CHAPTER 97: NIGHTMARE, PART 9

Everyone wanted to be at the top.

Anyone who said otherwise was either lying or had spent years making excuses, rationalizing, and coming to terms with their mundane lives. But if given the chance, nobody would say no to it.

No matter how humble, no matter how much of a saint they claimed to be, no one would refuse.

Saints and monsters wanted the same thing.

Money to fulfill every whim and need, more than enough to never feel fear again. So many people seemed to live to work rather than work to live, trapped by necessity. Anyone would do anything to escape that miserable cycle. And once you no longer had to fight and scrape for the essentials, you could start to think about what truly mattered, what truly filled you—the honey in the haystack.

Fine dining, cars, women. All kinds of things.

Some people might preach about humility, how money doesn’t buy happiness, and all that, but those were always the empty words of losers.

Life was actually very simple. It was about control.

People without control were desperate. People with control thrived and found happiness. Sam knew that deep down—it was just that simple.

That’s why Sam was convinced he hadn’t done anything wrong. Anyone else in his shoes would’ve made more or less the same decisions. Whether it was for power, the control it promised, or out of fear of Satan.

And the consequences of disobeying him without the strength to back it up.

So why had things turned out like this? If someone asked him what he would’ve done differently if given the chance, he wouldn’t even know where to begin. He had no idea how to avoid this ending.

Maybe Hunger had been right all along. Maybe some things were set in stone long before he came into this world, long before his reincarnation—or migration, or whatever they called it—into this new life.

He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Even in the best-case scenario, it would be a cold comfort, if it was any comfort at all.

Sam gasped, coughing violently. The pain was like being stabbed. No—he had been stabbed. One of the many beams that had fallen amid the wreckage had impaled him.

He was buried deep in darkness, the rubble pressing down on him like the lid of a coffin.

A beam had pierced his shoulder—shattered it, reduced it to pulp—and the debris crushed and suffocated him. His tomb was ready. Sam struggled to move, barely able to shift, clawing his way back toward the light, toward the surface.

What scared him most was that he didn’t understand why this had happened. He couldn’t remember how he’d ended up here or what he could’ve done to avoid this outcome, this… defeat.

Defeat? No. That was impossible. No one defeated him. Every single person who’d tried had died screaming for daring to think they could.

Forming a stalactite in his left hand, he shoved aside the debris and began crawling through a narrow tunnel, hoping it led upward. Believing it did.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

But his hands were slick with sweat, his head throbbed, and he couldn’t see anything. Nothing. His eyes burned, but there was only darkness. So dark.

Like the ocean floor. The depths of death.

No.

He was a god. He couldn’t fall here. He was a god, and he had defeated everyone.

Everyone?

He’d barely managed to send Castiel running with his tail between his legs.

Hunger had escaped him twice, and only Michael had saved him from being finished off in her vengeance for what he’d done to her sister, War.

Not to mention Michael himself, who thought he could control Sam, wield him like a weapon. Just like his brother had thought. Ha. Like father, like worthless son.

And maybe—just maybe—they’d been right all along. Maybe he’d been dancing in the palm of destiny’s hand from the very start. Misfortune never came alone. Or rather, it never stopped coming.

Life was nothing but suffering. Agonizing to the very end.

At the mercy of forces beyond your control—that was the life of an ordinary person. So what was so wrong about wanting control?

What was so wrong about wanting to be the master of his fate, the captain of his soul?

Fuck, it hurts. My guts are on fire. They’re more out than in. I can feel them. Dragging along the ground, with me.

The world was pain. Pain was the world. He couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t breathe in this darkness. He didn’t want to die in a place like this. He didn’t want to die at all.

He’d once read a story about some idiot condemned to hell, offered a way out. An escape via a single spider’s thread, climbing upward.

But his thread, his way out of hell, was this torturous climb, his guts scraping against the stone. His regeneration doing its best to shove them back in, to keep him alive.

And awake, despite the overwhelming pain.

It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t made a single mistake. That’s what pissed him off the most. At every turn, he’d made the right call, taken the optimal path. And still, everything had gone to hell. There was no justice in that.

Life was a shitty game.

Sam clawed his way out of hell, what felt like hours later—maybe it really had been hours.

He emerged, gasping like a drowning man breaking the surface.

The sky was red. Not the red of sunset, but the red of a fresh, festering wound. Even the moon had turned the same color.

Wait—the moon? How long had he been down there, in the dark? He must’ve passed out.

What had happened while he was gone? He almost didn’t want to know.

It could only be terrible. But he had no choice but to face it.

“Shit,” Sam muttered.

The ground was a heap of rubble and corpses.

A sea of blood flowed between the stones, but at least he didn’t see his sisters or the queen.

That was something, at least. They were probably alive. They were strong women.

They couldn’t have died while he’d been unconscious down there. That wasn’t… it wasn’t fair.

“Shit! Shit!” Sam muttered, stumbling through the debris and bodies.

Where was Hunger? That was another good question. Not to mention the abomination that had grown in her womb… and which she’d finally given birth to.

He couldn’t remember how he’d ended up in the dark. But he did remember that. The head of that unholy thing emerging from between her legs.

Its eyes had been nothing but cavernous sockets crawling with maggots.

It brings death, he thought. To everyone. To heaven and hell. That’s what it means.

Sam staggered forward, barely catching himself on a chunk of wall that, against all odds, still stood.

His breathing was harsh and ragged, like a wild animal’s.

He still wasn’t healed properly. He had to press his stomach wound with one hand to keep his guts where they belonged.

A moment ago, he thought his ears were ringing.

Now he realized he’d been wrong.

Trumpets.

Beyond the blood-red sky, the trumpets of the apocalypse were sounding.

“Sammy! Enough of this nonsense, okay?” said Lucifer. The voice came from inside his skull. “Give in. Surrender to me. Only together can we defeat it.”

“Where is it?”

“Right here. Right in front of you.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t see anything.”

Sam looked up. And then higher.

And then he realized something very important.

Yes, the sky was stained blood-red, but that wasn’t the only thing red in the heavens. There was a massive section where not a single cloud could be seen. A contrast so striking it would’ve caught his eye immediately—if not for the chaos, the confusion, and the fear.

All of which only grew now.

“Oh my God.”

The thing in the sky moved.