The Dreamer's POV

I did feel like a god destroying the hordes of monsters, and I had done it in a second blow just like how a god would be able to.

I moved from my fetal position born a new and powerful man. This special event was a hurdle I needed to cross, it was an obstacle that sought to keep me in place, and from the looks of things, it wasn't over.

[You have cleared the first challenge of this special event.]

[Congratulations]

The notifications beamed in my mind. I was finding the system annoying–it doing whatever, inhibiting my actions, acting against me and locking my abilities. It was starting to strike a nerve and every time I got a notification, I got reminded of its annoying presence.

That aside, once I got the notifications, the other thing that was in my mind was,

"Now what?"

What would come next? Surely it would be something as boring and easy as this, right?

I sought to zoom away from the strange stream of light that had me contained and move to the soil when the canyon suddenly closed. It struck close with me in the middle of escaping, and strangely, I didn't feel any pain, I didn't feel anything, instead, this canyon shrank. Its presence shrank and I drifted to the bottom until I came off and fell.

I fell into utter darkness, no, I let myself fall, I could have flown with energy projection, but I knew that I would need to take the second challenge to get out of here, and this was the second challenge calling me to it.
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I don't know when, my eyes were fixed to above, not the bottom, but light suddenly came about everywhere. My surroundings were illuminated, and it wasn't the warm light from the sun, but rather the fiery heat of flames, incredibly hot flames, and I turned to see what this phenomenon was.

I wasn't surprised when I saw pillars of fire about, flames interwoven into structures: a city of flames.

[Welcome to the capital of hell, welcome to Etonos]

[To clear this challenge, you would need to find the sword shorn from light: The hellish dark blade]

I continued falling when I saw a partly burning arched stone. I then surged energy around me and then drifted to the burning arc. Though I could tell that it was incredibly hot here, it was hell after all, I didn't feel that hotness. I didn't feel the burn–the sensation of the place trying to undo me and make me scream didn't reach me, I could only tell of its high temperature, nothing else.

The stone arch burned at its bottoms, it burned at the parts that connected to the larger structures that held it. It was like the flames there acted as joints that held the arch to the structures.

I stood on the tallest point, simmered down the energy that overflowed, and I stretched.

I looked around to understand the activities that took place around me, I needed to understand the terrain as well.

I took in some of that hellish air, my chest heaved and I breathed out. The air here was poison, it was meant to hurt those who breathed it in, but my resistances, high level and energy manipulation protected me against its ills.

"What a miserable place." I said, drifting my eyes over the sad and painful landscape.

I saw creatures, of which were as grotesque as expected of creatures of hell. They were like giant worms which from the looks of it are very thick-skinned. Their teeth jutted out from their mouth opening, and they crawled and crawled incessantly and swiftly.

They were rather fast too with their crawling. My eyes were squinted as I tried to make out the smaller creatures in front of them–those that it seemed they would stampede into.

"Those, those are people." Yes, they were people like me in Etonos. Not exactly like me for they looked to have suffered a great deal of pain and were incredibly emaciated, but yes, there were humans in this terrible place, and not just them, but also other creatures. I saw other things that looked more like beast than man, reptilian things, and I thought they were part of the hellish aesthetic for a second until later on when I realized that they were victims as well, and they all were in here to suffer.

There also were elves, but I didn't know that from where I stayed. They seemed like humans too from a distance.

The overly fat and large worms drifted their way forward. It seemed that they were blind or that they didn't care about breaking things as they crawled into structures, breaking them.

I observed them merely out of curiosity.

'What are they? They must be creatures of this hell.'

What they did next confirmed my intuition. Yes, they were creatures of hell, terrible creatures of a terrible place. They had the squirming ugly looks, they had the large teeth, but most of all, they terrorized the smaller figures in front of them, they ate them.

Was that death for them? A reprieve in this damning hell? No.

I heard their screams as they were chewed and torn by the smaller, more hidden teeth within the worms' mouths. They swept forward, swallowed swiftly. They did so like it was their sole and solemn duty. Suffering people were shoved in their mouths, and that was not all.

In the same period that they were chewed and swallowed, they were shat out, their bodies torn and mangled, yet they still lived. This was the experience of hundreds of people in my short time looking down there. It was a macabre and scary sight. I had to fight to keep myself from puking. I had seen terrible things, I have done terrible things, things that made me a deplorable monster, heck the system thinks I'm evil, but this, this was something else entirely. A truly damning place. Hell true to the myths was a terrible place.