For Persephone - Chapter 29 – The Fear of Losing Someone (2)

Walking corpses narrowed in closer like a net—Persephone froze. The closer they got, the more she could see their features and her stomach turned in knots. Half torn faces, hearts beating through exposed ribs, crawling with no legs…

A chill swept through Persephone’s body. She dropped down, frantically felt around the ground through the broken branches, and found something hard and thick. But she immediately regretted that. The ground was covered in skeleton bones. At that moment, a bony-faced beast with a bent spine like a camel rushed in.

That’s when it started.

“Grrrrraaaaaa!”

Persephone swung the bone pieces to avoid the claws of the bizarre beasts who were rushing in from all over.

The beast’s teeth were easily broken, but sharp enough to tear her cloak, and one of them soon landed an attack on her flesh.

She barely managed to endure the screaming and ran away; she swung without getting a clear look at the beast that was chasing her again, then fell down and kicked it off. That repeated several times.

When Hermes helped her the other day, she was flying in the sky and never expected the beasts lurking in the fog.

‘No. Don’t.’

She was covered in a cold sweat. And her heart thumping.

‘I have to see Hades.’

To make matters worse, the group of dead bodies began to mix with human-like zombies. The dead bodies were slower than the beasts but approached her more densely.

This was her first time ever coming face-to-face with fear in the underworld.

The fog that hid the lowly beasts was only waist-high. There was nowhere to run, so Persephone was on the brink of tears.

‘Where are you, Hades?’

Now the beast with the black mane, which had a rotten smell, started to rush toward her. With no possible way of avoiding its attack, Persephone immediately closed her eyes.

At that moment a hot wind blew and an unimaginably huge roar blasted through the air. The beasts were all swept away by the wind in an instant. The dead people shrieking and roaming around her began to flee.

‘What the…’

A huge shadow came over Persephone, who was crawling backward stutteringly on her butt. Her head was frozen stiff with a hard, strange feeling that rubbed up against her back.

She was better off fighting the herd of beasts and walking corpses.

A giant beast with a red eye as big as a human’s head looked straight down at her.

“Oh…”

Slither, slither. The same enormous head of the beast appeared one after another on the left and right sides. She thought it was a three-headed monster, but the necks were all connected.

Persephone covered her mouth to stop herself from screaming out loud.

Right when she realized that she was leaning up against its leg—she was swallowed.

*

It was the day that Sisyphos was captured and decided to come to be judged by the underworld. Hades may not have been the only one who expected Sisyphos when the sound of Kharon’s horn spread wide enough to reach the royal palace.

The one who Kerberos spit out—almost throwing up—to the bottom certainly mustn’t have been Sisyphos. For now, it was the girl.

Clever Kerberos was intoxicated with the satisfaction of the performance that he has just now only carried out the order from days ago, and the snake’s scales wagged its tight tail. Hades, who sent Kerberos a knock on the head, stared at the girl covered in wounds. With a feeling too difficult to explain for himself.

Dead servants crossed the river and washed off Persephone’s body. She couldn’t get her head straight after getting a good look at the inside of Kerberos’ mouth. Hades just stood there looking at her. He was a mess.

She had disappeared just like that, and now she has returned.

The time during the past two months or so, Hades felt as if he were being eaten up inside day by day. At first, he thought that maybe she had gotten lost at the palace’s entrance. Then later on he wondered if she had ventured off to look for some other place. When the girl who didn’t go back to Acheron had disappeared completely, he couldn’t argue that she had been mutilated.

Hades had searched everywhere because he couldn’t accept that, including the swamp that regurgitated what it ate and even cut open the stomachs of his dead servants; searching every nook and cranny for any possible evidence of her disappearance. But there was no way that even Kerberos could find her.

When he had to accept the fact that the lovely girl that had been brought to him had been mutilated in the underworld, he first felt angry at everything around him without any reason or consciousness. His warmth was gone. Even before his warmth of the lovely girl was completely shaken for the first time in hundreds of years, this underground world had eaten her up. He even felt empty as if someone had dug his heart out.

He should have taken better care of her and let her know the risks, but it was his mistake to laugh at her when he knew she wasn’t afraid.

That’s what Hades felt after she disappeared.

‘What in the world are you?’

And now, staring at her in front of him, this is the fear he felt.

The girl’s complexion was surprisingly good. No one would ever think that she had wandered around the underworld for the last two months or so. A tight line was drawn between his urge to embrace her immediately and listen to her voice in relief of being alive and the suspicion of something have gone wrong.

If she is the reason why Kharon blew the horn, it meant that she had crossed the Acheron River again. It was of Kharon protecting her, so Kerberos would go and rescue her from the sea of skeleton.

But how did she disappear without a trace before? Hades was muddled. Kharon swore he had never seen her go back over the river two months ago, and it didn’t make sense because the rule stated that she couldn’t go back if she didn’t get on the boat.

The only way someone could cross the Acheron River unseen is if they wear the Cap of Invisibility. Or the equivalent of God.