9 Levels of Hell: Volume 1

by Static, E. C.

  E.C. STATIC

  9 Levels of Hell © E.C. Static 2018 - 2021

  Contact:

  www.shoringupfragments.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover artist: Tithi Luadthong

  Character art sourced from Artbreeder.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 9798726198965

  To everyone who found a post on Reddit one day

  and stuck with it for hundreds of thousands of words: thank you.

  This book exists because of you.

  CONTENTS

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  BEFORE YOU GO…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  STATS APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book features frequent character stats, represented via the in-game HUD’s player profiles that show a character’s total attribute value, which is their base stat plus any relevant item they have equipped.

  For all my beloved stats nerds, there is an appendix in the back of the book which provides an item list, a glossary for power-ups/special abilities, and a precise breakdown of statistics on a chapter-by-chapter basis, for anyone interested in the exact numbers.

  If you’d like to start off the book knowing the intricacies of how leveling up, NRG loss, and HP loss function before starting the book, I suggest skimming the first two pages of the Stats Appendix before diving into the story.

  CHAPTER 1

  C

  LINT HAD THOUGHT THE CAR crash might kill him. But he definitely didn’t expect to wake up like this.

  He remembered everything. It played over and over in that infinite darkness that overtook him: the car, burning; Rachel, screaming; hot waves of his own blood oozing down his neck.

  But she had lived. He remembered that much. He had dragged her out of the wrecked car and used both his hands to squeeze the sputtering wound of her thigh shut until he heard the wail of ambulances.

  Her eyes had been so wide and wet with panic.

  And then Clint collapsed. He remembered wondering, as he stared at the damp pavement, whether he would ever get up again.

  But when Clint opened his eyes, he was back in his bedroom, alive. His thoughts felt slippery and scattered. He reached up to feel where his head had collided with the steering wheel.

  The gash on his temple was gone.

  He lay on top of the comforter and glanced down at his Arctic Monkeys hoodie. It had been so soaked with blood: Rachel’s, his own. If he closed his eyes, it felt like he was still kneeling on the concrete, pressing down on Rachel’s leg, telling her over and over, You’re not gonna die, I’m not gonna let you die.

  But now his hoodie was spotless.

  “What the hell?” Clint muttered as he sat up. His head pulsed with a hangover-heat.

  A dream. It had to be a dream.

  But when he blinked, shapes moved across his vision, like they were floating up out of a dark ocean. An image of his own face appeared in the upper left-hand corner alongside a trio of stat bars:

  He’d recognize it anywhere: a video game UI.

  The absurdity of it made Clint crack a thin smile. His own personal coma-dream HUD, courtesy of thousands of hours of RPGs seared into his neurons. But it looked better than any VR headset he’d ever tried on. It wasn’t just a screen close to his eyes. It layered over his sight line, moving with him. It even hovered in the darkness behind his eyes when he blinked.

  God, Rachel would make fun of him when he woke up and told her. Now I know you need to go outside more, she’d tease.

  Clint’s bedroom blurred crimson as a dialogue box drew itself across his vision, like a shard of stained glass. Words materialized within it.

  Thin white text flashed under the notification: swipe to dismiss.

  Clint’s heart pulsed high in his throat. Already he was considering the impossible. The world seemed small and far away as some voice within him whispered, over and over again, This is no dream.

  “Just wave your hand, and it will clear,” came a man’s voice from Clint’s left.

  Clint whirled and leapt out of bed. The notification dissolved like smoke as he turned to face the stranger in his room.

  A man in a crisp black suit sat at Clint’s desk. He held a palm-sized rectangle of gleaming glass, transparent from the back. It cast graveyard shadows on the sharp lines of his cheekbones. Clint took a long second to realize the object in his hands had to be a phone.

  “You certainly took your time waking up,” the man said.

  Clint reached between his bed and nightstand and found the smooth grip of his aluminum bat. He couldn’t sleep without it, not since that night he had been up at 2 AM, stoned, microwaving pizza rolls, and the front door handle started rattling.

  Rachel had been asleep in their bedroom as he stood there, weaponless and dizzy, and just watched in disbelief. In a few seconds, his mind would reengage and he would yell at the door to spook the guy off, but the memory of that initial shock still haunted him.

  That was the first time he felt the fist of mortal panic around his throat. It was the cold certainty that he was being hunted. That he had someone worth dying to protect. He felt it again now.

  Clint kept the bat at his side and held the man’s stare, evenly.

  The stranger’s eyes were black. A flat perfect black that reminded Clint of a shark.

  “Why are you in my house?” Clint said, keeping his voice calm.

  “There is a better question you should be asking yourself.” He didn’t even look up from his phone. “Why are you in your house?”

  “Uh. I live here?”

  “I’m disappointed you forgot what happened yesterday.” The man finally pocketed his phone. “I apologize. Work never rests.”

  Clint tightened his grip on the bat and swung it up against his palm with a metal thwack. As it moved, a flash of red followed it. Clint glanced at the bat, and his belly lurched. Another red notification hovered over it, smaller, no wider than his palm. It read, Trusty Bat (+2 Atk).

  When Clint looked back at the stranger, he was smirking, like an adult watching an infant taking their first steps.

  Clint said through his teeth, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “You’re in luck. That’s exactly why I’m here. They call me Death. You may have heard of me.”

  The light caught on Death’s
watch. The band was made of human molars, gold-dipped, gleaming. Looking at it made Clint’s stomach turn.

  “We met yesterday, when I picked you up off the road. The paramedics came as fast as they could, but...” Death winced in mock-concern. “They may have been too late.”

  Clint shook his head, over and over. He didn’t feel dead. His blood pulsed with a dizzying urgency that screamed in his ears: live live live.

  “Then how am I alive?”

  “Oh, you’re not. Not exactly, anyway.” Death smoothed the lapels of his suit and stood. He was tall, skeleton-thin, and when he walked, the shadows seemed to move with him. He crossed to Clint’s side and leaned so close that Clint could see the gray bloodless veins below his eyes.

  Death’s face split in a grin as he said, “I can show you. I saved yesterday’s recording of it, just for you.”

  Clint thought of a documentary he watched once with Rachel. How chimpanzees only smile when they’re about to attack. He took an involuntary step back.

  Death waved his hand at the television atop the dresser. The screen flickered to life and Clint watched from a camera angle that seemed hooked in the sky itself.

  There it was. The crash.

  His Subaru, busted like a shitty piñata. The truck that had slammed into Rachel’s side of the car. Both cars were crumpled, dropped like toys. A sprawl of highway traffic stalled behind them as a swarm of emergency vehicles surrounded the scene: a firetruck, police cars, a pair of ambulances.

  One ambulance was already wailing away while paramedics carried a body into the other.

  “Look,” Death said. He watched Clint’s face closely, his black eyes bright. “That’s you.”

  The camera zoomed in and passed through the roof of the unmoving ambulance.

  It was him, undeniably. Or his body, at least.

  He was strapped into the gurney, unconscious. A paramedic hunched over him, her shoulders pistoning up and down as she compressed his chest. The gauze on his forehead was already soaked through with blood. His face was mangled, bruised. He looked like a stranger. Like a movie character.

  But it was as real as the vomit rising up his throat.

  Death laughed. “Now you’re beginning to understand. This is a new limbo I’ve devised. I’ve been trying these things called video games, you see.”

  Clint couldn’t help but laugh. All this was too absurd. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself to wake up in a hospital bed, safe, alive.

  “I’m ready to get out of this absolute fever dream, thanks,” he said.

  But when he looked up, the screen had shifted. There was Rachel. Her face was twisted in pain, smeared with blood and road-dust, but she was alive. Clint could hear a paramedic saying, watery, as if on the other side of an ocean, Just stay with us, ma’am.

  “Does that look like a dream to you?” Death said.

  Clint swallowed the emotion in his throat and said, flatly, “Is she dead, too?”

  “Not yet, thanks to you. Very heroic. But you haven’t saved her from me yet.”

  Death straightened to his full height and stared down at Clint, his eyes hungry.

  Fear coiled in his chest, but Clint refused to let it show. He straightened his shoulders and glared back at the Lord of Hell.

  “You and I are going to play a little game,” Death said. “We’re going to see if you can get to the castle and rescue the princess. If you win, I’ll even let you keep her. If she can manage to forgive you for causing her death.”

  Clint fought the impulse to lift the bat and shatter the television screen, or maybe Death’s smug fucking grin. He wanted to snap back, It’s not my fault, it’s not, it’s not, but he was feeling less and less sure of himself by the moment.

  Instead, Clint growled, “You’d kill her as part of some stupid game?”

  “Yes. I’d also save her as part of some stupid game.” Death walked to the door. “It’s your choice, of course. But if you do nothing, she will die.”

  “But what am I supposed to do?”

  “Get to the next level. Escape hell. Find where I’ve hidden her.” Death grinned. “Think of yourself like a modern Orpheus. If you don’t keep looking for your girl, she’s gone for good. And so are you.”

  Fear and fury wrestled within Clint, but he only let the latter show. “Why are you doing this to us?”

  Death smiled again. It was insipid and maddening. “I was bored, and you’re interesting. Look at it this way: you could both be permanently dead. I’ve done you a favor.”

  He pulled the phone from his pocket again and said, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, there was just a very productive earthquake in Peru, and I’ve got some reaping to do.”

  A circle of fire flared around Death’s feet as he stood unfazed, scrolling idly through his phone.

  Clint staggered back from the heat, lifting his hand to shield his face. “Wait—”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll meet again soon.” Death’s smirk deepened. “If you manage not to get killed first.”

  The fire collapsed upon itself, and Death vanished as suddenly as he appeared, leaving only a ring of blackened carpet. Everything reeked of burnt polymer.

  Clint grimaced down at his bat and wondered, for the first time, what it would feel like to crush someone’s skull with it.

  He eased his bedroom door open. A red notification appeared in the doorway, hovering at Clint’s eye level.

  Through the dialogue box, Clint could see the hallway yawning emptily at him. It looked so familiar, his mind half-expected to hear Rachel singing to herself in the living room.

  Clint glanced back at Rachel’s face on the television screen. Rage was a hot coal in his chest. It sharpened his focus into a knife that cut through his grief, his terror, his disbelief.

  If this was real, he wasn’t going to win by standing here.

  He grabbed his backpack from beside the desk and dumped out his psychology textbooks and notebooks. Somehow, he doubted there would be anymore university lectures in Hell.

  Hefting up his trusty bat, Clint crossed the threshold, into the game.

  CHAPTER 2

  C

  LINT DIDN’T SEE THE KID standing in the corner of his bedroom, holding a glass-backed tablet, a plus-sized version of Death’s phone.

  But the kid saw him. He watched as Clint stood beside the bed, looking from the TV screen to the door and back again. Then, without even flinching, he crossed over, into the game.

  The kid raised an eyebrow. He said to the empty room, “Weird. Most of them aren’t that eager to go out and get killed.”

  He had died when he was only fourteen. Although his face was soft and young, he had the don’t-fuck-with-me stare of someone who had been running out of patience for centuries.

  Technically, now that the player was safely started, he was supposed to get back to work moderating. His main job as Unofficial IT Support Guy was to ensure all the player-start glitches were worked out, until someone finally got to Level 2, and he could do that tinkering all over again.

  Such a joy.

  It could get a little hairy, sometimes. Death hadn’t been patient enough to run a real alpha test when he dumped this idea on the kid’s plate and told him to make it happen, so some souls got a little… stuck between the living world and limbo. Nothing quite like a should-be-dead-guy waking up in the real world and talking to a Death who isn’t there.

  And, gods below, the paperwork from retroactively deleting all those mortal memories was an absolute nightmare.

  But this guy was interesting. Maybe just a complete idiot, but still interesting.

  The boy pulled up Clint’s player profile and skimmed over his stats sheet.

  Nothing out of the ordinary. He got the identical starting stats of any other player. Maybe his intelligence was just innately lower, then. The boy smiled wryly as he considered that.

  A message flashed across his tablet screen.

  MEET ME IN MY
OFFICE - DEATH

  The boy rolled his eyes. Being Death’s personal assistant was a genuine pain in the ass.

  He tapped at his tablet screen and vanished from Clint’s bedroom. Only the gentle flutter of the curtain, waving goodbye to him, showed he had even been there at all.

  Instantly, he reappeared in the hallway outside of Death’s office. He sighed and smoothed down his hair before he opened the door and walked in.

  Death’s office looked like an elegantly modern tomb. The walls were scarlet, the color of an old wound. The floors were black marble veined with streaks of gold. The dark colors and narrow windows running along the edge of the ceiling made the room feel like a fist, closing around the boy the moment he walked inside.

  Death sat facing the door. A wall of screens spread behind him, showing each of the main areas of Level 1.

  His desk was huge and glass-topped, supported by four legs that looked like femurs and hipbones, melded together. All four corners were epoxied arm bones, the hands curling around the edge of the glass to hold onto it.

  “Weren’t you on your way to Peru?” the boy said.

  “Oh, I still am. But first, what in all Hell are you wearing?”

  The boy glanced down at himself. He had on a pair of sweats and a plain hoodie.

  He shrugged. “I’m blending in.”

  “They can’t see you. There’s no blending you need to do. I expect you to look professional, or at least intimidating. No self-respecting demon looks like that.”

  “If they can’t see me,” the boy said, “why should I have to look professional?”

  Death’s eyes narrowed.

  The air in the room thinned. He held Death’s stare, evenly, until the Lord of Hell’s face cracked in an indignant smirk.

  “You’re making me wonder why I keep you around.”

  “For the banter, of course.” The kid walked up to his desk and pulled another bone-melded chair out of nowhere to sit down. “What’d you need? I’m pretty sure you didn’t call a meeting to critique my outfit.”