A body fell lifeless to the ground.
Empty eyes, breath stopped. On the computer screen, a video played the scene of the Infinity Castle. It was magnificent, epic... but the young man could no longer see it. His story in that world had ended.
Or that's what it should have been.
A cool breeze caressed his face.
Eric opened his eyes suddenly, gasping as if he had been underwater for hours. His heart was beating wildly in his chest as he looked frantically around him. He didn't recognize anything. He was in an abandoned shrine, with cracked walls covered in moss and rotten wooden beams that threatened to collapse at any moment.
Did I... not die?
That was his first coherent thought. He remembered the feeling: the sharp pain in his chest, the enveloping darkness, the absolute certainty that everything had ended.
Then he felt something strange on his back.
It was like having extra limbs, members that shouldn't exist but that responded to his will. They reacted to his thought and stretched involuntarily. From the corner of his eye, Eric caught a glimpse of something impossible: a pair of white and ethereal wings sprouting from his back, shining with a golden and supernatural aura.
For a moment, he thought he had gone crazy. That he was hallucinating in his last moments of life.
But it was real.
Too real.
He could not only see them, but feel them. He could move them as if they were a pair of extra hands, fold them, extend them, feel every fiber of their unnatural existence. And most importantly...
He was breathing.
He had felt death taking him. He remembered the cold spreading through his veins, the heaviness of a body that stopped functioning. However, for some incomprehensible reason, now he was back. Alive. Only that... not in his home. And definitely not in his world.
Eric stood up with difficulty, his legs trembling as he looked at the dilapidated shrine. The structure seemed centuries old, with rusty offerings and faded talismans hanging from the beams. The air smelled of dampness, rotten wood, and something else... something he couldn't identify but that made his skin crawl.
He decided to go out. He needed answers, he needed to understand what the hell was happening.
But just as he was about to cross the threshold to the outside, a fierce growl tore through the silence of the night. A hoarse and monstrous voice resounded outside, followed by a sound that froze the blood: the crunching of bones and the tearing of flesh.
Eric froze in place, his heart speeding up again.
It can't be...
With trembling hands, he approached an opening in the wall of the shrine. What he saw froze his blood.
A grotesque and deformed body crouched over the remains of what had once been a man. The creature devoured the dismembered limbs with delight, its distorted jaws crunching bones as if they were dry twigs. The demon's skin was a sickly gray, its eyes shone with an unnatural red in the darkness.
Eric felt all his instincts scream at him to run, to flee as fast as he could. But something else arose within him, something dark and visceral: a thirst for blood toward that abomination, a burning desire to destroy it.
Why? Why, despite the fear, do I feel this... fury?
Eric had never been someone aggressive. He was the kind who solved conflicts by talking, avoiding fights at all costs. But... how do you talk to a deformed and perverse monster that devours people? How do you reason with something that has lost all humanity?
Clearly there's no way.
The demon continued devouring, satisfied. From time to time it muttered between bites: "This blood... tastes better than the others... fresher..."
Something inside Eric exploded.
At that instant, only one thought dominated his mind, clear and absolute: KILL.
That perverse being had to be purged from this world.
As if something ancestral within him awoke in response to his will, a familiar weight appeared in his right hand. Eric looked down, astonished. He was holding a colossal war hammer, similar to Robert Baratheon's that he had seen in Game of Thrones, but this one was completely different: forged in divine gold, wrapped in a pulsating blue aura, much larger and heavier than anything a normal human could even lift.
However, in his hand it felt... perfect.
Eric didn't think twice. Instinct took control.
He launched forward at impossible speed, his wings spreading instinctively to propel him. He jumped high into the air, the hammer raised above his head, aiming directly at the demon that was still delighting in its macabre feast.
The creature barely had time to feel something approaching before it was too late.
CRASH.
The impact was devastating.
Eric crushed the demon's body with brutal force, reducing it to pulp and ash in an instant. But he didn't stop there. He kept striking, again and again, the hammer descending with uncontrolled fury. The ground began to sink under the violence of the impacts, cracks spreading in all directions like spider webs.
Eric's eyes shone with an intense red, unfocused, lost in a frenzy that he didn't recognize as his own. He seemed out of his mind, possessed by a primitive rage.
Then, as suddenly as it began, everything stopped.
Eric's eyes blinked, the red slowly fading until returning to their normal color. He breathed with difficulty, confused, looking around as if he had just woken from a dream.
What... what just happened?
The hammer was still in his hand, but he didn't feel any weight. He looked at the blood scattered around, the pulverized remains of the demon, the crater he had created in the ground.
Did I... just kill that?
There was no one else there. Only him and the demon.
But... what the hell was that feeling?
It had been a bloody and overwhelming need to destroy the demon, something that came from deep within his being. He had lost control of his body, of his thoughts, consumed by a rage that didn't belong to him.
And now he discovered that he wasn't only an angel, but that he had ended up in his favorite anime with powers he didn't understand.
Out of nowhere I feel... tired...
The exhaustion hit him like a wave. That moment of madness had drained all his energy. His legs wavered, the adrenaline fading and leaving him empty. The hammer disappeared into golden particles, and Eric fell to his knees.
Damn it...
He murmured before collapsing onto the cracked ground, his vision darkening once again as unconsciousness claimed him in the worst possible place: beside the remains of his first victim.