The day I died smelled like rain and gasoline.
I remember the headlights first—twin suns screaming toward me as my sneakers slipped on wet pavement. Then the impact. Not the Hollywood kind with slow-motion and angelic choirs, but the real kind: a crunch of bones, a flash of white pain, and suddenly...
Silence.
Cold.
Darkness.
I expected heaven. Or hell. Or at least a goddamn loading screen.
What I got was worse.
Now
Fire ants. That's what it felt like—a thousand of them crawling under my skin, biting their way out through my left arm. Except I didn't have a left arm anymore. Just a stump leaking liquid shadows that sizzled where they hit the ground.
"Fuck... fuck!" I rolled onto my knees, vomit rising in my throat. The air reeked of copper and something sweetly rotten, like forgotten fruit. Around me, the battlefield looked like a modern art nightmare:
- Knights in glass armor, melted from the inside out
- A horse-sized wolf with swords for teeth, still twitching
- And the sky—oh god—the sky was the wrong color, a bruised purple pulsing like a fresh wound
A boot crushed my wounded shoulder.
"Pathetic."
The voice dripped contempt. I looked up into the face of a man who couldn't be human—not with those golden eyes slit like a cat's, not with the living sword that writhed in his grip like a tortured snake.
"You're the one they chose to replace me?" He leaned down, his breath smelling of burnt cinnamon. "Tell me, Last Hero, do you know what happens to defective tools?"
His blade flashed.
I screamed.
Then something inside me woke up.
My missing arm regrew in a burst of crimson tendrils, bones knitting together with wet cracks. The pain was—
indescribable
—but so was the rage.
When the golden-eyed bastard swung again, I caught his living sword bare-handed. Felt its teeth sink into my palm. Didn't care.
"Defective?" I snarled, as my new fingers crushed the blade into screaming shards. "You want to see defective?"
Above us, the wrong-colored sky ripped open.
Something with too many eyes looked down.
And smiled.
---
END CHAPTER 1