The first thing I registered was the taste. Copper and bile.
The second was the cold stone pressing against my cheek.
I opened my eyes. The world spun, just another blur of gray rock and flickering torchlight. My head throbbed with a rhythmic, pounding pressure that synced perfectly with the frantic beating of my heart.
I tried to push myself up. Wouldn't happen.
Metal dug into my wrists. Iron. Cold, rusted, heavy.
I yanked. The chains rattled, the sound echoing sharply in the damp air.
"Don't," someone whispered. A shaky, wet sound.
I blinked the grit out of my eyes. To my left, huddled against the slimy wall, was Sophia. She was shivering, her art major cardigan torn at the shoulder, her eyes blown wide. Pupils fully dilated. Signs of extreme shock.
"Where are we?" I rasped. My throat felt like I'd swallowed glass.
"Hell," a voice muttered from the shadows. Mark. The graphic design kid. Always sarcastic. He wasn't being sarcastic now.
I assessed my body. A quick inventory. Habit.
Fingers move. Toes move. Ribs ache but feel intact. No major arterial bleeding, just the copper taste in my mouth—likely a split lip or a bitten tongue from the impact. I was a second-year med student; I knew the difference between hurt and dying. Right now, we were just hurt.
I pulled on the chains again, harder this time. I braced my feet against the floor and leveraged my back. I needed to find the weak point. Every machine has a weak point.
Clang.
The vibration traveled up my arms and rattled my teeth.
Solid.
"Jose, stop," Sophia whined. "Please."
Footsteps approached. Heavy. Not the sound of sneakers on pavement. This was the sound of iron-shod boots striking stone.
A creature stepped into the torchlight.
It wasn't a man. It stood seven feet tall. Gray skin that looked like cured leather. Tusks jutting from a lower jaw that could crush a human skull like a grape.
My brain tried to reject it. Hallucination. Gas leak. Mass hysteria.
The creature raised a baton made of black metal and swung.
It didn't speak. It just struck.
The blow caught me across the ribs.
The air left my lungs instantly. I collapsed, curling in on myself. The pain was blinding, white-hot and immediate.
This wasn't a dream. In dreams, pain is dull. It's a suggestion.
This was visceral. I felt the bruise forming, the capillaries bursting under the skin. I gasped, trying to suck in air that refused to enter my spasming diaphragm.
"Get up," the creature grunted. The language was guttural, wrong, but somehow, I understood it. The translation slammed into my brain, bypassing my ears.
I wheezed, forcing my legs to work.
We weren't just kidnapped. We were livestock.
They dragged us through corridors that defied architecture.
The angles were sharp, aggressive. The stone was black, veined with pulsing red light that looked uncomfortably like arteries. There were twelve of us. My classmates. Or rather, the art students I'd been dragged along to chaperone for the gallery opening.
Now we were a chain gang.
Sophia stumbled. I caught her with my shoulder, keeping her upright.
"Keep walking," I whispered. "Don't fall. If you fall, they hit you."
"I can't," she sobbed.
"Physiologically, you can," I said, my voice tight. "Your legs aren't broken. Your lungs are working. Move."
I needed to be clinical. If I started feeling what she was feeling—the terror, the hopelessness—I would freeze. And freezing meant dying.
We passed windows that looked out onto a sky that was burning. No sun. just a jagged tear in the atmosphere, bleeding violet light onto a landscape of jagged peaks and ash.
Mark was crying silently behind me. Kai was in front.
I watched Kai. He was different.
While the rest of us were hyperventilating, Kai's breathing was even. His shoulders weren't hunched. He was scanning the perimeter. Looking at the guards. Counting.
Strange. Kai was a photography major. Soft-spoken. He usually blended into the wallpaper. Right now, he walked like a soldier marching to the gallows—resigned, but alert.
The corridor opened up.
Enormous double doors, easily thirty feet high, made of bone and obsidian, swung open with a groan that sounded like a dying whale.
We were shoved inside.
The Throne Room.
It was designed to intimidate. It worked. The ceiling was lost in shadows. Pillars of dark stone lined the path to a dais raised high above the floor.
And on the throne sat the source of the pressure.
That's the only way I could describe it. The air in the room was heavier, denser. Gravity felt stronger here.
The figure on the throne was humanoid, but perfect in a terrifying, predatory way. Pale skin, hair like spilled ink, and eyes that burned with a cold, blue fire. He wore armor that looked fused to his body.
The Demon King.
My medical brain shut down. My lizard brain took over. Predator. Top of the food chain. Run.
But I couldn't run. The guards kicked the backs of our knees.
One by one, we hit the floor.
I slammed my knees into the stone, biting my tongue to stifle a grunt. I kept my head down, but I watched through my lashes.
"Welcome," the King said. His voice didn't echo; it filled the space completely, vibrating in my chest cavity. "Children of Earth."
"Please," someone begged. It was limitless terror. "I want to go home."
The King didn't even look at the speaker. He raised a finger.
The air pressure in the room spiked.
The student who spoke—David, a sculptor—suddenly grabbed his throat. He gagged, his face turning a mottled purple.
Hypoxia. His windpipe was being compressed.
"I did not give you leave to speak," the King said softly.
David clawed at his neck, his fingernails digging furrows into his own skin. Capillaries in his eyes burst, turning the whites red.
"Stop!" I yelled. I couldn't help it. "You're killing him!"
The pressure released instantly. David collapsed, heaving in ragged, desperate gasps.
The King turned his eyes toward me.
It felt like walking into a freezer.
"You have spirit," the King said. He leaned forward. "Or perhaps you are just stupid. Stand up."
I hesitated.
"Stand. Up."
My legs moved on their own. I stood, swaying slightly.
"Do you know why you are here?" he asked.
"No," I said. My voice shook, but I kept it loud.
"You are here because my world is dying," he said. He gestured to the side. A massive window overlooked the devastation outside. "The humans... they are a plague. They expand. They consume. They have pushed my people to the brink of extinction."
He looked at us with a mix of disgust and hunger.
"I summoned you. I pulled your souls across the void and wrapped them in new flesh. Flesh that can hold magic."
Magic.
"You are not students anymore," he continued. "You are weapons. You will lead my armies. You will slaughter the humans who threaten my domain. Or..."
He paused.
"Or you will die here. Screaming."
A silence stretched, heavy and suffocating.
"I won't do it," Sophia whispered.
I froze. Don't do this, Sophia. Not now.
She stood up. She was trembling so hard her teeth chattered, but she stood up. "I'm not... I'm not a killer. I paint landscapes. I won't hurt people."
The King smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a surgeon about to make an incision.
"You think you have a choice?"
He flicked his hand.
Invisible force slammed into Sophia.
She flew backward, skidding across the rough stone floor. She screamed—a high, thin sound that cut right through me.
"Sophia!" I lunged for her.
A guard slammed the butt of a spear into my stomach. I doubled over, dry heaving.
The King stood up. He walked down the steps of the dais. He moved with liquid grace, too fast for a human.
He stopped over Sophia. She was curled in a fetal position, sobbing.
"Pain is a wondrous teacher," the King mused.
He pointed at her left arm.
There was a sickening crack.
Sophia shrieked.
I looked up. Her forearm was bent at a ninety-degree angle halfway between the wrist and elbow. The radius and ulna had snapped.
"Stop it!" I roared, struggling against the guard. "She's in shock! You'll kill her!"
"I control life and death within these walls, boy," the King said calmly. "She will not die unless I allow it."
Crack.
Her other arm.
Sophia's scream turned into a gurgle. She was hyperventilating. She was going to pass out.
"Look at her," the King commanded the group. "Look at what weakness buys you."
The other students were weeping, faces pressed to the floor. Only Kai was watching. His face was pale, his jaw set so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. But he didn't move. He knew he couldn't win.
Smart kid.
"I can heal her," the King said.
He waved his hand. A green light washed over Sophia.
I watched, horrified and fascinated. The bones audible shifted. The skin knitted back together. The bruising vanished.
In seconds, she was whole. Physically.
But she didn't stop crying. She lay there, clutching her arms, rocking back and forth.
"I can break her a thousand times," the King said, his voice dropping to a whisper that carried to every corner of the room. "I can break every bone in her body, heal her, and do it again. Forever."
He looked at me.
"Do you understand now? There is no escape. There is no morality here. There is only my will."
I looked at Sophia. I looked at the monsters surrounding us.
I calculated the odds. Zero.
"We understand," I said. The words tasted like ash.
"Good."
The King turned his back on us.
"Take them to the pits. Let them rot for the night. Tomorrow, the training begins."
The cell was a hole in the ground. Literally.
They threw us into a circular pit about twenty feet deep. The floor was dirt and filth. The only light came from a grate high above.
Sophia was catatonic. She sat in the corner, staring at her arms, tracing the skin where the breaks had been.
The others were clustered together, whispering, crying, panicking.
"My mom," one girl was sobbing. "She doesn't know where I am."
"We have to fight back," Mark said, pacing. "We can't just kill humans. That's... that's genocide."
"We don't have a choice," I said. I was leaning against the wall, trying to slow my heart rate. It was still hammering against my ribs, terrified.
"There's always a choice!" Mark yelled.
"Did you see her arm?" I snapped. "Did you hear the bone snap? That wasn't special effects, Mark. That was physics. Torque and leverage. He snapped her like a dry twig."
I looked at them. They were artists. Creators. They weren't built for this.
"We survive," I said. "That's the goal. We do whatever we have to do to keep breathing. If we breathe, we can plan. If we die, we're nothing."
I looked over at Kai.
He was sitting apart from the group, under the shadow of the grate. He had a piece of straw in his hand, twisting it.
I walked over to him.
"You're taking this well," I said quietly.
Kai looked up. His eyes were dark, unreadable. "Panic burns calories. We won't get much food here."
"That's a very practical way of looking at it."
"You're a med student, right?" Kai asked. "Jose?"
"Yeah."
"You know how the body works. You know how to fix it."
"Mostly."
Kai nodded. He looked up at the grate. "Good. You keep them alive. Keep them from breaking."
"And what are you going to do?" I asked.
Kai snapped the piece of straw in half.
"I'm going to figure out how to kill that thing on the throne."
He said it with zero inflection. No bravado. Just a statement of fact. Like he was deciding what to have for lunch.
I stared at him. For a second, I saw something behind his eyes—something old and dangerous.
Then it was gone, replaced by the scared photography student.
"We should sleep," Kai said, lying back against the dirt. "Tomorrow is going to be bad."
"How do you know?"
"Did you see the guards?" Kai murmured, closing his eyes. "They weren't looking at us like prisoners. They were looking at us like meat."
I sat down next to him, keeping watch over the shivering pile of my classmates.
My hands were shaking. I clenched them into fists until the knuckles turned white.
The King's words whispered in my head. Tomorrow, the training begins.
I looked at my hands. Soft hands. Hands trained to hold scalpels and sutures, to palpate abdomens and check pulses. Hands trained to save lives.
Tomorrow, they were going to teach us how to end them.
Above us, the grate slammed shut, plunging us into total darkness.
The sound of a horn blew in the distance. A low, mournful sound that signaled the end of the day.
Or the beginning of the nightmare.
I closed my eyes, but I didn't sleep. I listened to the breathing of the others, counting the inhalations, monitoring the rhythm.
Sophia whimpered in her sleep.
I grit my teeth.
Survive, I told myself. Just survive the next hour.
But deep down, in the visceral, animal part of my brain, I knew the truth.
The Jose who entered that throne room was already dead. Whoever walked out of this pit tomorrow would have to be something else entirely.
Something worse.