As the sun was setting, Ethan Smith, a renowned decipherer of the five ancient stone tablets of Suyana (the unity of five South American nations formerly known as Colombia, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador), grew increasingly anxious. His wife, Jessica, and their young daughter, Sarah, should have returned home the previous afternoon. Yet, there was no sign of them, and Jessica wasn't answering her phone.
Ethan tried to suppress the dread creeping into his chest. Maybe they just lost track of time, he told himself, though he knew Jessica was never this careless. Swallowing his discomfort, he dialed the one person he avoided: Jessica's mother, Haeun. He had always found the old woman unsettling, with her piercing gaze and cryptic words, but she had helped raise Sarah when Ethan and Jessica were busy with work.
The phone rang endlessly before someone finally answered.
"Hi, Ethan." The voice was strained, trembling,Jessica's father, Jiho, speaking in his thick Korean accent.
Ethan's grip on the phone tightened. "Jiho? Is everything okay? Where's Jessica?"
A choked sob escaped Jiho's lips. "How are you doing, man…" His voice was barely a whisper, laced with terror. Then, in a desperate plea: "Come here for Jessica and Sarah, please."
Before Ethan could respond, another voice erupted in the background,a man screaming in pure agony.
"죽기 싫어, 제발… 제발, 아무한테도 절대 말 안 할게!" ("I don't want to die, please… please, I won't tell anyone! I swear!")
Ethan's blood turned to ice. Instinctively, he hit record on his phone, capturing the horror unfolding on the other end. Jiho's cries grew more frantic.
"Please, help! Save my daughter and granddaughter! Run as far as you-"
A wet, slicing sound cut him off. Then, silence.
Then… dripping.
Slow. Methodical. Like blood hitting the floor.
A new voice spoke,low, guttural, unnatural. A woman's voice, but distorted, as if something else was speaking through her.
"이 장소를 찾아라, 필멸의 그릇이여. 그러면 아스모데우스의 이름으로 너의 이름을 찬양하리라." ("Find this place, mortal vessel. Only then shall your name be praised in the name of Asmodeus.")
The call ended.
The silence in Ethan's apartment was deafening. His hands shook violently. He had to move. Now.
Ethan booked the first flight out of Osaka to Seoul that night. As the plane cut through the dark sky, he replayed the recording, his stomach twisting at the screams. He needed to understand the words—needed to know what was happening.
He dialed his old friend, Simon Byun, a Korean linguist he had worked with years ago.
"Simon, I need your help," Ethan whispered into the phone, keeping his voice low. "I just got a call, someone was screaming in Korean, and then a woman spoke some kind of… ritualistic phrase. I need you to translate it."
Simon, sensing the urgency, didn't ask questions. "Send it to me."
Ethan forwarded the recording. A few moments later, Simon's breath became heavier.
"Ethan… what the hell is this?"
"Just tell me what they're saying."
Simon exhaled shakily. "The man is begging for his life, swearing he won't talk. Then the woman… she's speaking in some kind of archaic, almost ceremonial tone. She says, 'Find this place, mortal vessel. Only then shall your name be praised in the name of Asmodeus.'"
Ethan's jaw clenched. "Asmodeus? As in the demon?"
"Yeah," Simon confirmed. "This isn't just some random cult shit, Ethan. This sounds like… something much worse."
A cold realization settled over Ethan. Whatever had taken his family, it wasn't human. Not entirely.
Upon landing in Seoul, Ethan took a taxi straight to Eunpyeong. But something was off about the driver.
"What brings you here, sir?" the man asked in flawless English.
Ethan's guard shot up. "Why do you ask?"
"I already know, Ethan, you have been chosen personally by the Grand-Priest to be the Vessel of our lord of destruction. I just wanted to see how long it'd take you to realize."
The driver smirked, removing his cap, revealing a grotesque symbol carved into his forehead: a blood-red circle with four eyes at its edges.
Before Ethan could react, the driver locked the car doors. Ethan didn't hesitate,he slammed his elbow into the man's face with a sickening crunch, shattering his nose. The driver was stunned, and Ethan kicked the door open, sprinting into the night.
Ethan ran until he reached the police station, panting as he explained the situation using the phone's translator. But the officers only grinned, too wide, too eager. When he played the recording, their eyes lit up with fanatic joy.
Then they removed their hats.
The same symbol.
Ethan bolted as they lunged at him with axes and machetes, they probably weren't allowed to use fire based weapons.
Their laughter echoed behind him. He didn't stop until he reached Haeun's house, only to find a nightmare.
Jiho's skull had been split open with an axe, his body twitching on the floor. A cloaked figure stood over him, chanting. Nearby, a dying man, the one who had screamed on the phone, was pinned to the ground, his stomach slit open, intestines spilling onto Jessica's nearly lifeless body. Sarah bound beside her mother, sobbing, begging for mercy.
Ethan charged at the cultist, but something smashed into the back of his head.
Darkness.
When Ethan came to, his body was paralyzed. A drug, maybe. He could only watch in mute horror as Haeun: her face smeared with black paint, her eyes hollow, stood over Jessica with a curved blade.
"Welcome To this World lord Asmodeus," she crooned, pressing the blade into Jessica's stomach.
"STOP PLEASE, I BEG YOU-" pleaded Ethan.
Jessica's screams tore through the air as Haeun slowly carved into her, peeling skin from muscle, muscle from bone. Sarah wailed, struggling against the cultists holding her down.
Haeun turned to Ethan, her smile stretching too wide.
"You're the mortal Vessel chosen byme for our lord Asmodeus." her voice echoed.
Ethan's paralysis was absolute. His muscles refused to obey, his screams trapped in his throat, his lungs burning with every ragged breath. He could only watch as Haeun stepped away from Jessica's mutilated corpse, her robes soaked in his wife's blood, and turned toward Sarah.
His daughter. His little girl.
Sarah's tiny body trembled as two cultists dragged her forward, her bare feet leaving smears of her mother's blood on the floor. Her face was streaked with tears, her lips moving in silent, desperate prayers.
Haeun knelt before her, stroking Sarah's hair with a grotesque tenderness.
"Do not fear, child," she whispered. "You will be the great offering for our lord Asmoudeus."
Sarah's eyes locked onto Ethan's, wide, pleading, begging him to do something.
Then the knife came down. It was not quick. It was not clean.
Haeun worked with the precision of a butcher, peeling back skin in strips, carving sigils into Sarah's flesh as the cult chanted in that guttural, inhuman tongue. Sarah's screams were high-pitched, animalistic, the sound of a soul being flayed alive. Blood ran fast down her legs, pooling at her feet.
Ethan's mind fractured.
"I can't do this anymore" he whispered.
He could feel something tearing inside him, a blackness seeping into the cracks of his sanity, filling the hollow spaces where love and hope had once lived.
Then nothing.
A cultist dragged Sarah's broken body to a pyre of blackened wood, her limbs twitching, her breath coming in wet, bubbling gasps. They bound her to the center post, her head twisting in pain, her eyes still open.
Still watching Ethan.
"I can't even protect my own family," he thought bitterly. "What kind of father am I?"
A faint voice broke through the silence.
"Dad… help me," Sarah whispered, her voice barely audible.
Ethan looked at her, forcing calm into his trembling voice.
"Don't worry, sweetheart. I've got you. Everything's going to be okay.
The torch touched the pyre.
Flames roared to life, licking at Sarah's feet, climbing her legs, devouring her dress, her skin, her face. The smell of burning flesh filled the room, thick and nauseating.
And through it all, her eyes.Wide. Unblinking. Staring into his soul.
The cult's chanting reached a fever pitch, their voices merging into a single, deafening cry:
"ASMODEUS! ASMODEUS! ASMODEUS!"
Then
Black.
The lights died. The fire snuffed out. The chanting ceased.
For a heartbeat, there was only silence.
Then
A sound.
The wet, splintering crack of bones breaking. The rip of tendons snapping. The squelch of muscle rearranging itself.
Something was changing in the dark.
Something was awakening.
A low, guttural growl rumbled through the room, vibrating in the chests of every cultist.
Then
Light.
Not from the candles. Not from the pyre.
From him.
Ethan stood, but it was not Ethan. Not anymore.
His body had stretched, his spine elongating, his shoulders broadening, his skin splitting and reforming as something else forced its way into the world. He stood seven feet tall, his flesh a patchwork of bleeding wounds and blackened veins, his fingers ending in hooked claws. His face was completely white and his eyes still Ethan's, wide and bloodshot, pulsing with black blood. From his back, jagged spurs of bone erupted, tearing through skin like broken wings.
Haeun fell to her knees, her voice trembling with ecstasy.
"아스모데우스 경… 오셨군요!"
("Lord Asmodeus… you have come!").
The thing that was once Ethan turned its head. Its voice, when it spoke, was a chorus of Ethan's agony,a demon-like cry and a thirst of revenge.
"No."
A claw lashed out on the Grand-Priest's throat . Haeun's head left her shoulders before she could scream.The cultists stumbled back, their faith crumbling into terror.
The thing smiled.
Then
It moved.
Limbs twisted, bodies burst, blood painted the walls. It was not killing. It was unmaking. One man was lifted by his jaw, his spine ripped free through his throat. Another was folded backwards, his ribs snapping outward like a grotesque flower. A woman tried to run, her legs were torn off at the knees, her shinbones driven through her eye sockets.
The house became a slaughterhouse.
The streets became a charnel pit.
The city was turned into a living sacrifice .
The thing that was Ethan and Not Ethan at the same time, stalked through Eunpyeong, its wrath unending. Doors were torn from hinges, families dragged screaming into the night, their bodies reshaped into monuments of suffering. A child's laughter was cut short as its skull was crushed like an overripe fruit. An old man praying was split down the middle, his halves kicked apart like kindling.
And through it all
The thing spoke.
A single word, uttered in that terrible, layered voice, shaking the earth beneath its feet:
"May this world understand the meaning of pain."
And then
It began.