The world had already decided his fate.
Aaron did not know it yet—but the spell had been cast long before the light reached him.
The rain fell quietly beneath the bridge, thin and cold, streaking down concrete pillars like veins of silver. Cars passed above in dull intervals, their sound distant, uncaring. Aaron stood alone on the upper walkway, cigarette burning between his fingers, smoke dissolving into the night air.
He was exhausted.
Five months of rented rooms. Five months of borrowed beds and broken sleep. Tonight was supposed to be different—his own room, his own silence—but work had taken that too. Again.
Aaron exhaled slowly.
"I'm tired," he muttered to no one.
Below him, unseen, another man leaned against the bridge support, phone pressed to his ear. He laughed softly, arguing with someone he loved, unaware that his life was about to be rewritten.
Neither of them noticed the sky change.
At first, it was only a pressure—like the world holding its breath. Then the clouds split apart, not with thunder, but with light. A vast circle formed in the heavens, ancient symbols rotating within it, glowing with impossible precision.
A summoning circle.
In another world, far away, thirteen kings stood in silence around a grand ritual hall. Priests chanted in unison. The air trembled with power stolen from forbidden texts and burned souls. This was not the first time they had done this.
Every two hundred years, humanity repeated the same sin.
Summon the hero. Kill the Demon Lord. Reset the cycle.
The spell reached across worlds, locking onto its chosen target.
And then—something went wrong.
The light descended like a falling star.
It struck the man beneath the bridge first—clean, precise, absolute. His scream never finished forming.
But the magic did not stop.
It surged upward.
Aaron felt it before he saw it. The cigarette slipped from his fingers. The air around him twisted, gravity collapsing inward as the circle expanded beyond its intended boundary.
"What the—"
Light swallowed him whole.
There was no pain. No warning. Only the sensation of being torn apart and reassembled by something that did not care whether he survived the process.
In the ritual hall, the priests froze.
"That's impossible," one whispered.
The circle flickered.
The hero had arrived.
But somewhere far from human lands—beyond mountains of bone and skies filled with winged predators—another presence fell screaming into darkness.
Aaron awoke to blood.
Not his own at first—dark, steaming blood soaked into cracked black soil beneath him. The air reeked of iron and rot. A forest loomed ahead, its trees twisted into shapes that should not exist, their branches pulsing faintly like exposed veins.
He tried to move.
Pain answered.
His body felt wrong—lighter, younger, unfamiliar. His chest rose sharply as he gasped for breath, lungs burning as if he had been underwater.
"What… is this place…?"
A sound answered him.
Footsteps. Heavy. Multiple.
Shapes emerged between the trees—horned silhouettes, glowing eyes, weapons stained with fresh kills. Demons.
Aaron's instincts screamed.
He did not know magic.
He did not know this world.
He did not know why he was here.
But something deep inside him—something the summoning had not meant to awaken—responded.
A word surfaced in his mind, cold and absolute.
Sacrifice.
The demons lunged.
And the world learned its first lesson:
A mistake had been made.