Thomas Arcos was sprawled across his crumpled sheets in his room, a thin layer of sweat shimmering on his skin. With his long black hair plastered against the nape of his neck, he looked for all intensive purposes to be in a catatonic state. His lean muscles quivered in a state of part exhaustion, part dehydration.

He had just finished a weighted run of six miles, a ritual that he had self-administered more than two years ago when he was a freshman at his high school. For years Thomas had been obsessed with becoming the best version of himself; in his grades, his choices, and in his physical fitness. Of course Thomas had not always been so single-minded in his pursuit of excellence, he had been a normal, happy, middle class American boy until the accident.

Since then; since his mother had been killed, Thomas had vowed to be someone she could be proud of, and since the day that he thrown the first grains of dirt on her coffin he had lived up to that vow. Of course in many ways Thomas had little choice in the matter, his father, an Apache Native American, had abandoned his mother and ran off to Brazil before he was born. As such Thomas had been placed into the vacuous, sterile, and unloving foster care system.

His mother had not been very wealthy but Thomas got enough money each month from the interest on her life insurance policy in order to take classes at a local dojo that taught Muay Thai and jujitsu, active sports that let Thomas release all his frustrations with the discipline his mother had always strove to instill in him. Certainly Thomas could have done a whole host of sports that allowed him to show off his gifts; Thomas knew he was one of the fastest boys in school, and he could have definitely shone on the school wrestling team, but Thomas hated attention. Yes, if there was one weakness Thomas Arcos was guilty of possessing, it was shyness.

By no means was Thomas crippled by his shyness, rather he simply avoided glaring examples of places where he would be the center of attention. There was a second reason, more powerful, and to Thomas one that could not fully admit to himself, as to why he pursued martial arts in his free time. His father, ass that he was, was a semi-pro fighter, the reason of course he abandoned Thomas’ pregnant mother 17 years previous in his pursuit of a MMA career in Brazil. And while Thomas hated him for leaving, blamed him even for his mother’s death, he felt a pull to prove himself worthy, to show his father what he had lost, maybe even to prove that he was more than the sum of his father’s decisions.

…

Thomas had not moved in fifteen minutes, so tired he was from his backpack run across town from his school. It was 5 o’clock, the beginning of April and smell of freshly spread pollen was rich, almost thick enough to taste, a common and altogether annoying by product of living in the American Midwest. Certainly it made it no easier to run with 8 kg worth of textbooks and more than that in ankle weights 6 miles through winding streets and even over Ambassador mount, an imposing (if only for sake of comparison with the inordinately flat normal landscape of the region) and steep hill road upon which downtown government buildings and a few hotel and high-rise apartments seemed to gloomily leer down upon the rest of the town.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Thomas was forced to bring home such a huge load because of the bizarre natural phenomena that had been occurring across the globe for the past week that seemed to only be growing in frequency and which had caused the state to cancel classes for the foreseeable future while scientists figured out what exactly was going on.

…

FLASH!

The sky erupted in a sudden burst of red and gold light. Thomas bolted up, running to the window. He stared out with shock as he saw before his very eyes, rifts opening in the sky, and in the distance a mountain was rising stretching, growing with amazing speed, and even more twisting of the earth, as the countryside seemed to gain dimension, in a minute the flat landscape that Thomas had known was completely altered, terraformed beyond recognition.

Suddenly a message appeared in front of Thomas’ face… an alert.. A messenger of the end of all Thomas knew to be true.

Welcome Thomas!!!

The world has changed. Now you must fight to survive. Devils, Angels, and monsters have been unleashed by God, so beware. Do what you must, or not! But do not despair for the limits of humanity have been broken. Anyone can rise to greater enlightenment. Defeat monsters, improve yourself, and control your destiny.

But be alert… Monsters could appear almost anywhere!!!

Good luck!

As Thomas stared at the alert window before him his mind raced. While the strange events of the past days had certainly helped place him into the mindset of suspending disbelief, even as the earth changed it was still within the scope of his understanding of the world and tectonic plates. But monsters? An alert window? This was not a world, a reality that he could recognize. What was going on?

Before Thomas could even fully process, he saw a ripple out of the corner of his eye. He turned, just in time to see a creature, humanoid with a bulging back, scaly arms, and most imposing of all, a large knife covered in runes in its right hand. At around 155 cm in height it was almost 30 cm shorter than Thomas it was not physically imposing but in its eyes Thomas’ experience with fighters immediately registered that this… thing was.. dangerous.. deadly.

Even scarier than its features, even scarier than its pitch black eyes, two pools looking right into the abyss, was the image floating above its head.

Lvl. 5 Lesser Devil (Imp of the 2nd circle)

Thomas stared, his mind and body hopelessly trying to connect as the events of the past few minutes in order to find some way of processing what was going on.

As he struggled to come to terms with the shift in the very fabric of existence, Thomas and the creature made eye contact. Then the creature, rather the imp, shifted, its guttural looking face contorting into a fang-filled smile. Hell had come to play.