.

  “This is the second circle, greed. People who cling too hard to their wealth end up here. The torture here is that no matter how much money they get, once again, it can never be enough. Look at that guy right there, see him? Old brit with a bowler hat.”

  I saw him. He was desperately pulling a slot machine arm over and over, not even waiting to see if he won.

  “He’s spending ten trillion dollars on every spin. He’s been here for fourteen hours. Any idea how much money that would be in your world? Of course, the money here is useless. It’s just a number to them. And, of course, we keep upping the ante for them (pun intended.) In a month or two, this guy will probably think of his current actions as like scrambling for pocket change.”

  “Hey, can I stop in this world for a moment? Just like, for a second, then I’ll come back.”

  “You’d wreck the whole thing. Sure, you’ve committed sins of greed before. But you don’t understand the scale of it. The only humans allowed inside any of these circles are within the very top percentages of their respective sin. Only a handful of the greediest people to have ever lived can enter this world.”

  Next, there was a barren, charred wasteland.

  “This is the circle of wrath. It’s just a constant escalation of fighting and warfare. Your power starts small, but as you kill others, you increase in scale of what you can do. First you might only have your fists. Then, you may get a knife. Later, a gun. And it just escalates forever. The place we’re looking at now is actually one of the many planets completely burnt out from nuclear railguns.”

  “What happens if one of these guys ends up on the receiving end of someone else’s wrath?”

  “That’s the funny part; they can’t. They’re all completely isolated in their own little worlds. Everyone they’re killing is just a figment of their imagination. After all, wrath doesn’t come from other people. It comes from inside of yourself. Next is number four, envy.”

  This one was like a mirror-image of the first one. Massive spires of opulent gems and crystals and precious metals.

  “This just looks like the circle of Greed again.”

  “It basically is, just from the other perspective. No matter how hard they try, they’ll never be able to claim all the opulence for their own. It’s an eternal rat-race of getting more, but never being satisfied. Number five, circle of lust.”

  The portal showed a lot of… Uh, you know.

  “Alright, no need for the details. Next one please.”

  Then, the portal became something like a landscape out of a Mario game in one of those food worlds. The ground was covered in icing, and mountain ranges looked like big strawberry cakes.

  “The sixth circle is gluttony. People don’t really do much but eat here. They just keep packing it away endlessly, simultaneously feeling fuller but also hungrier. People grow and gr—What’s that look for?”

  “Oh, nothing, just felt like I’ve seen something like that on the internet before. But, you know… a lot of these don’t sound that much like actual torture, to me. It’s almost a bit more like… wish fulfillment? I mean, like the greed one. It’s that kinda like, a gambler’s dream? To be able to do nothing but the thing they love? And this one, if the person is really enough of a glutton to end up here, wouldn’t the fact that they could eat forever with no real repercussions be a good thing?”

  Choronzon smiled.

  “One man’s hell is another man’s heaven. Like I said earlier, sin isn’t a problem, it’s a solution. If you’re sinful enough to end up in hell, there’s a problem you need to fix. And these circles are exactly how you fix them: by giving the person exactly what they want, all the time, without stopping. By the end of their sentence in hell, they’ve gotten it all out of their system, and can ascend to heaven as a more well-adjusted being. Though some people never seem to want to leave, and so they just stay eternally, indulging in vices… But in a safer way than they could anywhere else, heaven or Earth. Everything in the universe works together for a common good. Hell is no different. But, anyways, I saved the best for last.”

  Suddenly, the portal showed the inside of a room. The floor was a mint green, looking a bit like a cross between tatami mats and carpet. The room was nicely decorated, but wasn’t anything fancy.

  “This is the last one, the circle of Sloth. Now, allow me to introduce you to your new home, Mina.“