Chapter 1: The Price of Being Reborn
Pain. That was the first thing Alex was aware of when he woke up.
Not the agony of the bullet that had slain him, not the agony of his flesh rotting in a cold laboratory. No, something much, much deeper. Something basic. His soul was aflame, but not as it should have been—this was the fire of constant pain, the sort that shouldn't have been inflicted on the living. It ate away at him, seeping into every crack of his existence.
His eyes flew open.
He was on a cold, gray surface, nothing but a raging crimson void around him. The air had a bitter flavor, and it reeked of sulfur, rot, and the acrid, cutting smell of despair. He attempted to move and sensed something was off. His limbs were… small.
He stared down at his hands.Dusted skin the color of dust, fingers too thin, too pale. His body was boyish, delicate—anything like what he had ever experienced. It was like his entire existence had been trimmed to a savagery. A mirror image of what he now was—a devil, reborn into this lost world.
"Where am I?" he growled, his voice not his own. It was not the voice of the man he knew. No, it was the voice of something, something other than the man he knew.
He tried to rise gradually, stumbling, struggling with Hell's riding, throbbing energies and the weight of his new shape. No stars, no moon—merely the boundless, red-black eternity. A tempest seethed in the air above, and tension snapped through the air.
Then the heavy-footed rumble came—guttural, ancient, and wicked.
Alex's head jerked to the side. A towering figure came out from the distance, a devil, but a higher-grade one. Horned and big, with skin resembling obsidian that seemed to be molten and eyes capable of freezing the air out.
> "Another one," the devil growled, looking at Alex as if he were an insect. "Straight from the mortal plane. Pitiful."
Alex felt it then. The heft of the beast's power. The bare strength from hell was abhorrent to Alex's body. His new body shook in reaction, but he grounded himself. He needed to know.
He struggled to keep his voice even. "Who are you?"
"You aren't qualified to know weak thing" dark devil tells him in a language an know to Alex but for some reason familiar.
Just as he is pondering his situation,a flood of information from unknown flows into his mind.
At the same time a blueish holographic screen appears in front of him
Beep.....