**In which a man dies, and something older takes his place**
The first thing I felt, coming back to myself, was the cold. Not the ordinary cold of winter or a poorly heated room—that kind of cold reminds you that you're alive, that your body exists and protests. This was different. It was the cold of surgical steel, the cold of indifferent metal that does not distinguish between flesh and anything else it wishes to cut. It was the cold of something that does not consider you human enough to warm.
I opened my eyes slowly. The ceiling was white, lit by strips of cold neon that burned against my retina. I blinked. It took a moment—how long? Seconds? Years?—to remember where I was. Where, and above all, who I was.
My name is Luca Mancini. My name was Luca Mancini. I was thirty-two, with a degree in medieval history I had never used, and a bad habit of reading fantasy novels until three in the morning. Then I had fallen asleep on a bus in Milan, and I had woken up in another body—in another world. What transmigrators in books call "the awakening." Only in my case, the awakening had lasted about six months: long enough to understand where I had ended up, who I had ended up in, and how complicated the Marvel universe was when seen from the inside rather than from the pages of a comic.
The body I was in belonged to a man named Marco Vettori, an Italian-American freelance agent with a background in arms trafficking I preferred not to remember too clearly. No superpowers. No radioactive origin. Just me, his fragmented memories, and the uncomfortable awareness of living in a universe where Norse gods shopped in Manhattan and a man in an iron suit was the most media-saturated figure on the planet.
I had tried to stay out of trouble. Truly. For six months I had lived quietly, using Vettori's contacts just enough to survive, carefully avoiding anything that smelled like S.H.I.E.L.D., Hydra, A.I.M., or any other acronym that, in the comics, invariably meant enormous trouble. But evidently I hadn't been careful enough, because I now found myself strapped to a steel table in what looked like a medical facility hidden in the belly of some European mountain.
The walls were gray. Through a vent in the ceiling—not a real window, just an air outlet—filtered the smell of ozone and formalin. Along the sides of the room were metal shelves filled with medical equipment I couldn't name, and a dark screen with a small green flag taped to it. Not a flag I recognized. Then I saw it, on the opposite wall.
The tentacle embracing a skull. Hydra.
I didn't have time to process the panic. The door opened, and a woman in a white coat entered, her hair tied back with military precision, her eyes as pale as November ice. Behind her, two guards in black uniforms. No one looked at me the way one looks at a human being. They looked at me the way one looks at a biological sample.
"Subject awake," the woman said without turning, noting something on a tablet. "Monitor vital parameters. Initiate sequence B."
"Wait," I said. My voice was hoarse, dry. How long had it been since I spoke? "Who are you? What do you want from me?"
The woman turned. Her smile did not reach her eyes. "You are particularly resilient, Mr. Vettori. Three previous subjects did not survive the calibration phase. I hope to be more optimistic in your case."
In that moment, I understood that she wasn't answering my question because, from her perspective, the answer was irrelevant. What they wanted was inside me—inside this body—and they were going to take it regardless of what I had to say.
Sequence B, as they called it, lasted what felt like an eternity. It wasn't painful in the ordinary sense. It was worse: the sensation of being emptied, scanned, opened like a box whose contents someone wanted to catalogue. I saw projectors emitting light in frequencies visible only at the edge of perception. I felt the magnetic field shifting around the room. From what I had read in six months of surviving in this world, I recognized the technological signature of an attempt to awaken latent abilities.
Hydra was looking for powers. Subjects who, by genetics or exposure or some incomprehensible variable, could be turned into something useful for the Resurrection—their perpetual project of world domination. Three subjects had not survived calibration. They had probably died.
I was not Marco Vettori. I was Luca Mancini, a medieval historian with a soul from another world—and maybe, just maybe, that made a difference.
It is not the body that carries power. It is the fracture in the soul—the space between what you were and what you have become.
The fracture came in the fifth hour. Or so they told me later. For me, it was instantaneous: one moment there was the dull ache of the procedure, and the next there was total darkness—and then the voices.
Not human voices. Not voices from outside. They rose from something much deeper, from the bottom of a space I didn't know I had within me. As if Hydra's procedure had pierced something that should have remained sealed.
The first voice was fat, satisfied, with the slow cadence of someone who has never hurried because the world always ends up coming to him. The second was sharp, resentful, sour as spoiled wine. The third was a constant murmur, excited, frantic, like a fire that cannot decide which way to burn. The other four arrived together, in a dissonant chorus that should have been deafening but wasn't—rather, it was like finally hearing a music that had always been there, just beyond the threshold of hearing.
When I came to again, the lab was exactly as before. The woman in the white coat was speaking in a language I didn't recognize into an earpiece. The guards stood at their posts. The monitors tracked my vitals with the cold indifference of machines.
But the lab was not empty.
There were seven of them.
They stood in the shadows, at the edges of the room, in places where physically they could not exist—overlapping with walls, shelves, even the air itself. They were figures, but that word was imprecise: they were presences that had chosen, out of courtesy or amusement, to assume a recognizable form. Six of them watched me with expressions ranging from curiosity to admiration. The seventh was asleep, or pretending to be, leaning against the wall with arms crossed.
None of the Hydra scientists saw them. I understood that immediately: their gazes passed through those figures as if they didn't exist.
Only I could see them.
The first to speak to me moved with the grace of someone who had never misstepped in her life—or in whatever form of existence had preceded this. She was tall, regal, with features that seemed sculpted rather than born, and a gaze that evaluated everything and found everything slightly below standard. She approached the edge of the table and looked down at me with a smile thin as a blade.
"At last," she said. "We were waiting for someone exceptional enough. You understand that we wouldn't be here for just anyone, don't you? That our presence is, in itself, a distinction."
"Who are you?" I managed to whisper. The guards didn't react. I was speaking into the perfect silence of something that existed only in my perception.
It was the sleeping figure who opened one eye. He was massive, almost comically round, with a perpetual, satisfied smile and his fingers laced over his belly. "Who are we?" he repeated, in the voice of a man who has just finished an extraordinary feast. "We are what you have awakened, boy. The repository. The archive. The forces men gave names to before they even learned to write."
The great sleeper opened both eyes, finally, and in them there was a cosmic laziness—not the laziness of someone tired, but of someone who has already seen enough and decided that moving is rarely worth the effort. "I am called Belphegor in some texts," he said without rising. "In others, simply Sloth. I prefer not to think about it too much. Thinking is tiring. You, on the other hand, are thinking a great deal—I can feel it. You could stop. It would do you good."
The second to introduce himself stood by the vent as though studying a menu. "I am Beelzebub," he said, his voice warm and enveloping like a promise. "Gluttony. Do not think only of food, my friend—gluttony is anything consumed with voracity. Experience, pleasure, life itself. Hydra has opened you. I can show you how to fill that space with something worthwhile."
I didn't fully understand what was happening on a metaphysical level. But I was a medieval historian. I knew enough demonology to recognize the pattern: the Seven Deadly Sins had been codified in various forms through the centuries—Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, Gregory the Great. Moral entities, theological symbols, personifications. Not demons in the conventional sense—something subtler, and more dangerous.
Something Hydra had accidentally unleashed while trying to create a weapon.
"Listen," I said, steadying my voice and surprising myself. "I don't know exactly what you are or what you want. But I can deduce that if you're here—and only I can see you—then you're tied to me somehow. Which means you need something from me as much as I might need something from you."
There was a moment of silence. Then the regal figure—Pride—tilted her head slightly. There was something almost like respect in the gesture, though tinged with the air of someone granting tribute without feeling obliged.
"Intelligent," she said. "I'll grant you that: you are more intelligent than the other three."
"They were dead before they could negotiate," Belphegor added without reopening his eyes, with the placid calm of a still lake. "You are already negotiating. It's encouraging. Almost enough to keep me awake."
The woman in the white coat returned with three more technicians. She was about to begin the second phase of the procedure—I could tell from the way she gestured at the screen, from the German term she used that I vaguely recognized. She was about to increase the intensity. Probably to a level the human body was not meant to endure.
I felt something move inside me. Not muscles, not organs—something structurally different. Like a door I hadn't known existed, beginning to open from within.
"If you like," Beelzebub said conversationally, stepping closer to the woman without her noticing, "I can distract you enough that you won't feel anything. My gifts have this advantage: they make experience bearable."
"I don't want to be distracted," I replied through clenched teeth. "I want out."
The figure who had not yet spoken—dark, angular, with eyes that burned a quiet, resigned red—pushed himself off the wall and looked at me. Wrath. I knew it without being told: every movement carried the compressed tension of something perpetually on the brink of explosion, restrained not by lack of strength but by absolute discipline.
"Getting out is not the problem," Wrath said, his voice so low it seemed to come from the building's foundations. "Getting out is the consequence. First you must decide what you are willing to do to get there. I can give you strength. Not violence—true strength, the kind that does not burn out in a shout but burns slow and precise until what must fall has fallen. The difference between me and what humans call anger is the same as that between a wildfire and a crucible."
The procedure began. I had no time to process anything else. But in the midst of that storm of pain and light and frequencies that should not have touched nerves that way, I could feel the seven around me—present, real, rooted in the one place Hydra could not reach with any instrument.
Inside.
When everything went dark again and I was left with the dull sound of my lungs continuing to work out of inertia, I realized something simple and terrifying: I was no longer the same person who had woken up on that table a few hours earlier. Not in the romantic sense. In the technical, measurable sense. Something had changed in how I perceived space, time, the presence of the people in the room.
I could feel the woman in the white coat—her professional pride, her fear hidden beneath competence, her desire to prove something to someone who was not present.
Pride leaned close to my ear, as if she knew. "You see?" she whispered. "It's much easier now. You can read them. You can understand what moves them. And from there, moving them yourself is a very short step. Of course," she added with her thin smile, "a truly great man would not need to move them. They would move on their own."
I ignored the comment. But I registered it.
Because that was the dynamic emerging, as clear as the cold neon above: they were loyal. All seven of them. I could feel it—not with any ordinary sense, but with that new perception Hydra had unlocked—and their loyalty was real, solid, unconditional. They were mine. Not in the sense of possession, but of bond. Something had anchored them to me with the solidity of a contract written before I was even born.
The problem was what they brought with them.
Every suggestion was a sin disguised as a gift. Every offer was a shortcut that cost something I had not yet finished counting. They were loyal—but they were also what they were. They could not help me without pushing me, subtly, inexorably, downward toward the depths that bore their names.
I understood it then, strapped to a steel table in a Hydra lab somewhere beneath the Alps, with seven ancient entities watching me like a promising investment: the real danger was not the scientists in the room. Not even Hydra.
The real danger was the voice that already sounded reasonable. The voice that said wrath was justified, that pride was just self-esteem, that gluttony was simply living well, that sloth was wisdom.
I closed my eyes. I breathed. And I began to plan my escape—not because I was the hero of the story, but because I was the only one who could do it. And because I had seven very good reasons not to fully trust anyone, including them.
Especially them.