She Belongs To The Devil

"My personal hell? Tobias! Why are you doing this to me?" Ariel asked while defensively pointing her palms at her cousin.

She was ready to strike when Tobias did. But, unlike what she had expected, Tobias wasn't attacking her anymore.

Tobias stood right where he was. He then said in a calm and composed voice, "This place would have been your personal hell if you were my real enemy. But… you're my cousin. And I don't want to harm you."

Ariel knitted her brows in confusion. "You don't want to harm me? You literally tried to kill me a second ago!"

Tobias looked devastated when he spoke in a somber voice, "I was pretending to try to kill you. I knew that you were more than capable of defending yourself when you managed to catch that dagger I threw at you and stab my father with it. So, I threw a little too many daggers later. And I was right. You easily defended yourself."

Ariel finally stopped standing defensively and relaxed her shoulders a bit. But she still sounded as if she was in disbelief when she asked, "Why were you pretending then?"

"My father! I don't know why but he is after you. He threatened to harm my mother if I didn't attack you. Ugh!" Tobias pushed his red hair back and continued to complain, "I guess I can now say that he has gone completely mad." He shook his head and scoffed, "No, he was always mad. Now he is openly showing it."

"Are you okay?" Ariel was now concerned about her cousin's wellbeing. She couldn't even imagine having to live with a manipulative father like Michael who used his own wife to coerce his son.

Tobias pressed his lips together and shrugged.

Ariel didn't know what she could say to ease her cousin's heart. And since she had never been to the Heaven realm, she didn't know how things worked there. So she didn't have any useful suggestion that she could give to her cousin so that he could escape from the clutches of his father.

After a few seconds of awkward silence, Ariel dared to ask, "Is there anything I can do to help you? Do you want me to bring this issue up with our grandmother? Maybe she can help you and your mother?"

Tobias took a deep breath in to ask something of Ariel. But he simply exhaled and went silent.

But Ariel could see his restlessness. And she took a guess, "We cannot keep on staying here in this domain, can we? I don't think we can wait out for your father to leave on his own."

Tobias shook his head. "No, we can't stay here forever. He's going to be waiting for us." He sighed in frustration and said while looking sad, "I was hoping that our grandfather would intervene since it was you who my father wanted to harm. But…"

"Our grandfather? Why would he want to intervene?" Ariel asked in confusion.

Tobias' restlessness was increasing by the second. So he said with haste, "Ariel, let's talk about everything later, okay? Right now, I need to make my father believe that we were fighting to our death here."

"Oh! Of course." Ariel gave a nod. She immediately clenched her fist and asked, "Shall we have hand-to-hand combat then?"

Tobias laughed and replied, "We are getting nowhere if we have hand-to-hand combat. It will take forever for us to sustain enough bruises."

"Okay, then what do you suggest?" Ariel suddenly remembered her pendant. "Oh, oh! What if I call my father to deal with yours?" Ariel felt around on her chest but she couldn't find her pendant. She looked down to see that she wasn't wearing it anymore.

"No!" She immediately panicked and began to look around in the hall they were in.

"What happened? What are you looking for?" Tobias also looked around to see if he could find anything that didn't originally belong there in his domain.

Ariel frantically replied, "My pendant. My dad gave it to me to use to summon him."

"Right!" Ariel suddenly stopped looking around and asked her cousin, "I can teleport to Wyverndale, can't I?"

However, Tobias' answer disappointed her greatly, "Er… actually no. You cannot escape from here until either one of us gets defeated. And when we exit, we will first land in the same place where we were before entering this domain. So…"

"So… there' no any other option than fighting, is there?" Ariel gave a mirthless smile to Tobias. And she offered to be the victim because she could see Tobias' desperation to prove himself to his father. "Why don't you throw a few daggers at me? Just make sure not to hit my vital organs. Those take time to heal."

Tobias was surprised as well as grateful towards Ariel when she offered to lose to him. "Are you sure?" he asked to reconfirm.

Ariel nodded her head without any hesitation. "Yes. I am sure. Also, make it look believable. Your father asked to kill me, right? Make him believe that I am about to die. Discover more content at empire

And take him back to heaven as soon as you can. I will call grandmother right after. She will heal me."

Tobias, however, wasn't sure if their grandmother would respond. "I heard from my father that our grandmother was out of contact."

"Ah! Right!" Ariel remembered how she wasn't able to summon her grandmother a while earlier.

"Wait!" Tobias' eyes suddenly lit up. He ran to one of the corners of the hall and pulled out a small box that was lying behind a bench. He took something out of that box and ran back to where Ariel was.

"Open your mouth," he instructed Ariel.

Ariel looked at the pink pill that he was holding and asked, "What is it?"

"It's grandmother's healing pill. It can heal almost any kind of wound. Put it in your mouth for now. And when I take my father away, instantly swallow it."

Ariel put her trust in her cousin. She popped the pill inside her mouth and kept it under her tongue. She took her position and then mumbled to her cousin, "Whenever you are ready."

"Alright." Tobias stood in front of her and took a deep breath in. And he let her know what he was going to do to her, "I will plunge a spear on your stomach. I think it will be less painful rather than stabbing you with several daggers."

"Okay. Go ahead then." Ariel raised her hands in the air.

Tobias held out his palm. And right in front of Ariel's eyes, a thick and long spear made out of ice started to take form in Tobias' hand.

He then tightened his grip on the spear and looked at his cousin. Before doing anything, he went in and gave a warm hug to Ariel. "Thank you for today. Thank you for helping me save my nose. And I am sorry for what I am about to do."

"It's alright. I don't mind– Arghhhhhhhhh…" Ariel's gut-wrenching scream resounded throughout the hall.

Tobias had stabbed her when she was least expecting it, when he was still hugging her. He didn't think that he would be able to stab Ariel if he had to do it while looking into her innocent eyes.

He swiftly pushed her down to the floor and took her out of his domain when she was still screaming. He did that so that his father could satisfy his bruised ego by listening to her pain.

Tobias then turned to look at his father. Before he saw his father, he saw a lot of soldiers lying around while screaming in pain. He also saw Kenneth lying on the ground nearby. He had a huge open wound on his stomach. Joyce was healing him while Niylah was glaring and snarling at his father and standing guard.

Tobias' eyes finally landed on his father. He looked utterly satisfied upon seeing that ice-spear passing through Ariel's stomach. He was enjoying her screams of agony.

The part of the spear that was behind her back had turned red with her blood. Ariel was indeed in a lot of pain. But she was making it look as though she was about to die, hoping that her evil uncle would leave soon.

"Father, we have to–" Tobias held his breath when the dark sky suddenly turned bright because of a series of lightning. And he shouted urgently, "Leave! Father, we have to leave! Now!"