Derp

The Devil laughs. "Did you expect he'd be in heaven? Seong Gi-hun's soul is mine. He gambled. He squandered. He lied and tricked and betrayed and murdered. And he took his own life. He was not free of sin."

He begs the Devil to let Gi-hun go. Again, the Devil laughs. "And what could you possibly offer me, Hwang In-ho? Your soul already belongs to me."

In-ho spent so many years entertaining men and women who delighted in cruelty that it becomes the one thing he can offer: entertainment. The Devil gives him one chance; descend through the circles of Hell and convince Gi-hun to leave. If Gi-hun refuses absolution, In-ho will never see him again, and his own punishment will be worse.

In-ho agrees to the terms and enters Limbo, the first Circle of Hell. He hears a woman crying, and his stomach plummets. He knows that voice. He knows its his Yoo-na. He finds her clutching a small bundle - a dead child, its skin blackened and waxy. Although she lived a life that was mostly virtuous, her inaction damned the life of their child, and to remain forever outside of heaven is her punishment.

In-ho knows the Devil placed her here to cause him to stumble at the first hurdle but he promises her that he will return, that he will save her on his ascent out. He kisses her forehead, wipes her tears and tells her to hold on to hope, before he steels himself and follows the path onwards.

He stands before the gates to the lower Circles before King Minos, the judge of the damned.

Minos looks at him. "You are ripe with sin," he tells him. "But I know of your quest, Hwang In-ho. Do you want to know which circle you will be sent to when you inevitably fail?"

In-ho demands passage. He doesn't want to be distracted, and failure is not an option. And so he descends to the next circle.

Lust.

A heavy wind buffets the lost souls, who claw at each other for contact and comfort. In this circle In-ho is forced to face his obsession with Gi-hun. He has to decide whether it was love, or whether In-ho wanted Gi-hun to become another version of him. And he meets that version, twisted and bitter, cold and cruel, and not the Gi-hun In-ho knows. He wants to show the Devil that this twisted version of Gi-hun is proof that In-ho loved him, because he could not love this corrupted version.

The Devil doesn't believe him. He asks if he would like this version of Gi-hun to be his companion for the rest of his descent, but In-ho's choice is easy. He doesn't want this demon wearing Gi-hun's face anywhere near him.

He moves to the third Circle.

Gluttony.

As soon as he enters this Circle, he feels an insatiable hunger for physical pleasures. He encounters many of the VIPs in knew in life, wading through the thick and icy mud, Cerberus snapping at them whenever they reach for the food that turns to ash as soon as they touch it.

He sees a terrible spectre, a reflection of himself. This version of In-ho is gaunt, thin, wasted away, alcohol physically seeping from every single one of his pores. The Devil whispers in his ear that this is as good as it would ever get for him. The sight fills him with determination. He won't fail.

The Fourth Circle - Greed - greets him with the slow, relentless groaning of stone dragging endlessly across stone. Countless souls strain beneath burdens so immense that they bend almost double beneath their weight. In-ho watches them for a long while before he understands that none of them struggled because they believed they might one day reach the end. The labour itself has become their existence. They push because there is nothing else left to do.

"What did they covet?" he asks quietly.

The Devil's smile widens. "You assume greed begins and ends with money."

As though the words themselves had disturbed the illusion, the burdens shift. What had appeared to be rough-hewn stones slowly take on other shapes, becoming crowns, ledgers, rings of keys, rifles, masks, all manner of recognisable objects. Men and women cling to them with desperate possessiveness even as the impossible weight crushes the strength from their limbs. In-ho recognises faces among them. Wealthy patrons from the Games stagger beneath mountains of gold that spill uselessly between their fingers. Guards and officers drag crates filled with rifles that bury themselves deeper into the stone with every step, yet none dare release their grip.

Then he sees himself. Not a broken, twisted version, but as he was in life, in ordinary clothes. Jun-ho reaches for him across the stone with both his hands outstretched. There is no accusation upon his brother's face, only the desperate hope that In-ho might still choose differently if given one final opportunity. He watches himself hesitate, and then the familiar mask appears between his hands as though conjured from the air itself. He accepts it without resistance. The moment his fingers close around it the weight becomes unbearable. His shoulders bow and his knees strike the stone, but still this vision of himself refuses to let the mask go.

The vision shifts and this damned In-ho is no longer alone. A man stands beside him. He is dressed all in white, with a matching, expressionless mask, standing beside him as the overlook the Games dispassionately. In-ho feels his stomach plummet, and he looks away.

"Is this not what you wanted?" the Devil asks.

In-ho says nothing, but the figure in white removes his mask. As he suspects, it is Gi-hun.

The smile that greets him is gentle enough to break his heart, but the eyes behind it are empty, stripped clean of every impossible kindness that had once infuriated him.

"I'm exactly who you wanted me to be."

In-ho reaches for him before he can stop himself, but when his hand touches Gi-hun's cheek the flesh collapses into shadow.

He leaves the Fourth Circle without looking back.

He expects the Fifth Circle - Wrath - to be loud, but instead it is eerily quiet. A river lays across the landscape, black as ink and utterly still, until he looks more closely and realises that just below the surface are countless more souls. They drift beneath the water like corpses caught beneath winter ice, while nearer the banks the damned claw over one another with wordless fury, striking blindly at any hand that reaches within their grasp. .

The Devil steps into the water without hesitation and In-ho follows, gasping at how cold the water is.

It reaches his ankles first, then his knees, and as the black water climbs higher it ceases to feel like water at all. Memory seeps through it instead, carrying with it images so vivid they become indistinguishable from the present.

He sees Gi-hun again, his hands closed around Dae-ho's throat.

The young man struggles desperately, his heels scraping uselessly against the floor as panic widened his eyes. Gi-hun's face is twisted beyond recognition, and Dae-ho's movements grow weaker until at last they stop altogether.

The vision vanishes then begins again, over and over, and each time some small detail changes. Dae-ho begs. He apologises. He forgives Gi-hun before he dies. Gi-hun loosens his grip only to tighten it once more. Hell offers no certainty, only endless possibilities, each one crueler than the last. In-ho endures every version without turning away.

The river stirs once more and he finds himself standing outside the apartment he once shared with Yoo-na.

He remembers the faint hope that had lived inside him as he returned from the island with more money that he could have ever imagined, foolish enough to believe suffering could still justify itself if only he reached home in time.

And he sees that single instant when he understood that every degradation he had endured, every compromise he had accepted, every death that had purchased his survival had amounted to nothing at all. He had won a fortune only to discover that there remained nothing in the world he wished to spend it on.

As he wades through the ice cold water, the memories rush forward in a torrent. He watches himself become smaller somehow, though not in stature. Something within him folds in upon itself until compassion becomes suspicion, hope curdles into contempt, and grief hardens into the cold certainty that the world deserves every cruelty it inflicts upon itself. He sees the black mask as it is first placed into his hands and recognises, perhaps for the first time, that the Front Man had not been born from ambition or fascination with violence but from fury. The Games had offered him an explanation for suffering that required him never to mourn again. If humanity was irredeemable then Yoo-na's death belonged to no one. If everyone would eventually betray one another, then there had never been anything worth saving.

The Devil remains beside him without speaking; in this Circle there is no need for further explanation, and the Devil's silence is torment enough.

In-ho sinks to his knees beneath the black water, understanding that the greatest sin of his life had not been the lives he had taken or the atrocities he had overseen. Those had been consequences. The true beginning of his damnation had been the day he decided that because the world had broken him beyond repair, it deserved to remain broken forever. Only when the tears come, quiet and without resistance, does the river release him, and he rises again feeling, shaking as he continues towards the burning walls of the Sixth Circle.