XARD "SWORD SOVEREIGN" ASMODEUS
The Emperor of the playlist watched as a new Persona users awakened to fight. He inwardly grinned at the challenge that laid before him. How he would enjoy taking them all down a peg, or seven, with the power he possessed. Kim, Lance, and Mora had to be dealt with having halted his minions' attack.
He waved a hand over the hallway they stood near the examination room. This made the door shut to the rusty medical ward, and the door at the end of the hallway opened. Behind the group came a loud bang! If they looked behind themselves, and it would be good to do so, they would see a steamroller wheel with nasty spikes protruding outwards barreling down towards them, carving up the pipes, stone, and metal like it was tissue paper. It was gaining momentum fast, and that meant persona users would live the rest of their lives as ripped up pancakes with blood for syrup. Their best option was to run passed the enemies that were breaking out of their icy prison and make it to the next room up ahead.
If Lance, Mora, and Kim made it out alive, they would soon find themselves in a children's playground, but this play place of fun and merriment had seen better days. Or perhaps it always was some form of Hell from the beginning?
Leaky pipes that dripped rust colored water from the ceiling. The walls were lined with thorny vines that formed around open windows. If one were to look outside, they would see molten steel gushing out of pipes and into vat below the room, while a nightmarish train whizzed passed the room on tracks that got closer and closer to the room; chains held up the room by its four corners. The playground itself held a swing set with three seats, a set of monkey bars, a tall slide, a jungle gym, a merry-go-round, rocking horses on springs, and a circular patch of healthy red roses with a skeleton of a child strapped to a wooden pole in the center by rusty chains. The attractions had skeletal children attached to them by the means of barbed wire twine. There were six dead kids in all, three girls and three boys, one for each play item. The rose patch itself had a ring of six children joining hands with a corpse of a woman with no eyes in her empty sockets. The none of the kids around the small rose garden had a head, and once all the teens were inside the nightmare of a playground, the headless children and woman began to move slowly around the roses. Out of the woman's throat came an eerie telling of a familiar song:
Ring Around the Rosie. And then everything went black with the only light being subtle soft lights appearing from the tiny occasional heartbeats that came from the children corpses on the play sets and a seven crammed inside a larger body, six where the stomach would be.
All exits were closed to Mora's group unless the puzzle was solved. Time was of the essence, for the Hell Train had a schedule to keep.
While Ichika, Xander, and Ryu dealt with the void that would devour them in their entirety, The Emperor had some other meddling kids to murder. They had successfully stopped the charging Charon Hound as it leaped at them. Teya smashed open its boney hide with her strong fists, so the new persona users could roast the beast and cauterize anything would ooze out acid. It was clever, but there was a small problem with the idea; if a pressure has nowhere to go, it makes one. And the beast's pressure was making it expand to a much larger size than it was before, blocking any exit behind it. The kids only had a short time to run and get out of the way before the acid bomb that was the dog monster would burst, releasing a wave of corrosive liquid in both directions. This would likely kill them and destroy any means of escape by opening up the ground to the pit below.
If Teya, Matt, and Risa made it out alive from the rushing river of death, they would find themselves before an unlit stage with rows of seats before it that one would be able to make out once their eyes adjusted to the darkness within the room. Each seat was full of silent skeletons waiting for the performance to begin. The stage was hidden by a veil. For the show to start, the lights needed to be on, the music needed to be played, and the curtains needed to rise. Impatient whispers echoed throughout the room, demanding the show to begin.
Poor Ichika and company, running through twists and turns, would eventually find themselves inside a library. This room was littered with broken bookshelves, papers, and, of course, books. Much of which were waterlogged. In the four corners and four faces of the room were pedestals with missing books, eight in all. And throughout the room stood stiff and unmoving meat mannequins, twenty in all, without faces, eight of which held said books, but they also held nasty looking weapons. The statues did not react to the boys coming into the room though. And everything was eerily quiet until a song began to play on the speakers above their head. It was a warped version of
Silent Night.
On your knees, and swear your allegiance to me!
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