Chapter 1 – The Devils Playground
*
Blood to blood, and bone to bone. Break the child, remake our own. Name and soul to darkness cast. None shall mourn what does not last.
Let demon's gift and night's embrace. Carve perfection into flesh and face. From pain shall rise our finest art. A loyal blade, a fearless heart.
Praise the night that veils our sin. Praise the blood that dwells within. What we forge with willing hands. Shall bring this world beneath our command.
*
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The first thing that returned was pain.
It rolled through my body in slow, aching waves, leaving me with the sickening impression that every bone had been crushed and put back together wrong. I tried to move and immediately regretted it. My chest tightened as I dragged in several shallow breaths, staring into darkness broken only by a thin strip of torchlight beyond the bars in front of me.
“Where am I?”
Even my voice was wrong—too small, too high.
I lay still and tried to think past the fear. The last thing I remembered was the crosswalk. The red light. Headlights filling my vision as the truck closed the distance between us.
Then nothing.
This wasn't a hospital. The air was too cold, the floor beneath me too hard, and the darkness smelled of damp stone, rust, and something faintly rotten.
I lifted one arm and froze.
It was too small.
I raised both hands into the weak light and stared at fingers far shorter than I remembered, joined to thin wrists and arms that clearly belonged to a child. For several seconds I could only look at them, waiting for my mind to offer some explanation that made sense.
It never got the chance.
The barred door swung open.
Torchlight flooded the cell as three figures stepped inside. Each wore a dark, carved mask that left almost nothing human visible beneath it, and none of them showed the slightest hesitation as they approached me.
I tried to push myself backward, but my legs barely responded.
One of them crouched beside me and closed a hand around my arm. His grip was strong enough that I immediately stopped struggling.
He turned my wrist over, examined my face, and looked down the rest of my body with the same detached interest someone might give an animal they were considering buying.
“Still alive,” he muttered. He almost sounded disappointed. “Tough little bastard.”
The woman standing behind him laughed.
“He’ll wish he wasn’t soon enough.”
Every instinct I had screamed at me to fight. Kick. Bite. Do anything.
My new body refused to cooperate.
They dragged me from the cell and forced me through a maze of damp stone corridors while I stumbled between them, concentrating more on keeping my feet beneath me than on where they were taking me.
The room waiting at the end was worse than the cage.
Rows of narrow tables lined the walls, each fitted with metal restraints. Strange machines hummed along stone counters crowded with glass tubes, needles, stained instruments, and jars filled with fluids I couldn't identify. At the far end stood a stone altar darkened by so many old stains that I didn't need anyone to tell me what had soaked into it.
I stopped looking at it.
No one explained where I was or what they intended to do with me.
Instead, one of them seized my wrist and pressed my palm against a pale crystal floating above a metal pedestal.
Light rippled across its surface.
A translucent screen appeared in front of me.
Ding.
< [ STATUS ] >
Name : ——————
Class : None
Race : Human
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
HP : 10 / 10
MP : 0 / 0
Stamina : 5 / 10
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Strength : 5
Defense : 2
Speed : 2
Magic : 0
Charisma : 10
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Resistance : 100
Luck : -100
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Skills : None
Titles : None
My eyes settled on the final two numbers.
Resistance: one hundred.
Luck: negative one hundred.
I had no idea what scale any of this used, but putting those two beside each other felt suspiciously like the universe laughing at me.
The man studied the display and gave a disappointed grunt.
“Everything except the resistance is worthless.” His gaze remained on that number. “One hundred, though...”
The woman leaned closer.
“Maybe this one will last.”
I opened my mouth to demand an explanation, but they were already dragging me toward one of the tables. Metal restraints closed around my wrists and ankles before I could properly struggle, biting painfully into skin that still didn't feel like mine.
The man picked up a syringe filled with something so dark and held it briefly against the light.
“This will hurt,” he said pleasantly. “Quite a lot. I find it better not to pretend otherwise.”
Then he pushed the needle into my arm and the burning started before he had even finished emptying the syringe.
I screamed.
Whatever they had injected into me felt alive. Heat tore through my veins and spread into my chest, my stomach, my legs, until there was nowhere inside my body that didn't feel as though it were being ripped apart and rebuilt at the same time.
I screamed until my throat turned raw and my voice collapsed into broken gasps.
They simply watched.
I bit down hard enough to taste blood and clenched my fists until my nails cut into my palms.
Survive.
The word beat through my head alongside my pulse.
You just woke up. You don't get to die again.
After that, the days began to lose their shape.
They came for me again and again, each time carrying another syringe of that same black substance. Sometimes the burning lasted minutes. Sometimes hours. Eventually pain became so ordinary that I stopped measuring the days by anything except how long I had until they returned.
Other children were brought in during those first few days.
I heard them crying through the walls, begging to go home, screaming when the injections began.
Then, one by one, they went quiet.
I stopped counting them after that.
What I couldn't stop wondering was why I hadn't joined them. The only explanation I had was that absurd resistance stat.
Whatever that number truly meant, my body was enduring something theirs couldn't.
I didn't feel lucky.
Every morning I opened my eyes only meant the experiment wasn't finished with me yet.
I was right.
I was pretending to sleep when voices drifted through the corridor outside my cell.
“The final dose has been administered.”
“Good.”
There was a short silence before the deeper voice continued.
“And the transformation?”
“Slow, but stable, Master. The succubus blood has taken hold. At the current rate, the process should complete itself within a few years. The body will be female.”
My stomach twisted.
Succubus blood.
For days they had been pouring demon blood into me. I kept my breathing slow and my eyes closed.
“How much remains?”
“None. That was the last of it.”
“Hmm.”
Another pause followed.
“What else do we have?”
“Vampire blood, Master.”
The silence after those words felt somehow worse than everything before them.
“Begin the injections. All of it, if the body can take it.”
“Yes, Master.”
Their footsteps slowly disappeared down the corridor.
I remained motionless until even the echoes were gone. Only then did I open my eyes.
Succubus blood.
Vampire blood.
None of this had been random. The injections, the pain, the children who had gone silent one after another—it was all part of whatever they were trying to create.
And now I knew I was still alive because the process was working.
They were remaking me.
Piece by piece, they were filling this body with things that had never belonged inside it and waiting to see what survived at the end.
I didn't know what I would become. Worse, I didn't know how much of me would still be there when they were finished.
For the first time since waking in this place, that frightened me more than the pain.
But beneath the fear, something stubborn refused to disappear.
I was still alive.
Every dose they had poured into me had failed to finish the job, and as long as I kept breathing, there was still something they hadn't managed to take from me.
If they wanted to turn me into a weapon, then fine.
I would survive long enough to make sure they never got to choose where it pointed.