A dark, ominous scene unfolds in a shadowy forest. At the center stands a towering, cloaked figure, featureless and shrouded in deep black fabric that cascades down like a monolith. The figure has no discernible face or limbs, resembling a massive, hooded presence that forces the mind to acknowledge it. Surrounding the figure's top is a fiery shroud of dark clouds, and red lightning crackles violently through the dark red sky, intensifying the menacing atmosphere.
The cloaked figure asks,
"Any last words, Andreas?"
Lying on the ground, a knight clad in full plate armor lies motionless, his sword fallen beside him. His posture suggests defeat, possibly death, in the presence of the towering entity. The trees around them are bare and skeletal, adding to the eerie, apocalyptic mood of the scene.
"..."
Moments pass. The defeated knight does not answer, only staring at the cloaked figure with his tired eyes, the light of fear long gone.
"..."
A long, pale, skin-like tentacle stretches out from the cloaked figure and wraps around the defeated knight.
As his body is lifted off the ground, the knight's armor falls off, and odd, foreboding symbols form on the knight's naked body.
The knight is then laid on top of a tree stump to be attended by a woman whose eyes and the wound on her neck ooze dark liquid; her skin teamed with unnatural movements.
Somehow, the woman, who is long dead, moving like a puppet controlled by unseen forces stepped closer to the knight and ran her blade across his neck.
A fountain of blood arose from the knight's neck, yet he showed no reaction and did not resist when the dead woman held her blade to his neck.
As if attempting to nurse his wounds, the dead woman ignored the gushing blood and licked his neck wound.
As the woman kept licking his wound, something entered the knight's wound, and like the woman his skin–silent, methodical, and wrong
The symbols on the knight's body begin to darken, and his skin rots away.
A few minutes passed, and the woman fell, lying on the ground—now freed from whatever forces had held her.
"How futile thy resistance, even in death. All thou hast wrought is but a fleeting delay of the inevitable—my brethren shall emerge, unimpeded and inexorable."
The sky turns orange and crimson, as the sun starts to appear at the edge of the world.
Through a dreamlike transformation, the naked knight's body shifted, becoming that of a young man—seventeen years old—now dressed in oddly modern clothing.
"… disgusting," he murmured, eyes lingering on the decaying corpse. The words were hollow, like an echo in an empty room—spoken more out of habit than horror.
Now awake and having long forgotten his death long after the sun had risen, the young man was greeted only by the sigh of the decaying body of a woman. Worse still, a dark liquid from the corpse had stained one of his white shoes.
He stepped away from the rotting bodies and wiped the dark liquid from his shoe, grinding the stained part against the coarse earth.
He scanned the surroundings. Nothing but decay. The corpse lay bloated and sunken, and a strange blond girl in Victorian garb stared at him with wide, trembling eyes. Nearby, rusted scraps of metal and a broken sword jutted from the ground— as if already gnawed by worms and insects before they turned their hunger on the woman.
He crouched and grasped the hilt of the ruined blade. It felt oddly familiar, though he couldn't say why.
What is happening? he thought. None of this feels real. Or maybe it feels too real.
He looked down at the corpse, expression flat. Not fear. Not grief. Just contempt.
"Figures. I go to class and out of nowhere some dead chick bleeds on my shoes in the middle of a freaky forest."
He scraped the black fluid off with his heel.
"Alright, Andreas. Think. You were walking to class... then what? Some truck? Gunshots? No—no, this isn't the hospital."
"Right. Not a dream. So... dead, maybe. Which means this is hell. Obviously."
Well then it's not like I had any issues with dying, I wonder what do people in hell actually for fun.