✦ HELL ON EARTH ✦
Across the entire valley, absolute bedlam erupted. The sky above had been swallowed whole—a unnatural, suffocating collosal skull entity consumed the moon as towering, unnatural shadows descended from the atmosphere, creeping closer with every passing minute.
People ran frantically for their lives, abandoning everything at the moment in pure, unadulterated terror. The air vibrated with a gut-wrenching, demonic laugh—a bone-chilling roar that echoed from the clouds down into the deep trenches of the mountains, shattering the silence and driving the fleeing crowds into a blind, desperate frenzy for survival.
"Pedal! Faster, you idiots, pedal! Otherwise you two wouldn't able to outrun those approaching shadows, and become their feast." Chochi roared through the hillside road, his heavy frame pumping his pedals with feral desperation. Beside him, his two lackey friends rode frantically, their faces completely drained of color.
Suddenly, a loud, violent BANG echoed through the air, followed by a harsh, sweeping hiss. Chochi's handlebars jerked violently in his grip as his front tire flattened in a split second.
"No, no, NO!" Chochi screamed, slamming his brakes violently..
Behind him, his two friends stopped suddenly, their faces pale and eyes wild.
"What happened, Chochi?! Why did you stop here?!" one of them shrieked over the howling wind. "Those shadows are just right behind us!"
"Don't you see, you idiot?!" Chochi roared, kicking at his front wheel in pure panic. "My front tire is flat! It's completely dead! I can't ride this!"
"Oh god... oh no, now what do we do?!" the other friend whimpered, his hands shaking so hard he could barely hold his handlebars.
"What do you mean 'what do we do'?"
Chochi hissed, stepping off his ruined bike. "I'm sitting behind one of you. Let's go!"
"C-Chochi, we can't!" the first friend stuttered, instinctively backing his cycle away. "Neither of our bikes has a back carrier or stunt pegs! There's literally nowhere to sit! If a guy your size tries to double-ride on the frame, the rims will collapse and both our tires will burst under the weight!"
Above them, the sky darkened into a bruised purple eclipse. The monstrous, echoing laughter swelled—closer now, accompanied by a freezing wind that reeked of burnt ozone and rotting ash.
A distant, rhythmic whir-whir-whir of spinning tires echoed from around the upper bend of the hill.
The sound snapped whatever thread of humanity Chochi had left. Fear curdled into raw, predatory survival.
"Then we get another bike," Chochi spat, his small eyes gleaming with predatory resolve.
"How?!" both friends yelled together.
"Block the damn road!" Chochi ordered, grabbing his flat-tired cycle and shoving it into the narrowest bend of the hill road. "Drag yours over! Crosswise! Now!"
Without waiting, both his friends place their bicycle one behind the others in horizontal to the road, creating an impenetrable barricade spanning the entire hill path.
Down the bend, the faint, frantic sound of approaching pedals echoed as chochi heard earlier. Someone else was coming—and Chochi was ready to turn them into prey.
Seconds later, the frantic sound of spinning tires approached from around the bend. It was Sonu—a quiet, thin boy from their class, his large round glasses sliding down his sweating nose as he pedaled his pristine, brand-new bicycle for his life.
Sonu slammed on his brakes just inches from the tangled pile of metal. "Chochi?! What are you doing?! Move your bikes, the monster is coming!"
Chochi didn't answer with words. He lunged forward, grabbing Sonu by his oversized collar and wrenching him clean off the seat. Sonu hit the hard asphalt with a painful thud, his glasses cracking against the pavement.
"Hey! That's my cycle!" Sonu cried, his voice breaking as Chochi casually swung his heavy leg over the shiny frame.
"It was your cycle," Chochi sneered, gripping the handlebars. His lackeys quickly lined up beside him, ready to ride.
"Chochi, please!" Sonu scrambled to his knees, his hands trembling violently as he reached out to grab the edge of Chochi's trousers. The sky above was turning pitch black, and towering, monstrous shadows were already creeping down the hill slopes. "Don't leave me here! Let me atleast sit behind you! Please, don't leave me here alone in the dark! I don't wanna be killed."
Chochi looked down at the sobbing boy. There was no pity in his eyes—only cold, mercenary self-preservation.
He raised his heavy boot and kicked Sonu violently in the chest, shoving him backward onto the cold dirt.
"There's no room for dead weight, runt,"
Chochi hissed, spitting on the ground next to him. "If those thing stops to eat you, it would buys us an extra two minutes. Thanks for your service BTW."
"PLEASE! CHO—!"
Sonu's desperate plea was drowned out by the metallic whir of fresh gears. Chochi and his crew slammed their feet onto the pedals, tearing away down the hill.
Sonu sat alone in the middle of the road, staring in absolute horror as the shadow of his own bicycle shrank into the distance.
Behind him, the laughter stopped—replaced by the heavy, crunching footsteps of something massive emerging from the sky.
Inside the downside of the valley. Arjun and Gopi finally reached the village outskirts.
The last remnants of their childhood innocence were destroyed in a single, horrific heartbeat. The world had just turned dark and predatory.
From the bleeding sky, winged monstrosities descended like vultures made of shadow. They snatched men mid-stride, their talons sinking into flesh with sickening ease before crushing them as though they were mere insects. Bodies burst apart with a wet, visceral thud, like overripe fruit hitting stone. Above, the clouds seemed to weep fire; embers rained upon the thatched roofs and golden fields, turning lifetimes of labor into drifting ash within seconds.
Then came the giants. Towering demons, some reaching five meters in height, thundered through the narrow streets. Their faces were grotesque masks of goblin-like hunger, their jagged, mismatched teeth glistening with saliva and gore as they plowed through the fleeing crowds. Blood did not merely spill—it violently splattered across the village walls in such massive amounts that a crimson stream began to flow down the cobblestones. Every dream and every hope of the unfortunate souls whose blood joined that stream was now stripped of meaning, washed away aimlessly into the dirt.
Alongside them crawled huge, serpent-like creatures with slender, towering bodies and sickening humanoid faces that retained all their reptilian features. Slithering through the narrow streets, bushes, and ponds, they effortlessly snared fleeing villagers in their suffocating coils. With a terrifying, half-human smile revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth and a long, flickering, double-slit tongue, the monstrosities opened their jaws to an impossible width—devouring their screaming prey whole in a single, gruesome gulp.
Children's screams were cut short by the sound of rending bone. Families were torn apart in the time it took to draw a breath by the demonic knights riding on the back of demonic horses.
In the shadows of the granaries, some wolf face creatures had already begun to feed, hunched over the fallen while the living watched in a paralysis of soul-crushing horror, a little girl infant crying laying in the side of her dead mothers body, who was being devoured slowly by those creatures.
"Why?" Gopi wailed, his voice fracturing into a high, thin reed of sound. "Arjun, why is this happening?"
Arjun could not answer. The ground trembled beneath them. Flames scattered. Screams rose from every direction—a mother dragging her child, an old man limping with blood pouring down his face.
Human agony merged into a single, endless cry.
Tears streamed down Gopi's cheeks, reflecting the unnatural, bleeding light from above. "What did we do?" he choked out, his voice breaking under the weight of sheer terror. "What was our sin that brought this doomsday right to our doors?"
Arjun's throat constricted, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He remember the exact horrific scenarios of human corpses in his nightmare which was finally unfolding itself in front of him with such a bone shattering reality.
But watching his friend fall apart broke something inside him, and a toxic mixture of helplessness and white-hot rage finally erupted.
"The sin of weakness!" Arjun shouted, the words tearing from his throat. "We are too weak—too damn weak to fight back against these cruel entities! Look at how easily they extinguish a human life—like it's nothing! Like we are no more valuable than toys made of clay."
He gestured wildly at the encroaching darkness, his voice rising in panic and fury. "Not a single one of us stands a chance against these behemoths. Only gods could match them, but where are they? Every ancient horror of the Asuras devouring us mercilessly is repeating right in front of our eyes. It's forcing us to face the cold-hearted truth of our own fragile vulnerability—a truth we buried deep enough to forget. And now, they are digging up that exact catastrophe right in front of us to remind us who are they! We stand no chance against them. None. We are completely at the mercy of these tyrants now, unless they lose focus... or something divine intervenes."
He snapped his head up to face the suffocating, crimson sky, his eyes burning with a desperate, furious defiance.
"Why are they so strong?!" he screamed into the void, his voice a jagged blade of pure anguish. "And why the hell were we made so fragile?!"
He hurled the question into the bleeding heavens with every ounce of strength he had left.
He screamed the question into the crimson sky.
But the sky did not answer.
The only answer was a sound that chilled the marrow in their bones: a low, booming laughter vibrate from the very throat of the earth itself.
...