Chapter 2: This Is Hell

Koda didn’t think twice before running.

Whatever remained of the man who used to weigh consequences before acting had been left behind. The moment the scarred beast’s claws scraped forward, his body simply threw itself backward and ran.

The first few strides nearly killed him.

His new, gray-scaled legs launched him forward with an unasked-for violence, yielding more force in a single stride than his human body had ever managed in ten.

For one dizzying second, he thought he might actually outrun the entire pack. Then his tail swung wide on a turn, throwing his weight sideways, and he stumbled hard into a jagged surface of rock that sliced a shallow gash along his forearm.

’Okay. Okay, this thing has an owner’s manual and nobody gave it to me before dumping me here!’

Behind him, claws scrabbled frantic against the ground. A snarl sounded so close he felt the heat of the creature’s breath against the back of his tail. He didn’t look back. Looking back was how people being chased in stories died, and he had exactly one life left in whatever body this was.

He ducked beneath a low overhang of black rock that was sharp enough at the edges to have drawn blood had he been an inch higher, and burst out into a narrow gap between two boulders.

A snapping jaw closed on empty air just behind his heel.

Twisting through the gap sideways, his tail cracked against stone hard enough to make him hiss, but he kept moving. His lungs burned with the same sulfurous heat that had nearly choked him awake.

Then, abruptly, the pursuit thinned.

He risked a glance over his shoulder. The scavengers had slowed, then stopped altogether, their attention already swinging back toward the carcass they’d left half-eaten. The scarred leader gave one last, rattling growl of warning in Koda’s direction, before turning to trot back the way it came.

’They’re not even hunting me. I’m just not worth the trouble.’

He didn’t know whether to feel relieved or insulted. Settling for terrified, he kept running until his new legs finally gave out on him.

He found a narrow split in the rock wide enough to wedge himself into and collapsed against the warm stone, chest heaving in ragged, wheezing pulls of air that never quite felt like enough.

Only after his heartbeat slowed did he actually examine his surroundings.

The ground beneath him wasn’t dirt in any sense he recognized. It was pitch-black and powdery, fine as ash, it shifted under his claws as if undecided on being solid. A few feet from the crevice mouth, twisting red stalks of alien vegetation grew, glistening and oozing a sap that caught the dim light like something half-alive and reaching.

He didn’t dare to touch it. Instinct buried deep in this new demon body warned him off, the same way a human hand knows not to grab a hot stove.

A faintly purple fog hung low across the ground beyond the rocks, glowing with a sickly light of its own. It smelled of rot layered over something like quicksilver..., if quicksilver could decay.

Above it all, jagged black towers rose in the distance, volcanic and impossibly tall, venting columns of pitch-black smoke into a sunless, starless sky. There was only that bruised, endless red spreading through smoke that never cleared.

Somewhere out there, constantly, things were fighting. Even from the crevice, he could hear shrieks, snarls, and crunch of flesh and bone being torn apart.

’This is Hell,’ he thought grimly, and the realization didn’t even feel dramatic anymore. ’This is actually Hell.’

He tried to laugh it off, but it came out as a broken, hissing wheeze. His new throat still refused to make sounds. Maybe because he wasn’t accustomed to using it yet.

What felt like days went by with Koda still hidden, and then the feeling of intense hunger arrived.

It began as a dull discomfort low in his gut; the kind he might have ignored back on Earth, dismissing it as needing a meal in an hour or two. But it deepened rapidly, sinking past his stomach into something that felt like it was gnawing directly on bone.

’If I could just go back to Earth,’ he thought, hating himself a little for the impulse. ’But he knew that there was no back to go to. If I could just...’

A weak, rasping sound cut the thought short.

Creeping to the mouth of the crevice, he looked out.

A small, sickly lizard-like creature staggered a few paces into the open, dragging one useless leg behind it, before its limbs folded. It collapsed onto the black soil, sides heaving in shallow, failing breaths.

Koda instinctively licked his dry lips, but quickly caught himself and tried to turn away. But something in his chest pulled him toward it again; a subtle, magnetic energy radiating from the dying creature.

It was faint but unmistakable, like a low note only his new body instincts could detect. It wasn’t sound or smell per se, but something more unique: a leaking energy spreading out of the lizard-thing as its life edged toward its end.

His body told him to eat it and survive, but his mind resisted the urge.

’I’m not... I can’t just...’

The hunger in his gut grew stronger than the voice trying to argue with it. Before he consciously decided anything, he was already crawling out of the crevice, low to the ground. His claws dug soft crescents into the ash-black dirt as he crept toward the dying lizard-demon.

But as he got one of his claws against the beast’s hide, the world exploded into pain.

Something dropped from above which he never saw coming, just a shadow crossing the smoke-red sky before agony tore across his shoulder in four parallel gashes.

He shrieked, an ugly, hissing sound, and scrambled backward on instinct as dark, thick blood spattered across the ground.

A winged Demonling landed atop the lizard carcass with a heavy thud, its wings folding against a lean, tough body as talons sank possessively into the kill. It barely looked at Koda, just enough to confirm he wasn’t a threat worth finishing off.

Koda didn’t wait to see if it would change its mind. He threw himself sideways into the narrow crack in the rock, too tight for the winged creature to follow, and pressed himself into the dark. He hissed through his teeth as pain lanced through his shoulder with every breath.

From the safety of the crevice, he watched the winged demon settle in and feed, tearing into the carcass Koda had almost claimed. It swallowed down not just flesh, but something more; Koda could feel it even from a distance.

That same magnetic energy was draining out of the dead lizard and into the creature devouring it, faster now, and greedier.

’That was mine,’ he thought, regretfully. He was too exhausted and in too much pain to be horrified by the thought as he normally would have been.

Clutching his shoulder, blood slick and warm between his claws, he watched the winged beast gorge itself in the open without a shred of fear that anything would come to take its prize.

Because nothing would.

The winged thing was bigger and faster. Armed with talons that had opened Koda’s shoulder in a single strike before he’d even registered the attack. It didn’t need to hide in cracks in the rock. It didn’t need to run from predators... It was the Predator.

Koda’s eyes narrowed in the dark, breath hissing between clenched teeth as a cold, absolute realization settled over him.

Even a dying, half-eaten carcass on the ground belonged to someone in this place. But only if that someone was strong enough to keep it.