Atlas Herion, was your average high schooler, average grades, average looks… He really liked anime and manga, to the point that he sometimes even skipped classes to watch some episodes of his favorite anime. He also liked RPG games and he often imagined what he’d do if magic really existed in the world, for starters he’d get back at his bullies… Yes, he was being bullied, it didn’t matter that the high school he was attending to was one of the most prestigious ones in the country. That actually made it worse. If he had attended a regular high school, the teachers might have paid heed to his pleas for help, but he was attending a high school for elites, which meant that the schoolboard was more interested in getting benefits from the rich parents than in helping the students in trouble. This was actually what made him being so into anything fantasy world-related, it gave him a way to escape reality.

It’d have been different if he had a powerful background, but the only reason why he was attending such a high school was his aunt Mary, who had taken him in after his parents died in a car accident. For eight years, his aunt had tried to shape him into an “elite” boy, which of course included going to a high school for “elites”. She had married a South-Korean soldier of Chinese and Japanese ascents, who had hit the jackpot on the military supplies market and retired early. Although he had passed onto Atlas everything he knew by the time he was seventeen, Atlas was being bullied.

This might seem strange, you might wonder why he was being bullied if he was proficient in multiple martial arts among other things, the reason was quite simple, he was a coward. He had the skills to mop the floor with his bullies but he lacked the guts to go against them… until he found a letter of his friend Jasmine, who had taken her own life a year before. She had jumped from the roof of the school building, for no apparent reason. She was Atlas’ best friend and only pillar of support, and after she was gone, the bullying got worse. She was the only one, besides his bullies and teachers, who knew what he was going through.

He didn’t want to tell his uncle and aunt of his situation. His aunt had recently given birth to a girl, and he couldn’t bother them with his own problems. He had already told them that he would go out of the house as soon as he was eighteen, look for a job and live his own life. He understood that after the hit they had received after the fall of the economy in their country, the financial support they were giving him was taking a toll on them, and they needed the money for their own daughter. When they realized his real intentions in doing so, they were moved, but they didn’t try to stop him.

One day, six months after Jasmine’s death, he found a book of Jasmine’s in his bookshelf. It was a book she had lent to him the day before killing herself. He went through the pages while crying… she looked so normal that day… he was the closest person to her yet he failed to notice anything wrong with her. For six months, he had wondered why she had taken her own life, but he couldn’t find any answer. The schoolboard covered it up and her parents moved out of the country because they couldn’t take the situation.

When he was going through the last pages, an envelope fell on the floor. Atlas picked it up and opened it. Inside of the envelope, he found a letter and he recognized the writing, it was Jasmine’s. The contents of the letter gave him the answer he had been looking for, and his sorrow changed into rage, he was a coward, but he decided that this time he’d put his life on the line in order to avenge Jasmine’s death.

A school-trip to the mountains had been scheduled for a couple of months, and the departure would be the following weekend. He was sure his bullies would try to do the usual thing as soon as they arrived to the destination, so he planned to escape into the forest, and when they followed him, he’d confront them and make them pay with their lives for what they did to Jasmine, driving her to take her own life. He could have beard with anything they might have thrown at him, but touching Jasmine was unforgivable, and after what they did to her, only taking their lives would give Jasmine’s soul rest.

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Several days had passed and Atlas had put his plan into motion. He had managed to attract the bullies into the forest and had confronted them with what they had done to Jasmine, but he didn’t expect their reaction:

Bully 1: "Hahaha, so that bitch managed to tell you before killing herself?! Well, we had lots of fun with her, so it’s only natural that she couldn’t forget it! Hahaha!"

Bully 2: "You’re right, Marcus! Hahaha! Besides, it’s not like she didn’t enjoy it, she was even moaning at the end!"

Bully 3: "Well, Sam. After all the drugs, alcohol and aphrodisiac we gave her, it’d have been strange if she had done otherwise! Hahaha!"

Atlas: "You, motherfuckers! I’ll kill you!"

Atlas tried to attack them but he lost consciousness after being shot with a taser-gun. While he was unconscious, the other three were deciding what to do with him. He knew too much, and they couldn’t afford to let him tell his story. He might had some kind of proof entrusted to him by the dead girl, so the easiest way to avoid any further trouble was to kill him there and then, because as the saying goes… “a dead man tells no tales”.

Marcus: "Sam, Mike. Let’s just kill him!"

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Sam: "…"

Mike: "I don’t know, Marcus. Having fun breaking a girl is one thing… we’ve done it several times… but killing a guy in cold blood is a whole different thing… if it ever got out we could get the death penalty!"

Marcus: "Mike, isn’t your father a lawyer? Then you should know that when that girl killed herself, the crimes we could be charged with changed from rape, to rape and murder, because her death was caused as a consequence of what we did to her. That means that if we go to trial it’s almost 100% certain that will get the dead penalty! That’s why he must disappear!"

Sam: "He is right, Mike! I overheard some locals, there is a bottomless well close by. The locals have covered it so that there are no accidents, we can throw the body there after we’re done with him. Decades could pass before the body is found, if it ever is. And if it is found, it will look like he tried to look into the well and accidentally fell into it!"

Marcus: "Good idea, Sam! Mike, are you with us or against us?"

Mike: "You already know that I’m with you, man!"

Marcus, Sam: ""Good!""

After they agreed into killing Atlas, they kicked the hell out of him until almost every bone in his body was broken. When they got tired of kicking him, Sam checked him but couldn’t find any pulse, so they determined that he was dead and threw him into the well. Then they returned to the inn and took his luggage, they went back to the well and threw the luggage inside. They thought that way, if the body was ever discovered it’d look like Atlas had dropped his luggage into the well and he fell inside too when he attempted to recover it. Finally, they relaxed and went back into the inn to join their classmates.

When the teachers asked for Atlas, the three said that they had seen him go out of the inn with his luggage, and that he had told them he was going out of the country and never coming back. The teacher was well aware of the kind of relationship Atlas had with the trio, so, to avoid any trouble, he decided to take their word for it. As soon as he entered the inn, he called Atlas’ aunt to tell her the news, after doing so, he forgot about the matter. Mary thought it was strange that Atlas had left so soon and without any notice. Her husband thought like her, but he didn’t try to look for him. After all, if Atlas wanted to contact them he knew where to find them!

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The so called “bottomless well” was connected to a gigantic underground cave. At its bottom, Atlas woke up in pain. Fortunately for him, Sam was so nervous that he missed his pulse when he checked, and when they threw him into the well, he landed knees first, so aside from the serious internal damage and having almost every bone in his body broken, he was pretty much alive. He looked around and saw a light illuminating a radius of ten yards around a pedestal.

The pedestal was on the center of the cave. Atlas thought all that was really strange, but he didn’t care, given his situation, he’d have trouble finding the way out, and to do so, a source of light was indispensable, so he had to get it! Through an unimaginable amount of effort and pain, Atlas managed to drag his body to the pedestal, and then rested for a while with his back against it. After a couple of hours of rest, he climbed it up and discovered a glowing orb on top of it.

At that time Atlas hadn’t realized it yet, but his body was healing at a fast rate due to the effects of the orb, that was the reason for him being able to move despite the state of his body. Atlas tried to take the orb, but the very moment he touched it, he was transported into a white room with black flames 8 feet tall in the middle of it. Atlas didn’t understand what was going on, he desperately looked for an escape route, but there was none. It was a room without any door or window.

???: "Atlas Herion."

Atlas: "Who is this? Why did you bring me here? Show yourself!"

???: "Hmm, mortals never have any patience… Very well… Boy you could say that I am a being that in your mortal terms you would call a god, and my physical manifestation is the black flames in front of you!"

Atlas: "A god?! No kidding! Do you take me for an idiot? Gods don’t exist!"

???: "I can’t say that you are wrong, but neither can I say that you are right. Although it is true that there aren’t any gods in this world, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any in other worlds…"

Atlas: "So you mean that you are a god from another world who came here for a vacation and kidnapped me…"

???: "That’s not it, but it’s close enough. I came from another world, but not on vacation, I came because I was dying. The world I came from will suffer a catastrophe which will end with all life on it, and my power will be necessary to avoid that. However, as I already said, I was dying and the only way to help my former world is to send my power back. That’s why you’re here, I’ll transfer to you all my power and knowledge, then I’ll send you to that world. I don’t know whether the catastrophe I talked about earlier will happen in a week or in a millennium from your arrival, but you’ll be a god, so you can wait because you won’t die."

Atlas thought about the proposal, it was tempting but there were also some things which didn’t add up, for example, if the gods of that world were immortal, how came that this god had to seal himself into the orb to avoid dying?