Netori: Stealing The Hero's Party!

A basement was the last place Maria and Hayley wanted to be, but after having searched most of the lower castle–which, according to the incubus in the shed, had the treasury; they had no choice but to head downstairs. In the pitch dark, they flew as masked imps, and given the fact that the floor was made up of writhing flesh, they were glad that their wings worked and weren't mere decorations.

"Can you see anything?" Maria asked Hayley as the machina had better vision in the dark.

However, leading the two further and further down into the basement, even she couldn't see a thing after a while. With her suspicion of blindness confirmed by Hayley, Maria held her hand forward and conjured a glowing pink butterfly to light their path forward.

The moment it came into existence, the two noticed cages on both sides of them with malformed ghouls and infected damaged cages within. Bloated like a balloon with puss and parasites visible under their skin, their eyes stared at them, bulging out of their eyes, and some even popped to the intensity of the butterfly light.

"EWW!" Getting their fluid splashed on her body, Maria quickly wiped it off with an invisible third hand made up of her magic. Keeping her own hands clean, she took charge of their exploration and ventured deeper into the basement.
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The crashing sound of stomping monsters, of battles plenty, rumbled above the two. However, ignoring it all, the ex-queen focused on their task, for they couldn't afford to get distracted and leave without getting anything.

"A-are you sure that we should be here?" Hayley muttered, her iron grip squeezing Maria's hands tight.

Walking unbothered by the snarling voices and the attempts from the damned at grabbing them, Maria kept walking forward and eventually ran into an iron door. Only then did she turn her head to Hayley and answer.

"If we're not supposed to be here, then that's exactly why we need to be here," hoping the treasure would be beyond the door, Maria placed her hand on the door and allowed her mana to consume the door along with its frame. Sensing its mechanism with her extended mana, she moved the cogs, locking the door with her magic.

Clicking open, the door pulled itself back because of its own weight and the slanted slope that it was set on. Peering into the door with the room revealed beyond it, Maria sent the butterfly inside first, and to her surprise, the room was flooded with jars of dimly lit souls. But that wasn't what froze her still, as beyond it was a much larger room with imps running up and down what appeared to be a giant's toe.

In the darkness, the imps were eating away at a presumed corpse–that too while being locked inside a room from which they couldn't hope to escape. Was it a way to keep them desperate and make them work forever? Or was Taroyaan playing at something far more nefarious?

"These souls, why would they be thrown here so carelessly?" Hayley asked, unaware of the imps beyond the first room's walls.

"Because they're the most useless treasure he has, why else?" Shaking her head, Maria glanced at the jars again, each filled to the brim with spherical crystals of souls. To a devil who collected rarities, the human soul was far too abundant to be considered worthy to be treasure. Mulling over that face for just a moment irked Maria wrong, but she couldn't do anything about it. "Fuck it, we're taking them all. We don't have time to look through every single one of them!"

"What do you mean?! We can't take them all!" Turning her attention to the jars piling up in the room like garbage, Hayley tried to follow the tower that their pile formed, and yet darkness enveloped them before she could reach the end. "How do you plan to take it anywhere?!"

Humming to herself while thinking of a plan, Maria glanced over to the imps working like ants.

"I may have a plan," she whispered with a smile.

Entering the room, the ex-queen flew to the crowd, and Hayley followed right behind. Getting to the next room, her eyes wandered up the giant's crystalline toe, but once again, darkness consumed the creature's form before she could see its end.

"Maria, what the hell are you planning?!" Hayley screeched in Maria's ears, and yet, smiling still, the succubus mage turned into her human form and, holding her hand, used one of Asmodia's spells.

"Enchantment!" To her voice, the imps turned to her, and although for a moment nothing happened as her mana crawled up their spines, the imps lost their minds. Enchanted by the allure of magic, they saw the ex-queen as the most refined of women.

Lovestruck with their tongues hanging out of their mouths and their dicks and nipples hard as rocks, they gathered in front of her in a crowd so big that none of them could see the end. Smiling at her brainwashed slaves, she turned around and pointed to the jars of souls in the room that she'd just exited.

"Help me carry those jars, my lovelies, and you'll be rewarded, I swear~" Lacing her words with a hint of seduction, she charged the imps further. Thus, without wasting even a second, they ran over each other to get to the jars and carry them for her.

Watching them doing so, Maria could feel her mana waning already. Turning to Hayley, she grabbed a vial of mana potion from her bag and nudged her in the shoulders.

"You need to use that skill too. I can't control them for long even with these potions, but you can," having an infinite pool of mana, Maria only wanted to show the skill to the machina so that she could mimic it herself. And with done, it fell on the shy battle model to try her hands at imp seduction.

Feeling awkward about it already, she gave Maria a look that said, 'Do I really have to?', but there was no other option.

"F-fine, I'll do it…" Watching the imps grabbing the jars, she headed out of the room to take over for Maria. "You should lead their group in case our party members start attacking them on sight."

Nodding back at her, Maria decided to do just that. By the time she reached the entrance, Amedith and Liliayana were getting ready to head back to the shed, further boosting her confidence that they could make it to the shed.

The search for her soul, however, had to wait as there was far too much still at stake. One such ordeal was the battle between Helga and Libyan, not to mention Tariyaan's assassination–something Raven was just getting ready for with his hands gripping tight on the necroflower-powered wire.

Laying in his bed, the devil was bare of clothes as well as any concern. There could've been no better time to do this, and with that in mind, Raven looked at Mel and Linkle before sneaking closer to the devil at hand.

'Sleep forever, you monster!' Linkle thought, watching as Raven skillfully slipped the wire under this throat. Waiting for him to pull it, her heart began pounding like a piston, but the moment he did, Tariyaan's eyes popped open.

"DON'T LET GO OF THAT MONSTER! KEEP PULLING!" She screamed at Raven, but the mage already had no intention of letting that monster go.