He had to get out of there because the smell of fear still lingered in the air, stinking of death. Lucifer missed such nuances, and so did the other demons, but not him. When he served in Paradise, he was one of the Beloved, endowed by Yahweh with far greater sensitivity than the others. Neither the years in Hell nor the divinity given to him changed that. He was nauseated by the smell.

He walked up the steps to the fifth floor and turned right, stopping for a moment in front of the unassuming door of one of the most important places in Hell: The Wardens' Room. It was an oblong, large room where the old generals, judges, spies, commanders, executioners, and masters of pain held office. And what is worth knowing, it was unlike any other in Hell.

On the wall opposite the door hung imitation windows shielded by metal blinds painted white, and the windowsill beneath this bizarre installation was decorated with rows of ferns of all sizes. Underneath were crumbling boxes, bent maps, and unfinished projects piled in heaps. In the middle of the open part of the room, a large, heavy table for thirty people and a trampled carpet were displayed. Here, the walls were adorned with space plans, posters, certificates, hastily pinned ordinances and fresh directives, maps, weapons, and banners crammed too tightly in metal-decorated racks. Behind the table, there was a dense cluster of all kinds of chipboard furniture, a labyrinth of boxes and offices, stuffed with papers, flowers, and all kinds of gadgets. Only here could one see such inconspicuous things; there were no heavy wooden cabinets, no carved desks with leather tops, no bas-reliefs.

But he hadn't come here to admire the junk illegally transported across the border, just to see how things were. Because whatever was going on in the heart of Hell, it was right here, and if anyone was making decisions about their position as demons, it was nowhere else but here.

He walked in without knocking and paused, looking at the commotion he had never seen here. None of those employed in the room had gone home; they had all come to work today. In absolute silence, not even interrupted by a half-word, irregularities were being rectified, real forms were being written out in place of fake ones. Occasionally, they exchanged a communicative glance and pressed something into each other's hands.

However, not everyone corrected the deficiencies: Mephisto and a few others, as if in spite of all the running around, sat at the table, staring at the tabletop and sipping their morning coffee.

“Stop it,” Hunter tried to stop those who were tidying up, but no one bothered to listen to him. So he dragged a free chair to place it next to Mephistopheles. The latter, as usual, sat at the head of the table and did not interrupt his coffee.

“He killed them,” he finally declared.

"Yes," confirmed Beelzebub.

"He shouldn't have. And to whom? As for whom, to each of us, but you should not be told to bow down, Belz. If it weren't for you, he wouldn't have done anything. You are a hero," growled the master of pain. Several demons slowly shifted their gazes towards them.

"It's Lucifer. He does what he wants, you know that. And he fears for the throne."

"Yesterday... I know from Amojmon, you probably haven't seen the papers... He gave orders for the Academy. He only wants to accept every third kid from us old demons and to keep even fewer of us. He's decided to allow women in the army, he's introduced severe punishments for students, he demands daily reports from us, and he's set up committees to control the papers," the demon fell silent, clearly overwhelmed by thoughts of the consequences of what he had just talked about, and Beelzebub shook his head slowly.

"So he has gone mad." He also turned his gaze back to the tabletop with the same expression he had seen on their faces. "He panics when power is at stake, and it will be hard to stop."

"Maybe not. Morax has been sitting on a volume of law for over eight hours, looking for some sort of solution. He has not been in the Throne Room," Mephisto slowly lifted the gaze of his only visible eye and drove it to the other end of the table, where a lean, rather tall demon with a pointed face and light brown hair sat evidently paging through a succession of copies, paragraphs, and obliquely jotting down what was more important on the side.

There was silence again for a moment, and then Mephisto straightened up slightly, set his mug down on the tabletop, and pulled an expression of peculiar pride down his face.

"We'll bring him down if we have to," he finally announced, and the tone of his voice made everyone, every single one present, know that he wasn't lying.