This is a story of some time ago, before Astaroth established the country of demons and the five Demon Generals.

Long before Luciel started summoning Heroes, the world was split into three- the demonic realm, known as 'Gehenna', the mortal realm, known as 'Atlas', and the heavenly realm, known as 'Akasha'.

In Akasha lived the goddesses of the world, looking over it and occasionally interfering, being revered by mortals and granting them their power. Even back then, there was a distinction between 'worshippers' and 'cultists'- but that's something for another time.

In Atlas lived most creatures, such as humans, elves, dwarves, beast-people, cows, horses, wolves, goblins, orcs, vampires, slimes, dragons, etcetera etcetera. There were often wars between different races of people, between the same races, between people and monsters, between monsters and monsters, but just as often, there was peace between these groups- in a sense, it could be said people and monsters were roughly equal.

In Gehenna lived only monsters, and even then only certain monsters could live there. Devils lived there, fiends lived there, hellhounds lived there, etcetera etcetera. Oftentimes, these monsters lived in tribes.

One such tribe was the Bral'goch tribe.

A part of this tribe was a young girl. Her name was Lilith.

Lilith's father, whose name is unimportant for this story, was the tribe's shaman, and he deeply loved his wife.

As he was the shaman, Lilith was next in line for the position, and from a young age, she was taught magic and rituals. This lead to her acquiring various spells from the [Hell Magic] and [Devil Shamanism] skills, on top of the spells from [Devil Magic] and [Darkness Magic] she would've learned naturally.

Lilith was an only child, but she always felt it would've been nice to... not be an only child, much like someone with a stab wound might feel it'd be nice not to have that wound.

Her father, to her, was a reliable person, and a teacher, but he had always been lacking in the interpersonal department, so he was terrible at getting his point across and winning arguments, and Lilith recognised these issues at a very young age.

Lilith's mother was absent for much of Lilith's life, since she was a huntress, but still, Lilith loved her dearly. When she was around, she showed an incredible kindness to Lilith and her father, though she was never all that lady-like.

Due to this unbalanced upbringing, Lilith never truly learned manners, and even in the present day, it shows.

Also due to this unbalanced upbringing, Lilith started wishing she had a person who would teach her these manners, who would reproach her when she did things wrong and praise her when she did things right. She wished for a person to quarrel with over nothing, and then later laugh it off like the nothing it was.

In her early youth, there was a human man who would occasionally come visit, with eyes black as ebony. He wielded powerful magic, and as a young child, Lilith looked up to this man, but he would always talk to the chief about things Lilith didn't understand. He was fond of children, so he played with her every time he visited, and it was from him Lilith learned of Entropy and her faith.

One day, he suddenly stopped coming.

Despite these wishes and the man's sudden disappearance, it could not be said Lilith was unhappy, and eventually, as her father grew older, she succeeded him as the Bral'goch tribe's shaman.

She was the tribe's shaman for a while, and she was quite good at it, to the point the chief praised her for it.

This is the story of one such day, some time after Luciel started summoning Heroes from another world.

"Fuahhh...", Lilith yawned, stretching out her upper body as she raised herself to a sitting position, her bedsheets falling to her lap. Though this left her chest completely exposed, she did not mind, as there was no one present to see.

After getting dressed in a shaman's typical outfit, she left her room, walking with slow, lazy steps to the living room, where she spotted her father.

"Yo, dad", she said, lightly raising up her right hand as she came in.

"Ah, good morning, Lilith", he said, "did you sleep well?"

"Well enough, I guess", she responded, and she opened her mouth to continue when she was interrupted by the door to the outside being rather rudely smacked open.

"Lady Lilith, you have to help!", the devil who opened the door shouted. He was a regular Devil- more specifically, a Devil Hunter- but Lilith recognised him as one of the people who had once attempted to date her, aiming only for her body, and a frown took over her expression, much like the one you might make when looking at a pile of garbage trying to convince you to eat it.

"Can it wait? I just woke up", she said, not attempting the least bit to hide her displeasure. The devil shrunk back slightly at Lilith's scowl, but he stepped forward and promptly kowtowed on the spot, pressing his forehead to the ground so hard it was as if he was trying to dig a hole.

"Please! It's an emergency!"

"Uwah, this is...", Lilith let out, pressing her hand to her mouth in an attempt to prevent herself from vomiting. The act kind of made her look like she was stifling a yawn, except with the added upper body movement of a burp.

"Please help!", the devil pleaded again, putting his hands together in front of his chest.

"Alright, fine, I got it, leave it to me", Lilith said, barely managing to hide the disgust in her words.

In front of Lilith and the other devil laid the village of the Bral'goch tribe, but it was not in its usual lively state.

Instead, left and right lay the bodies of devils, many grunting in pain, the rest fainted.

The culprit was not immediately obvious, but what was obvious was that there had been large amounts of fighting.

Lilith nodded to herself, stretching out her body once again, before taking on a peculiar pose with her right hand while she took out some kind of paper talisman from somewhere on the outfit with her left.

After chanting some words in a language only Lilith could understand, she relaxed her right hand and traced the symbols on the talisman with her right index finger, after which she held the talisman up into the air and chanted, out loud: "[Ritual of Restoration]!"

The talisman went up in flames, though strangely, Lilith's hand was fine, and moments later, the wounds on the devils laying in front of Lilith were gone, like cotton candy dipped in water. Similarly, the grunts of pain, too, had disappeared.

"'Ey, are ya alright?", Lilith asked, kneeling down at the side of one of the devils who was still conscious.

"Thanks to you, Lady Lilith", the devil responded with a gaze full of gratitude.

"Hm, tha's good", Lilith said, "but what happened here? Can ya tell me?"

"A human, he called himself a 'Hero'... But he didn't save anyone, all he did was attack us... Damn, if only I'd had my sword, maybe I could've fought back..."

"A human? What'd 'e look like?"

"His eyes and hair were golden, and he looked like he had a terrible bedhead... Also, he kept going on and on about 'quests' and how it was more like a 'beat-em-up' than an 'RPG'... Honestly, I have no idea what he meant by that."

"Golden...? There shouldn't be any goddess with that colour, but humans don't have that colour naturally..."

"Huh? Didn't I pass by this area already?"

Lilith turned her head in the direction of the unfamiliar voice, and locked eyes with a pair of malevolent golden eyes, accompanied by a twisted grin. She shuddered as she felt the unpleasant sensation of someone she was unfamiliar with using [Appraisal] on her.

"You're kiddin', right? A village this small has a Shaman...? As expected of Gehenna, I guess... Well, maybe this'll be a bit more interesting, then?", he asked himself, his crooked grin somehow remaining on his face even as he opened his mouth to speak.

"Ah, so then you're the one who did all this?", Lilith asked him, her right eye slightly twitching.

"Yes, it was I! I am the Barrier Hero, Yxon!", he answered, a loud 'clang' resounding as he hit his chestplate with his right hand, which was covered by a gauntlet.

"Some 'Hero' you are, going on a rampage against innocent people with that kind of grin..."

"What are you saying? This is simply Lady Luciel's divine providence!"

"Luciel? Who the fuck's that...?", Lilith asked herself, prompting a response from another voice she did not recognise.

"Lady Luciel is our most honourable Goddess of Light, of course", the female voice said, sounding particularly self-satisfied. From around a corner stepped a woman, the same golden eyes and hair as Yxon, though her body was wrapped in the garb of a sister, rather unlike Yxon's full-body armour. Lilith made the mental connection that the female voice must have belonged to this woman.

"Goddess of... Light...?", Lilith wondered out loud, tilting her head to the side.

"Enough of the talking, you're just an NPC anyway! Let's get to fighting!", Yxon said, clutching his sword in his right hand. "But, if you're a Shaman, just wounding them won't help, and for some reason, I can't kill any devils in here... Then, how about I seal them instead?" Once he finished his words, he rushed up to the closest devil and planted his fist firmly in their gut, activating one of his barrier-related skills- he had too many to count, so which one he used was unclear- and though the effect of the skill wasn't clear immediately, it became quite apparent once the devil simply stopped moving, like a character from an online game experiencing rather large amounts of lag.

"Wha... What the fuck?", Lilith asked, disbelief playing across her expression as she could do nothing but watch. She felt her eye twitch again.

"Hahahahaha! How do you like that?!", Yxon shouted, gaining some weird euphoria off of the action.

Yxon lost no time in gaining more of this feeling as he rushed around, activating the same skill on devil after devil, and logically, Lilith felt angrier every time he did as such.

"Stop...", a small voice leaked out.

"Hm? What was that? Did you say something?", Yxon responded.

"I said, THAT'S ENOUGH!"

[You have evolved into the 'Unique'-rating species Berserker Devil. Physical parameters will increase drastically. Magical and spiritual parameters will increase marginally. Reasoning and mental ability will deteriorate.], such an announcement echoed through Lilith's head at this time, but she was not in the proper mental state to listen.

Lilith's eyes had gone entirely red, and her face was warped into a scowl so frightening it'd even scare her father, had he been present.

"Oh, crap, this could actually be kind of bad", Yxon muttered to himself, in response to which the woman in a sister's garb walked up to him, placed a hand on his shoulder and muttered something under her breath, after which he was enveloped by a gentle, warm light. Once it dissipated, she once again took a few steps back, the same smile still on her face.

Yxon flexed his hands a few times, seemingly testing the new strength given to him, before raising his gaze from them and looking directly at Lilith's red eyes.

She didn't even bother to speak as she glared, growling like a wild beast before jumping straight off of the ground onto the roof of a building, activating two or three spells in the span of that one jump. Yxon simply blocked them by raising his left hand in their way.

"Tch", Lilith growled, deciding to stay in one place and focus on casting more spells. She managed to cast at least ten in two seconds- for reference's sake, that is the equivalent of solving twenty relatively simple calculations intended for mental arithmetic in two seconds, if you were to equate average mathematical talent with average magical talent- but still, even though they came from all around him, Yxon blocked them all using his free hand and both his legs.

"Huh. Figures a monster called a 'Berserker Devil' wouldn't have any sense of tactics, huh", Yxon commented, completely disregarding his own abilities, which were cheat-like as they were, without the Saint's blessing. "Still, though, a spontaneous monster evolution caused by emotion? This is some event."

He then proceeded to kick off the ground, strongly propelling him into the air, roughly in Lilith's direction, and Yxon did a needlessly showy somersault as he lunged his sword in her direction. As a direct result of the delay caused by the somersault, Lilith was able to jump back and avoid his sword.

In such a manner, the battle continued for far longer than it probably should have, but eventually, it became clear the effects of fatigue were affecting Lilith more heavily than they were Yxon.

"Grrr... rrrr...", she growled, breathing heavily as her chest swayed up and down. Her face had turned a paler shade of purple, and the markings on it were glowing bright red, emitting mana so dense it was almost visible even to beings with no eyes.

"Haah... Haah...", Yxon panted, breathing only slightly less heavily, his face flushed red and his eyes unfocused. His grip on the sword had only strengthened as the battle went on, and despite his haggard state, it was moderately clear that he was actually overwhelmingly winning, as he had not a scratch on his face, only some dirt, whereas Lilith's entire body was covered with scratches, down even to areas which had initially been covered by her clothing.

"Do you see... now...?!", Yxon exclaimed, pulling from some mystical location the excess energy to perform a theatrical provocation in Lilith's direction. "There is no way... you can win!"

The saint had, at some point, gotten right behind him, and was hard at work recovering his fatigue. Truly, the definition of 'Holy Blessings' was very wide.

Even despite these circumstances, Lilith was not willing to give in. Her instincts were screaming at her, telling her she would die if she stayed here one second longer, yet she could not stop herself from firing her spells.

The moment she was about to fire what would have been her final spell-