Hellmouth Station looks different when you might actually die there.
It's stupid, because nothing has changed.
The System banner still hangs above the shuttered entrance, projected in the air like a threat and a promise:
[DUNGEON: HELLMOUTH STATION]
Difficulty: ★★★★☆
Recommended Lives: 10+
The cracked concrete plaza is still littered with old cigarette butts and snack wrappers. The vending machines still hum. The air still smells like rain on hot metal.
And Rin Shirosaki is still standing on the stairs like she owns the place.
"Yo, corpse boy." She lifts a hand without looking at me. "You're late."
I check the time. I'm not.
I walk up anyway.
Rin's in raid mode: hair tied up, jacket zipped, runner's harness strapped tight across her chest. The hilt of her energy blade juts over one shoulder, black and innocent until she turns it on and decides something needs amputating.
Her gaze flicks over me. "You look like shit."
"Good morning to you too," I say. My voice sounds almost normal. That's nice. "Traffic was a nightmare. Guy exploded on the train, took forever to mop him up."
One of the boys already hanging around laughs. "Bro, same. They should add a fast-cleanup buff to the Season Pass."
I give him a lazy smile and move past, joining the small knot of runners on the steps.
Party composition:
• Rin: DPS, pseudo-leader, ego tank.
• Two other regulars: Kenta (shield guy, loud), Mori (healer, quiet).
• Me.
Four bodies. Enough to run Hellmouth on the standard route with expected wipes.
Assuming three or four deaths each.
Assuming you actually have three or four deaths to spend.
Rin tosses me a look. "You good on lives?"
My stomach tightens.
I do the thing everyone does without thinking: glance off to the top-right, as if I'm checking my HUD.
There is nothing there.
I let my eyes unfocus like I'm reading invisible numbers.
"Yeah," I say. "Plenty."
It's not entirely a lie. I have plenty.
Plenty of memories. Plenty of patterns. Plenty of ways I've died here.
Just not… lives.
"Way you were dodging last time, you better be," Kenta says, slapping my shoulder hard enough that something crunches against bone. "We're going for a clean phase-three today. Rin wants that ranking."
Rin snorts. "Rin already has that ranking. I just want to beat my own time." She jerks her chin at me. "Trashboy's just here to make the boss feel better about itself."
"Honoured to be included," I say.
Inside, I'm already walking through Hellmouth.
Not here. In my head.
First corridor: blind corner to the right, spawner vent on the left, two corrupted commuters that always pretend to be corpses until you step between them. Third run, I tried sprinting straight through; they hamstrung me from behind.
Fifth run, I used Kenta as a shield. He thought it was funny. Getting your spine chewed is apparently "good content" when you come back.
Ninth run, I figured out you can aggro them with a thrown can and kite them to the stairs.
By the twentieth, I stopped counting.
"Alright, queue us," Rin says.
The world at the top of the stairs flickers; the safe, flat-grey sky of the city dims as the dungeon overlay syncs. A subtle pressure builds in my ears, like the world is taking a breath.
System text slides across my vision:
[INSTANCE: HELLMOUTH STATION – STANDARD]
Death Penalty: 1 Life
Party Size: 4
My counter doesn't appear.
Just white space where a number should be.
It feels like a missing tooth.
We step through.
The plaza blurs, then snaps into something sharper and wrong.
Hellmouth Station, dungeon edition:
The ticket gates are twisted metal ribs, half-melted and pulsing faint red. The station signs warp and scroll between real destinations and System icons. The air tastes like old blood and ozone.
I feel my shoulders drop into the groove they know too well. For all the horror-show dressing, this place is familiar in a way my own room isn't.
Kenta whistles. "Man, never gets old."
"It got old about death twelve," I say under my breath.
"What?" he asks.
"Nothing."
Rin draws her blade. The energy edge hums into existence with that sharp, clean sound that makes monsters and people both nervous.
"Standard route, same as last time," she says. "Kenta on point, I take left flank, Kai on right. Mori in back, keep an eye on our health bars. No one eats shit before the first checkpoint, or I'm docking shards."
"Aw, mum," Kenta groans.
She doesn't smile. She isn't joking.
We move.
The first corridor is exactly where I remember it. Cracked tiles, flickering lights, grime turned up to eleven by the System's sense of humour.
The two "corpses" lie in their usual place, slumped against the wall, shirts soaked dark, faces turned just a bit too far away to see.
I know the animation.
On runs three through twelve, they waited until my foot was exactly between them before lunging, knives already mid-swing.
I could sprint.
I could throw Kenta forward. That's the standard bit: he screams, they jump him, we stab them off him while he loses some HP and a chunk of armour durability. Efficient enough when you can afford a few resets.
I watch their shoulders.
A ghost afterimage flickers over each one. Two pale overlays—one jerking up, one twisting low. For a second I see three different outcomes stacked:
Me sprinting, getting my ankle shredded.
• Kenta shoved forward, taking the hit to the gut.
• A thrown can clanging off the far wall, drawing both sets of dead eyes that way.
I blink, and the ghosts vanish.
"Trashboy, you sleeping?" Rin hisses behind me.
"New route," I say.
I step sideways, grab an empty can from the floor—it's not really a can, just a decor prop, but the System likes consistency. I toss it low and hard at the opposite wall.
It hits.
Both corpses' heads snap toward the sound. Their animations jerk, wrong for a moment, then commit. They launch themselves that way, knives flashing at empty air.
I'm already moving, sliding through the space where their bodies were supposed to be.
"Now," I say.
Rin doesn't even question it. She's already flowing past me, blade singing out in a tight arc that takes the first one's head clean off. Kenta barrels into the second and turns it into gore.
Mori whispers a heal behind us. My HP ticks down by a tiny scratch when I brush the wall. It ticks back up.
Kenta laughs. "Yo, new tech?"
Rin glances back at me. "When did you learn that?"
"Got bored dying the normal way," I say.
It's a joke. Sort of.
We press on.
Hellmouth is a string of set-pieces, tied together by tunnels that exist just to make you feel exposed. I know every one of them.
The platform where the floor occasionally collapses into a nest of teeth.
The stairwell with the invisible push that tries to send you tumbling into the tracks.
The vending machines that spit acid instead of drinks if you press the wrong combination.
Ghosts flicker at the edges of my vision, showing me how it went last time, and the time before that, and the time where Rin lost an arm and laughed about how weird it felt to regrow it.
I adjust us by degrees.
"Don't stand there."
"Wait half a second before you swing."
"Left side first, then right."
Nobody notices I'm shaving off death flags, one by one.
We make it to the first checkpoint with no deaths, no major injuries, and only Kenta's pride slightly bruised from being told where to stand.
He ruffles my hair with a gauntleted hand. "Damn, Kai. Whole new man."
"Don't touch me," I say, but without much heat.
Rin taps the glowing Anchor pillar at the platform's centre. Blue light ripples over her hand.
[ANCHOR UPDATED]
She looks at me. "Well? You saving or what?"
I don't move.
Anchors are usually a comfort. They mean, no matter how bad it gets, there's a version of you frozen here, waiting to be reloaded.
If I touch it now, nothing will change. When I die, there's nowhere to go back to.
But not touching it would be weirder.
I step forward. Press my palm against the cool, humming surface.
Nothing happens.
No rush of safety. No subtle tick in the back of my head.
Just the System's polite lie:
[ANCHOR UPDATED]
"Happy?" I ask.
Rin watches me a beat too long. "Ecstatic."
We move on.
The second big set-piece is where the classic suicide strat lives: a narrow maintenance walkway over the tracks, flooded waist-deep with corrupted sludge. Little red eyes glow under the surface. If you try to walk it, they drag you down and chew you into paste.
The accepted solution: one guy jumps, aggros everything, gets shredded. The rest sprint across while the mobs are busy. Victim respawns back at the platform. Everybody laughs.
Kenta stomps up to the rail. "Alright, whose turn is it to be soup?"
He looks at me.
Of course he does.
I've done it before. A lot.
The sludge below ripples in anticipation. The System knows us better than we like to admit.
I step up beside him and look down. Ghosts bloom across the murk:
Me, thrashing. Me, screaming. The moment teeth tear into my throat and the world goes blue, over and over in different angles.
I could do it.
If I had even one life.
"Not this time," I say.
Kenta blinks. "Huh?"
"New route," I tell him. "We hug the ceiling."
"There is no ceiling route," he says slowly. "We tried that, remember? Spikes."
"Yeah. If you go straight." I point to the side rails, the support beams, the rusted maintenance hooks bolted into the concrete. "We go up, left, left, skip the middle section, drop on the last third. Mobs can't grab what they can't reach."
Rin squints at the path. "You sure?"
"No," I say. "But it beats getting eaten."
Mori mutters, "You love getting eaten."
Kenta laughs. "True."
Rin spins her blade once, then clicks it off. "Alright. New route. If we die horribly, I'm haunting you."
"Get in line," I say.
We climb.
It's ugly, slow, all sharp edges and bad handholds. Twice I nearly slip. Once, Kenta's foot skids, and I grab his harness and yank him back from the sludge.
His weight drags on my arm; something twinges hard in my shoulder. For a split second, I see us falling together, all teeth and screaming and blue light.
I grit my teeth, plant my foot, and haul him up.
At the far end, we drop onto the safe section of walkway with nothing worse than bruises.
Kenta wheezes. "Okay, that sucked ass."
Rin's breathing hard, but her eyes are bright. "It worked."
She looks at me again. Really looks.
"You been running this place without us or something?"
"Something," I say.
I don't tell her it took me twenty-seven deaths, across god knows how many loops, to map that path in my head.