Dante barely had time to curse before his vision fractured, like a mirror dropped from too high a ledge—sharp, jagged cracks spiderwebbing across reality itself. The bar around him lurched, colors bleeding at the edges, everything tilting sideways as if the world had been yanked out from under him. His breath hitched. His pulse pounded in his ears like a war drum. Then—
The screen appeared.
Not on his phone. Not on the bar’s ancient, dust-cloaked TV that barely picked up static. No, this thing floated, suspended in the air before him, casting an eerie, unnatural glow. A deep, resonant chime rang through his skull, vibrating behind his eyes as words began to etch themselves onto the surface, shifting and flickering like they were being written in real-time by some unseen, unknowable hand.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZED]
PACTMAKER CONFIRMED
Contract Sealed.
Primary Ability Unlocked: [ASHEN HAND]
Status: ACTIVE
Cancellation: NOT PERMITTED.
Dante stared. His brain, usually so good at keeping up with bullshit, stuttered. His first instinct was to assume he was hallucinating—too many sleepless nights, too much cheap whiskey rotting his frontal lobe. But the screen didn’t disappear. It hung there, solid in the air, glowing with a light that didn’t belong in this world. It was real.
Dante inhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate, the kind of breath a man takes when he’s actively choosing not to lose his shit. He exhaled through his teeth. Counted to three. Then, very carefully, he turned his head and looked around the bar, as if expecting to see a camera crew jump out and inform him that, congratulations, he was the latest poor bastard to get pranked by the eldritch horrors of reality television.
No cameras. No hidden stagehands. Just the same shitty bar, the same flickering neon sign, the same existential headache pounding behind his eyes. The screen didn’t waver, didn’t so much as flicker, which meant either he was having the most vivid mental breakdown of his life or—somehow, impossibly—this was actually happening. Dante clenched his jaw. He was tired. He was broke. And now, apparently, he was also the unwilling recipient of some glowing cosmic user interface that had decided to ruin his night.
His head tilted back, eyes locking onto the ceiling as if begging some unseen force for an ounce of mercy. Then, with the long-suffering sigh of a man who had officially had enough, he let his shoulders slump and muttered, “Yeah, okay. Sure. Why the hell not?” Because at this point? This might as well happen.
His breath escaped in a slow, uneven tremor, rattling past clenched teeth like it was trying to take the last of his composure with it. Every instinct screamed at him to not look, to keep his gaze anywhere but where the heat still burned beneath his skin, but the pull was irresistible, a sick kind of gravity yanking his attention downward. And so, with the reluctant inevitability of a man peering over the edge of a cliff he had already fallen from, his gaze finally dropped—
Stolen novel; please report.
To his right hand.
It burned.
Not with fire. Not with heat. But with something deeper, something older, something that coiled through his flesh like smoke trapped under his skin. His fingertips darkened, veins twisting, writhing like ink spilled in water. A horrible sensation crawled through his bones, like they were shifting, reshaping themselves into something not quite human. The very edges of his fingers crumbled to ash—just for a second—before reforming, whole but different. Wrong. Altered. Like his body was no longer entirely his.
Dante let out a sharp, shuddering breath. “Oh, hell no.”
He swiped at the screen, fingers cutting through the light, trying to dismiss it, close it, undo whatever the hell this was.
Nothing.
The text pulsed, a final, absolute judgment.
Cancellation: NOT PERMITTED.
Dante closed his eyes for a moment, dragging in a slow, shaking inhale through his nose. Then, with the deep resignation of a man who had just realized he had stepped off a cliff before checking if there was a parachute, he let his head drop forward, forehead meeting the bar with a dull, defeated thud.
The wood beneath his forehead was cool, solid—real. A small, stubborn part of him clung to that fact like a lifeline, like pressing his skull against the bar might somehow ground him in reality, might undo whatever cosmic mistake had just been branded into his bones. But no matter how long he stayed there, eyes squeezed shut, counting his breaths like he could slow his racing pulse, the glowing screen didn’t vanish. The words still hung in the air, smug and unyielding, like they knew he wasn’t going anywhere. Like they knew this was final.
He cracked one eye open, half-hoping, half-praying that the whole thing had just been a stress-induced hallucination, the kind brought on by too much caffeine, too little sleep, and the kind of existential dread that came with running a failing bar. But no—his hand still burned, still curled against the counter like a thing that no longer quite belonged to him. The veins were still dark, inked with something unnatural, something that wasn’t leaving. A shudder ran through him. He had no idea what “Ashen Hand” was supposed to mean, but if his body was any indication, he had just inherited something he definitely didn’t want.
Slowly, carefully, he lifted his head. He didn’t want to look at his hand again, didn’t want to acknowledge the creeping wrongness still settling into his skin, but ignoring it wouldn’t make it go away. Nothing would. Not anymore. Instead, he stared at the screen, jaw tight, fingers flexing against the counter as if testing whether they’d still obey him. The words didn’t change. The sentence Cancellation: NOT PERMITTED burned at the bottom of the display like a death sentence, a verdict that had already been carried out. Dante exhaled, long and slow. He had no idea what came next. But he did know one thing.
The universe had just handed him a loaded gun. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to let him put it down.