People like to imagine that pain has some arbitrary threshold, beyond which your senses blur and you can just sink into numb indifference.
They are wrong.
As I floated in the void, unable to move, every single moment of my temporary state was agony. Some force was slowly peeling away everything that came together to make up the very definition of who I was. One painful layer after another, that force was stripping me down to my very core.
I could feel every change. Every fragment of my being, even as it flaked away, was fully capable of processing everything that was happening.
The pain was like a white-hot blade, slicing through my essence. It kept me alert and awake and pointed in a single direction. A presence. Large, overwhelming, and so very, very hungry.
It lorded over my painful reality, readily slurping away whenever a little slice of my essence came loose. With no doubt in my mind, I could tell that once the presence was done amusing itself, I would disappear, completely and utterly.
I was desperate. I would do anything. Burn the world down. Sacrifice anything and anyone. Anything to get away from the pain. Or better yet, to flee from that unholy presence.
That was when my surroundings shimmered. A vague silhouette of a man beckoned me from the other side of the presence. I latched on like a drowning man, struggling with all my might to avoid my fate.
And somewhere, somehow, something heard my prayers. I could somehow wiggle. That clinched it. Normally, I’d double and triple check before diving in. For now, all caution was thrown to the wind. I dived towards the silhouette, and...
My eyes blinked open. I was sprawled on my stomach on hard, rocky ground.
Then I looked up.
"Huh?"
The unintelligent sound escaped my mouth on its own. Not a hard thing to justify when the first thing I saw after untold ages of torment was the angry face of a monster, looming mere inches away.
The monster had chalk-white skin and eyes that were black pools, deeper than any tar I ever knew. Its angry expression deepened into a scowl as I stared into its face. Before I could even begin to process anything, a heavy blow landed on the back of my skull. My face bounced off the ground, hard.
I saw stars. My head was in agony. Still, after the unspeakable torture of having my essence slowly stripped away, feeling physical pain was almost a relief.
"Damn it all, wasting my bloody time!" the monster growled. "If you’ve made it through, then keep moving. I don’t fucking need you holding shit up."
Its chalk-white hand grabbed the front of my shirt, dragging me up. For a moment I dangled, then it released me to totter on my feet. I only barely kept my balance.
"Yes, sir." I managed to slur the words instinctively, and they actually seemed to defuse some of the thing’s anger.
It — no, he scoffed, waving something at my face. "Move."
I did as I was told, but also managed to get a closer look at the item he held in his other hand. It was a necklace. Some sort of choker, really, like one would put on a prized pit-bull just to play up the species’ supposed aggression and fierceness. It seemed to be made of some kind of red metal. Sharp-looking spikes jutted out of it in every direction, except at the front, where there was a blank plate.
I tried to keep looking straight ahead. The instincts that drove my body onwards insisted that glancing around would be a bad idea. Despite that, I still caught a glimpse of what was happening.
There were lines of tough men and women, all in their early twenties, stretched away on either side into what seemed like infinity. At the head of each row stood a monster, though they varied in color, shape, and even size. Most were decidedly humanoid, like my chalk-white, tar-eyed friend, but that only made them more intimidating. Their job, if it could be called that, was to drive a ball of red energy into those at the front of the line.
A short-distance beyond the monsters were a series of booths, each containing one bored-looking clerk. They weren’t doing much, considering they only had to process about one in five of the people who found their way to the monsters. The other four would fall, flail, foam at the mouth, and then lie still.
It hurt to try and understand everything. My head was still pounding from experiencing intimate contact with the ground. I tried to work on the question of why some people were standing back up while others on the ground were collared and dragged away. Before I could make any progress, a voice interrupted me.
"Hrm, looked close, eh?" The red-tinted clerk spoke up when I reached him, shooting me such a vicious look that I was tempted to flinch. When I didn’t, he gave a small smile. "Not entirely useless, then. Hand."
No part of me suspected the box would hold a sword that looked like it belonged in a junkyard.
The weapon might have once been beautiful. It still had sections that were a soft lemon-green color. Whatever metal it was made of was obviously some magical bullshit. I could tell just from the way it refracted light.
All this, however, was overshadowed by the general state of the weapon. The sword looked like someone had done their best to destroy it.
Most of the blade was blackened, chipped, and brittle. There were actual cracks running all the way down its length. And when the demon jostled the box impatiently, the blade rattled audibly inside the setting of its pommel.
Now, I was by no means an expert, but I was pretty sure that the only thing you could do with a sword like that was scrap it. So why was the creepy demon looking at the weapon like it was a sumptuous meal he had to hand off to someone else?
"Well, boy? Are you going to bond with it or not? Or would you like for someone else to catch onto the fact that you, of all people, have a blade like that?"
None of this made sense, but I was not a fool, at least never to egregious levels. If the clerk demon was showing such obvious greed, delaying would do me no good. So, as I’d done with the bag, I bonded myself to the blade.
I almost staggered when the weight of its connection settled on me.
Unlike the bag, this sword was not to be underestimated. Hoping for some relief, I rushed through the motions of grabbing the extremely plain scabbard from the box and slamming the sword home into it. The feeling of weight on my shoulders ebbed, but didn’t disappear entirely.
"Lucky bastard," the demon muttered, then motioned to a stand with weapons on them. These, I noted, looked much better than the weapon I had just claimed. Gleaming daggers, swords that looked sharp enough to cut through razor wire, and shields that could both take and give a beating. "Pick your standard-issue weapon."
It wasn’t a hard choice. I grabbed a blade that was something between a dagger and a short sword. It didn’t look particularly deadly, especially in comparison to some of the other stuff on offer, but my body gravitated towards it. The second I took it, the demon clerk loudly shouted "Next!" and motioned me aside.
For no other reason than a lack of better options and a desire to get away from the demon, I complied.
Thankfully, ahead of me stood a line of people who looked to be in circumstances much like my own. They all held a weapon of some kind and had a bag hanging from their hips. They were also eying me hungrily, twigging every single self-preservation instinct I had.
Violence wasn’t on the menu, though. In fact, as I stood there, slowly feeling a pit of hunger build up in the pit of my stomach, I realized that nothing was on the menu.
I didn’t complain. My new instincts were telling me to stay still, keep quiet, and wait for instructions.
For a long time, nothing happened. It was boring enough to sleep, but not safe enough for such a luxury. Eventually, I settled into some kind of half-awake trance. I must have zoned out for a while, or for a very long time indeed. The next thing I was aware of was the booming voice of a demon ringing through the cavern.
"Listen up, you lot." The demon stood on a small stage beside the line of booths. He swept his head, so thick with horns that it looked like he was wearing a crown, over the gathered humans. "Today, you join the glorious ranks of the Duke of Torment! You will spill blood for him, you will fight for him, and you will claim souls in his name!"
He paused, like he was daring anyone to say something to contradict him. No one did, on account of not being idiots.
In what was ostensibly an endless expanse of cavern, his voice should have been devoured by the sheer amount of empty space. Instead, the words were echoing. It sounded like he was standing right next to me.
"And you will claim souls," he continued angrily. "If you fail to bring ten souls on your way back to hell, I guarantee that you will be unmade. My best torturer will have their fun with you, and by the time they’re through, you’ll regret not extinguishing the everlasting flame of your own soul sooner. I hope we are clear on this."
We were. The demon radiated so much bloodlust and rage that I would have obeyed him even if I’d been perfectly free, in control, and fully cognizant of what the hell was happening around me.
"Good. In that case, let’s get this started. I declare a war of conquest against the plane of Berlis!"
With those words, the demon spun and slashed one arm in a wide arc. His claws tore through the very underpinnings of reality, opening a rift directly onto a stretch of enchantingly picturesque grassy fields. Beyond the fields, I saw a scary fortress in the distance.
"Charge!" The demon released a guttural scream of pure violence, and countless throats echoed the sound.
Including my own.