Excerpt: Welcome to Hell

The spider sighed and rolled her stolen blue eyes, then stood up on her hind legs. Pulling her fore leg away from him, she opened her mouth, the tip of the leg moving into it and down her throat. Hades' risked cringing as he watched, a simple move that made her pause before she pulled her leg from her throat and pushed her face into his, her lips curling up into a cruel smile. "You made a face," she hissed, her mouth curling wider.

"Did not." He let his foot slide away slightly, feeling his heart begin thumping in his chest as he stepped back. Oh crap...

"You did. Your face is MINE!"

When Poh went to strike for his head, Hades ducked over backwards, narrowly missing the claw on the end of her leg. He moved out of the way, dodging her by rolling to the side before he turned to face her. "Hey! I listened to your jokes! You owe me a key!" he snapped, staying crouched for a moment with his right arm stretched out to the side as his left kept him balanced. His hand clenched into a fist, ready to light it with flames.

"I'm afraid not, boy," she hissed, falling back down to all eight of her legs as she turned to face him. Her face changed, returning to that of a normal spider, her eyes blinking at him as saliva dripped from her mouth. "It's been so long since my children and I have had fresh meat..."

"Children??" Feeling something crawling up his left arm, Hades looked down and his eyes widened when he saw two or three smaller spiders crawling up it. "Crap!" Fire flared up along his arm, squeals echoing in the pit as he jumped back, the Face Stealer's children falling off and running back into the darkness.

Well, he figured he had to get the key from her somehow. From the way she had been about to get it, it was in her somewhere. "HOW DARE YOU?!" Looking up, he could practically see the fury on her face, and Poh had switched to one of her stolen visages so it was clear that she was really, really ticked off at him. Hades let his other hand light up with flames, now having enough light to see through the darkness of the pit. Billions of tiny little spiders were crawling along the floor, marching towards him.

Glancing back up at Poh, he was just in time to see her transform. Her body mutated into something that appeared to be more human, her body in a sleek black silk dress that covered her full form, long black hair falling over her shoulders and bright green eyes that glared at him from behind a Noh mask "To get the key now you'll have to defeat me," was the hiss as her eyes narrowed, pointing at him with fingers that had nails almost like claws. "If you can."

"I'll be glad to." Dropping into one of the stances Professor Hephaestus had taught him, Hades drew his arms up to guard himself against her and her children, fire still licking at his hands. For a moment, he was grateful for what he'd been taught at the Academy. He turned on his right foot, lifting his left leg up and watching flames engulf his foot as he made to strike out at her. She made no move to back away and for a moment he was confused until he saw the small spiders jumping up to shield her.

She didn't seem to care that her children were unleashing their piercing screams as they perished in his fire, watching with greedy eyes as he attempted to attack her again, this time with a direct punch to the face before jumping away from her. Again, the spiderlings defended her and she laughed at his feeble attempts.

'Well crap...how am I supposed to get myself out of this one? Thanatos won't let me back in the door without that key...' Hades lit his feet, planning on keeping the children off him that way while he thought things over. He eyed Poh, who seemed to be rather content to let her young attack him despite wanting his face for her own. After a few moments of thought, his eyes lit up, a grin splitting across his face. "That's it!"

"Oh? What exactly do you have in mind, little boy?"

He didn't answer her. Instead, he lashed out with one foot in a low circle kick, spinning around on his other, setting every one of the baby spiders around him on fire. They squealed like pigs, trying to run away from the flames that engulfed them, becoming little torches. They bumped into their siblings, in turn lighting those spiders, and those ones lit others and so on and so forth. Poh's expression of mad glee turned to one of shock horror as her children burned around her, seething as he smirked at her.

"When I'm done with you, child, your corpse will be bearing my eggs!" she shrieked, her nails seeming to grow and hair spreading, becoming thread-like in their strands. Poh was standing in front of him one minute and then next Hades found himself unable to move, silken white threads making its way from underneath her nails and wrapping around his body.

Poh might have been laughing, but Hades kept a calm face, watching the threads wrap around and around him. He heaved a deep sigh, closing his eyes as she pulled him into her, wrapping him in her embrace. He could feel hot breath ghosting over his neck, feel the tip of her fangs prickling his neck. It was almost sensual in a way, the way she expected to take his face.

But of course, he wasn't going to have that. He needed to save Persephone.

Her shriek pierced through his ears as his body went up in flames, exploding like Mount Vesuvius had several weeks ago. When the silken thread peeled away from his body, he reached out and grabbed for her, grinning viciously from ear to ear. "I want my key," he growled into her ear, squeezing around her middle. Poh gagged, still screaming as fire engulfed her own body. The panic made her flick back and forth between her more human-seeming form and her real spider body, but the result was the same.

The key flew out of her mouth.

Pulling away from her, Hades sprung out from in front of Poh, snatching the key from the air as his flames automatically turned off without much thought. Standing from his slight stance, he looked over his shoulder at the burning spider-woman and grinned, tossing it up and down in the air. "Two down, three to go."

Listening to and watching Poh crumble into ash was more satisfying than it should have felt. Hades turned on his heel and began making his way back down the path towards the mansion, feeling rather confident in himself as he strode down the torch-lit walkway. Upon reaching the door and opening it into the waiting room of Hell, Hades gave Thanatos a smirk as he showed the elder God the key in his hand.

"Hades..." Thanatos' voice held a displeased tone to it, his arms crossed languidly over his chest as he shook his head and snapped his fingers, summoning a mirror. "Take a look at yourself."

Raising an eyebrow, Hades wondered what the personification of death was talking about and turned his head. His eyes widened, the key dropping from his hand as he fell back onto his backside.

That was when he finally felt the agony of the burn wounds to his body.

His scream of pain rocked the waiting room, the boy God curling into himself as he clutched at his head. In the mirror it showed a walking corpse, flesh peeled and blackened by the flames he had used to defeat Poh, bone showing here and there. His body screamed at him, unable to turn his eyes away from the mirror. "What...what...?"

"You do not have your immortality back yet. You are a regular human, just like those above us," Thanatos started explaining, snapping his fingers once again to make the mirror disappear as he looked down at his young charge. "Thanks to the healing powers that the Underworld grants its residents, you are not dead...barely. Had you wasted time fighting the Face Stealer any longer you would have perished."

"I...I didn't know...oh Chaos, it hurts..." He whimpered, rolling forward onto his knees as the smell of charred meat filled the air, coming from him. Hades wrapped his arms around himself, looking at Thanatos with an accusing look on his healing face. "Why didn't you tell me this would happen?!"

"I automatically assumed you would know that no immortality meant you were succeptible to the flames of your own demise," he replied, pulling a device out of his pocket and pressing the red button on it. Almost immediately a host of rabbit-like creatures appeared, dressed in nursing outfits. Several of them took hold of him gently, forcing him to stand as they looked to Thanatos who nodded. "Put him in ICU upstairs," he ordered, replacing the device back in the pocket of his double-breasted suit. "And for Chaos' sake, don't let the boy fall apart."

"Wait...!" Hades didn't have the chance to say anything else as he was swept away by the humanoid rabbits, and he was screaming once again soon after.

Thanatos watched them leave before he turned his attention back to the key, forgotten and laying on the floor. He stooped to pick it up, hearing it chime and hum in his palm. He smiled. "Two down, three more to go...that boy had better not mess up my plans further..."