The demon receptionist stared at the two in silence through her window.

  Her eyes thinned as she said, “I don’t believe you. Prove that you’re inspectors.”

  “You’ll get your proof when your review reaches your boss,” Yuri said and clapped Zeke’s shoulder. “Let’s go looking around.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

  Zeke caught up to him while glancing back at the rocky-face receptionist over and over. “Wait,” he whispered. “I don’t think she believed us.”

  The pair switched back to their normal voices.

  “Maybe she did, or maybe she didn’t,” Yuri said. “Give it some time.”

  Zeke groaned. “I don’t like this.”

  “I know we’re in the Netherworld, Zeke, but if you keep stressing like that, you’re going to give yourself one hell of a bad time,” he said, holding back his chuckle.

  Another groan came from Zeke, and then he rubbed his temples. He might kill himself before they’re caught by the demonic staff.

  “I say we head to the emergency unit,” Yuri said. “The signage said it was on the ground floor, yeah?”

  The words from the punny weirdo with closed eyes made Zeke panic, but he had no choice but to go along with it as he started speaking.

  He looked to the side and saw the extending hallway. “We can get there through the hallway,” Zeke said as he raised a hand, pointing in the hallway’s direction and then lowered it in embarrassment. “Sorry,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “I forgot that you were blind.”

  “Well, to be honest with you, Zeke, what I have isn’t actually blindness.” He opened his eyes, giving Zeke an unsolicited answer to the question: “What is behind the eye?”

  Zeke wished he didn’t see Yuri’s eyeless sockets, even as an aspiring doctor. Despite his stomach’s complaints, a mix of curiosity and pride kept Zeke from looking away. The gooey anatomy of the sockets had greening and yellowing dead nerves, muscles, and blood vessels that together looked like moldy chicken soup.

  Yuri closed his eyes and moved down the hall. Zeke followed.

  “My Container is busted. The appearance of it may change with the help of magic, but anything that changes its core functionalities is a no-go,” Yuri said nonchalantly. “My soul tether has also been messed with, making it impossible for my soul to occupy any other Container than my own. Plus, the procedures done on me made the connection that my tether has to my Container so strong that it is affected by its physical shortcomings. That’s why I still can’t see even in an Astral Realm.”

  “Wait, does that mean you’ll be blind when you die and cross to the afterlife?”

  “I’m technically already dead, though,” Yuri said and laughed. “However, my tether is inseparable from my Container.”

  “Why did someone do this to you?”

  They reached the inpatient department. Multiple doors began to appear on either side of the walls, and Zeke could hear wails and screaming coming from beyond them.

  Zeke brought his attention back to Yuri. “That’s awful,” he said softly. “I hope you find whoever did this to you and reverse it—”

  “Yeah, about that. Nah.”

  “‘Nah’?”

  “Nah. I have thought about that whole revenge thing. Find the person who did this to me. Make them pay and get my vision back, but then I decided: “Nah.” That’s too typical. I’m not going to dedicate years of my life doing that when I can be doing other stuff.”

  “Other stuff like what? What can be more important than making the person who did this to you pay and get your vision back?”

  Yuri smiled. “Being happy.”

  Zeke’s face contorted as he paused. “What does that even mean?”

  “Well, it has a different meaning for everybody; for me, it’s just enjoying life.”

  Enjoying life being eyeless while the person who ruined you roams free.

  How can someone be happy like that? Zeke thought while studying Yuri. He was clearly delusional. Nobody can be happy living like that. He was just in denial because he failed to find the culprit.

  “Hello, there!” a male demon in a black lab coat said as he approached them.

  “Would you two like me to show you around?” the sharp-toothed, red-skinned demon said as it nervously rubbed its hands together.

  Zeke looked over at Yuri, who winked back at him, knowing his gambit worked. It was the weirdest that the Diagnostician had ever seen.

  Equipping his low, demon voice again, Yuri said: “We’d like to… see…” he chuckled and then took an elbow to the side from Zeke, bringing him back to focus. “Your emergency unit.”

  “Okay, it’s just straight ahead. Follow me!” The demon turned and marched forward. The two followed.

  “We can start interrogating the emergency department to see if they know anything, and then we move up,” Yuri whispered to Zeke.

  It was a long walk, leaving Zeke plenty of time to wonder how many demons the place could fit at once.

  Zeke and Yuri stopped as they reached the emergency unit.

  It was packed with hundreds of demonic patients and emergency room personnel. Oddly, Zeke found beauty not in the hospital’s consistently bewitching interior design but in the controlled chaos of underworldly ER doctors using supernatural medical equipment and magic to save lives.

  Demon paramedics were rushing in with severely injured denizens of the Netherworld strapped onto gurney-like vehicles. The paramedics would find a free spot in the room where ER personnel bolted in an instant to help lift the patient onto their bed for treatment.

  The doctor who accompanied them turned to the two and said in an apologetic tone, “Rylkaz is going through some stuff…”

  Zeke assumed he was talking about the receptionist who treated them with oh-so-wonderful hospitality.

  “That incubus she was seeing impregnated a succubus from Kriappetora, even though he promised her he would only do that with other succubi from their homeland.”

  Zeke raised a brow. Infidelity in the demon world was nothing to be shocked about, it was the rules around that infidelity that confused Zeke.

  “Just… don’t mind her.” His voice was silvery, hypnotic-like. Definitely influenced plenty of minds to do heinous crimes in his free time. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?” he said, folding his hands.

  The demon wasn’t only good at kissing ass but watching out for his own. It was a very human-like attitude making Zeke wonder if he was a Beta Demon or if purebred demons and humans really were that similar in behavior.

  “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

  “Yes, we have some questions,” Yuri said, “How have things been around here regarding cases?”

  “Well, there are always hard cases and easy cases,” the doctor said, “But today we only lost 179 demons, which is a pretty good rate to have by this time of the day.”

  Zeke scrunched his face at the comment.

  “Any particularly eventful cases today?” Yuri asked, maintaining the nonchalance in his baritone voice. If there was a depressed rock band in the Netherworld in need of a lead singer, he would make the cut.

  The doctor took a back step and turned his head to the side. He paused. “Today so far… I would say there hasn’t been anything we haven’t seen before.”

  Zeke decided to join in on the interrogation. Making sure to stay with his gravelly voice as he spoke. “You said so far there have been 179 failed cases. Even with the head doctor around?”

  “Dr. Destrian helps us way more than we deserve!” The doctor turned to his side and got more jumpy. “Dr. Destrian is brilliant and the best thing that happened to the Netherworld and demonkind. Without him, we are nothing, okay? I support Dr. Destrian fully, no matter what.”

  The demon’s wording started to sound rehearsed, and Zeke picked up on its Black Magic energy flaring up—a clear sign of a Netherworld resident getting nervous.

  “Where is Dr. Destrian now?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor answered firmly, then added, with an exaggerated shrug, “I don’t even know if he is in the Netherworld…”

  Yuri snickered. “Okay, you can go now. We’d like to talk to the others.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Okay,” the doctor said as it cautiously backed away. “Do not hesitate to summon me if you need anything.”

  The two waited a bit after the doctor walked away and then debated in their human voices.

  “We have to be more careful with how we ask questions,” Zeke said.

  “Aye, aye, Head Doctor,” Yuri tried for a salute but missed his forehead.

  “Aida said we have 4 hours, right?” Zeke said. “That might seem like a lot, but we could easily lose track of time if we mess around. And it’s been 18 minutes since she announced it.”

  “You’ve been counting the time? Aiiiight, your brain is always working, huh?”

  Zeke avoided responding and scanned the hospital again. “Let’s split and meet back here in… 15 minutes.”

  “Okie-dokie!” Yuri said and walked off.

  Zeke watched him move with a bounce in his step.

  You have no vision, and a friend of yours has been inseminated with the seed of a powerful demon that can end the world. How in the hell are you so…

  He forcefully put an end to the thought by smacking the side of his head and started scouting the vast area.

  Zeke felt the familiar sensations of envy as he observed the intensity of the emergency room. Gill had so many underlings working and taking care of so many patients at once, while Providence Infirmary was absurdly understaffed, but it wasn’t like there was a need for more personnel since they never took on more than two supernatural cases at once.

  Zeke clenched his jaw and shook his head. What was he saying? Did he want more Winterberry residents to be inflicted with supernatural ailments?

  He looked over to a demoness crying in pain on her bed while a group of doctors applied ointment on her burnt flesh—Hellfire burns. Even some variants of the Netherworld can be scorched by it.

  Zeke stopped to stare, and a cold, comfortable feeling spread within him. The sight reminded him that sometimes the universe was just. Bad things did happen to bad people (and other beings), and that was good.

  One of the doctors finished with a limb and stepped away from the patient. The exhausted demon noticed Zeke and stared. “Who are you?”

  Zeke told him he was an inspector, and the being’s eyes widened. Zeke guessed it to be male. Either he was extremely gullible, or news within the hospital spread stupidly fast.

  Next, he asked the demon some basic questions about medical procedures, the staff, the patients, and anything eventful, but the devil clammed up when Gill was mentioned.

  After staying silent, he said, “Dr. Destrian is brilliant and the best thing that happened to the Netherworld and demonkind. Without him, we are nothing, okay? I support Destrian fully, no matter what.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is now?”

  He looked away and said. “Sorry, I have to go.”

  Zeke sighed and continued exploring.

  He tried other paramedics and ER doctors who weren’t busy with anything but heard the same scripted response whenever he asked about Gill, followed by: “I don’t where Dr. Destrian is” after he asked.

  Things were different when Zeke approached a station in the emergency unit where a duo of nurses watched over a much younger-looking nurse applying an ancient tourniquet onto the leg of a young demon boy.

  The nurses looked human in their black uniforms. They were absurdly stunning, but upon closer inspection, Zeke noticed their horns poking out of their caps and their scarlet red eyes and paid attention to their Black Magic output; they were all succubi.

  They were most likely avoiding having their wings out for better mobility. It turned out that succubi are used as nurses.

  Ugo would’ve lost it if he had been here, Zeke thought and titled his head to the side. He realized he wasn’t sure of the statement as Ugo had been acting so non-Ugo-like recently.

  Although, he did for a while during the incident at the Infirmary.

  Zeke approached the older duo and greeted them. They answered back with courtesy. It was implicit that they already thought he was an inspector.

  He went through the script of basic questions and cautiously asked about Gill.

  One of the nurses started with, “Dr. Destrian is brilliant and the best thing that happened to the Netherworld and—”

  “Where is Dr. Destrian right now?” Zeke interrupted. “Working on an important case?”

  “Maybe,” the younger nurse said and then flinched as the older ones shot a look at her. “But to be honest… I don’t know.”

  Zeke looked at each of the older nurses. “Same with you two?”

  They both nodded.

  Zeke remained still as he thought about what other questions he could try.

  “What is Gageriel like?” The older nurse to his left asked.

  “Huh?” Zeke asked, startled.

  The other older nurse smacked her shoulder.

  “What? He works with the Administration, so I’m curious to know what he is like.”

  “Gageriel is…” Zeke stopped for a moment to find a word and used the first one that came to him. “Cool.” He turned his back to them. “Thanks for the questions.”

  Zeke asked more demons as he walked back to where he separated from Yuri. The name: “Gageriel” stubbornly stayed in his head.

  It sounded like an angel’s name.

  Could an angel be down here in the Netherworld? Zeke asked himself.

  No, it would be impossible to do so without losing a single percentage of purity. Perhaps, a dirty angel? Zeke couldn’t agree with that thought either.

  Then, he remembered what Violet had told him about angels losing their purity and wings. They didn’t become human, but something similar to one… could that be what’s going on?

  “Gill trained these guys well,” Yuri said, startling Zeke with his voice.

  Zeke jerked to his side and then regained his composure with one hand over his accelerated heart.

  “Sorry,” Yuri said, changing back to his normal voice. “You’re so tense, Zeke.”

  Zeke sighed and did the same, “So, no luck with you, huh?” He stared at the decorative ceramic tiles. “I know there are clearly a lot of demons in here, but it’s crazy to think that the entirety of the Netherworld comes here for treatment.”

  “That is crazy to think,” Yuri said. “There’s not only one hospital that treats demons in the entirety of the Netherworld. Demons have learned from Demonologists for centuries. All kinds of clinics are set up throughout the hellish Realms under the Demonstone Hospital name.”

  “Multiple hospitals?” Zeke shouted. Luckily, the place was too chaotic for any demon to bat an eye. He quickly scanned the area and continued while lowering his voice. “Yuri, if that’s the case, then how do we even know that Gill is doing the delivery here?”

  “This is the main hospital with the best infrastructure,” Yuri argued. “If he is going to do it anywhere. It will be here. O-O-Or… at least this place will lead us to him—”

  “You don’t know for sure. We need to—”

  “I wouldn’t play around with Kimberly’s life like that!”

  Zeke pulled back, pausing for a while, and raised a hand. “Okay, sorry.”

  Yuri also allowed himself to pause for a while and said: “Me, too.” He slightly slouched forward. “Listen, Aida didn’t mention, but I think you’re all aware that the survival rate of giving birth to a Rebirth Seed is slim to none. I don’t think Gill will work as hard to keep her alive as he would for the demon.”

  The solemn expression on Yuri’s face made Zeke’s brain work to devise a solution to ensure Gill didn’t get his way. No matter what.

  There was a much quicker way to resolve this…

  He looked off to the side, and his mind began to replay the events of when he visited the Fairy Realm. What Akachi did to the fairy, Tansy, in order to get information about the castle.

  Imagine if they wasted time asking around during that time…

  If the world treated him like a Tainted, then perhaps it was time he started acting like it.

  “Screw this…” Zeke said and looked around the emergency unit. He selected a target: the red-skinned demon who accompanied them into the hallway.

  He was exiting the emergency unit. Zeke followed him, and so did Yuri.

  “How certain are you that they are completely convinced that we are certified inspectors?” Zeke asked.

  “Well, claiming to be an inspector means to claim to be a part of the Administration which is the main outfit that represents the Netherworld Ministry of Infernal Planes,” Yuri answered as they re-entered the inpatient department. “It’s way bigger of a risk for the demon saying that they’re an inspector than for a demon to not believe them. Impersonating an Administration officer warrants a punishment far worse than death.”

  Zeke stopped to look at Yuri. “Seriously?” He shook his head and continued tailing the doctor, impressing himself with how quickly he dropped it. “Okay, whatever; now I need you to follow my lead.”

  A tap on the shoulder had the doctor stop and turn around. He flashed his diplomatic smile that didn’t contribute to making his demoniacal features any more amicable. “Yes? Thought of more things I can help you two with?”

  The gravelly voice made its return. “In fact, there is. We’d like to talk to you. In private. If that’s no trouble,” said Zeke.

  The doctor led them back to his office without making any fuss.

  It was clear to Zeke that the doctor was truly trying to take advantage of the opportunity, grabbing it by the horns to get himself a promotion or something.

  “So, what is on your mind, inspectors?” the doctor said as he walked up to his desk and sat behind it.

  Aside from the demonic sigils and candles all around, the office was regular-looking with a medieval accent. Zeke could take a photo and show people in the Human Realm. They’d probably think he was showing them an office in an eccentric place they were hopeless to understand… like Europe.

  “Now what?” Yuri asked Zeke.

  The doctor opened a drawer and then placed a couple of small glass jars on his desk. “Please, help yourselves.”

  Curiosity had the duo approach the desk. Zeke took one of the items and inspected it. It was filled with blood. “Is this—?”

  “Human blood. Virgin, however, with nearly zero purity. Got it from the Market. A brilliant blend of essences. Trust me, it’s delicious.”

  Zeke clenched the bottle in his hand and made the phoniest smile he ever produced since his last Rosario family reunion special. He turned, dropped a hand on Yuri’s shoulder, and whispered into his ear: “Black Magic energy. Hit him. Hard. Do it now.”

  As he walked up to the door without looking back, Zeke pulled out the cork stopper, wet his hand with the blood, and started to draw the Infirmary sigil.

  Zeke stopped halfway and looked over his shoulder. Mister Eyeless was standing, doing nothing. “Yuri!”

  “Okay!” Yuri scoffed and pulled back a fist, coating it with a high output of concentrated Black Magic energy, manifesting in the form of black smoke streaming from the skin.

  The doctor rose to his feet. “Hey! Wait, what—!”

  Cut off by the enhanced fist that drove into his cheek, the doctor’s face blasted into the floor—cracks diverted in multiple directions.

  “Good,” Zeke said and added the finishing touches to the sigil. “Bring him over,” he ordered as he opened the door.

  “What are we doing?” Yuri asked.

  Zeke groaned, rushed to the disoriented doctor, grabbed him by the back of his collar, and dragged him over to the door and into the waiting room of the Infirmary.

  Yuri stepped inside. “Zeke—”

  “I’m doing what’s necessary to save Kimberly, okay?” Zeke snapped and ran back to the door. He smeared the sigil with his arm.

  The doctor, mouth drenched in black blood, was coming back to his senses and rose to his knees as Zeke closed the door.

  As their eyes met, there was silence.

  Then, Zeke allowed for his suppressed Healer’s Garb energy to flare up. The doctor flinched and pulled back. “You’re not a demon.”

  Zeke pictured how Akachi put the fear of God into Tansy back at the Fairy Realm that day.

  He resolved to do the same with even a demon.

  Increasing the intimidation, Zeke closed both his fists and kept his eyes wide as he flashed an evil smile. “Oh, yes, I’m something much worse than a demon.” He moved up to the doctor slowly and then raised his hand to the side; a tangle of veins slipped out from his sleeve. “Can you guess what?”

  The shivering demon gulped. “Tainted Generation.”

  “In the flesh,” Zeke said.

  Anderson’s Supernatural Medical Fun Facts: All Angels are immune to holy fire. But not all demons are immune to hellfire.