As Orion bolted aimlessly down the street, his heart skipped a beat when his eyes flicked back.
Grandma Hargrove.
The kind old lady who lived next door and stuffed him with cookies until his teeth nearly rotted. The one who let him crash on her couch when his brothers weren't around. The only person who ever treated him like he actually mattered.
He hadn't spent much time with her as of late, something that stabbed him with guilt now, but when he was younger? She'd practically raised him.
And now… the giant six-armed demon the size of a building was heading right for her home.
Its claws dragged across the pavement, curved like butcher's hooks, sparks hissing with every scrape. Smoke oozed from cracks in its tar-black skin, bubbling like molten asphalt. When its jaw split open sideways, glistening strands of saliva hung between its teeth, a hiss bubbling from its throat like boiling acid.
That was beside the innumerable other demons that were everywhere he turned.
"Oh… hell no." Orion skidded to a stop.
He ducked low behind a nearby porch, chest heaving, trying to convince himself this was all a nightmare. Hallucination. Stress breakdown. Some kind of VR simulation. Anything.
But the sulphur burning his nose said otherwise.
'Not her. Please… not Grandma.'
He sprinted, lungs on fire, legs pumping on pure desperation. His hand snatched up a rake left abandoned on someone's front lawn, the wooden handle nearly slipping from his sweaty grip. He clutched it anyway, like it was Excalibur.
The demons so far hadn't swarmed him directly. They seemed distracted, restless. Searching. It was almost like they were hunting for something greater, and he was just background noise.
'If what the system said is true, the energy released when that eyeball flew in my head must have drawn them in, but thankfully, they don't seem able to pinpoint the source,' Orion gathered, remaining somewhat calm.
'As of right now, I'm like a penny on the sidewalk while they were looking for a diamond. But if they can't find that diamond...'
He'd rather not think about it, and a tiny margin was all the chance he needed.
Despite the terror clawing at his skull, Orion acted without hesitation.
He darted across the street, slipping between the giant demon's legs as it stomped aimlessly and ripped at rooftops. Heart hammering, he sprinted for the house.
The front door burst open under his shoulder.
"Granny?!"
Silence.
The air inside was stale. Too still. Too wrong.
He tore through the kitchen. Empty. The dining room. Empty. The living room - her rocking chair sat unmoving, TV black, no humming hymns, no cookies baking in the oven.
No warmth. No life.
"Grandma!" His voice cracked, raw with panic.
Room after room. Corner after corner. He searched, frantic, half-expecting her to step out with that warm smile that always made things feel safe. But the house gave him nothing but silence.
She wasn't here.
A heavy stone dropped in his gut.
'Had those things got to her first?'
No, he couldn't think about that. Not now.
Because the shadows were shifting.
The scrape of claws against tile. The wet slap of something dragging down the hallway. A sticky slither above his head - something crawling through the ceiling beams.
His grip tightened on the rake until his knuckles turned white. His heart thundered in his chest.
The first demon lunged.
A slime-slick little gremlin burst from the kitchen doorway, mouth bristling with jagged teeth.
"GAHH-!"
Orion swung. The rake connected with a bone-cracking thwack. The creature smashed against the wall, splattering green ichor that hissed through the wallpaper in sizzling streaks.
The stench hit him. Acrid. Real.
"Oh, fuck…"
Another crawled out from under the dining table, its limbs bending backwards, jaw stretched impossibly wide. Orion booted it into the chair legs and brought the rake down hard. Its skull popped like a rotten melon, spraying black-green fluid across the carpet.
And then more came, drawn in by the commotion.
They poured through shattered windows, wriggled up through broken floorboards, their shrieks rattling the glass.
Orion ditched the snapped rake and grabbed whatever he could get his hands on - a lamp, a frying pan, the broken leg of a chair. Smashing. Swinging. Screaming with every desperate strike. He fought like a cornered animal, driving them back one blow at a time. But for every one he knocked down, three more crawled in.
It was hopeless.
There were too many.
Dozens inside and hundreds more outside.
His only chance was to run and hope that Grandma Hargrove had been out of town or at the store. It wasn't like he could do much else in his position.
He barrelled back out the front door, chest heaving, a kitchen knife clenched tight in his slick palms. He stumbled into the street and froze.
Because there were no people.
No screaming neighbours. No headlights. No sirens. Not a single sound of human life.
Just silence.
And the demons.
They covered the street like a living tide. Horned hulks. Insectoid crawlers. Twisted shadows with ribcages splitting into maws. Their glowing eyes were unblinking, feral, hungry. Their collective presence pressed down on him like a physical weight, suffocating and crushing the air from his lungs.
Not to mention the night sky that churned purple. It felt like he was in another world entirely, one dominated by demons.
And every single one of them… was now staring at him.
At first, they loomed. Watching. Gathering like a congregation before a sermon.
But they seemed to have given up on the ultimate prize and settled for the tasty-looking human.
One hissed. Another roared. And then, like a dam breaking, the swarm erupted.
They all slowly began closing in on Orion, who had nowhere to escape.
Hundreds of shrieks ripped through the night as the street convulsed under their charge. Asphalt cracked under their stampede. The tide of claws, fangs, and hunger bore down on him like an avalanche.
Orion's knees nearly buckled. His lungs seized. The knife's wooden handle creaked under his grip.
He forced a laugh. Brittle. Borderline hysterical.
"Cool. Awesome. Great. I'm the main course at a demon buffet. At least I'm going to have an interesting death."
There was no one there to laugh at his comedic coping as he stared death in the face.
The circle closed.
He could barely breathe. His heart jackhammered. His throat burned raw.
"Eighteen years," he whispered. His voice was barely audible under the chorus of growls. "No friends. No girlfriend. Zero prospects. My biggest achievement? Reading a crap-ton of webnovels." He barked out a broken laugh. "But hey… at least I made it to adulthood. Barely."
His eyes stung. His shoulders shook.
"Is this it?"
Dozens of claws raised.
Jaws split open wide.
More demons than he could count had surrounded him, but then-
Shing!
A streak of silver light split the night, and maybe it wasn't over for Orion after all...