Pain.
That was the only thing I could feel. It was suffering beyond mere flesh; my entire body burned from the inside out, as if every single nerve fiber were being ripped away, over and over again, right down to my very soul, forcing me to regain my fading consciousness.
As my mind returned to clarity, compelled by the agony, I observed my surroundings through the corner of my eye... Thick blood. Piled flesh, pulsating, still alive. It looked like a slaughterhouse of distinct organisms, a vast blasphemy to the sight, but... no. I didn't want to think about what it was. I just wanted to believe that this whole moment was a horrible nightmare. However, something inside me forced me not to flee from the repugnant reality surrounding me. A thought pierced the void of my mind:
"I don't want to look. I don't want to look. I don't want to look."
It repeated itself over and over. Like an echo. A useless prayer to anyone who might hear my pitiful pleas. But I kept looking. Because I couldn't close my eyes. I had no eyelids. Only exposed flesh with no movement.
Then, I saw it move. Flesh. Tissue that dragged itself, stretched itself; wet, sticky, with open blood vessels beating as if they had a life of their own. Bloody chunks crawled across the floor, devouring remains and attaching themselves to amorphous bodies. To my body. I felt it. A pressure. A moist heat. Something fusing with my nonexistent skin. A tremor ran through me. Pain, pain, pain. I felt them entering. How the alien blood dripped and sank into me, how something strange twisted inside, mixing with what remained of my own anatomy.
The pain became absolute. So great that it shut down the fear for an instant. Then, the fear returned. Pure fear. Fear that didn't allow for thought.
In the distance, there were figures. Humanoid shadows, perhaps. I didn't know if they were real. I begged that they were; I didn't want to suffer such agony in solitude.
"HELP!"
It was the only thing I could think. There was nothing else I could imagine that would cause such torture. They were people. Strangers. As they approached me—approached this poor, wailing being—I felt a pathetic relief, the relief of not being alone, even if they were the possible cause of this hell. Even with my low energy, I tried to speak, unable to even release a sigh.
"...!?" They began to speak. A strange, unintelligible language. The only thing I could understand was that they were talking about me, because from one moment to the next, they fixed their gazes in silence upon my body.
They realized something strange had happened. After the silence, they vocalized again, and suddenly, an intense light exploded before my eyes, causing me acute, photophobic pain.
"Ahh!!!"
More pain. Only more pain, increasingly intense. I couldn't resist it. The world faded and everything blurred as I lost consciousness of my surroundings.
When I regained my senses, I had only a sensation of vertigo and uncertainty. A pain that didn't seem to come from my physical body invaded me now. I tried to scream once more, and this time, my voice was heard.
"AAAAHH!"
A pitiful shriek filled the place, like waking from a fever dream. I wasn't alone. I was surrounded by people in clothing so odd it seemed from a culture alien to anything I had ever seen.
"[UNINTELLIGIBLE TONGUE]"
I wanted to scream again, now from the pain caused by hearing those voices at such a strange frequency. Between the stabs of pain, I realized there were others in my situation: five men and four women. They held their heads, creating a coordinated cacophony of laments. As my vision focused, I noticed it wasn't just us. Among the group were amorphous things, masses of strange, fleshy substance. And in front of everyone, the surprised crowd continued speaking that confusing language.
"...!?" one of us tried to speak.
Although I couldn't understand most of it, my mind recognized a familiar tongue amidst the babbling: it was Russian. I didn't know exactly what he was saying, but the intonation was unmistakable; just like us, they were only expressing questions and pure terror at what was happening.
"Calm down..."
The word didn't enter through my ears. It vibrated directly into my skull, soft, artificially calm. From one moment to the next, the headache drilling into my temples reduced. My mind, which seconds ago was a hurricane of panic, dimmed a little. As if someone had turned down the volume of my own thoughts by force.
"Please, calm yourselves. I will explain what is happening."
I looked up, trembling. My hands sought something to hold onto, but only found the cold stone floor. The one speaking... that... looked like a person. He wore ceremonial robes, clean fabrics that contrasted with our filth. His voice had an almost feminine cadence, but with the strength of a man. He spoke to us with a rehearsed softness, like someone speaking to a rabid dog so it won't bite.
"You were summoned by us and our God," the figure said, opening his arms in a gesture meant to be welcoming, "to help fight the war against beings from other worlds..."
I stared at him. My eyes tried to find something familiar, but my animal instinct screamed in terror. There was something wrong with him. His proportions were too perfect. His movements, too fluid, lacking the natural micro-vibration of human muscles. His eyes, though they had pupils and irises, conveyed nothing. They were deep black pits, surrounded by dark circles that didn't look like a lack of sleep, but like stains from an organism that was rotting from the inside.
I felt visceral repulsion. Deep disgust. The Uncanny Valley theory: when something looks very human but isn't, your brain rejects it like a corpse or a disease. That wasn't human. It was an imitation. An aberration dressed in silk.
I looked away, seeking safety, and saw the others. The ones who were with me. They didn't look like people. Some were trembling lumps, amorphous masses of strange, fleshy substance, remnants of the dimensional torture we had just crossed. I could barely distinguish where their heads began or their limbs ended. They were monstrous to behold.
And yet... I felt relief. Seeing those deformed masses, I felt a connection. They are like me, I thought. They are real. They hurt too. I felt immediate empathy for those amorphous "things" moaning beside me, while I felt absolute terror for the "beautiful" beings standing and watching us.
"They have already destroyed several kingdoms..." continued the figure, his hypnotic voice trying to crawl into my brain. "There aren't many of us left. Please, help us survive."
"......"
A thick silence flooded the place. I didn't know what to say. I wanted to scream, I wanted to run far away from that thing pretending to ask for help, but my legs wouldn't respond.
Everything seemed so unreal. A moment ago... what was happening a moment ago? I frowned. I knew there was pain. I remembered the fire in my flesh, the sensation of being flayed. But the memory was becoming blurry, distant, like a nightmare dissolving upon waking. Why can't I remember the pain clearly? Where was I before? I tried to cling to my memory, to my house, my home... but it slipped through my fingers. Only a sensation of emptiness and childish fear remained. That being was erasing us. He was wiping us clean to use us. And although my logical mind said "listen to him," my guts screamed a single truth: The ones asking for help are the monsters. And we are their sacrifice.
I took advantage of the pale being's attention being on the Russian to look beyond the circle. The place where we were... it was trying to be a temple, or perhaps a palace. There were immense columns disappearing into the darkness of the ceiling, carved with reliefs of battles I didn't recognize. But the grandeur was a lie, just like the Summoner's smile. The air smelled stale. Of ancient dust and something metallic, like dry blood scrubbed away a long time ago. The gray stone walls were stained with soot. In the corners, where the torchlight didn't reach, debris accumulated. This isn't a welcoming hall, I thought, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. This is a bunker. Or a prison.
The Summoner lowered his arms slowly, his rehearsed smile faltering for a fraction of a second upon seeing that none of us bowed before him.
"I understand your confusion," he said, and this time his voice sounded sharper, less theatrical. "The process of crossing realities is... traumatic for mortal flesh. But your bodies will stabilize soon. The blessing of translation has already taken root in your minds."
"Summoned?" The voice left my throat before I could stop it. It sounded raspy, weak.
The being fixed his black eyes on me. I felt as if he were dissecting me with his gaze.
"Chosen," he corrected, with a softness that gave me nausea. "Heroes brought from a peaceful world to save ours."
Lie. The word bounced inside my skull. No one kidnaps "heroes" by torturing them until their skin is ripped off. I felt nothing heroic in this. I only felt the filth on my body and the instinct of a rat trapped in a corner.
"!!?"
From one moment to the next, I felt my flesh twisting. It moved of its own will, wanting to change. I looked around and I wasn't the only one in this situation.
"Your bodies..." the Summoner's voice became deeper, losing that cloying sweetness, "are responding to your essence. In this world, flesh never lies. Flesh obeys the will."
A wet crack, like a green branch breaking, resonated to my left. I turned my head. The horror hadn't ended; it was just beginning its evolutionary stage.
I observed one of the women. She was curled in a fetal position, sobbing. In my world, that would be a normal panic response. But here, her body obeyed her desire to disappear, to be small, to be protected. Her spine was curving unnaturally, her limbs shortening and retracting toward her torso. Her skin was becoming translucent and gelatinous. Lack of structure, my cold mind diagnosed. Absolute dependency. She was turning into a parasitic larva. Into something that needs a host to live.
Further away, another of the men roared. His skin darkened and hardened rapidly, forming thick chitinous plates. His bones grew, breaking the flesh of his shoulders to form defensive spurs. It was the Russian. His fear had turned into a living fortress. Defensive aggression, I thought. He wants to be impenetrable. But then I saw the flaw. Between the plates on his chest, the flesh was red, exposed, and pulsating. By focusing all his energy on looking like an armored monster, he had left his vital core—his heart—unprotected, barely covered by a translucent membrane. He was a Glass Tank. His own aggression was his Achilles' heel.
I looked at my own limbs. They were trembling. What were they? They didn't look like hands anymore. Their outlines were fuzzy, shifting, like hot wax that won't quite set. I didn't know what I was. Flesh, shadow, bone... everything mixed into an unstable mass without definition. But beneath that amorphous surface, I felt a strange density. As if my vital organs were armoring themselves, hiding deep within this chaos. My exterior was an unknown, a ravenous blur, but my core had a single purpose: survival. And for that, I needed to keep my sanity, my only tool that was truly mine.
"Magnificent," whispered the Summoner, looking at the aberrations with a smile that didn't reach his dead eyes. "A promising batch."
Batch? The word hit me harder than any physical blow. I looked at the floor again. The dark stains I had mistaken for ancient dirt... I crouched and ran a finger along a crack in the stone. It was wet. It wasn't dry blood from centuries ago. It was coagulated blood from days ago. Maybe hours. There were drag marks. Scratches on the stone made by desperate claws... or by sharpened bones like the Russian's.
"We aren't the first," I said, my voice sounding strangely firm, devoid of emotion.
The Summoner stopped his inspection and looked at me. His head tilted, like a curious bird observing a worm that speaks.
"Of course not," he replied, and this time, his tone was one of pure bureaucratic boredom. "We have summoned thousands before you. Hundreds of groups. Thousands of 'heroes'."
He pointed toward the darkness at the back of the temple, where I now noticed mountains of... remains? Rusted armor? Bones?
"Most die in the first hour. Their minds break, or their bodies mutate into something useless that we must... discard." He paused, looking at us with contempt. "You are the last attempt. Resources are running out. If you fail, the barrier will fall. So I suggest you finish squirming and stand up. War does not wait for you to finish crying."
The Summoner was right about one thing: our bodies sought stability, but the stability they found was grotesque. It was a direct reflection of our broken psyches. My eyes, now adapted to the gloom, jumped from one body to another, analyzing the anatomy of our despair in the rest of the survivors.
To my left, a man with sharp features—perhaps Asian, though my memory couldn't place the map—shuddered. His skin had no fixed tone; it shifted subtly from gray to ochre, like a nervous chameleon. But what chilled my blood wasn't his skin, but his hands. His fingers were elongating, and beneath the nails, I saw the wet glint of retractable hooks. Small bone stingers, hidden, ready to inject venom or cling to foreign flesh. The Liar, I christened him in silence. His defense is deception. He looks harmless until he hugs you.
Further away, a dark-skinned woman with a robust build—perhaps from somewhere in Africa—groaned in pain as her forearms split open. There was no blood, only a whitish liquid that hardened upon contact with the air. Her bones were fusing and sharpening, breaking the skin to form natural blades. The Distrustful, I thought. Her fear is so acute that her body has turned into a cutting weapon. If you get close, she cuts.
Near her, I saw the other man, the one babbling in broken, guttural Spanish. He had no armor, no hooks. His transformation was internal and atrocious. His body fat seemed to have evaporated, leaving only a living anatomy of red, fibrous muscles, tense as violin strings about to snap. His body was slender, designed for flight or lightning-fast attack. Kinetic Hysteria, I thought as I watched his muscles vibrate involuntarily. His panic forces him to move. He needs to be faster than the pain.
Finally, I watched in horror at another of the women, who was weeping on her knees. Strange lumps, like cysts the size of fists, moved beneath the skin of her back. They weren't tumors. They were... embryos? Parasitic mitosis, I deduced with a gag. Her dependency was so strong that her body was creating "things" to fight for her. She was gestating living shields. She was a human hive.
They were larvae. We were all larvae. Imperfect sketches of monsters that still needed time. Time... and food.
I felt a roar in my own stomach. It wasn't hunger for food. It was an existential void in my cells. My body didn't ask for carbohydrates; it demanded biomass. Instinctively, I knew the golden rule of this place without the Summoner having to say it: For those plates to close, for those muscles not to tear, for those "children" to be born... we have to eat. We have to devour.
"It seems natural selection has already begun," muttered the Summoner, breaking my analysis. "Some of you have potential. Others... are simple bags of meat."
He walked toward us, and for the first time, I felt the weight of a biological order in my brainstem. It wasn't a suggestion. It was an imperative command, like the need to breathe. It was involuntary control.
"Stand up."
My knees cracked. My muscles, tense and aching, obeyed against my will. Beside me, the "Liar" stood up, his skin blending slightly with the color of the stone. The armored Russian rose heavily, instinctively protecting his exposed chest. The fibrous Hispanic sprang up, his eyes darting frantically around the room. We all stood up. Puppets of flesh in the hands of a pale puppeteer.
"You are hungry, aren't you?" asked the being, with a smile that didn't reach his dead eyes. "Good. Because evolution requires fuel."
He pointed toward the enormous rotting wooden doors at the end of the hall. They were ajar, and from them emanated a sweet and ferrous smell that made my guts roar with animal violence.
"Behind that door is the 'Discard'. The remains of failed attempts. Some are still warm. Others... still crawl."
My eyes widened in horror, but my mouth salivated. My human mind screamed No!, but my body, this new biology adapted for survival, screamed Yes!. I knew the rule. To survive, we had to consume.
"Eat," ordered the Summoner, turning his back on us as the shadows of the temple seemed to lengthen. "Devour and become strong. Or die of starvation being the pathetic aberrations you are now."
The door creaked. And we, the ten newborn monsters, took the first step toward hell.