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### **A Construction Site Near the City**
It was a nice summer day for most of Missouri, but not for one individual … "Hey, Jake, when are they going to be here?" Ethan called out, impatience creeping into his voice.
"They should be here any minute!" Jake shouted back. As if on cue, a semi-truck pulled in, loaded with pipes and construction supplies.
"They're here—come help us unload this stuff!" Jake yelled.
"On it!" Ethan replied, jogging toward the truck. As the group began unloading, Jake muttered under his breath, "I'll be right back."
No one questioned him.
The work was nearly finished when Ethan wiped his brow, as he spun around.
"Hey, I am going to check on Jake," Ethan shouted. As he took his first step, he became nauseous for a moment. Then he continued through the work site as he wandered deeper, the sun began to sink behind buildings in the distance. Muffled voices caught his ear. He dove behind a stack of pallets, listening intently.
"…fifteen years, boss," the masked man muttered.
Ethan's blood ran cold.
"I know," Jake sighed.
"I warned you back then—if we were gonna kill his parents, we couldn't leave loose ends."
Ethan fell to his knees, "This can't be real."
Then the masked man chuckled darkly. "And now it's time to get rid of him too."
"But, he's still so young," Jake fought back.
Ethan staggered backward. A nauseating rush of memories flooded his mind—his parents dying in an "accident," Jake taking him in, becoming his mentor, his friend. Every ounce of kindness… had been a lie.
Betrayal twisted his gut, but fury soon followed.
"You were right I should have when I had the chance, for our god Erudis," Jake says, his voice now colder than stone.
Ethan jumped up not with fear, but rage. As he stormed into the clearing. "You planned this all along," he spat, voice shaking with anger.
Jake's face paled. "Ethan—I…"
"Don't bother lying! I heard everything! You killed my parents, with a so-called road accident, now you're going to kill me, too?"
The masked man smirked. "Brother, want me to handle this?"
Jake hesitated—as all the times they had fun rushed forward just for a second. Then his voice hardened. "Go ahead, he knows too much."
Ethan barely had time to react before gunfire erupted.
BANG! BANG!
leg, chest. The ground rushed up to meet him. Blood, hot and metallic, filled his mouth.
"I'll drag every last one of you to hell!" Ethan roared, locking eyes with Jake.
For one heartbeat Jake's mask slipped. A single tear cut through the dust on his cheek. Then he turned away.
CRACK.
"Headshot," the masked man laughed.
Ethan's body hit the dirt. Missouri's sunset bled across the sky and went dark.
…So this is how I die.
---
Ethan woke to a suffocating shadow and a pulsing red glow on the horizon.
A spike of pain hammered his skull.
"I'm… alive?" he rasped.
He lurched to his feet. The memories crashed in again: Jake's calm face, the tear, the final gunshot.
Jake had never been family. He'd been the blade.
"Welcome to Hell," a voice hissed out of the dark.
Ethan barely registered it. His mind was still burning.
Every smile, every pat on the back, every "good job, kid"… poison.
A figure stepped from the crimson haze, tall, horned, skin like cracked magma.
"Silence, earthly trash."
"No," Ethan snarled, scrubbing tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Not until I rip his heart out."
The devil grinned, rows of needle teeth glinting. "Good. Fire. I like fire."
Ethan glared. "What do you want from me?"
"You will be reborn," the devil said, voice velvet and venom. "As the smallest ember of existence, a fragment of such a fragment so weak that creation itself forgot it." his demonic chuckle, interrupted himself.
"You will crawl. You will evolve. You will kill.
And in one hundred years, you will destroy the one the surface world calls their hero."
Ethan's fists shook. "And if I say no?"
The devil's smile stretched impossibly wide. "Then these chains will hold you forever while you scream into nothing."
Ethan met those molten eyes.
"Then I'll succeed."
The devil snapped its fingers.
---
Ash fell from a sky the color of a healing bruise.
Ethan was no longer in hell but something entirely different he stood in the middle of a street paved with broken teeth and glass. The dead walked it like it was Sunday.
A man shuffled past with three bullet holes glowing faintly in his chest.
As the woman dragged her feet, kitchen knives still buried hilt-deep in her spine.
Another carried his own severed head under one arm like a basketball.
Every single one wore the wound that killed them.
Ethan's mouth tasted of iron.
"Where… the hell am I?" he croaked.
He spun toward the closest corpse, the headless one, and screamed,
"How are you still moving?!"
The dangling head grinned with cracked lips. "Same way you are, newbie."
Other figures turned. Their wounds flickered like dying neon. One stepped forward, a woman with a rusted pole punched clean through her gut.
"Fresh meat," she rasped, voice scraping like gravel in a blender.
Ethan took a step back.
"What does that mean?"
The woman's pole clanked as she shrugged.
"We're not human anymore. Not even demons.
We're atoms, scraps of pain and hate stitched together by the Pit itself.
You want to stop being weak? You want to climb?"
She leaned in, breath smelling of old blood.
"Then you kill other atoms. Eat their agony. Grow."
The headless man chuckled, neck stump bubbling.
"First one's free, kid. After that… everything costs blood."
Ethan stared at his hands, still faintly glowing from the bullet holes in his own chest.
His pulse, if he still had one, would have thundered.
This wasn't the end.
This was the starting line.