After waking up in this unknown place, Liam, still disoriented, looked around, trying to find some point of reference in that nightmare landscape.
Mountains of bones rose toward a starless sky, rivers of lava snaked between valleys of ash, and in the distance, humanoid figures writhed and screamed as the fire consumed them.
The spectacle was so grotesque that it seemed unreal.
This reminded him of when he was a child, in the cold winters of the East End, his mother would curl him up under a tattered blanket and read him passages from the few books they managed to get.
The Bible had been one of them.
One day she had found it in a trash container near the market.
Although unlike his mother the words of the priest in the neighborhood church had never reached his soul, the descriptions of heaven and hell had captured his imagination.
The passage resembled very much how he imagined hell would look, in those reading sections.
"Mom, will this really be hell?" he murmured, feeling a pang of nostalgia for those days.
A sharp buzzing in his ears pulled him out of his memories.
Before his eyes, floating in the air like a hologram, a blue screen appeared
Name: None
Species: Tormented soul
Physical stats:
Strength: 4
Endurance: 3
Speed: 4
Agility: 3
Special stats: None
Specialty: None
Level: 1
Zone: Land of the condemned
"What the hell…?" he reached out his hand, but his fingers passed through the screen without resistance.
The vision lasted only a few seconds before fading, leaving him more confused than before.
Was this a hallucination?
Suddenly a growl alerted him.
A few meters away, emerging from the crimson mist, a creature advanced toward him.
It was a wolf, or something that had once been one.
Its fur was black as coal, with stains of fresh and dried blood that seemed painted by a madman.
The most horrifying were the holes in its body where flesh was missing, showing broken ribs and a heart that beat slowly beneath an exposed ribcage.
"Stay back," Liam exclaimed, stepping back.
But the beast was already in motion.
Liam screamed when the fangs closed around his arm, feeling the crunch of bones.
He fell to the ground, the creature on top of him.
For an instant, their gazes met, and Liam saw in those yellow eyes something more than simple hunger.
It was the desire to kill.
As if it were the only thing that moved it, the reason for its existence.
Before Liam could think anything else, the wolf with one bite tore his throat.
The world turned red.
------------------
Liam woke once more.
There were tears in his eyes and gasps escaped from his lips.
His whole body convulsed with the memory of the pain.
This time he was in a different place.
A rocky plateau from where he could see hell in all its extension.
In the distance, towers of human bones rose like macabre skyscrapers, and creatures with enormous wings on their backs crossed the sky.
"No, no, no," he said, staggering to his feet. "This cannot be happening."
The sound of footsteps was heard in the place.
When Liam turned his face three figures emerged from behind some rocks.
They were wolves, similar to the first but with different mutations.
One had six legs, another fangs that came out like sabers from the lower jaw, and the third seemed to have melted skin that dripped over the ash.
Liam did not think twice.
He turned and ran.
His feet slipped on the loose rocks, the hot ash burning the soles of his feet.
He constantly heard the sound of the growls approaching.
In an act of desperation, he threw himself forward, but his feet found no ground.
He fell off a cliff.
He hit directly into a river of lava.
The sensation was like nothing he could have imagined.
It was not only pain.
It was something a thousand times worse.
He felt his flesh burn and melt, his bones fusing.
His consciousness dissolved like sugar in hot water.
It only lasted a couple of seconds.
While his screams managed to escape from what was left of his mouth.
--------------------
He woke again.
Thus the cycle began.
Hundreds of deaths, perhaps thousands.
He lost count after the first hours, if time even existed in this place.
He died devoured by enormous worms that emerged from the ash-covered ground.
He died torn apart by birds with metal beaks.
He died drowned in rivers of coagulated blood or melted in lava.
Each death was an indescribable suffering.
He realized some creatures preferred to play with their prey, prolonging the agony.
Others were efficient, killing with brutal precision.
And the worst, those that seemed to feed not on his body, but on his despair.
After what could have been months or even years something broke inside him.
He fell to his knees in a field of human remains, looking at the eternally red sky.
"Please!" he shouted, his words echoing in the oppressive silence.
"I'm sorry! I know I deserve it, I beg you, have mercy!"
He remembered the words his mother read in a low voice.
"The Lord is a merciful being, you will always find forgiveness in his glory if you truly regret your sins."
"I repent, I know I should not have killed," he cried, pounding the ground with his fists.
"I will never do it again, I beg for your forgiveness!" he shouted at the top of his lungs.
But nothing happened.
His pleas only got an echo.
And wolves.
Always the damned wolves.
One emerged from among the bones, its yellow eyes shining with recognition.
It was in that moment that Liam understood he was condemned.
There is no forgiveness.
Only punishment.
Liam did not even try to flee when the fangs closed around his skull.
The years passed.
Liam no longer begged.
He no longer cried.
He only felt a cold hatred that kept him sane in the midst of madness.
A hatred concentrated especially on the wolves that had tormented him thousands of times.
One day, upon waking in a valley of talking shadows, he saw one approaching.
And something inside him simply… changed.
"Enough," he murmured, bending down to pick up a sharp femur.
He ran toward the beast, a guttural scream escaping his lips.
He died in seconds.
Upon waking, he tried again.
And again.
And again.
He stopped being a poor boy from the East End.
He learned to use bones as knives, rocks as hammers, his own body as a weapon.
He studied the attack patterns of the wolves, memorized their weak points, learned to read the language of their bodies.
Each death was a lesson.
He learned that the six legged wolf always attacked with the two front ones first.
That the long fanged one had a blind spot on its left side.
That the melted skin one was slow but its grip was deadly.
After countless attempts, the moment came.
Another wolf with fur black as night similar to the first that had killed him was chasing him.
Liam waited for it in a narrow canyon, two sharp bones in his hands.
"Come for me, bastard," he spat.
The beast charged.
Liam dodged at the last second, feeling the air move as the fangs missed by centimeters.
He turned and drove a bone into the wolf's eye.
The howl of pain was music to his ears.
While the creature writhed, Liam jumped on its back and stabbed its neck repeatedly.
Thick black blood gushed out, burning his hands, but he did not let go.
Finally, the wolf ended up falling off the cliff straight into the burning lava.
Liam dropped to his knees on the trembling ground.
A strange sensation flooded him
Not joy
Not triumph
something much deeper and that he himself could not understand.
For the first time in countless deaths, something had changed.
He had stopped being a victim.
He began to laugh, a hoarse and broken laugh that soon turned into crying.
Clean tears ran down his ash-covered face, washing away part of the accumulated
A buzzing sounded in his ears.
The blue screen that had appeared on his first day in this hell appeared again,
but this time with new information.
Hell wolf killed
Experience obtained: 50 xp
Level up: 1 -> 2
Upgrade points: 3