Blood filled Doom's mouth, a hot, metallic slurry that coated his tongue and trickled down his ravaged throat. It wasn't just the taste, it was the smell, thick and cloying in the damp air of the derelict warehouse, mixing with the greasy scent of old machinery, cordite, and the sharp, butcher-shop reek of freshly spilled life. This time, the enemies wore names and badges.
Task Force Aegis.
The elite unit forged solely to break Kael and his "demon spawn."
His father lay slumped five feet away against a rusted generator, breathing in wet, shallow gasps that bubbled ominously. Kael's leather coat was a sodden tapestry of crimson, not just the spray of the Aegis operatives they'd cut down during the frantic, bloody retreat from a new safehouse, but his own. Two high-caliber rounds had punched through Kael's lower back during the ambush outside.
He'd killed three more on the stumbling, scarlet trail back to this warehouse, his legendary precision faltering under the weight of shattered organs, his movements growing slower, heavier, like a mortally wounded bear. Doom had dragged him the last hundred yards, Kael's blood painting a slick, glistening trail on the rain-slicked pavement, the shouts and disciplined footfalls of Aegis closing in like hounds.
Now, cornered. Doom had fought like a thing possessed to buy seconds, taking bullets meant for his father, shattering bones and windpipes with his bare hands until a tactical shotgun blast caught him square in the chest, spinning him to the cold concrete floor. The knife came later, plunged deep into his gut by a cold-eyed Aegis sergeant as Doom struggled to rise, the sergeant's face a mask of professional disdain.
His ribs were a shattered cage, jagged edges grating like broken pottery with every shallow, hitching breath. His left eye was a throbbing mass of pain and pressure, swollen shut, narrowing his world to a blood-filmed slit. His right arm hung bent at a grotesque angle, the bone protruding whitely through torn skin and fabric, a useless, agonizing weight.
The warehouse floor beneath him was slick with gore, his, Kael's, and the Aegis operatives who'd paid the price for cornering apex predators. Shadows moved at the edges of his failing vision, boots crunching on concrete grit stained crimson. Tactical vests, helmets, the glint of rifle barrels catching the dim light filtering through grimy high windows. They moved with trained efficiency, securing angles, their faces grim behind visors, devoid of cruelty but radiating the cold satisfaction of a hunt reaching its inevitable, terminal conclusion.
"Targets contained," a voice crackled over a radio, clipped and devoid of emotion. "Alpha is critical. Omega is down and neutralized."
Omega. Doom. The designation scraped against his fading consciousness. His father groaned, a wet, bubbling sound. Doom tried to turn his head, to see him, but agony lanced through his neck.
Kael's voice, weaker than Doom had ever heard it, rasped through the shared pain. "Get... up... boy." It wasn't encouragement. It was an order from a dying warlord, a refusal to let his legacy end on its knees, a final demand from the forge-master to his weapon.
But Doom couldn't. The knife in his gut was an anchor, cold steel kissing his spine. Every desperate inhalation scraped torn flesh against it, sending fresh waves of nauseating agony through his core. It wasn't just pain, it was an invasion, a violation of his very center. His vision swam, the edges darkening.
Ainar's voice was silent. Utterly, terrifyingly gone. For two years, her whispers had been the constant current beneath the surface of his thoughts, a guiding hand, a cruel comfort, the architect of his becoming. Now, there was only a yawning void where her presence had resided. Just the wet, ragged sound of his own breath, Kael's weakening gasps, and the calm, methodical movements of the Aegis team tightening the noose.
This is it, the thought formed with glacial slowness in his fractured mind.
This is how it ends. Not in some grand blaze, but here, on cold concrete, drowning in my own fluids, my father dying beside me, surrounded by hunters paid to erase us.
The image was bleak, final. A failure. Kael's failure. His failure. His father's final gaze would be one of disappointment, witnessing his ultimate weapon break.
But Doom had never been one to accept endings. A spark, cold and hard as flint, ignited deep within the ruin of him.
Not like this. Not in front of him.
His fingers twitched against the sticky floor, curling into the thick, lukewarm pool of his own blood. It felt obscenely intimate, this connection to his own draining life. The pain was a distant roar, a fire glimpsed through thick ice, present, immense, but muffled, separated by layers of encroaching numbness and shock. He had been here before, broken, bleeding, teetering on the crumbling edge of oblivion. Each time, a silent plea had been his anchor. A prayer offered into the indifferent dark.
And each time, he had whispered the same desperate bargain. A plea for power. For violence. For the strength to break his enemies.
Now, with death's teeth sunk deep into his throat, his father's blood mingling with his own on the concrete, the icy breath of the void washing over him, he dredged the words from the wreckage of his lungs. They scraped free, raw and guttural, a challenge thrown at fate and the men who thought they had won.
"Let me break them."
His voice was ruined, little more than a growl, a vibration in his ruined chest. But the words carried, heavy as a vow forged in iron and despair. They hung in the suddenly still, thick air, seeming to echo far beyond the physical confines of the warehouse, into a deeper, colder silence.
"Let me kill them."
The air stilled. The calm radio chatter cut off abruptly. The advancing boots froze. The very dust motes dancing in the weak light seemed to freeze mid-fall. The pressure in the room shifted, growing denser, charged with an ancient, predatory awareness that had nothing to do with tactical training. The hairs on his remaining skin prickled, not from fear, but from the sudden, undeniable sense of presence. A vast, cold attention turning its gaze upon this insignificant point of pain and desperation.
Somewhere beyond the world, beyond the veil of blood and concrete and agony, something vast and hungry and impossibly old listened. It turned its focus, like a colossal beast shifting in the dark depths of eternity, its attention drawn by the raw, desperate power of the plea. A familiar hunger, echoed in the void within Doom, resonated across the gulf.
---
Darkness. Absolute, suffocating, a velvet shroud that pressed in from all sides, devoid of light, sound, or sensation. It was the darkness before creation, the silence of the grave amplified a thousandfold.
Then
Fire. Not gentle flame, but eruptions of violent, blood-red light that cracked into existence atop twelve immense pillars. They stood in a perfect, impossible circle, towering monoliths of a stone so dark it seemed to drink the very light it bore.
Each pillar was ancient, scarred with deep, unreadable runes that pulsed faintly with the rhythm of the flames above, symbols that hinted at geometries and concepts that defied mortal understanding, causing a low thrum of existential dread to vibrate in Doom's bones. The air hummed with a low, subsonic thrum, a vibration felt deep in the marrow rather than heard.
At the top of each pillar, the chains began, impossibly thick links, each larger than a man's torso, forged from a substance darker than the void between stars. They stretched inward, impossibly taut, groaning with a sound like continents grinding against each other, bearing an unimaginable strain. The metal wasn't merely dark, it seemed to absorb light, radiating an aura of absolute negation, of endings.
At the center of this circle of fire and shadow, suspended by the agonized chains, was the figure.
Vaguely humanoid, yet fundamentally other. Tall, impossibly so, yet emaciated, its form wasted as if by eons of imprisonment. Its skin, the colour of dried blood and obsidian ash, was stretched drum-tight over a jagged, angular skeleton that seemed too large, too sharp, too wrong.
Limbs elongated to disturbing proportions, ending in hands where fingers like gnarled talons flexed slowly. The nails were shards of purest black obsidian, long, cruel, and wickedly sharp.
Its face was a nightmare sculpture, high, knife-edged cheekbones, a jawline that could cut stone, a mouth that stretched far too wide when it moved, revealing needle-sharp teeth like splintered bone. And its eyes… they weren't eyes. They were pits, bottomless voids that held not darkness, but a hunger so profound it warped the very air around them, pulling at the soul, whispering of dissolution.
The chains bound it with brutal finality. Massive manacles at the wrists, abdomen and ankles, biting deep into the unnatural flesh, and a collar of the same dark metal locked around its throat, forcing its head slightly forward. One chain, attached to its right wrist, showed distinct signs of damage. The metal wasn't rusted or worn thin; it looked dissolved, pitted and scarred as if splashed with a cosmic acid. The scars wept a thin, viscous fluid that wasn't quite liquid, shimmering with faint, sickly iridescence in the hellish light. Strangely, directly beneath this weeping chain, on the featureless, dark floor that seemed to absorb the pillar-light, lay a small pool of fresh, vibrant crimson blood, his blood.
The creature's gaze was fixed utterly on this pool. Its head was tilted, an unnerving stillness about it. Within the blood's surface, reflections danced not of the fiery pillars, but fleeting, fragmented scenes.
The warehouse floor slick with gore, the glint of the knife in Doom's gut, the circling predators, the raw agony on Doom's face, Kael's dying form, moments plucked from the very edge of oblivion.
Then
The prayer, ripped from a dying throat, echoed not just in the warehouse, but here, in this impossible prison, vibrating the very chains, resonating with the entity's own boundless hunger.
"Let me break them."
The creature's lips, thin, grey, and cracked, peeled back slowly from its needle teeth in a grin of pure, chilling ecstasy. It stretched wider, impossibly wide, splitting the lower half of its face.
It laughed.
The sound wasn't merely heard, it happened. It was the shriek of tortured metal amplified, the crack of glaciers calving into an abyss, the wet crunch of a spine snapping, layered over the primordial scream of the first dying star. It echoed not just in the chamber but through Doom's fading consciousness, a sound of terrible, ancient recognition.
"Finally."
Its voice followed, a grating rasp like a blade dragged slowly over unyielding stone, yet resonant with a power that vibrated the air itself, thick with millennia of waiting.
With deliberate, agonizing slowness, it raised its right hand, the one bound by the damaged chain. The obsidian thumb-nail, long as a dagger, gleamed wickedly. It pressed the razor edge against the pad of its emaciated index finger. Black blood, thick as molten tar, heavy with the scent of ozone and grave soil, welled instantly. A single, glistening drop formed, trembling at the tip.
It fell.
It hit the small pool of fresh, red human blood.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent. The red blood didn't just boil, it screamed silently, erupting in furious, hissing bubbles. Then it twisted, defying gravity and physics, spiraling upwards with terrifying speed into a vortex, a whirlpool of blood and darkness, a doorway ripped screaming into existence, a maw hungry for what was promised.
And Doom...
His broken body on the warehouse floor seemed to dissolve into the vortex, pulled not by physical force, but by the sheer, gravitational will of the entity and the covenant of his own desperate prayer.
Doom was pulled.
---
Naked.
Covered in gore that felt suddenly alien, not just his own blood, but the mixed essence of the men he had killed, now cold and sticky against skin exposed to an atmosphere thick with the taste of old copper and ozone. The transition had been instantaneous, brutal. One moment, the cold concrete, the knife's kiss on his spine, the jackals closing in.
The next, this.
Kneeling on a floor that felt like cold, seamless obsidian, radiating a chill that seeped into his bones deeper than the warehouse's damp. His clothes were gone, dissolved or left behind in the transition. The air pressed in, dense and metallic, heavy with the scent of ancient violence and something else, the dry, infinite cold of interstellar void.
Above, the twelve blood-red flames flickered, casting jagged, leaping shadows that made the towering pillars seem to sway and the chained figure's emaciated form stretch and contort into even more impossible shapes.
The silence here was profound, broken only by the deep, rhythmic groan of the straining chains and the wet sound of his own, miraculously steady breathing. His wounds were gone. The agony was a phantom echo. But the violation of the knife, the crushing despair of Ainar's absence, those lingered like ghosts.
He didn't flinch. He didn't beg. Survival instinct screamed, but a deeper, colder core, the part shaped by Kael's brutality and Ainar's whispers, locked it down. He lifted his gaze, meeting the abyssal pits that served as the creature's eyes. And in that endless, devouring hunger, he understood.
Recognition slammed into him, colder than the obsidian floor. This was the silence that had listened when he broke bones in dark alleys. This was the void that had drunk the psychic spillage of every kill offered like a prayer. This was the unnamed god he had been sacrificing to all along. The source of the hunger that had always echoed inside him.
The creature tilted its nightmare head, the movement causing its chains to shriek a protest that vibrated through the floor and up Doom's spine. Its too-wide mouth stretched further, revealing more of those needle-sharp teeth in a grin that held no warmth, only the promise of dissolution.
"You have been mine from the moment you made your first offering," it rasped, the sound like mountains grinding to dust. The words resonated not just in his ears but in the hollow spaces of his newly healed bones. "You just didn't know it."
Doom's breath came slow, deliberate. The alien air burned his lungs. "What are you?" The question was raw, stripped bare, echoing the vulnerability of his nakedness.
The creature's laugh was a physical assault, a low-frequency vibration that made his teeth ache and his vision blur. "What do you want me to be?" It leaned forward, the chains screaming in protest, pulling taut like bowstrings. The stench of decay and cosmic cold intensified, washing over him. "A god?"
"A devil?"
"A voice in the dark?".
Its breath, hot and rancid, yet carrying the sweet, cloying scent of forgotten graves, washed over Doom's face.
"I am the thing that answers when men like you pray. I am the hunger behind every fist, the rage behind every knife. The silence after the scream. The void that consumes."
Its taloned hand, the one bound by the weeping chain, uncurled slowly. The obsidian nails gleamed like shards of dead stars. It extended its index finger, hovering over Doom's chest, over the place where the knife had been. It stopped directly over his heart.
Talon and skin came into contact.
The air crackled with static, raising the hairs on Doom's arms and neck. He felt something terrible emerge. Where the talon pressed, it wasn't just touch, it was scoring.
A fractured, corrupted sigil burned into existence above his heart upon contact, flaring into a searing, brand-new agony. It felt like the talon wasn't just resting, but actively tracing the broken lines of the sigil, etching them deeper, branding them into his very essence. The sharp burn intensified, radiating outwards as if molten metal was being poured directly onto his soul. It was a covenant forged in fire.
The entity retracted its hand
"And you, little killer," it breathed, the voice dropping to a terrifying intimacy, "have been delicious."
Doom remained statue-still. The entity's presence was a physical weight, an ancient, crushing gravity. "What now?" The words were ash in his mouth.
The creature's grin became a rictus of pure, unholy anticipation. "Now?" Its palm descended, not fast, but inevitable. The cold, dry, impossibly hard surface of its skin pressed against the center of Doom's chest, directly over the burning sigil.
"Now you burn."