Dante didn’t stop running until his lungs burned—sharp, raw, punishing—like cheap whiskey chased with regret. His body screamed at him to stop, to breathe, to process the fact that he had just tried—and failed—to outrun something that wasn’t even chasing him. Not in the way a person would. Not in the way anything with a face would.

The city pulsed around him, its neon glow slicing through the night like veins of molten color, everything too bright, too loud, too real—and yet, he felt completely untethered. His mind reeled, spinning between the system’s cold, damning words and the weight coiled around his very existence. His right hand still smoldered, the blackened veins writhing beneath his skin in slow, deliberate patterns, like ink bleeding through old parchment. And beneath it all—tap. Tap. Tap. That same phantom knock, lurking just beneath the surface of his thoughts. Fainter now, but no less present. Something wanted in.

Panic wouldn’t help him. Neither would running blindly through the city until his legs gave out. He needed answers, and there was only one place to get them. Because when you had a problem that didn’t belong in the waking world—when you were tangled in debts that defied logic and bound by contracts that had never seen a courtroom—there was only one place to go.

The Undermarket.

It had no official address. No friendly neon sign. No mention in city records, no late-night deep-dive threads on conspiracy forums. The Undermarket wasn’t found. You either knew where to look, or you never saw it at all. It sat beneath reality, a hidden artery beneath the skin of the city, pulsing with trade that shouldn’t have existed—secrets, curses, favors, power. If you were desperate enough, reckless enough, or just plain unlucky enough, it was the only place that mattered.

Dante had never been there. Not personally. But he’d heard the whispers. The way some of his bar’s more eccentric regulars would start to talk too much after their third or fourth drink—muttering names that made the air feel heavier, mentioning places that didn’t appear on any map, hinting at transactions that had nothing to do with money.

Contracts. Debts. Power.

And now? Now he was one of the poor bastards bound to one.

So he followed the scraps. Pieced together half-drunk confessions and slurred warnings, traced the outlines of a hidden truth buried beneath layers of urban myth. It led him down, ever down, through the city’s forgotten veins—the places where streetlights barely reached, where the scent of old metal and bad luck clung to the walls like a second skin.

Until finally, he saw it.

A rusted service elevator, tucked into a dead-end alley, its doors warped with time, half-obscured by layers of graffiti. No signs. No markings. Just a single keypad, old and grimy, its screen blinking with a faint, waiting cursor.

Up close, the elevator looked even worse—its metal frame eaten away by rust, the seams lined with something dark and waxy, like old candle drippings or seals melted shut. The graffiti covering its surface wasn’t the usual drunken scrawls of teenagers with spray cans. No gang tags. No slurs. No declarations of love that would last only until the next coat of paint. Instead, the markings were intricate, deliberate, a tangled script that made Dante’s vision swim the longer he stared. Some looked vaguely mathematical, others jagged and sharp, like they had been cut into the metal rather than painted. And one, just above the keypad, sent a shiver down his spine—a simple eye, drawn in thick, uneven strokes. Watching.

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The keypad itself was old, ancient even, its buttons worn smooth by hands that had pressed them long before Dante was ever born. No labels. No numbers. Just a grid of blank squares and that blinking, expectant cursor. The thing had no business still functioning, but as Dante stood there, hesitating, the screen pulsed faintly, almost like it was breathing. A low hum filled the air—not mechanical, not the quiet churn of an overworked generator, but something deeper, subterranean. A resonance that he could feel in his teeth. In his bones. Like the whole damn thing was listening.

Dante flexed his fingers, trying to shake the uneasy static that curled beneath his skin. His right hand still tingled, the remnants of that failed debt transfer coiling in his palm like dying embers. Could this thing tell? Did it know what he was? What he carried? He resisted the urge to wipe his palm against his jacket, as if he could scrub away the weight of his choices. Instead, he exhaled slowly, forcing down the knot of unease in his chest. This was it. The moment between knowing and plunging headfirst into the unknown. One last chance to walk away. But if there had ever been an exit route, he’d passed it long ago. Only one way left to go.

Dante flexed his fingers, his palm still tingling with the remnants of something not entirely his own. He swallowed hard.

“Well. Here goes nothing.”

He pressed his hand against the pad.

The metal burned cold. Not the chill of winter air or forgotten steel, but something deeper—the cold of locked vaults and unpaid debts.

A second passed. Then another. The cursor flickered.

CLICK.

The doors lurched open.

Beyond them, stairs spiraled downward. A winding descent, far deeper than any subway line, any basement, any place that should have fit beneath the city. A faint golden glow pulsed from below, casting twisting shadows against the stone walls. And the air—God, the air. It smelled of ink and old parchment. Of dust and secrets. And beneath it all, something faintly, unmistakably wrong.

Dante hesitated for exactly half a breath. Then he stepped forward.

The second his foot crossed the threshold, the air shifted. Not just the stale, metallic scent of the elevator, not just the faint draft from below—it was something deeper, more fundamental. The city above felt distant, like he had stepped through an invisible barrier, like he had already begun sinking into some place that did not obey the rules of the world he knew. The walls of the elevator were covered in old, tarnished mirrors, their glass warped and rippling, as if they had once been melted and refrozen. His own reflection stared back at him, slightly wrong—the shadows under his eyes darker, the black veins on his hand more pronounced, crawling a fraction further up his wrist than they had before.

A deep groan rumbled through the elevator, metal and something older straining against unseen forces. The floor beneath him shuddered. Dust drifted from the ceiling in lazy spirals, catching in the dim, golden light that flickered from below. The moment felt suspended, stretched thin between movement and stillness, between arrival and descent. And then, from somewhere deep beneath him, a sound—low, rhythmic, steady. Not machinery. Not gears turning or cables pulling. A pulse. A slow, deliberate heartbeat thrumming through the bones of the structure itself, as if the Undermarket was not a place at all, but a living thing waiting to wake.

Dante inhaled sharply, instinct telling him to turn back—even as he knew there was no turning back. His fingers twitched at his sides, resisting the urge to touch the contract’s mark on his hand. The system had registered him. It knew he was here. And whatever waited below? It knew, too. His body tensed, ready for—something. A drop, a shift, a voice in the dark. But there was no warning. No count to three. No moment of preparation. The Undermarket had already made its decision. And with a final, resounding clang, the doors slammed shut.

The doors slammed shut behind him.

And just like that—

He was in the Underworld.