[Do you have time today? Want to meet?]

  I wake up in the morning to this message. It isn’t like the ringing woke me up, but that this is the first thing I see after getting up.

  “Oh, um…” My blurry vision starts to clear as I look for the message’s sender. “Laura…? That’s… unusual.”

  Most of the messages I receive are from Ricard asking to py DMA together. Which, for obvious reasons (mental health), I tend to ignore. I do reply and accept her offers from time to time, though. I’m not that evil.

  Other than him, I receive messages from my sisters and parents the most. Of course, that’s if I don’t count the messages from the permanently silenced groups…

  …hundreds, even thousands of messages every day! What a waste of time!

  But Laura doesn’t send me any messages. She usually tells me everything in person; the few messages she sends are those regarding DMA, which she sends to the group with Ricard and my little sister.

  I smack my head, forcing my brain to wake up completely. “Ah, right. It’s the holidays. She can’t meet me in person unless we agree beforehand.”

  Meeting with Laura… I don’t see why not, but before I give her an answer, I should check my agenda.

  “Let’s see, let’s see… Pying DMA, pying more DMA… sleeping, watching the invaders’ despair… watching the TV, pying even more DMA, pying games that aren’t DMA…” I’m not sure, but I might be able to accommodate her, depending on what she wants. I’m kind of busy, after all.

  [What are you thinking? I’m kind of busy today…]

  [I’ve heard about a very interesting dungeon, one everyone’s talking about and was thinking we could go together. It has a quest]

  Aah, she wants to py together, I see. It isn’t that different from what I pnned on doing, so I guess it’s fine.

  [Sure. I’ll eat breakfast and tell you when I’m ready]

  [Okay!] She ends the message with a smiling face.

  “Well, well, well…” As I get up from the bed, I think about the dungeon she talked about. “I wonder what is so interesting about it. And a quest, she said…”

  When pyers say that the dungeon has a ‘quest’, it means that the dungeon has different rules from usual. Instead of the more common ‘dive into the dungeon and destroy the core’ objective, the way to win is different. When the quest is completed, the dungeon core usually appears near the quest giver or quest objective and the pyers can break it to ‘win’.

  Of course, regardless of the dungeon, it’s always possible to find and break the core, ignoring the quest completely, but it being possible doesn’t make it enjoyable.

  Some common quests are ‘find X object and bring it back’, ‘protect/escort Y NPC’, ‘hunt the rge monster’, or ‘save the vilge from the monsters’. The options are vast.

  Furthermore, the quests usually require the presence of NPCs or at least some way to deliver the instructions to the pyers. This means most quest dungeons require that the dungeon owner knows how to modify AIs, and that’s the reason why they’re rare.

  “I’m very curious. For Laura to call it interesting, it must be something very unusual.”

  Laura, who likes to py tabletop RPGs, knows a lot about quests and also DMA’s quest dungeons. If she’s interested in this one in particur, it must be really good.

  “Well, I guess I’ll find out ter. Now, breakfast.”

  I happily go down the stairs, looking forward to today’s game session, only to find my little sister angry at me because ‘I promised to py with her first’. Did I? It wasn’t written in my agenda, and I’m very meticulous when it comes to writing all my pns down.

  If I read the agenda after that is another thing, though…

  As the light from the teleport clears up, I start looking around. Laura told me it was best to leave all support mobs behind, so it’s just me and her.

  Through the rge windows in front of us, I can see the red sky outside. The clouds, thin and long, are drawn towards a single point, moving in a spiral that encompasses the whole sky. It’s really weird.

  Laura walks closer. “Hey there. Isn’t the scenery quite beautiful?”

  My sight remains on the spinning clouds. From here, it looks like a huge vortex, one that’s trying to swallow everything below it. I can see trees and rocks being sucked into it. “...Uh, yeah, sure.”

  It is beautiful. Dangerously beautiful. In a lethal way.

  She grabs my arm, holding it closely, and starts dragging me forward. “Come. The quest will start after we cross the hall.”

  The hall is long and narrow, like a corridor. It doesn’t feel cramped, though, because it has rge windows on both sides. As we walk forward, we start to hear moans and painful cries. A slight iron smell fills my nostrils.

  At the end of the hall, the building splits into two wings. There are lots of doors on the walls, with the same distance between them. On the other side of the closest one I see a bckboard and what looks like a teacher standing in front of it. Two rge horns adorn his head, and the two bck wings are inconfusible. He’s a demon.

  I expected something like this when I read the dungeon’s name: Hellschool. But I didn’t expect it’d be so… literal.

  “...A school? Really?” I ask, slightly confused.

  “Yeah. I know it sounds weird, but believe me. The best is yet to come!”

  Laura excitedly points to the side, so I turn my head in that direction. There, I find a teenager crucified upside down, with a sign that reads ‘I won’t talk during css’ hung over one of his legs.

  There’s no blood or gore. The sign even has a nice silk strip to hang it. You can say it’s family-friendly, which might make you think it’s a joke, but the teenager’s dead eyes tell otherwise. By the way, this student is the reason we’ve been hearing moans the whole time.

  You see… the demons have a somewhat… unique decorative element. It’s something called ‘humans’.

  Hell, where the demons live, it’s supposed to be where the souls of humans that committed grave sins end up. There, they’re punished by the demons for all eternity. But the humans aren’t part of the demon faction, they’re just their… stress relief targets.

  Taking this into account, the DMA developers allowed the demon faction to use ‘humans’ as part of the decoration, but not as units. They don’t have skills or stats, can’t be leveled up, and any damage they take instantly kills them. But they can be put into torture devices, move around independently, and pay for their sins as intended. In short, they can behave like other units and can have their own AI, but aren’t considered a unit.

  An example I’m sure you’ll understand: killing humans in a demon dungeon doesn’t give any souls, nor can I capture them to use in my dungeon.

  …not like I’d ever capture a human, even if I could.

  To avoid confusion, the developers also made sure it was impossible to confuse the demons with the humans. If it doesn’t have blue skin – or another color –, horns, cws, wings, or any other non-human trait, then it means it’s a human. A useless and worthless human.

  You’d be astonished at how creative can the pyers be when it comes to using ‘humans’ as part of the decoration... I’ve seen things that made my skin crawl in disgust. The ‘human’ hanging in front of me is but a mere child’s py in comparison.

  I gulp. There are more students in simir situations. I can only imagine where the cries come from. “You like… this?”

  A demon dragging me into a demon dungeon… Maybe, I should have refused. Now, I have nowhere to run.

  “Huh?” Laura tilts her head, showing confusion. “No? But I find it funny that the creator of this dungeon thought about this. Don’t you find it fitting? That a school controlled by demons would punish the students like this for any mistake they make?

  “...I won’t argue against it.”

  It is fitting. It’s also as dangerous as the sky outside.

  “So… how will we know what we’re here for?” There are no expnations written anywhere, and the… ‘students’ menting their bad decisions aren’t in any condition to talk.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll know soon.”

  “Aha…”

  While we wait, I continue observing our surroundings. There could be something we missed. The floor is impeccably clean, the walls are filled with portraits and sculptures, and the ceiling is fully painted. It reminds me of the pictures I’ve seen from the Sistine Chapel.

  The school is cssy and luxurious, to such a high degree that it goes the full round and ends up feeling cheesy and decadent instead.

  A shiver makes my whole body tremble.

  This is… this is true hell. It looks good, but I can’t think of a worse thing that could happen to anyone. Not only the students here are forced to go to school for all eternity, but they’re brutally punished for any mistake they make, regardless of how tiny it is.

  Can you imagine? Having to go to school for all eternity? Waking up early, paying attention to boring lessons, and having to do all your homework… Listening to the same lessons until the end of times! Furthermore, you can’t miss a single css, answer incorrectly any exam question, or do anything that isn’t studying or you’ll be brutally tortured.

  If this isn’t THE true hell, I don’t know what it is. I… I’ll behave from now on. Just in case.

  “Are you the inspectors sent by the government?”

  I lower my sight at the unexpected voice coming. The one who talked is an Imp dressed like an executive. It wears a funny hat and a necktie so long that it touches the ground. It makes me chuckle.

  “Yes, we are,” answers Laura, gring at me. Hey, what do you want me to do? It’s so ridiculous I can’t stop ughing!

  “Ah, finally!” The Imp’s high-pitched voice makes him sound like a child. His stature is that of a child too. “As you sure know, there have been several deaths in our prestigious Hellschool as of te. All the victims were male and were found drained to death, like mummies, though they all made happy faces... We suspect it’s the work of a succubus.” The Imp kneels on the ground, pleading for help. “Please. Please help us! We don’t know what to do!”

  “Kuhu…!” A chuckle escapes my lips. Hahaha, come on, I can’t take this seriously!

  Laura gres at me once more, but she doesn’t say anything, as she knows that the Imp has a set of lines. It doesn’t matter what we do or say, the Imp’s single purpose is to say what we need to know. At most, he’ll repeat those lines if we ask him once he finishes.

  “We’ll take care of this, director,” She says. “We’ll solve this mystery.”

  “Aaah, thanks! Thanks…!”

  The Imp starts crying, or to be more precise, acting like he cries. Inside the game, it isn’t possible to cry. Then, having finished his ‘performance’, the Imp stands up and stays still, a stupid look on his face.

  What is it doing now…? Ah, right, it’s an AI. I should have expected it.

  “Hee… so we’re pying detectives?” I never expected the day I’d rolepy as a detective in DMA. At least, not when pying as Mad Rat.

  “Yes!” Laura nods with enthusiasm. “Don’t you find it interesting? We have to solve the mystery!”

  It certainly is unusual. It’s the weirdest quest I’ve heard of in DMA. We have to search the school for clues, facing demented teachers and tormented students… who knows what else we’ll find? I’m looking forward to it.

  “Wait a moment…” I scratch my chin, “If the suspect is a succubus… Aha!” I raise one arm, index finger extended in a ‘eureka’ pose, my eyes wide open. I point towards Laura. “I found our suspect! It’s you!”

  Laura tilts her head, not understanding what I’m saying.

  “You brought me here with the pretext of having fun, when in fact you’re the true culprit behind the mysterious deaths! It’s all clear now! You’re the succubus, and you want me to be the next victim! You want to drain me to death too!”

  As I keep exposing the ‘truth’, Laura’s face changes from confusion to surprise, and then… She slightly lowers her head and looks directly at me. Instead of replying, she makes a seductive smile and licks her lips.

  …Oh, man. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. I was just fooling around, okay!?

  To prevent pyers from being let down when diving into a random dungeon, the dungeon owners had the option to give their dungeons the ‘quest’ tag. When a dungeon had the tag, it would be excluded from the random pool. This made it almost impossible to stumble upon a quest dungeon unless the pyers were searching for them, but at the same time, it made it easier to find them, since they could be searched by the ‘quest’ tag.