The Tortured Fighter

This story is part of the same shared universe as some of my other stories. It details a simple human with nothing being put through Hell

Magic in the world of creation functions using the principle of life force. Unlike some kind of mana or even stamina, life force can be imagined as the embodiment of one’s own health in energy form. Apart from demons, who have the ability to regenerate their life force, creatures are born with a certain amount of life force which they will deplete as they simply live their lives. It isn’t only magic that decreases life force; It can be used up by being injured, can be decreased via an unhealthy lifestyle, and will always inevitably run out through a person’s natural process of aging. While it is possible to increase the amount of life force a person has through certain forms of magic, or even through rigorous training or consuming certain substances, the amount of increase is almost never significant. So you can imagine how unfortunate it would be for someone to be born with a so small it could not even be measured. No one remembers quite what the boy’s name was, but he is now referred to as various ominous-sounding names such as the scourge, the second cataclysm, or the end of the world. But those who claim to have seen him personally know him simply as H. Born to a family of humans living in Hell, he was at a disadvantage from the very moment of his birth. Demons have regenerating life force, and as such their society has been built around the free use and even exchange of it. H was born with so little life force that the doctors worried he had been a stillbirth. From the moment he emerged he was sickly and lethargic. While not stupid he was never particularly intelligent, and he obviously lacked the capacity to either pursue magic or to train his body. He was destined for a life of barely-maintained mediocrity, but things would only get worse for him from there. With almost no life force to speak of, he was constantly looked down on by all of demon society, shunned and unable to get any kind of job, to find any kind of friends, or to have any kind of success whatsoever. Even his family would soon be broken apart, as his mother would be diagnosed with a terminal disease and die a few months after his 10^th birthday. His father looked down upon him for being a failure, and he grew deeply depressed and angry. So you might think it almost a blessing when the cataclysm happened. He was with his family when he saw them begin to shimmer, or melt, or disintegrate, or claw themselves to bits before his eyes. Though he hated his father and held resentment toward his siblings they were still all he had ever known. He was still just a child only 17 years old, and he fell upon his knees hoping to finally meet the end of his pitiful existence, but it was not be so. A kind hearted demon mage, seeing the scared, suffering human child, and bearing none of the resentment towards him that he had felt from every other person he had ever known, shielded him from the effects of the cataclysm, preventing him from death. This was undeniably the greatest cruelty that would ever befall the man known as H. When he emerged after the cataclysm, he was surrounded by scattered piles of rubble, and what may have once been living beings, but were now unrecognizable as anything that should ever exist. He wandered for miles and miles, but H was very sickly. He ate what little food he could find that had been protected from the cataclysm, and drank from pools of magically irradiated waste as they were the only source of water that remained to him. After three weeks of this irradiated nightmare Hell, he finally fell upon the ground, his body exhausted, beginning to mutate into a grotesque perverted version of the strong, muscular body he’d always wished he could possess, but not one that his life force could ever support. He was thin and stretched having gone without food for so long, and he had endured numerous injuries from the mutated wildlife that had managed to find a semblance of survival through the cataclysm. And it was due to all this, he finally managed to die. 

 

Among all the races, humans have powers that are perhaps the most unique. While most are born simply inferior to all the other races, there will, on occasion, be born a human possessing a unique kind of potential. Though only one human had ever managed to even discover its existence let alone awaken it before the cataclysm, potential might well be the most powerful force across all five worlds. No one quite understands what these unique types of potential are, as really it can be anything at all. A human is simply born with a unique potential, which they will remain completely unaware of unless it is awakened. The way to awaken a person’s potential is utterly unique and nigh impossible to figure out before it happens, but it always involves one common factor: magic. So when H drank from the pools of magically irradiated water, when he was clawed and beaten by the magical mutants or when he dragged himself through the world that had been destroyed by magic, he awakened his potential; and when he finally managed to die, it quite simply didn’t manage to stick. A few minutes after his death, his spirit would return to his body, which would be repaired just enough that it could sustain a living soul for only a moment before dying once again. For weeks on end, the boy would drag himself through the wilderness during these brief moments when he was alive. He would die and resurrect over and over, his body gaining new injuries and being mutated and mangled even further to the point where he was no longer even recognizable as human. But he dragged himself onward until he reached a city in the kingdom neighboring that of the demon Domiel, which had been protected by the powerful devil’s own magic simply due to its proximity to that which he actually cared about. He dragged himself to the gates and begged the guards that he be let in. When they refused, he could do nothing but stay there, dying and resurrecting, over and over, never being let into the city, and losing all concept of time in the process. This finally changed, when he heard the sound of someone approaching. Whether it had been months or mere minutes he had no idea anymore, but it was clear to him that whoever was coming was important. Indeed he was correct, for the person who was coming was none other than the devil that ruled over this land, the king himself. Seeing the pitiful, horrible creature lying dead or dying at the base of the city, the king’s own guard sought to move his body out of the way so as not to disgrace the devil’s presence. He approached him, and reeled back to kick him out of the way, but in that moment, H grabbed the demon’s foot and pulled. He no longer cared about the pain, nor about wasting his life force, and so he pulled with a strength he had never known he had, and he tore the limb from the demon. He died from over exertion, taking the demon with him, but in only a minute, he was back, and with a new demon guard standing over him. One by one, he killed each of the Devil’s guards who approached him, sacrificing his own life to do so but coming back every single time, until finally none were left but the devil himself. The devil was surrounded by powerful magic, and was an extremely competent fighter, but upon seeing what H had done, this being was utterly taken aback. He felt a strange mix of pity, fear, and respect, and perhaps out of all three of them, he decided to offer the sad, broken man a gift. He bent down to bestow upon him a signed document demanding that he be let into the city, and when he bent over, he revealed his horns. In a blind fit of rage and madness H ripped one of the horns from the devil. Enraged and in a great deal of pain, he recoiled, but H in his hunger did the unexpected: he ate the devil’s horn. As is known, it is the special ability of the demon royalty known as the devils that they can “make life force their own”, allowing them to regenerate any life force they’ve won, bought, or stolen from another being and storing that life force in their crownlike horns. Ordinarily, eating a devil’s horn would be instantly lethal to any person, and even if they managed to survive it, they would reap no positive effects from it. But H was far from normal. The magic he had been bathing and baking in had mutated his body, and when he ate the horn though he did die once again upon his return he found he had gained all the life force that was contained within the horn he had just consumed. Immediately he rose up and killed the kind devil without a second thought, before once again demanding to be let into the village. With his signed royal document and all the power he possessed, the guards deemed it more dangerous to keep him from the village than to let him in, and he charged through the gates in search of food and medicine. He ate everything remotely edible in sight, and though he did continue to periodically fall from life, it was less of even an inconvenience for him now. He demanded of every person he met that he be directed to a doctor, and if they could not meet his demands he simply killed them. He took whatever he wanted whenever he saw it and if someone tried to stop him he killed them too. Eventually, the guards and the populace realized that they could not stop him through brute force, and eventually he was granted audience with a talented doctor, who treated his wounds under threat of death. H’s mutations, however, were permanent. The skin was missing from a large portion of his body, and a third limb, ending in some cross between a hand and a foot, protruded from his back. His scalp was completely devoid of hair, which instead grew out of his eyes, and it is said his genitals were mutated unrecognizably. The doctor was inevitably unable to fix these, and of course was murdered by H as soon as that fact was discovered. He would continue to heal and eat and recover in town under the care of one physician after another, some lasting a few months while others lasted only hours or even minutes in one case. But the townsfolk never stopped seeing him as only a monster, and there were more attempts made to kill him than could be kept track of. H was forced to deplete the life force he had stolen from the devil in order to fend off these attackers, and eventually ran out. Soon after attempts on his life became commonplace, however, H began learning how to fight. As the assassins grew more frequent and more skilled and his power grew ever weaker, his abilities were forced to increase to compensate. Though occasionally an assassin would succeed in killing him, he would always come back, and when he did he would be in a murderous rage. After less than two years of this, he had killed every single demon in the city. So he moved on to the next, and did the same thing. He continued to do this, traveling city to city and killing everyone within them. All the while he honed his abilities, which were augmented by the immense strength and enhanced reflexes his mutations had ironically granted him. Many believe that he would eventually have conquered all of Hell, if it weren’t for the intervention of one of Domiel’s students. Sources vary as to who it was, with some claiming it was student 101 or even Domiel’s own daughter while others say it was merely the portaler, having just developed his ultimate spell. Whatever the case, H was ultimately defeated, but he cannot be killed by anyone. 

 

The world of creation is structured like this: there are five planets orbiting around a sun, with a second sun orbiting around the five planets on another axis. However, this is simply part of what is called the world of the body, and it is one of the three realities that exist. Running parallel to it is the world of the spirit, home of the first fairy godmother, but the realities exist in a trinity, and the third reality is known as the world of the mind.

 

While the world of the body and the world of the spirit possess planets, suns and celestial bodies, the world of the mind possesses none of that. The world of the mind functions like a dream. The only objects within are the contents of the mind of its inhabitant. Some are simply physical incarnations of the ideas of objects within a person’s mind, so perhaps if a very tired man were to be transported there, he would quite easily be able to locate a bed. Others, however, are more abstract. Literal representations of one’s inner turmoil, physical manifestations of feelings of lust or greed, anything contained within one’s mind, whether good, bad, or morally neutral, is born into reality by anyone with a consciousness entering the world of the mind. There is also no way to control it. Your entire mind will be manifested, idea by idea, until everything within your personal reality is before you in physical form. This is the world where H was sent. It is said he was also cursed to think primarily dark and evil thoughts, prompting a constant stream of torturous ideas to manifest before him in the other world, and forcing him to fight them off constantly. If this was true however, they would only serve to further H’s power even more, giving him more time and combatants to hone his skill. As soon as he gains enough power, it is said he need only imagine a way out of the world, and he will be able to exit it. Once he does, it could mean the end of the world of Hell.