MINNESOTA, UNITED STATES

  Last week, it was UFOs. The week before that, Covid conspiracies. I understand the American people are going through a tumultuous stint right now, but we need to get a hold of ourselves and start seeing things for what they are.

  You're saying these recent 'demon sightings' were made up, then?

  I'm not saying anyone made anything up. What I am saying, however, is that the people are looking for something they can turn to, a, erm, source of comfort. A scapegoat, if you will. And if these supposed demons prove to be a good enough distraction, then you better believe some will jump the gun and blow whatever phenomenon is behind these out of proportion. There's people saying the rapture is coming, Paul. How much more insane do you want this to be?

  SICILY, ITALY

  We have just got word from one of our reporters in the field that beasts--creatures, maybe, we are still trying figure out what they are--erm, have made their way into the city through what people are describing as 'gates'. These creatures look nothing like any animal we have ever seen and have shown to be overwhelmingly hostile towards humans. The State Police have advised people against leaving their houses for the time being, stating--

  YUBENG, CHINA

  I have made a pact to uphold the Great Kawagarbo's will. I have cast my heart--my benevolence--to the people of this sacred village in ways that astonish even myself. And yet, in spite of the zeal I have shown in serving my guardian's interests--your godforsaken interests--you humans have usurped his sense of charity and twisted it to fit your mortal agenda. I am tired. Your antics, your selfishness, and even your worldly scheming--I have grown tired of it all. It is inadmissible, and I will tolerate it no longer. Know, subjects of Kawagarbo, that my goodwill is no more. It ends today.

  P-Please, Your Holiness. We did not mean to anger you, only--

  Silence. You had your chance to prove demonkind wrong. I need not consult my brethren to know your realm is walking down the path of ruin. I will leave now, but remember this: you shall bear witness to the wrath of Hell soon enough.

  ???

  CHAPTER ONE: HELL

  ???

  A crash.

  Or had it been a fall? I couldn't quite remember. The harder I tried to rack my brain for any semblance of a timeline, the more it felt like it was trying to slither its way out of my skull.

  Something had happened to me, though. That much I was sure of. The cold embrace of the thin cotton sheets and the slight incline of the bed's angled backrest worked to force my eyes into two confused slits.

  Doing that seemed to have brought the first few pieces of the puzzle together. I was in the hospital, my belly was a stitched mess of a hurting scar, and my head had been dressed in gauze so as to cover the left side of my face in full. The ticking of a clock had my eyes swiveling from the bleached walls to a curtained window from which the moon was shining a deadly red. To my left, strewn about the whitened floor in pieces, was the room's sorry excuse of what I assumed had once been a door. Its hinges had been torn off the wall and left to rest next to the wooden splinters, whose size made it look like the door had been run through some kind of paper shredder.

  What the hell happened here? I could feel a lump build about my throat as my eyes darted back to the crimson light. It can only be, I mused, that I'm still a ways into recovering. I'd read about this before. Hospital delirium, I believed it was called. Who knew just how much shit they'd pumped me with during my stay here? Something in that cocktail must have done a number on my senses.

  My fingers fumbled at the blankets as I made to leave the bed and peek past the curtained window. If the quiet was unnerving enough as was, then the temperature of the hospital's air was an even less welcome surprise. It was freezing. The cold spreading about the room was so tangible that I could see vapor form as I breathed out.

  Then a second wave of cold hit me. Not letting my abdomen's protests stop me from getting out of bed, my right leg stretched to reach the ground. I was expecting a damp squelch to accompany my foot, but that feedback never came. Instead, a crusty and gluey red met each of my steps, sending my breathing into a tumbling panic that ended only when my back reached the wall.

  Blood.

  It was blood.

  The dried blood had pooled underneath the bed to form a flaky layer of red that seemed to start right where it ended. There weren't any signs of dragging nor any signs of movement. I could only assume that whatever had died down here had somehow vanished into thin air.

  Alright. Deep breaths, I told myself. Forcing myself to remember what had led me here wouldn't do me any good. Besides, whoever had had the pleasure of mothering this inhumane amount of blood clearly knew better than to stick around to tell the tale. My memory was a lost cause and my body was run through, so I did as planned and turned my attention back to the window.

  I thrust my arm out first and reached for the thick curtain. My stomach recoiled in a knotted clutter of nerves I could no longer tell apart from the flaring scar, but I clenched my teeth as hard as I could and forced my back away from the wall.

  It was no more than two seconds before I found myself facing the window. With a throb from the scar and an irony taste scrabbling up the back of my mouth, my fingers wrapped themselves around the curtain and yanked it to the side.

  Only then did the moon reveal itself.

  Red, and with a glittering glow that grew to eclipse the sky, the moon shone brighter and bigger than anything this world had seen before. Buildings had crumbled, bridges had fallen, and the air to what I believed was Boston reeked of a razed destruction you'd find only in a raging battlefield.

  That's when my eyes found themselves being pulled into a nearby construction crane. The crimson of the falling moonlight clashed against its mangled silhouette to reveal a winged figure perching about the thing like an angel of death.

  Then the creature's eyes fell on me. Its head spun slowly, a calculated twirl bent on overwhelming my every sense with fear, and bore into my soul as if to unearth each and every one of my deepest secrets.

  Hospital delirium.

  I blinked.

  That's got to be it.

  And the beast disappeared.

  My heart dropped. The freezing cold of the hospital's room wriggled inside my stomach to leave me gaping at the window. My eyes glued themselves to the reddened glass with the knowledge--a very instinctual kind of knowledge--that another blink could and probably would cost me my life.

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  But my body was running on emotion. A visceral sort of survival had taken over and no amount of reasoning would snap me out of this state.

  Which is why it didn't take long for that second blink to come.

  By the time I'd willed my eyes open, the hellish creature had already closed the distance between us two. The glass shattered, then it broke, and it was still halfway into its fall when the demon made to plunge down on me.

  Its shoulder spun to bring out an arm so sharp it'd sliced right through the window. The creature then slapped the air with its wings, let out a deafening shriek--

  And speared a clawed limb at me.

  ???

  I'd heard people say time is sure to slow down when you're faced with certain death. Your brain jumps from memory to memory in hopes of finding something it can latch on to, operating under the belief that the key to life itself lies somewhere within your consciousness.

  So maybe that's why time seemed to have come to a complete stop. Not slowed, the way I'd been told.

  Stopped. Like someone had blocked the passage of time with a boulder the size of a river.

  And the flying beast had stopped with it.

  The movement felt far from natural, but I could just about force myself into hauling my eyes from one side of my skull to the other. From no more than an inch away, the creature's features had suddenly become apparent. Every molecule of its dark, glossy claws glowed at me like the pixels on a screen. It cried a toothy roar, its face drawn with the rough undertones of a bat as if chiselled into stone. Behind it, brushing against both corners of the room with less leeway than I cared to admit, were two wings hovering against the falling moonlight.

  I wanted to calm myself down. To let my breathing fall back into its usual pace. But I couldn't. The freezing of time had left my heart stuck in a panic that refused to budge no matter the way I reframed my thinking.

  I just couldn't make sense of any of this. The hospital, the bleeding moon, the ravaged city, the flying demon, and now this.

  None of this made any sense.

  And it was exactly when I found myself praying for a way out of this fever dream that a shining window the color of the crimson sky popped into existence.

  The trial has come to an end. You have now completed all one-hundred-and-ninety-eight trials.

  Please wait while we finalize your assessment.

  Only for that crimson color to suck the life out of reality. The demon's hand was the first to vanish; its sharp limbs melted up the air in motes of floating energy that worked to swallow what was left of its body. Then came the wings. The very ground I was standing on gave way to the same dotted light I'd seen put away its body earlier, and the ruined city followed along.

  No more than a couple of seconds had passed when I found myself plunged into absolute darkness and staring at the red pop-up window in disbelief.

  We are almost finished. Please wait while we finalize your assessment.

  A sharp pang rang deep inside my head. Things were just now coming back to me. The sight of a rumbling earthquake suddenly found its way into my memories. It was early in the morning, and I was walking down the street when that catastrophe of a disaster first reached me. I distinctly remember glancing up at the sky and thinking the sun was taking its time coming out that morning. It really did feel like the night was stretching on for much longer than it should've.

  Then, the ground started shaking. Buildings went up in flames before crumbling into pieces as though raining napalm. Rifts the size of the earth tore the ground open to send people tumbling down in heaps. It was like the world was protesting and all of humanity had been forced out of the stands and onto the pitch.

  I was fortunate enough to have survived for a second more--and I say only a second because it didn't take long before I followed. Once what I assumed was the end of the world had been set in motion, an archway the height of a cloud rose from the earth to reveal a million different figures, each shaped differently like the letters in the alphabet. Some flew, some trudged, but every one of them burst from the transparent portal to spread through the sky like mold, painting it a dark hue that hid the stars. The moment the sun showed itself, a moon the color of blood rose and replaced its usual light, driving the brunt of the demon herd forward and out of the otherworldly gate.

  What happened next was way too obscene for my brain to even register. Some grotesque maiming snuffed out whatever hope I was still holding on to before I woke up staring at the same well-lit window of red text I was now seeing.

  The first message I read was unusually candid. Your assessment is about to begin. Please wait while we prepare the first trial. From there, a second, a third, and a fourth trial followed, but I couldn't remember what happened during any of them.

  As far as I was aware, I would let sleepiness get the best of me for a fraction of a second only to wake up and find out that whatever trial I was set to do had already come to an end.

  I hadn't even been given the time to breathe. Whoever was responsible for running these had been careful enough to ensure that each consecutive trial began the second the previous one came to an end.

  It was only now, when I'd already sat through 198 iterations of this never-ending loop, that things seemed to have settled. I didn't have much to go by, but my guess was that this was a good thing.

  I took this chance to give myself a good look. While I could definitely tell that my limbs were, in some profoundly metaphysical way, there, I felt more like a baby firefly at the mercy of the wind than an actual person, beating heart and everything. Gonna go out on a limb and say this is what death really feels like. I believe it was halfway through the looping trials that I came to the conclusion that there was no way out of this. I'd experienced having my stomach handled and split open like a piece of bread by a giant beast only for some magical assessment to put me to sleep without so much as a 'yes' from me. It's no surprise I'd already come to grips with whatever was going on here.

  But I was still dying to know what lay in store for me. That, and whatever the hell those creatures were. I wasn't holding out hope for some sort of afterlife, but the fact I was being judged did mean there was something someone was preparing me for, and I could only assume it had something to do with the oddity of my death.

  Reincarnation was also a possibility. I had my doubts about how liveable the world would be after whatever the mess that seemed to have struck it was, but there was always a chance some smaller critter would manage to--

  Your assessment has come to an end.

  I blinked. The red letters rose to the window one by one as if entered manually. I turned my attention back to it, expecting some more downtime as the text sorted itself out, only for my musing to be cut short by the bold lettering of the new text.

  YOU HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THE PATH OF THE UNFETTERED SWORD.

  What?

  The dark took to a violent shaking that seemed to be branding my very being with a burning iron of pain. I didn't need a physical form to know every inch of my body was squirming in anguish. I wanted to claw at my neck, to scratch away this itch even if it meant tearing a hole through my chest. There were a million ants crawling all over my skin and I would not hesitate to scrape them off with a sharpened knife if it meant putting a stop to this horrible sensation.

  I struggled to find something I could grab on to. My breathing would have gotten the best of me if not for the fact I had no lungs to work with.

  Seconds devolved into an eternity that seemed to last forever. One more second passed, then another, and the unprompted burst of hellish misery suddenly died down.

  I stopped, finding it impossible to get myself together. A new line of text had taken over the shining window, but my eyes were busy grappling with my senses for any semblance of feeling.

  There was no way around this. It must've taken me the best part of a half hour to gain the courage to let my eyes drop over the new shining window.

  It was blurry, and I could barely tell the E's from the F's and the P's from the B's, but I sparred with the message for long enough that something of meaning eventually came to me.

  We will now proceed with the integration process. Call for your Sentinel when you are ready.

  I mumbled out a weak 'Sentinel' just clearly enough that the window would recognize it.

  And it did recognize it.

  A rainbow of colors rose from the empty nothingness. They grew to cover each and every dot of my vision, filling the dark void with every tone and every shade known to creature, before coalescing on me as if to swallow me whole.

  The sensation was too overpowering.

  Having lost the energy to fight against this never-ending cascade of color, I let go of my grasp on the world, stopped struggling, and finally blacked out.