At frst, he thought it was memory. The mind replaying its last moments the way people said it did when dying. But this was sharper than memory and far too detailed.
Dante was dead. He knew he had been dead for some time now.
So why could he still hear the noise?
It wasn't sound in the way he remembered sound. There was no direction to it, no volume. Just pressure, like fingernails unfurling at the inside of his skull, patient and repetitive.
Scratching. Dragging. As though something was trying to remember how to move him from the inside out.
There was no pain. That was the strangest part. The agony that had torn him apart in his last moments was gone, stripped away so completely it felt unreal, like a story he had once overheard about someone else.
He couldn't feel his body. Couldn't feel the rain soaking into ruined flesh or the blood congealing beneath him. There was only awareness, thin and stubborn, floating in a heavy, formless dark.
Time did not behave properly here.
Moments stretched until they lost meaning, then folded in on themselves.
The scratching came and went. Sometimes it felt close. Sometimes impossibly far away.
Dante tried to think of his sister,her face, her voice, but even memory felt blunted, as though his mind were wrapped in layers of wet cloth.
He could hear depth, distance, layers. The scrape of boots on concrete far away. The rumble of something massive shifting its weight. The thin, strangled breathing of people trying not to be heard.
He could hear how sector 4 was taken apart with grim efficiency, street by street, shelter by shelter, hope stripped down to its last trembling threads.
Deep beneath the city, civilians flooded into the transit tunnels in panicked waves as old evacuation routes meant for wartime drills became choked arteries of fear.
Families pressed themselves into maintenance alcoves, holding hands so tightly their fingers went numb.
Children were forced to stay silent, their mouths clamped shut by their shaking parents as the sounds of the surface filtered down.
Some prayed. Others stared at the tunnel walls, counting cracks, counting breaths, pretending numbers could keep death from noticing them.
On the streets above, the soldiers were already bleeding time.
Unit leaders and commanders barked withdrawal orders, abandoning all pretense that victory was possible. Barricades were abandoned mid-construction. Heavy weapons were spiked or dragged into fallback positions they knew wouldn't hold.
A few squads stayed behind anyway, forming shrinking kill zones to buy precious seconds for civilians they would never see again.
Dante heard all of it.
And inside him, something else began to stir.
At first, it was distant. A pressure behind his ribs. A dull ache that didn't belong to pain or injury. It felt like thirst, but deeper. Like starvation that had nothing to do with an empty stomach.
Then he his teeth started growing wildly.
His senses sharpened with vicious clarity. Every heartbeat nearby sounded loud and obscene. Blood wasn't just a smell to him anymore, it was a presence. Warm, heavy and calling.
He could tell how close people were by the rhythm of their veins. He could hear fear change the way blood moved through a body, faster, thinner, panicked.
"No. No—"
The hunger ignored him.
It crawled through his chest, coiling around what remained of his heart, squeezing. His mouth filled with saliva that tasted metallic and wrong. His jaw ached like it wanted to unhinge. His throat burned as if something corrosive had been poured down it.
Images of him feeding on humans forced themselves into his mind.
Heat spilling as he salivated over the relief of feeding.
He tried to think of his sister. Tried to hold her face in his mind like an anchor. It slipped. The hunger didn't care who she was. It only knew she was alive. That she bled.
His fingers twitched.
He hadn't realized they could move.
Muscles that should've been dead screamed back to life, knitting themselves together with raw, grinding force. Bones ground and shifted. His lungs convulsed, dragging in air that felt like fire. Every breath scraped his throat bloody from the inside.
"I'm not— I won't—"
The hunger surged in response, furious at being denied.
It showed him what was nearby, civilians huddled in a service tunnel, teenagers clutching younger children, a wounded man leaning against a wall trying not to scream. Each pulse of their hearts was a hammer strike against his skull.
[Feed.]
[Just once.]
[Just enough.]
His chest compressed violently.
Something inside him cracked.
Like a vice closing around his heart. He felt it fold in on itself, collapsing, imploding under the strain of refusal. Darkness clawed at the edges of his vision again. He tasted blood that wasn't in his mouth.
The hunger shrieked.
And then
His eyes snapped open.
No longer human eyes.
The world flooded back in sharp, merciless detail. His body lay twisted and ruined, skin discolored, veins blackened and crawling beneath the surface. His hands ended in fingers that shook with barely restrained violence.
And the hunger roared.
Somewhere nearby, someone breathed.
Dante turned toward the sound.
The sound was close.
Too close.
A wet, uneven breath behind a torn canvas wall. The rustle of fabric. A soft, broken whimper someone was trying, and failing to swallow. Dante's head turned before he meant it to. His neck moved with a stiffness that felt wrong, joints grinding like they hadn't been used in years.
The hunger surged in triumph.
"Just one. I'll only feed just this once" He rasped in hunger, saliva drooling down his maw.
He mapped the body on the other side of the wall with obscene precision. Heart rate elevated. Blood loss already present. Easy. So easy. One bite would end the screaming in his chest. One mouthful would quiet the fire clawing through his veins. His body leaned forward.
He felt it happen like he was watching someone else move his limbs. Fingers dug into the floor, nails cracking and regrowing sharper. His knees pulled under him with a strength that made the concrete fracture. His mouth opened and he smelled her.
Antiseptic, smoke and blood. It was a scent he was all too familiar with.
His sister. She looked pale as if she was on the verge of passing out. Her eyes were wide, fixed on Dante's face as the capillaries in his cheeks burst, mapping spiderwebs of black blood under his skin. She wanted to scream, to shake him, but the terror had severed the connection between her brain and her voice. She just stood there, hyperventilating, watching the only safety she knew rot in front of her eyes.
The scream tore his throat. It wasn't just pain. It was Hunger.
When he looked at her, his vision warped. The colors shifted. She didn't look like his sister anymore. She looked like a heat source. She looked like Meat.
He slammed his head against the wall, trying to knock the thought loose.
That's Maya.
That's Maya.
That's Maya.
But the whisper in his blood was getting louder. EAT.
"Go," Dante tried to say, but his throat had fused. His heart hammered against his ribs, hump-thump, thump-thump, getting faster, harder, a desperate animal trying to break out of a cage.
Then, silence.
The hunger didn't hesitate. It lunged.
Pain exploded in his chest as he forced himself to stop. Muscles locked. Tendons screamed. His spine bowed as if something inside him was trying to tear its way out. His jaw snapped shut so hard his teeth fractured, shards cutting his gums. He swallowed blood and bile and something darker.
"No," he tried to say.
What came out was a ruined sound.
The pressure in his chest intensified. Not a heartbeat, there was no rhythm anymore. Just compression. Crushing. Like an invisible hand closing around his heart and squeezing harder each second he refused to feed.
His vision tunneled. Red bled into black.
The hunger retaliated.
It sent pain screaming through every nerve at once. Fire in his veins, molten and heavy, like liquid iron being pumped through his arteries. His organs felt swollen, overstressed, forced to work in a body that was no longer built for restraint.
[Feed.]
[Feed now or break.]
He slammed his fist into the floor to anchor himself. Concrete shattered. The impact sent a shock through his arm that would've pulped a normal limb. He welcomed the pain. Clung to it.
"I won't," he rasped.
He wouldn't do it. He wouldn't become one of them. Not to her.
"Better to die again than—"
He forced the hand down. He forced his knees to buckle. He dragged his rebellious, screaming body away, inch by inch, his fingernails carving grooves into the floor.
Stop, he told his heart. Just stop.
And it listened.
Something inside him failed.
His chest caved inward with a sickening, final pressure. Darkness swallowed him whole for the second time.
And in that instant, right before everything ended. He heard a voice in his mind as a interface was displayed in his peripheral vision.
[ CONGRATULATIONS ]
[ YOU HAVE UNLOCKED THE SYSTEM ]
[ PREPARE FOR AWAKENING]
[ SYSTEM INITIALIZATION ]
[Subject: Dante]
[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: THE FIRST DEFIANCE ]
Description: You are the first entity in history to deny the Hunger
[ ATTRIBUTE GRANTED: DIVERGENT ]
Description: You are the bridge between the Living and the undead.
[Scanning Soul Signature…]
[Error: Conflicting biological signals.]
Subject is 50% Alive / 50% Undead.
Willpower exceeds Viral Programming.
Subject is ineligible for Death.
Subject is ineligible for Life.
[ RESOLUTION PROTOCOL ]
Unable to purge Viral Signal without destroying the Soul.
Initiating [DIVERGENT] Sequence.
Splitting Power Source...
Constructing Core I (The Human Core)
Constructing Core II (The Necrotic core)
What? Dante tried to think, but he had no control over his body.
[ RESOLUTION ]
Re-writing Genetic Code...
Constructing Secondary Core…
Awakening Abilities…
Awakening Anomaly…
[Awakening Completed]
[Reviving Subject]
GASPPPP.
The sound was violent, like a vacuum seal breaking.
Dante shot up, his hands clawing at his chest. The air rushed into his lungs, cold and sharp.
He was still in the alley
It was silent and dull apart from the dust motes dancing in the air.
He became aware of his body.
The alley wasn't silent anymore. His sister wasn't there and the dread lord was nowhere to be found. He could hear the weight of dust settling, each grain ticking softly as it touched metal. Water somewhere far off, dripping at an uneven rhythm. The faint hiss of his own breath moving through his lungs, the air splitting cleanly around it.
His heartbeat wasn't loud. It was measured, steady and efficient.
He straightened slowly, expecting dizziness but it never came.
Instead, balance locked in instantly, his muscles adjusted before he consciously shifted his weight. His feet found the most stable angle on broken concrete without thought. His spine aligned itself as the tension was redistributed around his entire body.
He dragged a hand across his forearm, and froze.
The skin felt different.
Not tougher exactly. Denser. Like the same material compressed into something cleaner. When he flexed, the movement was smooth and economical. No wasted motion. No hesitation between intent and execution.
He caught his reflection in a cracked piece of glass wedged into the wall.
For a second, he didn't recognize himself.
He was still Dante. Same face. Same bone structure. But everything had been corrected.
His eyes were clearer, the whites brighter against pupils that seemed darker, deeper. His features looked sharper without being harsher, as if fatigue had been edited out rather than healed. Even the grime on his skin couldn't fully dull it. There was a presence to him now, an unconscious symmetry that drew the eye.
He inhaled slowly.
He could feel the open space of the alley like a shape carved around him, could sense where walls ended and gaps began without looking. He could sense every movement and vibration of everything around him in a 10m radius
He wasn't even trying to sense any of it.
That was the part that unsettled him most.
It was just on.
And it cost him almost nothing. No drain. No strain. Whatever fuel fed this state was barely being sipped.
His mind followed.
Thoughts arranged themselves faster, and cleaner. Fear was still there, but it no longer jammed everything else. It sat to the side, loud but contained. His brain tagged exits automatically. Noted cover and calculated distances with rough, ugly math that felt born from instinct rather than training.
Dante clenched his fists, then relaxed them, feeling the subtle readiness beneath his skin
He was still human.
At least a part of him.
He could feel that..
He felt refined and invigorated. He recalled the strange occurrence that happened and was glad to have finally awakened. He had heard stories about awakened all his life and he looked up to them. So the joy of joining their ranks no matter how painful the process was, was not something he took trivial.
He had little knowledge about how awakened operated. He closed his eyes briefly and concentrated on his soul core to summon the interface.
[ SYSTEM INTERFACE ]
Subject: Dante
Evolution Rank: Awakened
Attribute: [DIVERGENT]
Infection Status: [INFECTED]
[ SOUL CORES ]
Core I (Necrotic): The Viral Strain.
Core II (Human): The Willpower.
[ ABILITIES ]
[Neuro Weave]
[Harmonic Resonance]
[ PASSIVE SKILLS ]
[Sensory Domain]
[Pain Suppression]
[ ANOMALY ]
[Sympathetic Agony]
[Thralls]
None
[Relics]
None
"Holy Shit"