Kael was just a 19-year-old teenager when his life ended on steel tracks. He had been carrying a plastic bag of groceries, humming quietly, when he noticed a small boy near the railway line. The train's horn screamed, but the boy didn't move.
He's not listening?
Kael Shouted,
Yet no response.
And then Kael realized the boy was deaf. His legs moved before his mind could even form the word "run".
He shoved the boy aside with all the strength he had, only to feel a wall of iron bearing down on him. His last memory was a blur of metal and sound, followed by a weightless silence and extreme pain alas only for few moments.
"Ah… what did I just do?"
And then darkness swallowed him.
Kael's POV
I don't know what possessed me in that moment. My body acted on instinct, and now here I am.
Not heaven. Not hell.
But another world.
Was this one of those reincarnation clichés? No. This wasn't like the novels I used to read. There were no kindly gods, no glowing stats, no second chances wrapped in blessings.
Instead, I opened my eyes in chains.
I awoke choking on the stench of death.
Around me, piles of corpses rotted in silence. Their flesh was gray, their eyes glassy, their mouths frozen in screams that would never end and maggots crawled out of their eye socket. My own wrists were bonded with iron shackles, heavy enough to bite into bone.
"Move," a voice barked.
and then a whip followed.
Dozens of chained figures stumbled forward, all as broken as I was. I didn't need to ask where I was this was no place for the living. It was "hell".
The soil beneath my bare feet was black, as if it had drunk centuries of blood and refused to yield anything but despair. A battlefield turned graveyard. A graveyard turned into a breeding ground for more soldiers.
And somehow… I wasn't afraid.
I should've been. Any normal man would've screamed, wept, clawed at the chains. But my heart felt cold, my thoughts disturbingly clear.
Even though that should not have been possible, this level of emotional control in me?
Should've just been a dream but instead It wasn't.
As if this body this sixteen year old husk I now inhabited was already accustomed to death.
Memories began to return slowly. Faint glimpses of pain, hunger, the stench of burning flesh. A lifetime lived in misery until now.
And maybe… it would've been better if they had never returned.
Because this world… this cursed land was nothing like Earth.
It was a world ruled by endless war.
War so ancient it had swallowed entire kingdoms. War that shattered mountains and left gods as corpses beneath the sky.
And now, I was nothing more than a pawn—no, less than that.
A slave.
They marched us in a line. Shackles clanked. Whips cracked.
We were being herded like cattle not for labor, not for trade, but for the frontlines.
"Are we trained?" I whispered to no one. The man next to me, skin stretched thin over bones, only laughed—a dry, humorless rasp.
"Trained?" he said. "We're not soldiers, slave. We're fodder. The first wave. Meat for the spears and fertilizer for this accursed soil"
And as the horns of war echoed from the horizon, I realized the truth:
We weren't marching to live.
We were marching to die.
And then we arrived.
The scene was worse than the one before.Mutated corpses rotted in heaps, but they weren't the only companions of this cursed land.Death itself had made its home here
"Grab whatever you can," a soldier barked orders, and like our bodies were just born to follow someone heeds. We did just that.
I found myself a rusted sword; time had decayed it, but it couldn't resolve this dying world, whose sky was painted with red, as if the stars were bleeding. But maybe it was, after all, for the Gods who were long dead.
Horn blazed and the battle took place.
No calling it a battle would be an understatement; it was after all, a Slaughter.
Slaughter of the slaves.
The horns wailed again, a dirge for the damned.
The sky rained fire and steel. Arrows whistled, jagged and black, burying themselves into flesh with sickening thuds. Men screamed. Some dropped immediately, their chains clattering as they collapsed. Others tried to run, but the shackles dragged them back into the chaos.
It wasn't a battlefield—it was a butcher's pit.
The soldiers who drove us here didn't even fight in the front. They stood behind, with their spears ready in hand. True Monsters. , driving us forward like cattle into the teeth of monsters. And the monsters… gods, the monsters.
They weren't men. Not anymore. Twisted flesh, bones jutting like blades, jaws unhinged wider than human throats should allow. They tore through the first ranks, ripping apart bodies, feasting even as the horn still blared.
I gripped the rusted sword tighter. My hand trembled not from fear, but from instinct. The blade was dull, half-eaten by rust, but my arm moved with precision I didn't understand. I swung. Steel met flesh. A creature shrieked as I carved a jagged line across its torso. Not clean. Not strong. But enough to drive it back.
Then pain.White-hot, blinding pain.
Something slammed into me an axe, wild and brutal. I raised the sword to block, but too slow, too weak. The blade snapped, and the edge found my wrist.
Bone crunched. Flesh split.My left hand fell to the dirt.
A scream ripped out of me, torn between my throat and my mind. Blood poured, hot and relentless, soaking the black soil already drowning in it. My vision blurred, every heartbeat spraying more of my life away.
I fell to my knees. Around me, slaves died one after another, their bodies swallowed by claws, steel, and fire. The world tilted, sound collapsing into a dull ringing. This was it. My end.
And then shadows cut through the chaos.
A new horn. Louder. The air shook as armored figures swept across the field not the slavers, not the beasts, but someone else. Black clad soldiers carved through both monster and slave alike, efficient, merciless.
One stopped in front of me. His armor was jagged obsidian; he was looking at me through the helm. He crouched, tilting his head at my stump where blood still gushed like a fountain.
"Still alive?" he muttered, voice distorted through metal. His gauntlet pressed cruelly against the wound, and I screamed as darkness flared at the edge of my vision.
But he wasn't mocking me. He was studying me.
"This one's different," he called to the others. "It survived the cut."
Another soldier barked back, "Barely. Not worth the effort."
The man chuckled, low and cold. "No. This one's worth keeping. Look at him still clinging to life when the rest are meat. This one has the hunger."
My body was lifted, slung over his shoulder like nothing more than cargo. The last thing I saw before blacking out was the field—littered with torn corpses, the soil glistening red beneath a bleeding sky.
A slaughterhouse.And I was the lone animal dragged out alive.Saved? No… I was condemned. Death would have been mercy. But fate left me breathing, only to rot in this endless hell.