Death did not arrive with clarity.
There was no tunnel of light, no weightless peace, no final revelation that made suffering meaningful. If anything, death felt incomplete—like being interrupted mid-thought and dragged somewhere unfinished.
Kael Veyrion's last memory of life was not important enough to linger. It dissolved quickly, stripped of context and emotion, until only a dull certainty remained:
He had died.
That certainty did not comfort him.
Pain followed.
Not the sharp, localized pain of injury, but something far worse—systemic. As though his existence itself were being compressed, bent into a shape it did not want to take. Awareness returned in fragments. Thought came before sensation, and sensation came before understanding.
He tried to breathe.
The attempt failed.
Panic surged instinctively, but it had nowhere to go. His chest did not rise. His lungs did not burn. There was no air to hunger for. The absence of breathing was not suffocating—it was simply irrelevant.
That realization was wrong enough to terrify him.
Kael attempted to move, and agony answered.
His body—if it could still be called that—twitched uselessly against something hard and uneven. Stone scraped against raw flesh. His vision swam, blurred by unfamiliar angles and a field of view that felt… distorted. Too low. Too close to the ground.
Something was wrong with his proportions.
The pain sharpened as awareness deepened. He felt small. Not metaphorically—physically. Compact, malformed, as though his bones had been rearranged without consulting him. When he tried to lift his hand, what rose instead was a thin, clawed appendage, trembling under its own weight.
He stared at it.
The claw was uneven, the chitin cracked and poorly formed, more a mockery of a weapon than a real one. It looked fragile enough to snap with effort. His skin—dark, rough, and dry—pulled uncomfortably tight when he moved, as if it had not finished growing around him.
A sound escaped his throat.
It was not a scream.
It was a wet, broken rasp.
Kael froze.
That voice was not his.
The ground beneath him pulsed faintly, like a slow heartbeat embedded in stone. The cavern around him stretched outward into darkness, its walls jagged and irregular, carved not by erosion but by violence. Veins of dull red light crawled through the rock, illuminating the space just enough to reveal depth without comfort.
The air was thick. Not with smoke, but with presence. Something intangible and oppressive pressed against his senses, heavy with despair, malice, and exhaustion so old it felt geological.
Hell.
The word did not arrive as a thought so much as a recognition.
This was not the Hell of mortal stories. There were no rivers of fire, no choirs of the damned screaming in unison. What surrounded him was worse—quiet, vast, and functional. A place not designed for punishment, but for use.
A place that had been running long before he arrived.
Something shifted nearby.
Kael's malformed body tensed instinctively, pain flaring as muscles he did not recognize reacted on their own. His vision adjusted just enough to catch movement—a hunched silhouette pulling itself across the stone with unsettling speed.
It was thin. Too thin.
Its limbs bent at unnatural angles, joints popping softly as it moved. Its skin clung to its frame like dried leather, stretched over sharp bone. Eyes—small, glowing, and alert—flicked toward Kael with immediate interest.
An imp.
The knowledge surfaced uninvited, planted whole in his mind. Not learned. Assigned.
The imp sniffed the air, its elongated nose twitching.
"New," it croaked, voice sharp and grating. "Barely holding together."
It circled him slowly, claws clicking against stone. Kael tried to crawl backward, but his limbs responded sluggishly, coordination lagging behind intent.
"Low integrity," the imp continued, lips peeling back in a grin that exposed jagged teeth. "Didn't even finish forming. Must've slipped through wrong."
It crouched.
Kael felt it then—a subtle pulling sensation deep in his core, as if something inside him were leaking. Fading. Whatever this body was made of, it was failing.
"Thirty percent," the imp muttered, more to itself than to him. "Maybe less."
It lunged.
Fear finally caught up to him, sharp and paralyzing. Kael tried to scream again, to plead, to do anything, but his throat betrayed him. The imp's claw came down—
And the world stuttered.
Not time. Not motion.
Perception.
Something cold unfolded inside his mind, precise and invasive, like a blade sliding between thoughts.
---
Text appeared where thought should have been.
Not seen. Understood.
---
ABYSSAL INTERFACE INITIALIZING
---
The imp hesitated.
Its claw hovered inches from Kael's chest, trembling. Its eyes narrowed, confusion replacing hunger.
"What…?" it hissed.
Kael did not understand what was happening, only that the pain inside him sharpened and aligned. The chaos of sensation snapped into something coherent. He could feel himself now—not as flesh, but as structure. As numbers. As limits.
A foreign awareness settled over him, indifferent and immense.
You are not meant to survive.
The words carried no malice. No encouragement.
Just fact.
Prove otherwise.
The imp snarled and struck.
Kael moved.
He did not plan it. His body reacted before fear could interfere, before reason could protest. His weak claw lashed out wildly, raking across the imp's leg. The blow was clumsy, shallow—but it landed.
The imp shrieked, more shocked than injured, stumbling back.
"You little—!"
Kael surged forward.
There was no technique. No strength. Only desperation compressed into motion. He bit down with a mouth that felt too full, teeth jagged and mismatched, sinking into infernal flesh that burned like hot iron against his tongue.
The taste was unbearable.
Ash. Sulfur. Screaming.
The imp clawed at him frantically, tearing into his side. Pain exploded, raw and overwhelming, threatening to drown him completely.
Then something tore loose.
Not flesh.
Essence.
The imp's scream cut off mid-sound. Its body stiffened, then collapsed inward, dissolving into gray dust that scattered across the stone. From the remains rose a thin strand of crimson light, flickering violently as if resisting.
The light was dragged toward Kael.
Pulled into him with force.
His body convulsed. The cavern blurred. For a moment, he thought he was dying again—this time properly.
---
[System Notification — PRIVATE]
Lesser Soul Absorbed.
---
The pain receded.
Not gone. Never gone.
But quieter.
Kael lay sprawled on the stone, shaking uncontrollably. His malformed chest rose and fell in shallow motions he still did not understand, driven by instinct rather than necessity. His mind felt stretched, as if new space had been carved inside it.
He was still alive.
That realization was distant, fragile, but undeniable.
The cavern did not react. The world did not acknowledge his survival. Far away, something massive roared—a sound so deep it vibrated through the stone beneath him. Closer still, faint skittering noises echoed from the dark.
Others were coming.
Kael forced himself to move.
Every inch hurt. His body protested with weakness and imbalance, but it responded. Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself upright, leaning against the cavern wall for support.
If this place was Hell—
Then there would be no second chances.
No explanations.
No mercy disguised as kindness.
Kael looked at the drifting dust where the imp had been and understood, with terrifying clarity, that survival here was not a state.
It was an action.
And he would have to choose it again.
And again.
And again.