Distant noises of steel rending through rough and hard skin and flesh and spilling black bile all over the mountainous surfaces around the Devil's Castle. A potent thud at the old and massive wooden door drove it open as a panting ronin warrior slipped inside. Guts and black bile of demonic remains covered the shaken fighter as he slipped indoors and slammed the door shut behind him, shaking his leg for the halved demon carcass to let go.
The swordsman let out an animalistic growl as he forced the door back open and slipped out, grabbing the scattered bodies as he drew and swung his sword around to fend off the vulture-like flying demon bats that swarmed him intending to take him off and dropping him somewhere off the mountain peaks. As the pterosaur-looking demon avians weren't capable of ripping Yajirobe apart all by themselves, they figured the mountains might have been of some help.
Yajirobe sliced through the cravens and shoved the demon flesh he had selected for dinner back indoors while he forced the door back open and slid inside himself. A handful of troublesome fliers followed him but the swordsman took it all the way to the entrance hall ceiling to slice a few of them up while he met the final one on his way down and cut them clean into two by just putting up his sword and seeing the frenzied demon just fly past it and basically split itself in half.
"Ugly bastards. Ye can't even lift me off da ground, so why do ya have ta hassle me?" Yajirobe dusted off his hands after sheathing his sword and looking around the place he had burst into. It had been a dark and dreary place. A castle covered with dust and webs even in the entryway, almost as if nobody had lived there. A particularly peculiar feature of the fortification was the fact that it seemed just as stuck in between the outside world and a sophisticated interior as its exterior would have suggested.
The chubby swordsman tapped his wooden sandals around, feeling a pleasant, wet slap wherever he placed his foot. "What da hell is dat?" he muttered to himself as he tip-tapped around, trying to determine just what he was walking on. It felt warm and sticky like blood, based on the few drips that got into his sandals and touched his feet, but it may have been far more viscous than that and smelled scads worse.
"Oh, finally…" Yajirobe scurried along after his eyes got a bit more used to the dark and he rushed to a majestic carpet and dropped his sandals to rub his sticky and dirty feet off at the oriental marvel. "You'd wonder why you'd have swamp for floor in the first place if ye need to provide a mat to wipe the feet with. That's village folk for ya…"
"My, my… Feet right on the carpet… This will most vex Lucifer-sama…" a hunchback demon in a rich suit appeared on a staircase at the northernmost end of the entryway hall. The dandy had a burgundy-colored suit and a red bowtie, though his wicked appearance of a rotten and misshapen, murky brown face and balding old head greatly contrasted his classy style. "It'll be back into the tube for Igor, yes it will…" the hunchback limped back into the hallway he came from, leaving Yajirobe blinking by himself and staring at the curious sight that had occurred.
"What de heck?" Yajirobe muttered under his nose while rubbing the upper part of his dirty sandals at the carpet a few more times before kicking his feet back in and grabbing hold of the cut-up and gift-wrapped demon corpses he lugged around. "Ey! Creepy monkey-suit guy! Where is the fireplace in dis ere hole?" Seeing how nobody answered him, Yajirobe just sighed and mumbled to himself, "The service ere is abysmal…"
"You will find no fire here, human!" a raspy voice came from the shadows of the spacious entryway hall.
"Fire is a source of light, and we demons are strongest in the shadows! A demon's strength is at its peak when the Sun is down, after all." Another one joined in as more and more beaming, cold-blue eyes started lighting up around Yajirobe.
"And soon enough, the Sun will be out for good!" yet another demon caused a wave of snickering amongst his comrades.
"It's like dis place is infested or somethin'…" Yajirobe sighed to himself as he patted his robe and took a sword drawing stance in preparation to engage all the swarming demons around him.
"This human would fight us! Let's show him how foolish he truly is!" the voices from the shadows grew louder as more and more devilish brutes armed with all manners of weaponry burst forth from the shade and began trampling all over the swampy floor of the inside of the castle. Laser beams lit up the place, revealing distant totem-like pillars made of stone hardwood and carved human skulls. Yajirobe leaned down under the ranged attacks, outrunning the jets of flames or breaths of chilling ice and rolling down under the ocular laser beams as he dashed across the hallway toward the demons.
The hunchback butler demon named Igor pressed the neck-less stump he called his head to the door, listening in on the room where he sent lord Lucifer's elite demon soldiers that roamed the castle looking to protect it. Igor pressed his hand to his mouth and chuckled to himself as he heard howls and wild screams. The demonic servant pulled his head off of the door with a sadistic smile.
"How bloodcurdling, oh, how these walls missed these screams, don't die too soon, slothful human, your yells of peril will wake up the mistresses and they'll rush in to join in on the feast of your plentiful body and fatty blood soon enough…" Igor chuckled as he rubbed his hands together. Before he could get much further into his dreadful manifesto, however, the hefty, house-sized wooden door shot open, swatting the butler aside and off the staircase where he had been lurking and stalking this most curious human visitor that had stumbled into the Devil's Castle.
"That's just damn wasteful." Yajirobe turned back at the demons that slowly stumbled into the next central hallway with a round staircase made of human skulls, all nicely lined up, one by the other. "You guys ain't too tasty ta begin with, but you'll go bad by the time I'll even need you guys. I've got plenty 'a your pals to chow down on for dinner already…"
"Wh-What an abnormal fatso! Is there no end to his hunger? He's eating demons alive!" an ogre-like demon with cross-shaped devil's horns shook and dropped his mace, shouting like a madman before taking off and along the staircase leading up to the upper floors of the Devil's Castle.
"Course I'm eatin' ye bastards up, I've been eatin' nothin' but damn beans for over ten years!" Yajirobe flipped out, shaking his fist out in front of him. "The way I sees 'em–if yer tasty, yer good ta eat!"
"A monster… A monster!" the surviving demons whimpered in terror as their orders and brutish nature compelled them to attack and try to rend, gouge or smash the human to a bloody death but the more rational and deceitful part of their demonic nature screamed for them to flee for their lives and hope that this chubby ronin would stay satisfied eating nothing but whom he had chopped up already.
"So, it wasn't the human who was screaming for mercy, but Lucifer-sama's elite guards?! Impossible!" Igor scratched his head before trembling and looking down. As a massive ivory fang was sticking out from his abdomen, the demonic butler realized he had gotten himself impaled on one of the many totem pole pillars decorating the Devil's Castle.
"Damn, dere's a whole heap of ye's. Cuttin' all 'a ye down is gonna make me work up an appetite, I might just end up stuffing all 'a ye in!" Yajirobe beamed a grin as he drew his sword and showed off its razor-sharp blade to the terrified demons. Silver flashes followed lightning-fast brown and black blurs that seemed to camouflage with the shadowy halls of the Devil's Castle. With each slash, a handful of more demons met a grisly demise, losing limbs or heads and some integral parts of those.
"What a curious human… Just who might he be, I wonder…" Igor mumbled to himself as he pulled himself off of his impaling predicament and, with a gaping hole in his core, the demonic butler scurried to a statue of a slouched demon. Igor raised his hand and grabbed hold of an object sticking out from the demon's bumhole, pulling on it with all of his demonic strength and finding the desired artifact to give way. "And why is he so ungodly strong? Oh, well… His blood will reveal all secrets!"
As Yajirobe kept slashing and cutting down the demonic guards, he felt a stinging prod in his backside, as if someone had slid a broken shard of heated glass into his bottom cheek which forced even the experienced swordsman to wobble his lips in waves and twist his face out. The ronin jumped up and began patting and smacking his poor lower backside as if he could still fix the irreparable damage as the whining ronin cried fist-sized tears of pain and discomfort.
"Ye dumbass!" Yajirobe grit his teeth and turned seething red when he saw Igor scurrying up the staircase and away to the top floor to present the treasured massive syringe he clutched in his arms which was very easy to see washing with foamy red inside through the gaping hole in his midsection. "Now ye done did it!"
Cutting down the few demons with enough willpower to resist him, Yajirobe took more aggressive measures to clean the path between him and the fleeing demon butler as he bashed at any further interlopers with his forehead and sent them crashing to the swampy ground or stomped on their heads leaving only a confusing mush out of things when the murdered demon fell to the swampy floor of the place. Just as Yajirobe touched down onto the ivory railing and began scaling the round staircase up, a swoop of air washed over him that forced him to cover up as the rushing wave of air sent him tumbling and rolling back down.
"What de heck!" Yajirobe whined out as he found himself back down on the ground floor with the annoying servant gnat fleeing with the massive syringe full of his blood.
"My, my… After so many years, we have a visitor to play with at last," a feminine voice with almost superhuman, ethereal spread filled the castle halls as a woman with the lower half of a vulture floated in mid-air with yet another picking under her wing on the railway while a third one hung on the ceiling and waited for her chance to home in on the sprawled ronin.
"If only he'd not be an unsightly hick like this one…" the second wife of Lucifer sighed in pity. "He may have a most curdling scream for mercy that was enough to wake us up, but his blood can't possibly be good for our diets…"
"And to think Igor ran off with a whole syringe full of it, Igor, remember what the black shaman told you, you need to watch your cholesterol levels!" the third wife of Lucifer cupped her wings to shriek something in a voice that was half temptress and half a squawking bird of prey. "Now, as ugly as this pudge is, let's play with it since we've woken up, Pule, Kokoshka!"
"I bet you wish you'd have woken up all by yourself so that you could have drunken this slob dry all by yourself? We all know the type of voracious eater that you are Kloska," the first wife, still waving her wings and sending gales down at Yajirobe who felt stuck fumbled over with his backside exposed until he caught a wave of wind and let it flip him back over again.
"Outta my way!" Yajirobe growled as a dire warning to the trio of shrill harpies flying around the staircase, eager to prevent him from chasing the demonic servant that ran away with his blood and thirsty for more of his life source.
"Master, master…!" Igor bellowed as he limped through the throne room where a tall chair stood and Lucifer observed his cannon that was aiming upward toward where the Sun would be when it reaches its zenith.
"Igor, what's that you've got, is this about the intruder? I hope it is taken care of? Some gargoyles let me know he has a starry orb, just like the one we've found a few weeks ago. It's been doing wonders storing moonlight, and it's powered up the Sleeping Princess twice as much as the moon would have normally powered it up in half the time." A formally dressed, pale-skinned demon with a bowtie and a golden jewel necklace that raked one's eyeballs upon seeing it with spiky black hair and two pairs of pointy fangs gleaming in his mouth turned to his servant before pointing at a Three-Star Dragon Ball resting on a chain inside of a disco-ball like a prism that lustered with beams of pure moonlight at all times after absorbing it for just one night.
"Y-Yes, Lucifer-sama… This is his blood right here, I've nicked him in the butt while he was cutting through your guards…" Igor raised his arms up and handed his lord the giant syringe that had vibrant red tufting inside with a thick, foamy layer of bubbles on the top. The demon lord took the syringe off the hands of his servant and raised it, tilted it over his head, pressing at the other end as he squirt some blood into his mouth and immediately belched it out.
"Igor! This tastes abhorrent! It burns! What has this man been eating!" the features of the classy Lucifer became more monstrous as his eyes bulged out and took sharper angles and his teeth protruded and turned sharper and thicker, shifting up the entire proportions of the demon overlord as he tried washing the horrific taste out of his mouth.
"Demons, it seems, Lucifer-sama… That must be why he's so ungodly strong. He's got our might by eating demons out in the wild." Igor explained. Having noticed how sweaty Igor looked and how heavily his body acted, Lucifer raised the syringe over his head and squirted some blood off into the air before raising his hand up and freezing the splash in mid-air. He gently manipulated into Igor's mid-section and clenched his fist, filling up the jarring hole of his butler at once.
"No wonder it tastes so putrid. I detest cannibalism…" Lucifer bit his lip with his own fang in wrath. "Where is he now? I reckon if he is so mighty that I shall have to dispose of him myself? Maybe I'll have his putrid blood revitalize all of my underlings he had slain. Then I'll force the village down on the mountainside to drink his blood and eat his guts as punishment for breaking free of being our thralls. Most importantly–the other starry pearl…"
"The last I saw him, he was fighting your wives, Lucifer-sama. The ungodly screams of butchered demons woke them up, it seems…" Igor scratched the back of his head.
"Those wenches might just gobble him whole, the pearl included. They have no restraint for they have been born human. Igor, since you were the one to engineer them to soothe my solitude, make sure that they don't eat that starry orb. It'd be a pity to carve my own wife up for it…" Lucifer raised his authoritative hand.
"I can always make more for you, Lucifer-sama… The village is full of women and thralls can always make new ones for me to experiment with…" Igor chuckled.
Before the hardwood door slammed open and Yajirobe emerged from the middle of the doorway, holding a handful of chicken legs as he pulled a rougher muscle off of a larger one of them amongst the ones he lugged around like logs over his head and back.
"What is the meaning of this!?" Lucifer hissed.
"Are you da boss 'a dis place? I'm 'ere ta tell ya, it sucks! No fireplace, lousy welcome, at least the poultry's alright…" Yajirobe mumbled with a full mouth as Kokoshka's hip smacked him in the face after a yank a few ounces too hard. Despite its unruly and rough nature, the demon-eater slurped the juicy muscle back in before swallowing it and the massive chunk of meat visibly straining his throat before hitting a hard bottom in his belly.
"Y-You…! You killed my wives!?" Lucifer quivered in wrath as he clenched his fists and ground his sharpening fangs, as his elegant features were dwindling away. "And you have the nerve to eat them right in front of me!?"
"Ye gets what ye gets for being a lousy host, dumbass!" Yajirobe dropped the cooked, demonic chicken legs all over the floor while pulling his eyelid down in a mocking gesture before his eyes glistened with the orange gleam of a Dragon Ball. "Ey! Dat's a Dragon Ball right dere!"
"A what? Ah… So, the secret of this treasured orb is familiar to you? Ghastel and his men found it in the mountain range a few weeks ago. They've brought it in as a decoration for my collection, perhaps a gift to my wives when they grow grumpy after a lengthy slumber? It was just an accident when I realized how shiny it turned in the full moon. I realized it was very good at absorbing moonlight so I had Igor devise this disco ball that amplified the pearl's ability to store moonlight even further!" Lucifer moved aside and pointed his hand at the large, shiny ball beaming pure moonlight all over the shady throne room.
"I thought ye demons hated light…" Yajirobe scratched his head. "Do ye like da moon or somethin'?"
"You fool! We demons detest all forms of light. Even the moonlight. However, stored inside this cannon is the Sleeping Princess, a powerful jewel that consumes moonlight as energy and powers the cannon. Using this cannon I shall destroy the Sun and plunge the entire world into darkness! Then the entire humankind, all over the world, shall become our thralls and I, Lucifer–their king!" Lucifer laughed out proudly to himself, imagining himself as king of the world.
"Ye, good luck with dat, man… I'mma just snag this and off I goes with yer dead wifeys…" Yajirobe huffed and panted as he jumped a few times on top of the cannon to reach the disco ball with the Dragon Ball better. Lucifer jumped away from the swift swordsman, not having noticed him move an inch before he just appeared right behind him and did as he pleased inside of Lucifer's own pride and joy–the Devil's Castle.
"You shall not ruin my plans! I had figured to power the Sleeping Princess up with sunlight decades ago, but I miscalculated how many nights were brimming with moonlight. Then, it seemed like the moon had completely disappeared altogether for a time… That was weird… But now… Now my plan is finally the closest it has been to being complete!" Lucifer hissed as he pounced at Yajirobe, who just cringed and flipped away with the disco ball in hand. The ronin was incredibly clumsy in mid-air, however, causing him to trip up and kick the back of Lucifer's head and kick off of it as he leaped over the demon lord, shoving the frightening castellan of the Devil's Castle into the back of his own cannon.
"N-No…" Lucifer gasped when he realized what he had done by accident. The frightening demon lord stared in absolute horror as his marvelous cannon let out a beam far away into the cosmos, missing the Sun entirely as Earth had been twelve whole hours away from the cannon pointing at the Sun. Then the demon lord began hissing himself as his very skin bubbled as if he had begun to melt.
Yajirobe looked down at the disco ball that he clenched in his hands and realized that it had been becoming too hot to hold, which prompted the ronin to fling it upward and continue pulsing with intense reflections of the Sleeping Princess Cannon's rays inside of the Devil's Castle. Igor and Lucifer alike turned black as coal from the focused light, while even Yajirobe, who wasn't troubled by flashing bright lights, had to cradle and cover himself up to avoid being blinded.
"Eh… What wuzzat?" Yajirobe scratched his head, observing a few piles of ashes scattered all around them. And not a trace of Lucifer or Igor. "Oh, well… At least Goku's wench won't be hassling me for not doing anythin' useful when I got two Dragon Balls already!" Yajirobe cheered for himself after punching a hole in the disco ball and pulled the Dragon Ball out from its center before returning to the mountain of cooked demonic chicken legs that waited for him by the doorway.
With how much progress Yajirobe had done here, no one's gonna give him flack for staying the night over and eating his fill up!