Chapter 1 – Awakened in Ruins
The first thing he felt was hunger.
Not the kind that gnawed politely at the edge of your gut. This was primal. Violent. A black, bottomless void twisting inside him, screaming to be filled—with flesh, with metal, with meaning. Anything.
Tony opened his eyes to a sky torn in half.
Crimson clouds bled across a sickly violet horizon, streaked by lightning that made no sound. Towers once proud were now mangled skeletons of glass and steel. Roads split open like wounds. Smoke twisted upward in silence, rising from a battlefield long since abandoned. And in the distance… faint cries, not of men, but something else—feral and hungry, just like him.
His breath hitched. Cold. Dry. Human lungs. Human throat.
He blinked and lifted a trembling hand.
No claws. No bone armor. No halo of hunger-flame. Just skin—scarred, cracked, fragile. His flesh.
Again.
He coughed, each breath cutting his ribs like glass shards. His clothes were torn and burned, military in origin but no longer recognizable. The insignia on his chest had melted away. Blood—his own—clung to the cloth like a second skin. He touched his ribs. Broken, at least three. Shoulder dislocated then jammed back in, poorly. His body screamed at him. So did the thing inside.
That thing… still alive.
The void.
The hunger.
The sin.
He tried to speak, but the words came out as ash.
"…Gluttony."
It wasn't a voice. It was a memory. A curse. The weight of who he used to be pressing down on who he was now. His mind rebelled against it. Not here. Not again. But the truth was already blooming in his bones like a sickness.
He remembered war. He remembered betrayal. He remembered the angel Gabriel, and the six siblings—envy, wrath, pride, lust, sloth, greed—who once stood beside him. Who now lived inside him. Their voices had faded, but the echoes… the echoes never left.
And the deal? The false promise of Heaven?
A lie. One he had swallowed whole.
He'd devoured them, all of them. Their screams had become echoes in his marrow. Pride had begged. Wrath had roared. Sloth didn't even resist. But it was Envy that lingered in his bones—the whisper that never left. "You wanted what we had, didn't you?"
Yes. And he took it all.
And now he was here again.
Reborn. Cursed. Human.
He rose to his feet shakily. The Blue World. That's what they used to call it before the fires came. A world colonized by survivors, torn apart by invasions. Angels had fought here once. Not to protect it—but to cleanse it.
He had been one of them. A tool. A traitor.
Now? Just Tony.
The name wasn't even his. It was assigned during his last rebirth. He didn't protest. He didn't care. A name was a leash, and he already had too many.
His eyes scanned the ruins. No signs of life. Not yet. But it was out there. It always was. The world didn't care who you were. Only what you could offer before it devoured you in return.
Ash crunched beneath his boots. A burned flag lay tangled in rubble, its symbol unrecognizable, flapping in wind that tasted like rust. A crumbling mural showed a family smiling beneath two suns—their eyes melted off by time. Beneath the wreckage, ghosts of laughter echoed, trapped in fragments of memory that didn't belong to him.
Suddenly, he stopped.
Something moved in the ash.
His senses, dulled but never dormant, kicked in. Footsteps. Measured. Confident. Watching him. Maybe hunting. His left hand twitched instinctively, dark veins pulsing beneath the skin, power still dormant but coiled like a viper.
"Come out," Tony rasped, voice dry and hollow. "If you're gonna kill me, do it before I remember how."
No response. Just the hiss of wind between shattered walls.
Then a voice—gravelly, old, but not weak.
"If I wanted you dead, boy, you'd be dust already."
From behind a scorched bus frame stepped a man cloaked in patchwork leather and age. Gray hair framed a hard face, eyes glinting like shattered glass beneath thick brows. He leaned on a staff made from wood and tech parts, fused like something out of a forgotten war.
Tony didn't move.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Name's Mr. D," the man replied. "And you? You've got the eyes of a starved devil. Makes me wonder what kinda hell spat you out."
Tony didn't answer. Couldn't. The name clawed at the edge of his tongue, but it burned too much to speak.
Mr. D took a cautious step forward. "You remember where you are?"
Tony shook his head.
"Figured. Most don't. You're on the edge of Zone 5, ruins of Old Vanguard City. Last stronghold before the angels pulled out. Aliens been crawling through the cracks ever since. Whatever killed this place—wasn't human."
Tony's eyes narrowed. The term "angel" scraped his ears like poison. His stomach turned. Not from hunger—this time from something colder. Regret.
"You a soldier?" Mr. D asked.
Tony looked down at his hands.
"Used to be something worse."
Mr. D nodded like he understood too well. "Well, whatever you were, looks like you're stuck being human again. Question is—what the hell are you gonna do with it?"
Tony didn't answer.
Because the real question was—how long could he stay human?
And what happens the moment he can't?
He glanced back at the broken city, a place once filled with children playing, mothers screaming, soldiers bleeding. Now, only bones and silence remained.
A gust of wind swept through the ruins, kicking up soot and memory. In the distance, a siren howled—mechanical, broken, dying. And far beyond that, something roared. Something vast. Something hungry.
He didn't flinch.
And somewhere inside him, the hunger stirred again.