Aaron stood over the lifeless body of the man who had once shaped him, his expression unreadable as rain washed blood from his face. The guards behind him were silent, their weapons lowered. He thought it was over. The Devil had won.
He turned his back to the corpse, dragging one leg slightly, the pain from his shoulder wound throbbing with every step. His coat fluttered behind him in the cold wind as he took a deep breath of the rain-slicked air.
Then—CRACK.
A single shot rang out.
Aaron stumbled.
Another. Then another.
He collapsed to one knee, coughing blood. His eyes widened in surprise—not fear, not regret. Just amusement.
He turned his head slowly, and there they were. The guards—his guards—standing still, rifles aimed at his back. Their eyes were calm, their betrayal clean.
"You..." Aaron muttered, the taste of iron thick in his mouth.
One of them stepped forward. "You were never supposed to survive this either. You and the King were just two pieces we needed to remove. Letting you kill each other saved us the effort."
Aaron laughed, blood dribbling from his lips. "Damn... that's cold," he wheezed.I guess I Bleed Red Just like Everyone else!..
Another of the guards tilted his head. "You trained us too well, Devil. You taught us how to lie. How to wait."
Aaron slowly stood, swaying slightly but still somehow towering with presence. Despite the blood, despite the pain—he smirked.
"I see..." he whispered. "I really raised a fine bunch of monsters."
"You're finished," the guard said.
Aaron's grin widened through the blood. "You really think this is my end?" His voice, though weaker now, still carried that same arrogant swagger. "The Devil doesn't die when you shoot him in the back."
He took one step forward, slow and defiant.
"The Devil dies... when he decides to."
Another shot rang out—then silence.
Aaron fell to the ground, a crooked smile still carved across his lips.
Even in death, they hadn't broken him.
------------------------
Looking At the corpse of the two men who ruled the dark side of the world the guards felt a strange sense of victory.
The guards stood still, weapons aimed, cautious—watching the Devil to be sure he was truly dead.
But none of them noticed the tiny flicker of movement in Aaron's jaw.
He bit down—hard—on the inside of his cheek. A sharp click, a grind of metal against metal.
Then silence.
A soft pulsing sound came from somewhere deep in his chest.
One of the guards frowned. "Wait… what's that?"
Too late.
A microburst of energy exploded from Aaron's body in a flash of heat and sound—a compressed high-frequency kinetic charge, hidden deep in his chest cavity, activated by the shutdown of his vital signs. A failsafe. A final gift.
The explosion didn't just kill the guards. It incinerated them—along with half the rooftop. Concrete shattered, flames spiraled into the night sky, and the storm winds howled as if the heavens themselves were raging.
And amid the blaze, pieces of scorched tactical gear and fragmented weapons rained down like metal confetti.
Aaron had predicted it all.
----------------
Half a world away, in a quiet, seemingly abandoned apartment on the edge of a neon-lit city, an old laptop booted up on its own. Its cracked screen flickered once. A single line of text appeared:
> "The Devil has died. Let game End."
The laptop connected to a hardwired signal buried in concrete and steel.
Within seconds, a signal pulsed out—encrypted, silent, deadly.
---
In the Devil's warehouse, hidden under the guise of an old freight yard, dozens of high-tech weapons caches suddenly armed themselves. The very walls began to hum with energy as a hidden fail-safe sequence activated.
Lasers fired, explosives ignited, chemical weapons were unleashed. The air turned to poison and the steel melted from the heat. Anyone unfortunate enough to be inside—technicians, rogue agents, and those who thought they had stripped Aaron of everything—were consumed in a storm of death.
One man clawed at the door as gas flooded in. His skin blistered. He screamed Aaron's name before his body dissolved into the floor.
---
In a luxury penthouse, the King's top lieutenants laughed over champagne, celebrating their betrayal. One of them raised a toast, "To a future without the Devil!"
The floor beneath them dropped.
Hidden explosives tore through the marble, bringing down three floors in an instant. Fire spread like a sentient beast, devouring everything. Screams filled the air as the Devil's vengeance arrived in a symphony of blood and concrete.
One man tried to escape—he made it to the elevator, pressing the button frantically.
The doors slid open.
Inside: a mirror-lined box with one sentence etched in blood across the back wall.
> "I told you. The Devil decides when he dies."
Then it exploded.
---
Even the King's private villa, hidden on a tropical island with his most loyal conspirators, wasn't spared. As King's son who orchestred the assassination of his father and his sworn brother stepped into his private pool, watching the storm on a security feed, he smirked.
"Finally… peace."
The water turned red.
A body floated beside him—his personal guard, throat slit, eyes frozen in terror.
He looked up. A drone hovered overhead, blinking once.
Beep.
The entire villa vanished in a blaze of light, vaporized off the map.
---
The Devil didn't just plan revenge.
He programmed it.
Every traitor. Every accomplice. Every coward who lifted a finger against him.
Burned.
Ripped apart.
Annihilated.
---------------
As for the man who caused all the havoc was drifting in the void unconscious.
There was nothing.
No sound. No thought. No sense of time.
Just stillness.
Aaron floated in the void like a forgotten thought—no longer a man, no longer flesh. His essence had condensed into something small, something raw. A faint, flickering orb of pale light drifting in the endless black.
He didn't move. He couldn't. He didn't even know.
Not yet.
How long he remained in that state, not even the stars could measure. Seconds? Centuries? Time was meaningless here.
But then... something stirred.
A pulse. A flicker from deep within the orb—like the faint echo of a heartbeat. And with it, came a crack across the silence.
> tch...
The sound was more memory than reality, but it was enough.
The orb twitched.
Then, something inside awakened.
Aaron's consciousness clawed its way back like a buried instinct. He didn't gasp—he had no lungs. He didn't blink—he had no eyes. But he knew.
He was awake.
> Where... am I?
No answer. Just the overwhelming sense of nothing.
Emptiness stretched in every direction, eternal and suffocating. No walls. No sky. No ground. Just void.
And him—reduced to a single, fragile mote of soulstuff.
He floated in silence.
Still. Weightless.
His thoughts were fractured, barely stitched together.
> Is this... death?
> Tch. How boring.
Even here, he found the humor. The arrogance. The Devil was not so easily erased.
> If this is the afterlife... it's got terrible pacing.
Still nothing.
Aaron's faint glow flickered, just slightly.
He drifted, now with awareness—but without direction.
But something else... something out there... had noticed.
Something old.
Watching.
Waiting.
-----
The void had no sound.
So when the silence shattered—it was felt, not heard.
Aaron's soul, still glowing dimly like a distant star, suddenly trembled. Something was pulling him. Not like gravity. Not like wind.
It was a command.
A judgment.
The empty space around him cracked like glass—fissures of black lightning etching across the void. Then, with a thunderless roar, reality bent.
Aaron was ripped from the stillness.
He spiraled downward—if down even existed. Shadows coiled around him like tendrils of living smoke, dragging his ethereal form toward something vast… something ancient.
There was no resistance. No fighting it. Not yet.
The void split wide—like a curtain parting to reveal a stage built on the bones of stars.
And beyond it, Aaron beheld the Domain of Death.
It was a throne of silence, surrounded by an endless expanse of petrified souls—millions, suspended mid-scream, frozen like statues. The sky above swirled with stormclouds made of grief. And at the center, sitting on a black monolith that seemed to pierce through existence itself, was Death.
Not a skeleton. Not a hooded figure with a scythe.
No.
This entity was shifting and formless—a silhouette made of memory, shadow, and inevitability. Its "face" was a void within the void—an endless mirror that showed Aaron… himself.
Not as he was. As he could have been. As he tried to be. As he feared becoming.
It spoke—not in words, but in certainty.
> "You are late."
Aaron's flickering orb paused, floating before the entity's presence. His thoughts steadied, sharpening like blades.
> "Sorry," his voice echoed from within the light, cool and casual, "got caught up in a little backstabbing, rooftop gunfire, self-detonation… you know, a real party."
The entity did not move. It didn't have to.
> "You are not supposed to be here, yet you are. You have danced too close to destiny… too often. The line between fate and defiance wears thin."
Aaron's soul dimmed for a moment—then flared again with that familiar smirk of defiance.
> "That's just called being good at my job."
The realm shivered. Not from anger—but amusement.
> "And yet… here you are. A soul unclaimed. Unbroken. Unready."
Death leaned forward—not in body, but in will.
> "So tell me, Devil… why should you not be cast into the abyss like all unrepentant murderers before you?"
Aaron hovered in silence for a moment.
Then:
> "Because I didn't come here to beg."
"I came here to see what happens… when Death stares back at me."
The air fractured. The souls of the damned moaned in distant echoes.
And for the first time… the entity of Death leaned back, intrigued.