(Somewhere in the restless playgrounds of Majisto - A neighboring settlement sharing borders with Hollowvale)
The afternoon heat beat down mercilessly on the basketball court even without the sun, turning the asphalt into a furnace that seemed to cook them from below. Victor wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, but it was pointless—more kept pouring down his face like a river.
"Hey! Pass me the ball!" he shouted, his voice cracking slightly with frustration and exhaustion. At eighteen, Victor was caught in that awkward space between teenager and adult, all gangly limbs and desperate determination. But right now, none of that mattered. What mattered was that they were getting absolutely destroyed out here.
This wasn't just losing—this was humiliation served up on a silver platter.
The opposing team moved like they were born on this court. Every play was flawless, every shot effortless. But there was one guy in particular who made Victor's blood boil. He couldn't have been much older than Victor, maybe nineteen or twenty, but he played like he owned the world.
"Pathetic," the guy sneered, weaving through Victor's teammates like they were traffic cones. His dribbling was surgical in its precision, each bounce calculated to make them look foolish. "You guys even trying, or is this just how you always play?"
Victor's teammates were starting to hang their heads. He could see it in their body language—the slumped shoulders, the hesitant movements. They were giving up, convinced they couldn't compete with this level of skill.
But Victor wasn't built to quit.
Maybe it was pride, maybe it was stupidity, but something inside him refused to back down. When the cocky player came driving toward the basket again, Victor stepped directly into his path. It was a desperate move—reckless, even—but sometimes desperation bred miracles.
The collision was inevitable. Victor threw his whole body into the defensive play, and somehow, impossibly, he managed to deflect the ball. It bounced awkwardly off the guy's knee and rolled toward the sideline.
For just a moment, everything went quiet.
The cocky player—Tyler—stood frozen, staring at the loose ball like it had personally offended him. His teammates stopped moving, sensing that something had shifted in the air. Even the handful of spectators who'd been casually watching from the bleachers seemed to hold their breath.
Tyler's face darkened. This wasn't supposed to happen. Guys like Victor weren't supposed to stop guys like him.
That's when someone erupted his ass off the grounds.
The sound came first—a deep, resonant BOOM that seemed to originate from somewhere beneath the earth itself. It was the kind of sound you felt in your chest cavity, in your bones, in places sound wasn't supposed to reach ( makes no sense right 💀). The basketball court buckled and cracked like an eggshell, fissures racing outward from a central point near center court.
Then came the blood.
It erupted from the cracks like a crimson geyser, spraying twenty feet into the air before raining down on the stunned players. The smell hit them next—metallic, thick, overwhelming. Several people immediately started retching.
Through the fountain of blood and the billowing smoke that followed, something began to rise.
At first glance, it might have been human. The basic shape was there—two arms, two legs, a head where it should be. But as the smoke cleared and the blood settled, the differences became horrifyingly apparent.
The thing stood nearly seven feet tall, its frame packed with muscle that looked more like machinery than flesh. But it was the skin—or lack thereof—that made Victor's stomach turn. There was no smooth surface anywhere on its body. Instead, thick veins pulsed and writhed across every inch like living cables, each one swollen with blood that leaked constantly from tiny ruptures that seemed utterly disgusting. The creature was literally weeping blood from every pore.
Its eyes were the worst part. They weren't just red—they were drowning in blood, as if someone had filled the sockets and let them overflow down its cheeks in steady streams.
"Huhhhhhh... huhhhhhh..." The sound it made wasn't quite breathing. More like air being forced through a broken speaker, distorted and wrong. When it finally spoke, its voice carried the same electronic distortion, as if the words were being filtered through static and pierced through everyone's ears.
"I am Blood Lust," it announced, tilting its head at an unnatural angle. "Archdemon."
"Loyal servant of the 7th Hex Demon—Lust herself."
The demon's gaze fell to the ground near its feet, where Tyler's body lay in pieces. What had once been a cocky teenager was now something that barely resembled human anatomy—just fragments of meat and bone scattered across the cracked asphalt.
"Oh my," Blood Lust said, its voice dripping with mock concern. "And who might this have been?"
The theatrical nature of its speech was somehow more terrifying than raw fury would have been. This thing was enjoying itself.
Then it moved.
Victor had played enough sports to recognize speed when he saw it, but this was something else entirely. Blood Lust didn't run—it simply appeared in different locations, as if the space between point A and point B was merely a suggestion it chose to ignore.
The killing began before anyone could process what was happening.
The first victim was one of Tyler's teammates, a kid named Marcus who'd been standing closest to the eruption point. Blood Lust materialized beside him and drove a clawed hand through his chest with casual ease. But instead of simply killing him, the demon began to feed.
Marcus's scream cut off mid-note as his skin grew pale, then gray, then translucent. Victor watched in horror as the boy's blood was literally drawn out through the wound, flowing into Blood Lust like water through a straw. Within seconds, Marcus collapsed—not dead, exactly, but empty. Just a deflated sack of skin and bones.
The other players finally began to run.
Victor's legs moved without conscious thought, carrying him toward the edge of the court. Behind him, he could hear the wet sounds of the demon feeding, punctuated by screams that grew shorter and shorter as more victims were drained dry.
One of his own teammates—Jamie, a good kid who'd never hurt anyone—stumbled and fell directly in Victor's path. Before Victor could help him up, Blood Lust was there, looming over the fallen boy with predatory interest.
"Interesting," the demon mused, crouching down to examine Jamie like a scientist studying a specimen. "Young blood. Untainted by vice and thereby the sweetest of all."
Jamie tried to crawl away, but Blood Lust grabbed him by the ankle and lifted him into the air as easily as picking up a doll. The demon's claws extended, each one about six inches long and sharp enough to cut through bone.
Victor wanted to help. Every decent instinct he possessed screamed at him to do something, anything. But his legs wouldn't obey. He could only watch as Blood Lust opened Jamie's throat with surgical precision, then pressed his mouth to the wound and drank deeply.
When the demon was finished, he let Jamie's empty husk fall to the ground and turned those blood-soaked eyes directly toward Victor.
"Did you really think you could escape me, human?"
Victor didn't bother to listen and tried to run, but his legs had turned to jelly. Blood Lust approached with deliberate slowness, savoring the fear that rolled off his prey in waves. Each step left bloody footprints on the cracked asphalt.
"I can smell your terror," the demon whispered, raising one clawed hand toward Victor's face. "It's almost as delicious as—"
THUNK.
An arrow sprouted from Blood Lust's chest, its shaft vibrating from the impact. Electricity crackled along its length, sending blue sparks dancing across the demon's blood-slicked skin.
Blood Lust looked down at the arrow with mild curiosity, as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder rather than shot him with what was obviously an enchanted weapon. He reached up, grasped the shaft, and pulled it out with a wet sucking sound.
"How rude," he said.
Then he vanished.
Victor blinked, and suddenly Blood Lust was fifty yards away, standing over the crumpled form of a woman in forest-green armor. She was young, maybe mid-twenties, with short blonde hair and the kind of determined jawline that spoke of someone who'd never backed down from a fight. On her shoulder was a patch Victor recognized—the Ethereal Knights logo, a silver sword crossed with a lightning bolt.
She'd been an elite warrior, trained to fight demons and monsters that most people only saw in nightmares. Now she was just another corpse.
Blood Lust held up her severed head like a trophy, dark blood dripping from the ragged neck. His smile was the most terrifying thing Victor had ever seen—not because it was monstrous, but because it was genuinely happy.
"You know," the demon said conversationally as he walked back toward Victor, "blood is my fuel. But fear... fear is my dessert."
He reached the terrified Victor and, with casual precision, drove his claws into the boy's stomach. Victor felt his flesh part like tissue paper, felt the impossible cold of the demon's touch spreading through his abdomen. He looked down and saw his own intestines spilling onto the ground, steaming in the afternoon heat.
The pain was indescribable. But worse than the physical agony was the knowledge that this was how it ended—not as a hero, not even as someone who'd tried to make a difference. Just as prey.
Blood Lust opened his mouth impossibly wide, revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth, and began to feed.
Victor's consciousness faded as his life was literally consumed, but his last thought was surprisingly clear: someone needed to stop this thing before it killed everyone.
* * *
The response came faster than anyone had expected.
The Bastions arrived first—twenty soldiers in gleaming silver armor, their movements precise and coordinated. They formed a perfect circle around Blood Lust, each one raising a translucent blue shield that connected with those of his neighbors. Within seconds, they'd created a dome-shaped barrier that trapped the demon inside.
Blood Lust paused in his feeding and looked around at his captors with genuine delight.
"Oh, how wonderful," he said, clapping his hands together like a child who'd just been given a new toy. "Fresh playmates."
The Ethereal Knights came next.
Ten of them descended from the sky on wings of pure energy, each one a master of combat who'd spent years training for exactly this kind of encounter. They landed inside the barrier with practiced grace, their weapons already drawn.
There was Isabella, the Knight's Vice-Captain and the second in charge, wielding twin chain-maces that crackled with electricity. Marcus Ironwall carried a shield as tall as he was and a war hammer that could crush stone. Sarah Brightblade fought with dual cleavers that left trails of silver light with every swing and others with their own mastered weapons.
But it was their leader who commanded attention.
Kael Draven stood eight feet tall and looked like he'd been carved from granite. He wore no armor, just torn pants and a green bandana that had seen better days. His weapons were two massive cleavers connected to his wrists by heavy chains, each blade easily four feet long and wickedly sharp.
He'd been fighting demons for fifteen years. He'd never lost.
"Archdemon," Kael said, his voice carrying easily across the battlefield. "By the authority vested in me by the Magistian Council, I order you to surrender."
Blood Lust's laughter was like breaking glass.
"Oh, I don't think so," he replied. "I'm having far too much fun."
The battle that followed was unlike anything the gathered spectators had ever witnessed.
Blood Lust's moves were like a liquid, his claws leaving crimson streaks in the air as he struck at his opponents. But the Ethereal Knights were no ordinary warriors. They fought with the coordination of people who'd trained together for years, each one covering the others' weaknesses.
Isabella's maces wrapped around Blood Lust's arms, the chains crackling with energy that should have paralyzed any normal opponent. Marcus charged with his shield raised, trying to knock the demon off balance. Sarah darted in from the side, her cleavers aimed at vital points.
Blood Lust caught Isabella's chains, yanked her toward him, and drove his claws toward her throat. She twisted away at the last second, the strike missing by inches. Marcus's shield bash connected, but the demon absorbed the impact and spun with it, using the momentum to backhand Sarah across the arena.