It was late in the afternoon, the shadows grew long as the sun fell towards the horizon, and yet none of the lights in the Cabrera’s house was on.

The interior of the house was dark, save the areas near the windows where the late afternoon sun poured in its warming rays through. Everything inside the house was eerily quiet, as if there was nobody at home on that early summer day.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sprawled on the floor of the house’s messy living room, next to the overturned dining table and the fallen cabinet that used to hold their old CRT television - now broken on the floor, much like many other things in the room - was Joaquin Cabrera, the man of the house.

Or rather, the dead body of Joaquin Cabrera.

The middle-aged hispanic man laid down dead on his stomach, with his eyes wide open, his expression locked in a mixture of rage, pain, and disbelief all at the same time. The cause of his death was easy to discern, as the half-dozen stab wounds on his back would testify for themselves. Intent to kill was obvious, as the stabs were deliberately aimed at his kidneys, liver, stomach, and lungs, which ensured that he died a prolonged, painful death.

Which was the whole point, and one that was achieved, considering the obvious pain on his final expression.

Elsewhere in the quiet house, the quiet noise - usually hard to discern, but obvious in the prevailing silence - of flowing water could be heard. In fact, the rose-tinted water had flooded part of the house, where it ruined the carpeting and seeped through gaps as they spread out from the bathroom swiftly and unimpeded.

Inside the bathroom itself, within the white bathtub lay a young woman, still a teenager, really, who rested her head of curly hair on the rim of the tub. The source of the rosy tint of the water came from her submerged wrists, from where her lifeblood freely flowed out and diluted itself into the flowing water all around her, as she simply waited for and welcomed the oblivion that approached.

From the midst of her barely conscious mind - or what remained of it, she couldn’t really tell in her current state - Esperanza thought that she heard someone knock on the door of the house. She thought that she heard Alissa’s voice, one of her very few friends at school, asking if she was home. Neither caused her to react one bit, though even if she wanted to, she probably couldn’t do anything about it anyway with how far she had gone by then.

Not like it would matter. Not like anything would matter at all, soon. She could feel it, if vaguely, how her consciousness - or what was left of it - seemed to slowly dissipate away, slowly vanish like the smoke. Everything seemed to distort around her bleary vision, as in the world twisted around on itself, and Esperanza felt almost as if she was falling. A gentle, slow fall, yet one without end.

Was that what death felt like?

She thought it wasn’t so bad, if it just meant one would cease to be, to never feel anything more. Definitely better than the so-called heaven or hell that all the priests kept preaching about on the weekly mass. That was fine. She was tired of life. If the afterlife was just like life, but either with way more boredom - like the who in the everloving fuck ever thought that an eternity spent “praising the lord” would anything but boring as shit anyway - or more suffering, then she was fine with none of it.

She wanted none of it.

After some time passed - it was hard to tell, given whatever her situation was, really - Esperanza thought she heard voices in her head. Was she hallucinating prior to the end? No, those voices sounded a lot like one of those announcer things from the computer games Alissa liked, with the monotone delivery and all the lack of emotion. Had she liked them so much that she hallucinated about them at her final moments? Really?

C@ndidate De|ected…

3heck1ng…

Sy$te\ In$egr@ti&n Init%at#d…

!7/%7@8 Processing…

ER#)R!

!$+OR!

3RR^@!

And then everything felt as if someone just overturned the world and gave it a big shake.

Suddenly, Esperanza felt everything seem to settle down, and she could… not see, nor really “feel” what was around her, but it was more like she had some sort of general sense of the things around her. She couldn’t really sense herself per se, nor could she sense much of whatever was around her, which just felt like one huge, empty space, but she felt something more important.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

She sensed that she was not alone.

We see that you had felt our presence, o stranger from the strange land. That will help make this… introduction simpler.

The voice - for that was what it best resembled - was not one she heard with her ears. It was something that seemed to come from everywhere at once, as it echoed and reverberated all around her, yet somehow remained harmonious rather than cacophonous. It sounded like it was said by many different people at the same time, male and female, old and young, yet they all also somehow blended into a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.

“Quién? Que? Is this supposed to be the afterlife or something?” asked Esperanza in a flustered flurry of questions. Her voice sounded like it was said under water to her senses, but for some reason she just knew that whatever the voice that first accosted her was, it would understand her regardless, even though she had reflexively asked in Spanish at first. “I thought I was dead.”

You were dead, that is correct, foreign one.

“So if I was dead what am I doing talking to you right here then?” she asked back. “Puta Madre! Don’t tell me that because I got high that one time back at tenth grade I’mma be living the rest of my afterlife as some sort of weed dream?”

We are uncertain what this weed you meant was, but let us at least assure you that this is not a dream, although you might well think it could be one. We are… what your kind used to call gods, deities, angels or devils, we went by many names in the past. Now we are just… what little is left of us here.

“Oookay… If this is some sort of exposition dump I’m listening, for now anyway,” said Esperanza with what she “felt” might have been a shrug of her shoulders. She still couldn’t feel anything that resembled her body… was she just some errant soul in whatever this place was? “Go on, por favor.”

It might be difficult to accept, but first, please allow us to lay down the facts. You, foreigner, are dead in your home reality, and by sheer happenstance, the remnant bits of your soul that still lingered in your final moments were swept in the wake of a summoning ritual intended to call upon… heroes from your reality to ours.

“Huh? Heroes? So like those stories Ethan really liked, huh?” asked Esperanza with some exasperation in her voice, paired with obvious incredulity. Nevertheless, she was aware enough that she caught on to the slight pause the voice had before it used the term “heroes” just then. “Mierda. It’s not as simple as that, isn’t it? There’s some Cojones going on behind the scene or something I take it?”

You are a perceptive one, but yes. Will you listen to our situation?

“Not like I have much of a choice, now do I?”

It is polite to ask nevertheless, is it not? We thought that your kind valued such politeness.

“True, I guess. Go on, then. I’m all ears.”

This world used to be a more… peaceful place to be, until in the distant past, two nations at war used long-forbidden rituals to call upon powerful heroes from other worlds. What they had not expected were that the heroes summoned by the nations happened to come from the same world, and once they met on the battlefield, they swiftly banded together against their summoners.

“Serves the Pendejos right. Calling people to fight their fight for them… Qué Cabrón!”

Right. We like that term you used to describe them. Anyway, as we mentioned, the heroes banded together, but they were not content with just ending the war. They kept striving for higher heights… until they reached powers not unlike our own, and then decided that they would make better rulers of the world below than us.

“So they overthrew you lot, got that. I assume what you’re gonna say next is some explanation on why I should side with you rather than them.”

Astute. The heroes had soon grown… bored of their position and responsibilities. It was then that they… began twisting the world into their playground to relieve themselves of that boredom. They used our remains to fortify the world and bound our remnant souls to it, and then used what power we had left in our carcasses to summon another batch of heroes like how they were summoned.

By then they had divided the world into two sides, and had commanded their worshippers to go to war with each other, which they treated as entertainment. The newly summoned heroes were only told as much as they needed to know, and while they grew powerful, it was a power that came with shackles, as the new gods had not wished for rivals to their rule.

“So what did they do to them?” asked Esperanza, somehow enthralled by the… entity’s tale despite herself. It was either that this was merely some hallucination prior to her end, or that it was real, and either way it didn’t hurt to listen.

The new gods harvested the summoned heroes once they grew strong enough to be of use for their plans. From their souls, mixed with part of our own remnant souls, the new gods then crafted something they called a… “system”, something that bent and replaced the rules of the world and encompassed every living being under its power.

“And then?”

And then the new gods repeated the process every time they grew bored, every new hero summoned, harvested, their soul bound into the system to further empower it. By now the new gods no longer truly controlled their creation as it had likely grown stronger than they were, only kept safe by its lack of a will of its own. It is through… learning how to manipulate bits of this system that we managed to draw upon you into this audience with what was left of us.

“Okay, I get that much, sort of, I guess. Just two questions before we go on though. Why me? And what do you want out of me that you’d pull me over like this?”

The answer to the first question is simple, foreign one. We are deprived from most of what we once were, mere remnants with a fraction of the power we used to wield. We lacked the power to draw in one of the other heroes, who were brought to this reality in their fleshly bodies. Only you were in the form of a remnant soul, one small enough for us to draw over with what little mastery of the system we managed. As such, it was not like we had much choice in the matter. You were the first and only candidate we were able to attract to our side over countless years.

“Because I’m already dead, huh? Okay, I guess I can buy that much. And the second question?”

As we had mentioned, our remnant souls are bound into the world that had long been twisted to the new gods whims. The world is dying, foreign one, yet the new gods forcefully kept it in existence against the flow of nature itself. Our wish is for you to bring everything to an end, so that it could begin anew as it had always been intended.

This would require much of you, as you would need to gain power until you were strong enough to wrestle access and control of the system from the gods, and through it, bring everything to its destined and much awaited endpoint. That is what we would request of you, o foreign one. That you bring this unnaturally prolonged existence that had shackled both us and this world to an end and allow it all to pass on peacefully.

That you destroy this world.