✦ HELL ON EARTH ✦
Inside the downside of the valley. Arjun and Gopi finally reached the village outskirts.
The last remnants of their childhood innocence were destroyed in a single, horrific heartbeat. The world had just turned dark and predatory.
From the bleeding sky, winged monstrosities descended like vultures made of shadow. They snatched men mid-stride, their talons sinking into flesh with sickening ease before crushing them as though they were mere insects. Bodies burst apart with a wet, visceral thud, like overripe fruit hitting stone. Above, the clouds seemed to weep fire; embers rained upon the thatched roofs and golden fields, turning lifetimes of labor into drifting ash within seconds.
Then came the giants. Towering demons, some reaching five meters in height, thundered through the narrow streets. Their faces were grotesque masks of goblin-like hunger, their jagged, mismatched teeth glistening with saliva and gore as they plowed through the fleeing crowds. Blood did not merely spill—it violently splattered across the village walls in such massive amounts that a crimson stream began to flow down the cobblestones. Every dream and every hope of the unfortunate souls whose blood joined that stream was now stripped of meaning, washed away aimlessly into the dirt.
Alongside them crawled huge, serpent-like creatures with slender, towering bodies and sickening humanoid faces that retained all their reptilian features. Slithering through the narrow streets, bushes, and ponds, they effortlessly snared fleeing villagers in their suffocating coils. With a terrifying, half-human smile revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth and a long, flickering, double-slit tongue, the monstrosities opened their jaws to an impossible width—devouring their screaming prey whole in a single, gruesome gulp.
Children's screams were cut short by the sound of rending bone. Families were torn apart in the time it took to draw a breath by the demonic knights riding on the back of demonic horses.
In the shadows of the granaries, some wolf face creatures had already begun to feed, hunched over the fallen while the living watched in a paralysis of soul-crushing horror, a little girl infant crying laying in the side of her dead mothers body, who was being devoured slowly by those creatures.
"Why?" Gopi wailed, his voice fracturing into a high, thin reed of sound. "Arjun, why is this happening?"
Arjun could not answer. The ground trembled beneath them. Flames scattered. Screams rose from every direction—a mother dragging her child, an old man limping with blood pouring down his face.
Human agony merged into a single, endless cry.
Tears streamed down Gopi's cheeks, reflecting the unnatural, bleeding light from above. "What did we do?" he choked out, his voice breaking under the weight of sheer terror. "What was our sin that brought this doomsday right to our doors?"
Arjun's throat constricted, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He remember the exact horrific scenarios of human corpses in his nightmare which was finally unfolding itself in front of him with such a bone shattering reality.
But watching his friend fall apart broke something inside him, and a toxic mixture of helplessness and white-hot rage finally erupted.
"The sin of weakness!" Arjun shouted, the words tearing from his throat. "We are too weak—too damn weak to fight back against these cruel entities! Look at how easily they extinguish a human life—like it's nothing! Like we are no more valuable than toys made of clay."
He gestured wildly at the encroaching darkness, his voice rising in panic and fury. "Not a single one of us stands a chance against these behemoths. Only gods could match them, but where are they? Every ancient horror of the Asuras devouring us mercilessly is repeating right in front of our eyes. It's forcing us to face the cold-hearted truth of our own fragile vulnerability—a truth we buried deep enough to forget. And now, they are digging up that exact catastrophe right in front of us to remind us who are they! We stand no chance against them. None. We are completely at the mercy of these tyrants now, unless they lose focus... or something divine intervenes."
He snapped his head up to face the suffocating, crimson sky, his eyes burning with a desperate, furious defiance.
"Why are they so strong?!" he screamed into the void, his voice a jagged blade of pure anguish. "And why the hell were we made so fragile?!"
He hurled the question into the bleeding heavens with every ounce of strength he had left.
He screamed the question into the crimson sky.
But the sky did not answer.
The only answer was a sound that chilled the marrow in their bones: a low, booming laughter vibrate from the very throat of the earth itself.
...