As the scroll in Abel’s hand ignited, his eyes flashed, and the man standing in front of him started sweating.

"You are the one who spoke, so don’t pretend to be in shock. Don’t mingle your words, because look, now I’ve become your lord." Abel flicked his fingers in front of the terrified man, and chains started to emerge from the shadows, engulfed with searing hellish flames.

The man tried to scream, but not a single weep could escape his drying lips. As the chains bound his arms, neck, and soul, his hair grew longer, his bulky frame thinner, and in the blink of an eye, he found himself having become a woman.

"See you in the hells, lovely." With a single tap on the head, flames sucked the man into hell, and the key to the door he guarded fell on the ground with a clang.

Abel might not be an archdevil or pit fiend, but with his curse, skill, and cunning, he managed to become a threat that no mortal should be able to handle unprepared.

He picked the large copper key and gave it a look. It didn’t look magical in any way, so the door itself was mundane. He doesn’t need to worry about traps, so now he can just walk in and retrieve the girl before they can harm her.

He put the key in the door and turned it open. Slowly pushing the door open, Abel looked inside only to see a blade flying right at his face. At this distance, he couldn’t dodge. It seems they were waiting behind the door to strike him the moment he walked in.

The blade hit Abel right in the eye, and pierced his whole head.

"Fool!" The man inside growled. "Where is the guard?" The thugs inside had set a rule: whenever the guard opened the door, he had to call them out first, so if the door opened without him calling, they would attack whoever opened it without asking a question.

The other thugs in the back growled, "He is dead, don’t let too much blood spill outside. Cleaning it would be a pain." One stood and waved his hand, "Bring him inside."

"So? Where is my girl?" Abel asked, and the man who stabbed him laughed. "Your girl, you’re..." It was only then that he realized it was Abel who spoke. "Bastard!" He tried to pull his sword out of Abel’s head, but Abel grabbed and held it in place.

"How are you alive?" As the man cried, Abel smiled. "Well, I just made a hole in my head before your blade could hit me."

Just as Abel explained, there was a clean cylindrical hole that went through his whole head, starting from his right eye until the back.

"Like this." Abel threw his leg forward and kicked the man in the guts, punching a foot-wide hole into his torso.

As the blood splashed everywhere, all the thugs rushed at Abel at once, and each of them held a different weapon. One man swung a dagger, only to end up disarmed by Abel, then smacked down on the table.

Two tried to tie him with ropes and strangle him, but both of them ended with fist-sized holes in their chests the moment Abel touched them, and when another man tried to hit him with a chair, Abel just grabbed him by the throat and ripped it off.

The other thugs tried to escape the moment they realized that defeating Abel was impossible, but half of them were quickly killed by his curse, and the rest fell on the ground in pain, groaned for a few seconds before turning into women and getting sucked into hell.

Abel looked through the entire house for several minutes, but still couldn’t find his missing girl. Which only meant they moved her not long before he arrived. Luckily, he didn’t just send those fools to hell for no reason.

A few seconds later, the flames in the fireplace burst and roiled, and a devilish woman walked out of them. She was tall, had jagged black hair, and blood-red skin with a tired face and disturbing orange eyes.

"There is a moving caravan crossing the forest, which their moving base. They kidnap people from one city and sell them as slaves in another. The girl should be safe, since they don’t want to damage their ’Goods’..." As the devilish woman explained, Abel looked at her with a smile, thanked her for the information, and then flew away.

She looked at the door, then sighed. "Lord Abel... fine, I’ll try and get more information out of them." She then disappeared right back into the flames.

Outside the city, far beyond the walls and at the depth of the forest, a massive caravan of more than twenty wagons and over two hundred men and women camped in the woods. At first glance, they seemed like ordinary merchants resting in the middle of their travel.

Abel floated in the dark sky above their camp and looked down with a cold glare. What hid beneath the piles of goods in their carriages were tight, tiny cells with humanoids cramped inside like bags. Inside one of those cages, he could sense his missing girl.

She at least was alive, but seemed to have several bruises across her whole body. She probably tried to run away and they beat her down.

He lifted his hand, looked down at all those thugs pretending to be merchants, and sighed.

"Atone for your sins in hell!"

[Elemental Expansion: Hole Rain]

All of the thugs looked at the sky in awe, watching as blood red clouds covered the starry night sky. Those of them who were awake pointed, and those who were deep in their sleep peacefully snorted. Clear droplets of water rained down, and the moment some of the thugs could spot Abel, it was already too late.

The first drop hit one man in the head and pierced him down to the groin. Each droplet that fell was unstoppable, and they left the hundreds of thugs all looking like Swiss cheese.

Abel’s Elemental Expansion, unlike everyone else, wasn’t bound by a range. The only costly thing he had to worry about was the rain droplets, which were a condensed form of his cursed mana.

Once a droplet hit a target that Abel could sense and deem as an enemy, his curse would activate and punch a hole right through. The only two ways to survive this expansion were to either hide from his detection or engulf your body with a dense layer of mana to nullify his curse.

All of the thugs died, except one, a wizard who managed to survive only thanks to a barrier that he always kept active around his body.

"What! What was that?" The wizard screamed as he saw everyone around him lying on the ground and drowning in their blood. This was a true massacre; in a second, they were all drinking and laughing together, and in the next, everyone was dead.

"Judgment, unfair, cruel, and merciless. True punishment, the hell’s way, the only justice we devils have for mortals." Abel landed in front of the wizard. "Do not blame the jailers, only curse yourself for the foolish mistake of ending on the wrong side of the bars."

The wizard didn’t listen to a single word that Abel said and instantly pointed his wand forward, charged a large spell, and blasted a beam of compressed lightning.

BAM! But before that mean could even hit Abel, a hole was already blown in the wizard’s chest, and the lightning completely missed its mark.

"My curse is stronger when I directly use it, and your barrier weakened after getting hit earlier, and now when you cast a big spell. That is why you lost." Abel took a step forward, stepping on the countless corpses. "Now, give me my girl back."