by Wolfe Locke
Luca could only watch in horror as the red sludge moved among the survivors, back toward his other self to be consumed by the man. As the refugees fed the sludge, so too did the sludge feed the Black Seraph, and at that moment, he absorbed the strength of the millions he had decimated.
With his voice amplified by a power, so everyone could hear him, Seraph began to yell into the crowd, "Move faster, or I'll kill more of you. Death comes with that storm, and I won't allow the weak to burden those who want to live. Trample who you need to, push through whom you need to, just move."
The crying continued as the refugees pushed forward, even as the red sludge continued to kill many among them. Seraph may have been a ruthless tyrant, but they knew some safety could be found with him. The dungeon ruled by Seraph was the only safety left remaining.
Multitudes died while fleeing the dark storm, and many more died by Seraph’s hand as he unleashed more of his power, summoning a pack of Hellhounds from the abyss to collect those worth saving, with orders to kill all others.
The Hellhounds carried survivors in their great jaws, mauling and mangling the survivors’ bodies. It was all justified in Seraph’s mind as they would survive—they would heal within a day, and their lost flesh and limbs would regrow. As his hounds worked, so did he. He resumed his purge of the weakest of humanity as his minions and guildmates worked to shelter and contain those they had found worthy of survival in his name.
"This was the darkest of moments," said the voice from before, the voice of the dungeon as the vivid memory Luca had been dreaming started to unravel and fade. "My dungeon was the last bastion of safety on Earth from the ravages of the Aeon’s Blight, and you, Luca, killed so many. Yet, you saw it yourself, did you not?
The Infernals can be killed, and if one man's power could kill so many, what about an army? The same Infernals you find on the final floor of my dungeon are the same Infernals that overtook the Earth. My dungeon does not exist to kill all of you, but rather to challenge and help you to grow. Humanity must survive, Luca. Remember this."
Luca nodded in understanding. What he had seen, those images overwhelmed him, and as the dream faded, he was thankful but exhausted from the ordeal of what he had seen.
The dreams were not yet over as he saw himself barely older than he was now—maybe a few years into the future if that. His skin was glistening like iron, with wings of black silk. He was powerful, but not quite as powerful as that other version of himself.
He watched as this version began to kill bound prisoners outside a burning guild hall as he held their guild standard in his hands like a trophy. The guild leader’s head was impaled on the standard, his face a permanent fixture
ask of shock and terror.
In his cruelty, his shadow-self cast a spell to prevent the head from decaying, and then another to trap the spirit of the deceased guild leader into the severed head to prevent him from passing on to the next life.
As for the guild members, Seraph remorselessly ignored their pleas for mercy as, one by one, he killed his captured enemies, consuming most of their power as he did. He didn’t just take their power.
He consumed their souls and destroyed their spirits. As his enemies passed into the void of oblivion, he grew stronger with every kill. Seraph—in his cold and remorseless voice—spoke, resolute, determined, and angered: "If you will not serve me in life, you will serve me in death."
The scene Luca had just watched unfold then faded to black, only to be replaced by another memory of something yet to occur. This time he saw himself as he currently was, a near mirror image of himself, laid out on the ground and unable to move from the shadow of the gate of entry into the dungeon.
A dungeon whose birth had destroyed the grounds it had been birthed upon. Signs for sales could still be seen hanging off jagged rocks and rebar that protruded out from the great doorway that had torn and created itself from the Earth.
Luca saw himself at his lowest moment, wearing clothes familiar to him. Weak, orphaned, desperate, and crippled. He saw his body fall through the air after being thrown through the dungeon gate by a a pair of scared menhoping to appease whatever dread deity they thought controlled the dungeon.
"Please accept this sacrifice and spare us, Lord." Luca thought he heard the men say as they ran away, unable to look their victim in the eye or say his name in regret as they attempted to trade his life for their own.
As for him, he lay bound and alone in the dark of the dungeon’s entrance. Shivering in fear and waiting for death, his blood poured from numerous wounds throughout his body as bones protruded, stabbing through his skin after being thrown. This version of himself knew agony.
Unable to move and dying, he begged for vengeance against those who had wronged him. He cared nothing for justice—only the power to never be weak again. From within the dungeon, his cries for help were answered. He would have his vengeance. Pain shot through his body as black wings began to grow through the skin of his back. The pain was nothing compared to the pain of being helpless, and even that pain soon became pleasurable as he grew in power.
Luca watched himself become the monster he had seen in his dreams.
"I won't let this come to pass; I promise, spirit. But how can I change the future?"
The Spirit of the Dungeon answered, "I will help you; I will guide you in a way that I have never helped anyone in any world I have visited before. In you, I will have a tool to save humanity. I release you back to your world. Think on what you have seen and what trials await you. Do not forget what I have shown you."
As the presence of the dungeon spirit left, Luca found himself alone, and as the vision ended, he felt his heart begin to pound as the hair stood up on his arms and the back of his neck.
He found himself in a nightmare, his hand pressed against a bloody handprint, looking at a new visage of himself—a visage comprised of shadow, terrifying and monstrous. However, rather than him watching that visage, the visage watched him. The nightmare was keenly aware of his existence—a fact that terrified Luca.
Luca tried to run, but black wings beat down upon him as he tried to turn away from the monstrous sight of this dark avatar. An avatar of broken black steel wings that had been shredded. A body covered in coagulated blood and grime. Bloodshot eyes bore into Luca, staring into him with desperate hunger.
As Luca tried to will himself awake, this horrible image of himself shot out a bloodied talon that tore through his chest and pierced his heart. He watched with a mouth unable to scream as his heart was torn from his body, and that image of himself consumed it.
Chapter 3: Back To The Past
* * *
The feeling of movement woke Seraph from his slumber as tires beat against a paved asphalt. Groggy and tired, Seraph strained to open his eyes. Heavy with sleep and struggling to awaken, he tried to stand, but as his body shifted to match the movement beneath it, he felt something strain against his chest.
Restraints? he thought. Me? Who would dare to restrain me? What is this? Another trick of the dungeon? His sudden irritation and anger flooded his body with chemicals, and his body responded by banishing the last vestiges of sleep. He opened his eyes, words of power on his lips, ready to unleash devastation and destruction on his captors. In the back of his mind, he wondered where he was as he could not clearly recall his memories after talking to the dungeon spirit. To him, much of the recent past was a blur.
With eyes open, he looked around in startled confusion and saw that the strap across his chest was not some torture device, but rather a seat belt—a device no longer familiar to him. Light filtered and shone through the window that he saw in his peripherals.
A window, he thought in awe as he turned to look. Through that window, he saw cars passing by in a blurry haze as they sped down the road in the long procession of people trying to beat the afternoon traffic. The spells he had been prepared to unleash dropped from his mind as he took in the moment and the novelty of it all.
Seraph hadn't seen a
car in decades—not since they had abandoned the Earth entirely and retreated into the dungeon. But even before then, after he went into the dungeon, he had rarely returned to the surface. The sole exception was his travels preceding the great calamity of the green fire that overtook the Earth and his efforts to root out the enclaves of survivors and forcefully evacuate the talented and strong among them.
Just to be sure, he reached out to touch the glass, the window feeling cold against his fingers. The reflection of a pre-teen on the cusp of manhood looking back at him with blue eyes. A tangled mess of unkempt and greasy brown hair. Despite himself, he couldn’t help but stare in amazement. As he stared out the window, his memories came rushing back to him as he smiled, thinking, I'm no prisoner. It worked. I've replaced my younger self and traveled to the past. This is my rebirth. The dungeon had meant to give his younger self his memories, but Seraph had refused to die, his soul lingering. He had instead used that chain of events to partially consume his younger self and replace him.
He banished the wonderment from his mind. This was not the time to get distracted. This was the day the dungeon would first appear—day 0—and he needed to get to the dungeon and receive the spoils reserved for those who went first. Thankfully, he was already traveling in a car. It was just a matter of rerouting the driver.
I'm in a car, but who’s driving? he asked himself as he looked forward toward the driver, trying to catch identifying details through the rear-view mirror. From what he could see, an older man was driving, a salt and pepper mid fade, but from this angle, he couldn’t make out any other details. Not willing to put it to chance, Seraph moved his fingers in discrete patterns to cast an identification spell that would feed him details of the driver, but the spell failed without even a notification to alert him explaining why it had failed.
Not to be deterred, he tensed his wings, ready to defend himself, ready to kill the man at the slightest provocation. He prepared himself to launch a quick counterattack that would behead the man if Seraph sensed any intention to attack while activating his defensive abilities that made him all but vulnerable to harm as he sought to control and anticipate every avenue of defense. Yet the uncomfortable sensation of fear crept in as his body failed to respond, and his abilities failed to work. Try as he might, nothing happened. He had a phantom sense of memory of a part of his body that no longer existed. His body tensed in rage as he realized he no longer had his black wings.
Seraph's movements must have alerted the driver as the man turned around to face him, a familiar face with hazel eyes that Seraph could not quite place.
“Hey, kiddo. Was hoping if I left you alone, you’d settle down and fall back to sleep. You could use it. I know you had a rough night last night; I heard you crying in your sleep.” After a few brief moments, he continued, “It doesn’t help that the school asks so much of you, as if you weren’t already exhausted enough with everything that's going on. But we still got a little while before we get home, so why not try to get some more sleep? It'd be good for you to be nice and refreshed before we dig into your homework later.”
Seraph felt a sense of unease as he struggled with how to respond, his thoughts awkward, confused, and disoriented. Though he was no longer sleepy, he knew his mind had grown foggy, lacking the mental clarity he had been accustomed to. His thoughts were now jumbled and without focus, in a way he could not remember ever being. This was different from some sort of debuff; he was slower in every sense. The answer came soon enough.
Seraph realized he was normal again. An average, normal human, weak and pathetic. He truly had taken the place of his younger self when he had consumed him.
He needed to get his bearings and try to navigate the situation toward his goals without alerting the driver that he should have cause for concern.
“Where are we?” he asked, ignoring the driver’s comments, focused instead on his mission and his goals, a hint of arrogance showing through in his voice.
The driver bristled at the rudeness, and Seraph internally chided himself for the mistake.
The driver adjusted the mirror to get a better look at Seraph and responded, “Well, kiddo, I know you had a rough day today, but you seem to have forgotten that when I ask you something, I expect an answer.”
“I’ll go ahead and answer that question and give you some time to rethink this newfound attitude you seem to want to give me. We’re stuck. We’ve been stuck in pretty bad traffic on I-85. I've been listening to the radio trying to figure out what's the holdup, but there doesn't seem to be many details for the slowdown. Maybe it is something to do with that freak storm that popped up a little while ago while you were sleeping. Or it's probably another waste spill outside the carpet factory. Not that it matters much. The GPS is lit up red for miles, and I'm not pulling any detours off the GPS.”
Wait? thought Seraph. Kiddo? Kiddo? He caught glimpses of his reflection in the driver’s mirror and turned to get a better look at himself in the window. Something he had not thought to do before.
His body felt different, alien, and unfamiliar. It did not respond with the precision of training and the strength he was used to. There was no sign of age at all. In his reflection, he saw a teen of maybe 15 and knew from his reflection that he was basically a child.
Realization set in that if he was wearing the body of his younger self, that would make the driver, the man upfront that had called him kiddo, his father—a man who had been dead to him for decades.
Warning bells went off in Seraph's head as he realized the implications of his situation. For all practical purposes, he was without power. He would be unable to leverage death, danger, or threat of violence to force others into action for the foreseeable future. If he was truly a teen again and this man his father, then his father was an obstacle that he would have to overcome to reach the dungeon. An obstacle whose only answer was acting and diplomacy.
Remembering the words imparted to him of “No second chances,” Seraph knew he had to succeed in every opportunity. He wouldn't be allowed to fail again. He needed to convince his father to take him to the Mall, so he could begin his search for the budding entrance to the dungeons.
"Dad,” he said—the word long since unfamiliar, stumbling out of his mouth awkwardly—"What day is it?" Seraph just needed to verify. If his father was unwilling to take him, he would need to resort to force, but he did not want to revert to that as his first option. His success, if he was forced to take that route, was far from guaranteed.
"Wow, kiddo." The man laughed. "That was some nap, wasn't it? You’re still pretty groggy, I'm sure. You always sleep hard like that. "
"Sorry, Dad," Seraph replied, the words coming out unfamiliar and with forced casualness. Father was too formal of a word, and as he talked to the man, it seemed to pry loose memories. He remembered his dad never being overly formal. It was one of the few memories of his father.
The last thing Seraph wanted was for this man to interfere directly or indirectly with his plans. "What day is it though, Dad? There is something I’ve been looking forward to, and I think today is the day.” He needed to know for sure what day it was, and if the man refused to take him where he needed, he would take the car by force, even if it meant costing the man his life.
Grinning, the man turned around and looked at him, "Tuesday, kiddo. It's Tuesday the 7th, in this the two thousand and twentieth year of our Lord."
The man waited for Seraph to laugh, his smile turning to a frown when he didn't elicit a response of either a laugh or smile from Seraph.
"Luca," he said, completely reading the situation wrong, "I know things have been hard on you ever since your mom passed, but you have to let me in. We're a family, you know. We're all each other have, and I’m always going to be there for you, just like I promised your mom."
For a moment, shock filled Seraph's body as he was reminded that he had forgotten his own name. It was something discarded and thrown away, alongside his bonds to family once he assumed his identity as Seraph. He
found the thought that he had not always been Seraph to be uncomfortable. Oddly enough, he felt his eyes water at the mention of his mother, and he quickly wiped it away.
Seraph got what he wanted from the conversation; he knew what day it was. Today was the day the dungeon opened, the day it first appeared, and the day it let in the first souls who would walk its halls and claim its power. Today was the day the dungeon would begin to unleash monsters in the surrounding area. Today was the day in the past when he had originally lost his father, killed by a monster while stuck on the highway, stuck in traffic that seemed to never end.
He had to think quickly. The entrance to the dungeon had first appeared in the food court at the mall downtown, not far from where they currently were. He knew that the first ones to enter the dungeon would receive abilities and classes beyond what was made available to those who came later.
Additionally, something they had learned in his other time was that the world grew more dangerous every time someone entered the dungeon, as a monster was released elsewhere to wander the Earth, maiming and killing all until put down. If he was going to do things differently, he would need to get into the dungeon first, and maybe there would be long term benefits if he could keep his father alive.
Seraph had never needed anyone in the dungeon, but he could always use trustworthy allies. Though he had no problems using the stick and carrot to coerce cooperation, he preferred actual loyalty. He looked at the man and smiled, his mind made-up.
"Sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to worry you. I’m just groggy and have a lot on my mind. You know, I was thinking, since the traffic is so bad, and we haven't done anything in a while, maybe we could pull off the road and head to the mall? I’d like to see this new game shop that opened up. Maybe hit up some food. You know Mom really liked that smoothie place down at the food court."