RETURN FROM THE UNDERWORLD
Victory was certain, even archived.
The prince began to turn his back on him, certain that he would never see him again.
The melee had just taken place without any rules or limits on his part and the result seemed to prove him right. His most fearsome and highly-rated (though unknown to most) opponent was writhing from the pain wickedly inflicted by the man he was to replace.
Replaced him? By this wretched human? An ordinary one with nothing special about him? What had the Creator ever seen in him? Utter banality compared with the most enlightened and majestic created being ever.
Yet in order to overpower such a nobody in hand-to-hand combat he had had to resort to infamous low blows, thus revealing his most brazen and cowardly disloyalty.
What, the grandmaster struggling against a human to such an extent that he had to use all his strength, all his more than a thousand years of experience and all his treacherous treachery to file a case which at first sight had seemed a trivial challenge, but which day after day proved to wear him down and wear him out more and more, to such an extent that he seemed to age even faster than humans?
All this, needless to say, went around the underworld in no time at all and the whole army of demons and devils blindly devoted to him gathered around the two who were measuring themselves, one with a truly disarming transparency and correctness (bordering on naivety), while their commander-in-chief, floundering ever more conspicuously, used every means (licit and illicit) to get rid of an opponent he had considered ridiculous, even non-existent, but who was now ridiculing him, the Supreme.
A clumsy and mortal dwarf who was making a mockery of him… it was really too much even for his acolytes.
Not even the last of the unclean spirits and abominable birds were missing. They were all there staring at the incredible, nightmarish scene… an endless torment.
How, they who were the masters of torment falling victim to the darkest and blackest torment? The despair now not only furrowed the face of their champion, but no longer spared them either.
Was this the end foretold for millennia by biblical prophecies? The air was electric.
The prince, in his last desperate attempt, pulled his opponent with him into the underworld. An environment so hostile as to take the breath away from any human should have given him the advantage he sought to send his challenger back to the sender.
The underworld thus swallowed both of them like a black hole. Nothing could be seen or heard.
The entire army of spirits and demons held their breath, waiting (still convinced) that their leader would soon emerge victorious.
But the face that appeared to them from that black hole called the underworld made their blood run cold: it was the accursed human who, to return from the underworld where he had been imprisoned, chained and tortured to death, had broken the thick, strong, hot-dipped galvanised steel chains with his bare hands, then grabbed the doors and the two jambs of the main gate of the underworld, unbolted them together with the bar, and put them on his shoulders and carried them to the top.
No one had ever returned from the underworld, no one. But then it was possible!
And now that the gate to the underworld is unbolted, how many more humans will break free following his powerful and inspiring example?