In the late twentieth century, the prophets of progress promised paradise.
They dreamed of a world polished by technology, enlightened by reason, united by freedom. The future was to be bright and clean—silver cities on the Moon, colonies on Mars, machines serving mankind, and hunger confined to history books. Work would become leisure, and peace would be perpetual. Humanity, at last, would graduate from its primitive adolescence and take its first confident steps among the stars.
But the future never arrived.
Or rather—it did, just not the one they had imagined.
Instead of reaching outward, humanity collapsed inward.
The bright horizon of progress dimmed, swallowed by the same flaws that had always haunted civilization. The machines grew smarter, but the people grew dumber. Technology delivered abundance, but also apathy. Information flowed freely, but truth drowned in it. Democracies that once prided themselves on freedom of thought succumbed to noise, division, and the tyranny of emotion.
Aristotle had warned of this more than two thousand years ago:
that democracy, untended, would rot from within.
That when equality is mistaken for equivalence, the unwise will exalt the unworthy.
That the masses, in their hunger for comfort, will mistake flattery for leadership, and grant power to the loudest liar rather than the most virtuous mind.
And so it came to pass.
The majority ruled—but without wisdom.
The poor demanded justice, and the powerful demanded obedience. Each side called itself righteous, and neither listened to the other. Laws bent to the will of mobs. Principles decayed into popularity contests. Demagogues rose from the ruins of discourse, weaponizing outrage like artillery. Expertise was mocked, truth was optional, and fame became the only currency that mattered.
The world grew richer than ever—and more impoverished in spirit.
Science advanced, but philosophy regressed. The more humanity built, the less it believed. And as the century staggered forward, the promises of progress were quietly replaced by the habits of decay.
The Earth, overburdened and overheated, began to turn against its masters.
Famine, flood, and fire reclaimed the land. Cities drowned. Harvests failed. Billions starved while billions more scrolled past the suffering on screens. Nations that once cooperated began to compete, then to conspire, then to kill.
The global economy cracked under its own contradictions.
Birthrates collapsed. Life expectancy shrank. Desperation metastasized into war.
Old alliances fractured. New empires arose. The so-called "Union of Nations"—the last monument to collective hope—could agree only that things were very, very bad.
And so humanity, once destined for the stars, fell back to the mud.
The dream of utopia curdled into the nightmare of history repeating itself—only louder, faster, and more efficient at its own destruction.
Now, at the dusk of the twenty-first century, the species that once sought to colonize the Moon can barely govern itself.
Its people are angry, divided, and armed to the teeth.
The planet groans beneath their weight.
And on every horizon, a different empire prepares to strike.
The future is no longer something to look forward to. It's something to survive.
***
And so it was that somewhere in the Middle East, under a moon lit night, armed men slipped across the rooftops of a ruined coastal city. They moved like shadows learning to walk. Bandanas hid their faces—inked with symbols an Englishman wouldn't recognize and a linguist wouldn't admit to.
They carried rockets like pallbearers, easing each tube onto a cracked parapet, sighting down alleys blown open by older wars. When everything was ready, one of them thumbed a radio and breathed a single phrase:
"Akl alqaraf."
They waited.
The reply came in ragged stereo, crawling through static from cellars, minarets, fishing piers, hilltops:
"Akl alqaraf."
Again.
And again.
Until the words sounded less like language and more like weather.
Then the final command:
"Al-mawt li'Amrīkā."
Death to America.
The city—and a dozen like it—answered in orange. Launch plumes kicked from rooftops and courtyards, from the ribs of ruined stadiums and the backs of battered trucks. From north to south, across the crescent of night, missiles lifted and arced toward coordinates chosen long ago and polished hourly.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the Mediterranean, aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, Lieutenant Jack Fritz was being torn out of a mediocre dream.
Sirens went first—those metal-throated banshees that make conversation irrelevant. Red battle lights pulsed across the bulkheads like a bad heartbeat. Jack pried one eye open and gave the room an opinion worthy of a dying walrus. Still half-asleep, he patted the nightstand. Nothing. He flapped a hand under the pillow. Nothing. Just sheets, sweat, and a lifetime of poor decisions.
Then he felt it: something firm, warm, and catastrophically misfiled in his underwear.
He fished it out with all the grace of a raccoon in a gift shop. His phone. Big. Thick. Unreasonably durable. The kind of device that could survive a nuclear exchange or, worse, a trip down the ladderwell to the hangar deck.
He woke the screen. The screen betrayed him.
Too bright, too blurry, too three in the damn morning.
"Oh, come on, eyes—work, damn it," he muttered, as if yelling at his face would update its firmware.
The sirens didn't care. Somewhere above him, steel lungs inhaled and the whole ship shuddered, turning into the wind, squaring its shoulders for whatever was climbing over the horizon.
From under his pillow, Jack retrieved his emergency self-care kit: a lighter and a pre-rolled joint. With the elegance of a sleep-deprived raccoon, he sparked it, inhaled deep, and let the tension dissolve into smoke. The world made slightly more sense now.
He checked his phone.
03:00.
Jack flailed an arm toward the ceiling, as if appealing to some divine scheduler.
"You've gotta be kidding me. Three in the fucking morning? Again?"
This wasn't his first false alarm. He'd been stationed aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower for months now—one more cog in a U.S.-led deterrence force parked in the Mediterranean to keep the peace, or at least pretend to. Recently, "peace" meant nightly sirens, occasional missile launches from the coast, and absolutely no sleep.
A few rockets fired. None hit.
The Navy called it readiness. Jack called it insomnia with paperwork.
Assigned to the flight deck, he spent his nights climbing staircases that went nowhere, sweating through his uniform while listening to the same alarms that had long since lost their power to scare him. Every. Damn. Night.
"Fuck me, man," he groaned. "Why now? What the hell's out there—someone get trigger-happy again?"
Still muttering, he started pulling on his uniform, half buttoned, half conscious. That's when the pounding began—violent, frantic, shaking the thin metal door like it owed someone money.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant! Open up!"
Jack froze.
That tone wasn't part of the usual drill.
He cracked the door open. Standing there was a short Petty Officer Sam, red-faced, sweat-soaked, panting like a Labrador on espresso. His eyes were wide, manic, and shining.
Jack squinted at him through the haze of half-sobriety. "Sam, if this is another false—"
"Sorry for disturbing you, Lieutenant!" Sam blurted out, snapping to attention with an overcooked salute. Behind him, sailors sprinted down the corridor, their boots hammering the deck, shouts echoing like thunder.
Jack blinked. "Okay, what's the circus this time?"
"Sir, it's war! We're at war! The news just came out!"
Jack stared at him, one eyebrow twitching.
"War? With who?"
Sam swallowed, eyes bulging.
"Everybody."
The words landed like a sucker punch to the soul.
Before Jack could process it, the ship's 1MC intercom crackled to life. The Admiral's voice blasted through the speakers, distorted by static and raw panic.
> "This is not a drill! I repeat—this is not a drill! All personnel to battle stations immediately! Set Condition One throughout the ship!"
The corridor erupted. Sailors slammed watertight doors shut, alarms screamed, and red lights strobed across steel walls.
Jack stared into the chaos for one long, sober second.
Then he exhaled, long and slow.
"Welp," he muttered. "There goes the joint."
He flicked the butt into the ashtray, zipped up his uniform, and ran straight into the noise.
The ship's corridors were alive—red lights flashing, sailors shouting, boots hammering on steel. Jack bolted after Sam, adrenaline cutting through the haze. Every alarm, every vibration felt amplified, like the whole carrier was a single metal organism thrashing in pain.
Then came the sound.
The Phalanx CIWS—those six-barreled gods of war—spooled up overhead. A mechanical snarl, rising, churning, becoming a metallic scream. It was the sound of a blender having an existential crisis at 4,500 rounds per minute.
The guns opened up.
Fast. Relentless. Terrifying.
Explosions answered in the distance—deep, rolling thunder that didn't stop, didn't echo, just stacked.
As they ran, Jack's mind wandered, because of course it did.
Shit... how the hell did it come to this?
This wasn't the life he'd signed up for. He'd joined the Navy for the easy ride—sunsets, medals, maybe a deployment or two to make his résumé sparkle. A wife. Kids. Dog. Backyard barbecue Saturdays.
Not this. Not Armageddon.
He'd imagined himself sipping beer in a lawn chair by now, not sprinting through red-lit hallways while the sky tried to kill him.
World War Freakin' Three.
Right when he was finally hitting his prime.
Couldn't they have waited thirty years? Let him retire first, send the next batch of idiots instead?
Yeah, Jack was a coward. He knew it. Never threw a punch, never took one. His only superpower was yelling with enough authority that people assumed he knew what he was doing.
His dad had told him once—"Son, you'd be happier gutting fish with me than playing soldier with a gun."
Maybe the old man was right. But gutting fish meant actual labor, and Jack had spent his entire life avoiding that kind of thing on principle.
Too late now.
YOLO, he thought bitterly, which felt like the worst possible epitaph for the end of civilization.
How bad could it really be?
Then he stepped onto the deck—
—and forgot how to breathe.
The night sky was alive.
Tracer rounds carved glowing veins through the darkness. Streams of red, orange, and white stitched across the horizon like angry fireworks. The sea below reflected it all—turning black waves into a molten, flickering mirror.
And beyond those glowing arcs, he saw them.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of inbound lights.
A meteor shower of guided death.
"Wait... what the fuck...?" Jack whispered. "Those aren't stars."
He squinted.
His stomach dropped.
"That's a fuck-ton of TNT coming our way."
The truth hit like a body blow. With that many rockets, not even a carrier this size stood a chance. One hit—maybe two—and the Eisenhower would become a floating tomb.
Jack dropped to his knees, a reflex more than anything. His brain had already filed for early retirement.
Beside him, Petty Officer Sam stood at the railing, eyes wide, mouth curved in something halfway between horror and wonder.
"Damn, that's frickin' awesome!" Sam shouted over the roar. "Lieutenant, what do we do? Why are you kneeling? Sir? I don't think this is the right time to reenact that scene from Platoon!"
Jack didn't answer.
The excitement in Sam's voice faltered. He turned and saw his lieutenant's face—pale, distant, eyes wide and glassy. The look of a man who'd just realized his Tinder date was also his cousin.
But then something shifted.
Sam drew in a breath and steadied himself, his tone lowering, deepening, becoming something almost… noble. The chaos raged around them, but for a moment, it felt like the world had gone still.
"I know, sir," he said quietly. "It's all wrong. We shouldn't be here—so far from home. But we are. It's like in those great war stories—the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger. And sometimes you didn't even want to know how they'd end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?"
Jack blinked, dazed, the words cutting through the noise like a flare in the dark.
"But in the end," Sam continued, "it's only a passing thing, this darkness. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it'll shine all the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. The ones that meant something—even if you were too small to understand why."
He looked out toward the sea, eyes glinting in the fiery haze.
"I think I get it now, sir. Folks in those stories had plenty of chances to turn back… only they didn't. Because they were holding on to something."
Jack stared up at the sky—the horizon blooming with incoming fire—and felt his throat tighten.
"What are we holding on to, Petty Officer Sam?" he asked softly.
Sam placed a blood-slick hand on his trembling shoulder, his voice calm and certain.
"That there's still some good in this world, Lieutenant Jack," he said. "And it's worth fighting for."
Jack almost laughed, but the sound caught somewhere between a sob and a breath.
Then he saw it—a glint on the water, bright and fast, carving a path straight through the night.
"Sam—"
The explosion hit before he could finish.
A cruiser off their port side took the impact full-on. For an instant, it was there—whole, defiant—then split clean in half, erupting into an expanding sun of fire and shrapnel. The shockwave punched through the air like the hand of an angry god.
Jack didn't hear himself scream. He didn't feel the deck vanish under him.
Only silence—thick and absolute—as the blast picked him up and threw him into the void.
He saw his boots float past his face, weightless and surreal, before the darkness took him.
When consciousness staggered back, Jack knew he was done. The blast from the shattered destroyer had tossed him like trash; everything inside him felt ruptured, leaking, rearranged. Breathing was a chore. Thinking was a rumor. He lay there and tasted iron and heat and the end.
Above him, the sky was coming apart.
Missiles fell like hard rain, bright beads on black thread. Tracers stitched upward to meet them—fiery needlework, desperate and precise—then unraveled, strand by strand, as more lights punched through. One of those lights broke past the last web of fire and came straight for him, growing, blooming, holy.
Jack smiled, stupid and small, and held up a trembling hand as if to catch it.
Yes. There you are. The big, beautiful angel. Take me. Make it easy. Make it anime. Isekai me, baby.
The glow swelled—then vanished.
A shape dragged across his vision and collapsed on his chest with a wet thud. Sam—short, broad, drenched in soot and blood—crawled into the light and smothered it. He was legless from mid-thigh down, breath rattling, eyes fierce.
"Not yet, Lieutenant," he croaked. "We can still make it. We can live. You just have to believe."
Jack stared up at the sweat-slick face filling his world and wanted to scream.
"Oh, come on," he rasped. "You're blocking my angel, man."
He tried to shove him off. His arms didn't listen.
The incoming light swelled around Sam's silhouette, a halo with bad timing.
Jack's last clear thought was petty and human and bitterly funny: I wanted a clean exit. A flash. Not Sam's face.
Then the warhead arrived.
The world turned white.
He expected nothingness after the flash—silence, blank, a long exhale into nowhere.
Instead, there was water.
Cold, clear, and endless. A single, pale light burned somewhere far above him, a coin on black velvet. No carrier. No escorts. No smoke. Just the hush of a vast, still sea and the slow tumble of his body.
He checked himself without thinking—hands, ribs, legs. No holes. No fire. No pain beyond a distant ache, like a bruise on his soul. Questions crowded his skull, but breath came first. Breath was the only problem that mattered.
He angled upward and swam.
He was good at it. Old muscle memory uncoiled and did the work: long kicks, steady stroke, tight core. He rationed his air, counted the beats in his head, rode the calm that came with a task that had rules. The light spread as he climbed—warmer, kinder, a gentle heat stroking his face. Almost there. He reached—
Something clamped his ankle.
The pull was immediate and absolute. He jerked down hard enough to wrench his hip. He kicked, twisted, clawed for purchase on nothing. The grip didn't shift. It was weight, not force; inevitability, not struggle—like a ship's anchor pretending to be a hand.
He looked down.
A red thing waited in the dark: horns arcing back like scythes, eyes lit as if from a furnace, a smile made of knives. It did not thrash or roar. It simply held him and watched, delighted to let gravity do the killing.
"Are you—oh, come on," Jack choked into the bubbles, panic slipping its leash. He hammered at the thing with his free heel. His heel might as well have been a feather. He grabbed at the grip on his leg and felt only slick, living iron.
The light began to recede.
His lungs pleaded, then barked, then screamed. He kicked harder, arms carving water that gave him nothing back. He was sinking—slow at first, then with the heavy confidence of a decision already made.
He looked up again, one last time, into the bright.
A shape fell out of it—compact, fast, wrong.
Sam.
Short, broad, legless, bleeding from the blunt ends where thighs became ruin, and somehow still moving with ridiculous speed. He arrowed down past the sheen of light and seized Jack by the wrist with both hands.
Jack shook his head, mouthing around the last coin of air. No. Go. Go. He tried to shove him off, to spare him, to save at least one of them.
Sam clamped down harder. Stubborn to the marrow even where marrow was missing.
The demon's grin widened. The ocean took them both.
The light shrank to a pin. The pin went out.
His chest convulsed on reflex, the body choosing air that wasn't there. Black crept in from the edges, soft as felt, final as a verdict. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the burn to become nothing.
Instead, the world cracked.
They fell—still underwater, yet no longer buoyed—plummeting as if someone had turned the sea upside down and opened a trapdoor. Pressure vanished. Sound vanished. Even the cold vanished.
Then—impact.
A brutal, ringing thud rattled through him like a bat through teeth. Jack tensed and felt it: not deck, not sand—bones. Dry, splintering bones that clicked and shifted when he breathed. No wind. No waves. Only the scrape of his own movements and the slow, brittle settling of whatever he was lying on.
Air found him anyway, sour and thin. He coughed it in, blinked, and saw nothing. The dark was absolute.
Something heavy hit nearby with a crack and a grunt.
"Lieutenant… where are we?" Sam's voice, ragged, trembling.
Jack clenched his jaw and pushed himself upright; the surface jabbed back with a dozen sharp points. "How the hell should I know?"
He stopped. Far off—impossibly far in a place with no distance—a flame winked to life. It hovered above a black, glassy sea, breathing heat into the dark and swelling by slow, patient degrees. Its glow crawled toward them, peeling back the dark in layers.
The world came into view.
They were perched on a mound of bones—an island smaller than a football field, shaped like a heap poured from the bottom of the ocean and left to harden. It crowned higher in the center and sloped toward a ragged shoreline where tarsal bones met oily water. Everywhere he looked were skulls and ribs and vertebrae, chalk-white and age-yellowed: human femurs stacked with saurian tails; tusked jaws the size of kayaks; skulls with single eyes, and others with too many. Ancient. Brittle. Wrong.
Under their weight the island made old-man noises—groans, creaks, soft snaps. Little avalanches sloughed down the sides, bone on bone, until the heaps found a new, temporary balance.
"Lieutenant," Sam said after a beat, "I think we're not on the aircraft carrier anymore."
The mound shifted again, a slow, downward sigh. Bone-dust wafted up and stung Jack's throat.
"And I think this island is sinking," Sam added.
Jack looked to the black sea. The pile had settled lower—centimeters, maybe—but enough to make the water lick closer around the edges. "Well, shit," he said, genius fully deployed.
Sam began to scramble—not stand, scramble—hauling himself backward by his arms, legless stumps dragging, leaving a dark trail that pattered between ribs and vanished into the cracks. Jack followed, slipping on slick femurs and shattered skulls, until they reached the crown: the highest, least-collapsible-looking place on the heap.
They sat shoulder to shoulder—two idiots in detention—like the time a middle-school teacher made them share a desk until the bully and the bullied stopped making each other's lives hell. Now it was just a different room, same seating chart, end of the world version.
From the top they watched the sea.
Shapes stirred in the water. First smudges, then eddies, then forms—pale and phosphorescent, drifting just below the surface. Some were almost human. Most were not. Antlered silhouettes with too-long jaws. Threaded ribs on serpentine spines. Children-sized things with empty, coin-bright eyes. Others weren't shapes at all so much as suggestions of shapes, as if memory had forgotten how many limbs anything needed.
They circled the bone shore like sharks. They never touched land. Each time the water swelled and a pale head neared the bones, it sheered away hard, as if the mound was barred territory.
Sam glanced down at his stumps. Blood leaked in thin threads, beading at the edges, dripping into the lattice beneath him. The circle tightened. "They're interested," he said, trying on a grin that didn't fit. "Guess it's like chumming the water."
Jack swallowed. The flame on the horizon pulsed—larger now, warmer, a furnace-lantern hanging over the black. The island answered with another low groan. Tiny fractures spidered through a stack of vertebrae by his boot and tinkled down the slope like dry rain.
"I dunno," Sam said, eyeing the pale shapes circling below. "Maybe they're helpful ghosts. Maybe they wanna heal my legs. Hahaha."
Jack stared at him, flat as a dead battery. "How can you laugh right now? We are so fucking dead. And you're bleeding out. You get that, right?"
Sam grinned through soot and blood. "Our science teacher used to say, 'If you believe there's a way, you'll find the way.' I believe we can live. You wanna live too, right? So believe it—maybe it becomes real."
Jack's fists knotted. "Of course I want to live. I just don't believe wanting it changes the part where we're… wherever this is… surrounded by whatever that is."
Before he could wind up for another complaint, the distant flame bloomed.
Heat rolled over the island like an open furnace door. The air wavered. Bone-dust lifted in shimmering veils. The fire didn't just rise; it unfurled, a column clawing hundreds of meters into the dark, spreading wide, a mouth in the sky.
Two horns emerged from the heart of it—each as thick as a tree trunk, long as a streetlamp—curving out of the blaze. A face hid behind the curtain of flame: suggestion more than shape, as if the fire itself refused to let it be seen.
The voice came next—deep, old, and heavy enough to rattle cartilage.
"Mortals," it said, and the word cut like a hook. "I gift you a choice. A chance to have anything, if you are willing to sacrifice everything."
Bone clattered behind them.
They turned.
In the center of the island, on a little plateau of fused vertebrae, a dagger now existed where no dagger had been. Black metal, etched in symbols that crawled when you didn't look straight at them. The handle was glass—translucent, vein-lit—with a slow, sick red pulsing at its core, like a trapped ember learning to breathe.
Jack felt it before he understood it. A tug. A gravity. The promise wrapped in the problem.
He took a step.
"Jack—no." Sam's voice cracked. He dragged himself between Jack and the blade, stumps leaving half-moons of blood that vanished into the lattice of bones. "Don't be tempted. This is a devil's bargain—he's testing us. If we give in, we're damned. This… this has to be the Sea of Souls—the place between. If we falter here, we may never return to God."
Jack laughed, the sound brittle as old marrow. "Is that a fact? Look around, Sam. I want to live—and I don't see another way. You? You got a plan that isn't 'get eaten by glow-in-the-dark piranhas'?"
Water lapped higher, wetting Jack's boots. The island sighed and settled another inch.
He moved.
"No! Don't—"
But Jack was already lunging for the dagger.
The moment Jack grasped the blade, a shock tore through him—up his arm, into his skull, burning behind his eyes. His pupils flared red. He gasped.
Power flooded him like fire in his veins. The pain vanished, the exhaustion dissolved, and for one dizzy heartbeat, he felt invincible.
Then came the dread.
He tried to drop the dagger. His hand wouldn't listen. His fingers had fused around the hilt like molten metal. He clawed at it with his other hand, slammed it against the ground, but it stayed locked in his grip.
"Jack? What's happening? Let it go!" Sam called, voice shaking.
Jack fell to his knees. "It… it spoke to me, Sam," he stammered. "It said… it's called the Soul Dagger. It wants me to kill you. In exchange… for my life. And power."
Sam froze. The black water had reached his stumps.
"Is there no other way?" he rasped.
Jack shook his head, tears streaking his soot-stained cheeks. "No."
For a heartbeat, they just stared at each other. Then Sam nodded once, slow and steady.
"Do it."
Jack's eyes widened. "What?"
"You're an atheist, right?" Sam said, his smile trembling through the pain.
"Yeah, so?"
"Well, I'm not. My soul's safe. Yours… maybe not. Take the deal. Live. Redeem yourself somehow."
Jack's lips quivered. "Oh, Sam…"
"Don't worry, Lieutenant. We'll meet again. One day. Up there." He pointed weakly toward the dark sky.
The demon's voice crashed over them, booming from every direction, shaking the bones beneath their knees.
"I grow impatient of this whining! Do it—or I end you both!"
The fire flared higher. The heat blistered their skin. The ghosts howled.
Jack's whole body trembled. He pulled Sam close, pressing the smaller man's back against his chest, holding him tight as if bracing him for an execution neither wanted. The dagger hovered over Sam's heart, inches away. Jack's grip shook.
"I can't," he whispered. "God help me, I can't do it."
Sam's hand came up—bloody, shaking—and closed over Jack's.
"I can," he said softly.
Before Jack could react, Sam drove the blade inward.
It slid clean through his chest, punching out the other side and straight into Jack's heart. Both men gasped—the same sound, the same sharp breath of disbelief.
Jack's eyes went wide. "Sam… you absolute… idiot…" he croaked, a faint, wet laugh bubbling from his throat. "That's… not how physics works…"
Sam's blood spilled over his hand. His head drooped back onto Jack's shoulder, a faint, broken smile still on his lips. "Guess we're… even now…"
The two of them sagged together, Jack's arms still locked around Sam as the life drained out of both their bodies.
The firestorm dimmed. The demon's shadow loomed, vast and furious.
"YOU FOOLS!" it roared, its voice a quaking thunder that split the dark. "I OFFERED YOU POWER BEYOND MORTAL REACH—AND YOU GIVE ME THIS?! STUPID, SENTIMENTAL MORTALS!"
Jack's head lolled back, a smirk still tugging weakly at his mouth.
"Yeah… well… we're only human…" he wheezed.
The demon's rage shook the world—but the two men were already gone.
Jack exhaled his last breath. Sam's smile faded.
The fire collapsed into itself, leaving nothing but darkness.
And the sound of the demon's wrath echoing into the void.