Prologue

Hell could never be described in a simple matter. It was a world unlike any others, that had multiple layers and could never quite fully be understood, at least not by mortal minds. More than the afterlife that many knew it to be, Hell was a world in which one could be born and inhabit for the remainder of their life.

Demons were the lucky creatures that could call Hell their home, for they were the only ones that truly lived there. The rest, the many creatures that jumped at their very shadow and spent every minute of every hour trembling in fright, knew of this world only the fact that it was what came after lives, filled with joy or with nothing but regrets.

Of these creatures, none were as famous as the Humans. Weak, held back by frankly mind-numbing morals and codes, and above all else....Cowardly.

A young boy whom many only by his first name, Pietro, knew the contempt that his kind drew from others. However, he could never quite bring himself to care. Hell was neither a prison nor a desolate place to him. In fact, he had found more warmth here than wherever he had gone when he was still alive. He had lived, he had died, with nothing happening in between, and he had found a new family.

In a region of Hell, he knew not the name of, filled with floating mounds of earth, he had woken up surrounded by monks. They hadn't seemed all that different from the Buddhist monks he had seen in pictures back on Earth, though they did possess physical traits that differentiated them from his kind. Demons were exactly like he had imagined them to be, and yet somehow completely different.

These monks had looked almost human if not for the crooked horns sitting atop their heads, as well as the long tails they often tied around one of their legs. Most of them had grey skin that had looked unnatural at first, yet with time Pietro had grown accustomed to all of these little differences.

There was one thing that still shocked him to this day, however. He had never imagined, even in his wildest of dreams, that Demons knew fear. Oh, but they quite clearly did.

He could see it clear as day on their faces, as he walked between them. He could hear their whispers, he could see the sweat on their creased foreheads. They had already seemed quite old when he had first met them, but they appeared to have aged by entire decades in a single day.

He knew what drew this kind of emotion from them. How could he not, when he felt the same existential dread in his heart?

He cursed the idiot who had thought it a magnificent idea to give the task he was to accomplish, to a child who had been in Hell for less than fourteen years. For he had indeed been given a mission to complete. In the last minutes, however, he had grown to see this as a call for his own execution.

He was walking, a bit uncertainly, amongst the sacred ground of the temple he had been sent to after his death. He passed by a broken statue and ducked his head as he neared his objective. If today was the day he would die for a second time, he would perhaps regret not being able to gaze upon Hell once more. So he did. The temple offered a great view of the mind-confusing landscape of Hell. All around the temple, floating 'islands' similar to the one the temple had been built upon, formed a chain of mountains, hovering above a frozen land that knew no life, sentient or not.

Quite surprisingly the temple itself did not suffer from the harsh conditions that should have come from being placed in such a land. The air was not cold, nor was it warm in any way. The soil beneath the temple was frozen, but past a certain altitude, contrarily to what should have been the case, the air was not frigid.

All of this would no longer matter in a few seconds if he did not handle himself exceptionally well, Pietro knew it. He arrived at a removed part of the temple, a building that shared none of the simple and sober design of the rest of the edifice. It was a tower of sorts, built with a definite Chinese influence though Pietro wasn't entirely certain if Demons even drew inspiration from anything lowly beings such as Humans created. The tiles of each floor were black and adorned with gold, the tower itself was of the same color but seemed to be made out of particularly sturdy wood. Pietro had never really bothered trying to understand the different materials that were used to create the temple, though they apparently had something to do with the impossible temperature.

The doors to the tower were not as intimidating as the rest of the building, but they did not need to be. What was behind them, was already terrific enough. Pietro swung the doors open without knocking on them, having been told that this could anger the resident of the tower even further. Not that Pietro believed that this 'thing' could even be more enraged than it normally was.

As soon as the doors opened with no small amount of creaking, Pietro screamed and ducked as a wooden table came flying his way. Looking behind him to see the table crashing against a pillar of the temple some ten meters away, Pietro quickly said his prayer to Satan and forced a smile upon his face.

"Hey...Um, I know you don't really like to be-" Another piece of furniture was sent toward his head and he jumped away, a sigh following the movement. He knew this couldn't be easy, but he could never quite get used to just how annoying the tower's resident was. Placing his hands forward in a placating manner, Pietro showed that he wasn't going to send anything back, and a disappointed moan was his only answer.

"I really just came to tell you something, not to fight, nothing like that!" He exclaimed with a nervous chuckle.

He looked at the room, or what was left of it, and already knew that the monks were going to shout at the top of their lungs for the days to come. But that wasn't his problem, no, his problem was the child laying on the ground in the middle of said room. He was a bit younger than him, by three years if he remembered well and Pietro knew that he did, for his brain was one of the only few things he had been proud of when he was still on Earth. Of course, the child looked nothing like him, not that it even looked similar to the monks.

He had been told during the classes the monks gave him so that he could comprehend Hell and what it held, that the demon species was comprised of several races, all as different from one another as they could be, save for the horns that seemed to be a staple of Demonkind. But even that, the child did not possess. His body was made of grey clay and ash, or so the monks believed most fervently, and his head showed no hints of horns, not even a small and slowly growing one as all children had. All he had was a bush of red hair, spiky and long, that looked a bit less dirty than Pietro would have expected. That fiend did not register in the young human's mind as someone who knew what a shower was.

The child was taller than Pietro, and that was quite something as the human was himself taller than most of the demons of his age. He had much more muscles on his body and they were developed beyond what Pietro even thought possible, but of course, that could only be the case as that monster knew only violence. His clothes were just a tattered form-fitting black robe and a black and red pair of ample pants. He had no shoes and none of the accessories that the monks and Pietro had. His clothes were the same color as the ones that the human wore, though they went better with the fiend's skin and his piercing black and white eyes. Pietro had met his fair share of Demons with unusual scleras, so the inky black one that the creature had did not surprise him. He had rarely ever seen the other child with his eyes open, but then again he had tried to avoid him as much as possible ever since he had learned of his existence.

Yet, today was the day he could no longer run, for he was now tasked with living with that devil for the foreseeable future, and not even in the temple he had grown to love, but in a city. An honest to God, or perhaps to Satan, city in Hell. Oh what an adventure this was going to be. Though he would have to share it with his worst nightmare. His first incursion into what Hell truly was like beyond that lonely temple he inhabited, and he would have to spend his time with the absolute menace that sat in front of him.

That child was named Asura, the devil that overshadowed his peers, Pietro included, and that had driven the monks mad enough that they decided to throw him in a city, under the guise of having a school teach him more than the monks could.

That child was named Asura, and he was a demon of an unknown race, perhaps the first of many to come.

Hell had known it's longest period of peace before his birth. The day the universe had to bear his coming into existence, Hell was coincidentally once again plunged into war.

It was said that before his birth, the lone temple that sat atop the skies had been visited by a guest of great importance who had noticed the lack of statues inside the edifice. Most temples in Hell, at least those of the faith this one represented, had statues. The monks felt quite shameful to admit that none of them could build anything that wouldn't look horrendous in the middle of the beautiful temple. Their guest offered to build them a statue, one that would last for exactly one hundred and one years.

It was a great statue, though no one could identify whom it was modeled after. With time came the idea that perhaps, it could not be identified for the one it represented was not yet born. That statue of clay, ash, and blood broke one day.

A child that did not cry came out of the statue and had it been less energetic, perhaps the monks would have taken it for another statue itself for it looked to be made of clay and ash itself. It was a beautiful child and one that bit to the death the first monk that approached it.

And for the years that came after, it knew only blood and violence.

Yes, that was whom Pietro's companion for the future was supposed to be, though Pietro supposed that truthfully he was to be the companion here and not the opposite.

That child was called Asura, and all would know him as the single most angry demon to have ever existed.