Dante's Angel (s) {Dmc Fanfiction #2}

Part 17

(Part 17)

Maybe it was Dante's presence in the mission. Maybe it was the fact that all the demons that passed me totally ignored my presence as if they couldn't see me or feel. All demons in the castle I saw were almost literally flying towards the front gates where Dante probably still was, stuck with the sheer number of them.

I breathed a small sigh of relief when I saw that there were not too many high-level demons flying through the hallways. Either they hadn't been activated yet, or they were already engaged with Dante, pushing his fight quickly to an end. But still, I prayed that the son of Sparda knew his own limits. I wouldn't expect him to be able to single-handedly thrash the entire horde of demons that I'd seen at the front gates, combined with all those that I saw steadily streaming towards him.

Still, he was welcome to give me a pleasant surprise, though I wouldn't judge him at all if he didn't finish all of them off. Maybe 50% of the demons would be a norm. Considering Dante was a lazy ass, then maybe 25% of the demons.

Very occasionally, one or two demons slowed down in their quest to the front gates, turning to look at me. I guessed those were the rare demons who were wired to actually be able to sense out humans. Still, they were luckily all low-levelled demons that I shot dead easily without much of any problems at all. Getting to be able to kill some demons without any consequences was a great refresher after taking a break that was almost a month and a half long.

That wasn't including the time I spent with Dante here in Hell, which I had no definite measure of how much time we had actually spent. I guessed that Hell didn't exactly have time the same way that was measured in the two human worlds, which meant that Dante and I could have been here anytime from three days to three weeks.

I tried not to imagine how things might have changed in the three days-or-weeks that we had spent trying to get to Mundus's lair, remembering the instructions from Azazel. He had made it sound so easy –to look for the door with the bloody handprint.

Yeah, it would be easy if not for the fact that Mundus's castle had probably a few hundred doors. It didn't help that the lighting inside the castle was particularly horrible and not very beneficial for the lousy human eyesight. I had to squint against the partial-darkness to look for any tell-tale handprints at every door, which slowed down my progress greatly.

By the seventieth door, I was beginning to get a little irritated. By the hundredth, I was already jumpy and annoyed as hell. That was when I decided that the room with the bloody handprint had to be the most obvious, most conspicuous. It was the keys' room, after all. Demons probably had eyesight problems as well since they couldn't see a very-human me running past them, and if they needed to get some keys, they probably had to go there as well.

Going by that faulty, and rather shoddy logic, I cleverly skipped through the more mundane doors, only stopping by to look at doors with more ghastly decorations. Some had skulls hanging on them, others had bones and whatnot hanging from doorknobs. Some doorknobs were shaped like skulls, and a few other fancier ones shaped like bats.

It turned out that I didn't need much looking at all, because I eventually ran down this hallway where no rooms hung on either sides. For some strange reason, the candles hanging on the walls in this particular hallway were particularly bright, and I saw the blood handprint even from a distance away.

Sighing internally at my effort wasted squinting on the mundane doors, I ran down the relatively empty hallway –and was almost beheaded when a scythe swung down from a mechanism from the ceiling. Thank goodness for my knee-jerk reaction to step back, I narrowly avoided rolling heads at the cheap but extremely dangerous Halloween trick.