It looked like a goblin. Or maybe a gremlin? Felix couldn't care less about its classification. All that mattered was the grating, mocking cackle that suddenly tore from its throat.
In a blur of motion, the double-barreled shotgun rose. Suddenly, Felix was staring down the dark depths of its twin barrels.
His eyes widened, stretching to the brink of their limit as death was staring him in the face.
He tried to negotiate—to speak, even—but nothing would come out. It was like his words were caught in his throat, unable to be said. Pushing with his every strength, something managed to come out.
"W–wait!"
The plea was pathetic, short, and it was entirely ignored.
The muzzle flashed, painting the world in a brief sheet of orange from the barrel. A spray of lead tore through the empty space between them.
Without even being able to curse his terrible luck before the shockwave hit him, his own short-lived cry was almost completely overshadowed by the gunfire.
The round ripped a massive chunk out of the plaster, missing Felix by literally inches.
It was a piercing, agonizing note that tore through his ears, completely swallowing the roar of destruction. For a long moment, he couldn't hear his own breathing.
A heavy rain of pulverized plaster and stone showered over him, painting his surroundings.
He coughed, shaking his head. A thick layer of dust settled onto his clothes and stark white hair, turning it a muddy, unrecognizable color.
Busy fighting a losing battle against the damn debris in his hair, it was a surprise to hear a fast rhythmic ratchet clicking coming from somewhere.
Slowly, without lowering his hands from his head, he rolled his eyes to look for the source—it sounded so close by too.
The vile little creature exhaled a thin line of smoke from the smoldering barrel.
"That was just to fool the vermin out the door into thinking you've got a proper hole punched through your hide."
The imp dropped from his stool. He marched over and, with surprising leverage, rammed his hands into Felix's chest, knocking him flat onto his back. Even flat on his back, Felix managed to look down on the creature.
"What possessed you to go and squawk about their little plan?"
Every instinct screamed at him to pounce and take control of the situation. Only one thing held him back, and that was a hidden knife by the gremlin's side.
Rubbing his forearm, Felix kept his voice level.
"I figured you'd be more neutral. Someone that wouldn't kill me without a better reason."
The explanation was close enough to the truth. When push came to shove, his primary hope was simple—and desperate. He needed them to draw enough of each other's fire to create a distraction.
With his agility, a quick escape through the chaos was guaranteed. That was assuming the goblin dropped the two thugs out front first. Or, if a miracle occurred, he might get the opportunity to completely disarm the gremlin.
The latter thought was a massive gamble. A suicidal one, really. Felix had only attempted a disarm a handful of times in his past life. And back then, he actually had backing. Now, he was entirely on his own.
When his lower lip tightened in frustration, he winced. A sharp pain flared through his face, forcing him to look down. Droplets of blood slipped past his teeth, thick and tasting of copper.
He wiped his lip, but a red stain spread.
'This is the second time. Seriously, what is wrong with my mouth?'
The imp's gravelly voice snapped the internal monologue back to reality.
"Wonderful, now get lost."
"But don't you wanna know who those people were?"
"Got a pretty damn good idea as to who. By now, they've already scrambled back to whatever they crawled out from."
The gremlin reached into his pocket, his fist closing around something small.
He launched a small object across the room. Felix's hand snapped out on pure instinct, plucking it from the air. He opened his palm to find a crumpled piece of green paper.
"Consider it a thanks."
Smoothed out, it looked just like a dollar bill. But before he could even look at the design, a sudden spark shot straight from the paper into his fingers.
The shock burned, firing up his arms to strike his chest with a surge of raw energy.
Felix opened his mouth to shout at the shop owner, but something distracted him. In front of his face, glimmering sigils materialized in the air. They appeared to be projecting from his new eyes.
Speechless, Felix could only react by waving his hand through the projection. No surprise, his fingers passed right through.
He scanned the sigils. It was clear that whatever they were, they did not belong to any common language. Somehow, however, Felix could still understand them.
* * *
Name: Felix
Moniker: —
Scale: Low-tier Hellborn
Capabilities: Avarice inducement, Quality sense.
* * *
"I told you to get lost already!"
Before he was able to continue to read further, he was interrupted by the gremlin's shout.
Just as quickly as they had arrived, the magical sigils vanished back into darkness.
Still bewildered by the chaos, the lingering fatality of the gremlin's next move gnawed at Felix, driving him toward a desperate bid for clarity.
Danger was a certainty now, but the weight of the unknown was worse. He needed answers.
"Wait. Let me ask something first. Where the hell am I?"
* * *
Some time later, Felix stood near the dilapidated counter, listening to what he now knew as an imp babble. The creature's voice droned on, unraveling a reality far messier than anything he could have anticipated.
The message was painfully simple: Hell was a real place. The Sunday school stories were not fairy tales or metaphors. God existed, a golden kingdom sat hidden in the clouds, and a divine scale had weighed Felix's soul.
It had judged him, finding him lacking. And without a word of explanation or reason, it had dropped him straight into the abyss to rot alongside the dregs of humanity.
A cackle bubbled up in his chest. He wasn't even surprised.
His short life had been nothing but a sequence of petty, unholy acts. He was a master of his own destruction, a man who had perfected the art of self-sabotage before he could even legally drink.
That somehow made him prouder that he was the one controlled how he'd ended up here.
In his youth, a revolving door of exhausted social workers and teachers had warned him where his path would lead. He had never listened. Why would he? The world had never given him a single reason to care.
If this grand creator truly existed, then that being had spent seventeen years watching Felix drown, entirely indifferent to every single second of it.