Rob stared at a faint and distant light as a fetid black marshland consumed him, slowly but surely. The world was devoid of light, except for star-like fluttering shapes in the dark, but all faint, and all disquieting. He faintly remembered the giant arms of the creature, Baal-Yasu, wiping the blood, gore and ash off of the smooth stone floor of it's chamber. He was discarded alongside the others, and thrown into the pit where the Evil God was standing. The slow flow of unwanted things and festering waste flowed down from his feet and deeper into the Great Chasm. When Rob became aware of his surroundings again, the flow had stopped, and he was sinking into the muck.

The hole in his belly had filled with the soot-like filth. His body stopped moving and his heart seldom beat at all. How he was alive despite it all boggled Rob's mind. But soon, he knew, the sea of rotten mud would consume him, and eventually, he would stop thinking just to escape the waking nightmare. He looked around, seeking out anyone, anything, living. The pipe dream of seeing the Hero's triumphant resurrection, or the figure of Sam, rescuing him and returning home to a peaceful Granica entertained him for a time. But when the oily filth crawled into his ears and the corners of his eyes, he woke up in cold sweat.

What should I do? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, what should I do?! This skill, why, why would it only work now? Isn't this worse than death? What would father think? No, to hell with that, if the demons reach our town it won't matter what he thinks!

Something clicked in Rob's mind. He had used his skill, the [PRAY I], at least a hundred times since he unlocked it at the age of 13. And only once had it shown some sort of response. Throughout his life he was under the impression it worked as any common ability: use it and forget about it until the cooldown is over. The mere fact that only Baal-Yasu had ever answered directly in such a way, had terrible implications.

Does Auciel... Not listen to our prayers? Does he simply not answer the people's pleas? But how can he not? He sees all, he's the God of Observation and Judgement! Did he... Judge me unworthy? But all my life I followed the teachings of the Bright Temple... This is absurd. No, this just can't be-

Rob almost inhaled the dark substance as it covered his eyes and nose. If he remained alive despite the broken bones, the shattered spinal cord, and the gaping hole in his body, it only implied that he'd suffer for eternity in the fetid pits. Choking, unable to move, unable to see, starving and dying of thirst for thousands of years. He shivered. It seemed all-too-convenient. Torture, to motivated a believer to forsake his vows to a good deity?

Even if this is a ploy. Even if I'm being taken for a ride. There's still a chance they are alive. Father, and the others. Samuel's family. At least, there's a chance I'll suffer usefully. I accept Baal-Yasu's Blessing.

Rob screamed and thrashed in an agonizing fit. He felt his bare flesh ooze out through the gaps in his clothing and armor, and the cold touch of metal against his bones. The shattered lower end of his spinal cord sprouted a tentacle of cartilage and nerves, reattaching his upper and lower body. The blood in his veins was drained out, and the black substance that engulfed him replaced the spend fluid in equal measure. A small piece of the Evil God Baal-Yasu, a chip of his fingernail, fused with the meat and fat of his abdomen, and the muck that filled the gap in his stomach became one with his body. Rob's padded clothes, the chainmail and his skin became interchangeable, covering up the giant wound.

"AAAAAAaaAAAGHAAH-AhhAHha!"

A voice unlike anything he'd ever heard came from his mouth. A haunting, metallic howl. He doubled over and rose to his knees, then immediately fell on his face. Struggling up, he saw himself reflected in a puddle of something dark and foul smelling, guided by the faint light that emanated from above. The outline of his helmet reflected in the dark pool. A rough exterior, covered with small pointed spines. Two eyes, his eyes, with slit like pupils, in sunken orbits: orbits made up of the metal of his headgear. Rob gasped, and the skin of his neck and face opened to reveal dagger-like teeth. A monstrosity. A demon. The tip of his helmet, a single horn. The face guard, a beak-like protrusion. He grabbed and scratched at his shoulders and his sides, feeling a grid of steel interwoven with bony plating inside of his skin. With a careless movement, he touched where the hole in his stomach once was, and doubled over in pain. Immediately, the painful pangs of hunger hit him in the guts.

"Ack!- Ah nheed thoo... Fhindh shehther..."

Rob struggled to his feet, and felt his knees buckle under him. He was low on blood. The divine messenger had said as much earlier. And to recover blood, he would need to...

"Mheath... Lhivherths..."

Half-sunken in rotten filth all around him were the corpses of his comrades in arms, tattered robes and the dismembered pieces of Semien's men. Robert crawled on all fours, using the dim light that seeped in from the surface world as a beacon. Arms, legs, gnawed carcasses, a sword warped by the hero's powers, the head of a demon, a polearm... He grabbed the weapon, and pulled it out of the muck. The front half of a spear. 

Good enough.

Rob dragged himself up a blood streaked slope and towards a cave-like opening. Shelter came first, and food, second. Four Roberts could fit inside without it being unbearably cramped. But when he entered the rocky hideout, something else waited for him inside. Rob froze, and so did the creature.

"AWAY! AWAY! YOU CAN'T EAT ME!"

Something wet struck his face. A piece of leg, covered in scales.

"STAY BACK, MONSTER!"

He snatched the leg and tumbled backwards out of the occupied burrow, rolling back down towards the rising muck. He remembered seeing a reduction in his DEX. But he hardly expected it to have made him stiffer and less agile than a noble's son in ill-fitting full plate. Rob held the leg out and spread his legs to slow his fall, skidding down on his knees. The jagged rocks scratched his skin without lasting harm. And at the bottom, the man-turned-monster sat up and stared at the gory piece of leg in his arms.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

A demon's teeth cut the flesh with ease. It was almost frightening how easily he shredded a creature's raw limb without the aid of a knife or a fork. He hardly noticed the fact he had eaten everything except the femur. And when he did, Rob grabbed a stone, and snapped the leg bone in half, sucking out the marrow.

"Ghoghribbhle... Dthisghuzhdihng..."

Another person. Or a demon that could speak Granican. Rob neither cared, nor had the stones to confront it again. At his 1/10 HP, one bad move would spell disaster, and he knew it. Especially when he'd lost so much blood and could barely control himself. The last time he felt what a depleted BLD bar was like, would have been after his team fought against a lvl 2 highwayman. He struck Robert in the inner thigh with a piercing sword, and Rob nearly bled to death after the fighting was over. In that time, he had been reduced to 25 BLD, or Blood, and he was unable to move or think properly. The fearsome resilience of a demon with 17 RES astonished him. And at the same time, it disgusted him. He really became a monster. He really accepted the help of the very thing that murdered him and Sam, and now continues to send demons out into the world.

Sam... Wait, the prayer mentioned him! What if he's still alive out there?!

Rob got up and continued to half-crawl half-walk across the rotten marsh, looking for where he'd first woken up. A field of bodies, human and demon. The armors they wore looked strangely corroded, not that they could fit around Rob's new head. After all, he was already his own armor. If not for the dire despair in his heart, Rob would've laughed out loud. 

Dad always told me I should take it off more. I guess I should've listened...

He walked up to the fetid pile that birthed his current form, and started digging. Heads, legs, destroyed weapons, shields turned to rotten, holey planks. How long had he been in there? By the looks of things, at least a day. But there was no telling. There were too many bodies, and too often they were too badly mangled to identify. And too often Rob found himself salivating at the sight of the fresher bodies in the pile. He wasn't finding Sam any time soon, alive or dead.  Unless, of course, he'd been slow-cooking in the sea of soot and refuse for over a week. It was worth the try, at least, to attempt using his [PRAY I]. But to call upon the same creature that murdered him and everyone in the exploration team... Robert grit his teeth, and prayed, imitating the legless demon he'd encountered in the tunnel.

Baal-Yasu, Baal-Yasu. Please show me the way to Sam.

So he was right, after all. Just how long had he been, half-dead, half-awake, in that stupor? For a moment, Rob sat idly and stared at the formless darkness at his feet. A grim question posed itself to him: "what if the demons had already overrun Granica, and killed or eaten everyone there?". And then, another: "what if what I find is just a corpse?". And once again, a question: "has this been our destiny all along?". But then, just as he contemplated the sheer ugliness of his situation, the demon, Rob, saw a faint string of blue light burrow it's way out of his head, and loop around, traveling off to somewhere. Instinctively, he knew it was the effect of his skill, [PRAY I]. Proof that some form of his friend still existed. A lingering attachment to a world that might've already been lost.

Robert found himself picking up the pace as he followed the thin blue line. Every now and again, he would receive a notification from the divine messenger, informing him that his BLD is slowly but steadily increasing. He'd walked for so long he lost track of time, but the thin blue line showed no sign of stopping. Demons' remains so ancient they'd turned to discolored bones were scattered everywhere, and footprints littered the swampy earth. "Weeping Soil" - he faintly remembered the name from when the divine messenger assaulted his senses at the most inappropriate time. He couldn't find it in himself to complain about, or gods forbid, berate, a benevolent spirit that was sent by the high divine. Rather, Rob thought, it's plain strange to expect someone to read and remember the proclamations of the gods when the listener is in the midst of a seizure. And at that thought, something popped in the side of his head, and he almost cried out in pain. 

What the hell?! I feel... sick...

Rob hit himself in the temple, and the helmet that fused with his skull made a dull "thud". A coldness spread throughout the inside of his cranium, and the pain was gone. A less than reassuring sensation. If he was prepared to sacrifice his health to keep the people that mattered to him alive, he'd sacrifice the original shape of his body to do so. But as for Rob, he couldn't help but revile the demons. And by extension what he had become.

His wounds healed at more than ten times the speed that a human's would. A lvl 1 human at 1/10 hp would need at least six month of rest and good meals to fully restore the lost vitality. A lvl 1 demon at 1/10 hp seemed to only need a pound of raw meat and a day without taking damage. Rob couldn't help but want to claw his way out of his new reality. His body, a chimera of forged metal and demon-flesh. His terrible hunger. The jumbled-up feelings and thoughts, and the strange jolts of pain in his head. Rob's thoughts became so preoccupied with questioning these things, and with self-loathing, that he only heard the tremors when they'd gotten noticeably close.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The lost recruit fell prone and looked up, looking for the source of the rhythmic shaking he'd heard and felt. Giant legs. Six of them, like the legs of massive plucked chicken. It strode through the rocky black wastes, and struck the mud with a lance-shaped beak, scooping out bones and the corpses of demons and humans. Compared to Baal-Yasu, it would've really been chicken sized. But for the vulnerable, death-prone mortal men and monsters, it was an elephantine horror. Rob quietly and slowly crawled up behind a rock, and waited for the creature to pass.

Thump. Thump.. Thump... Thump......

It didn't seem to care, heading straight for the pile of bodies Robert left behind when he went to search for Sam. The warriors of humanity. Heroes of Granica. Bird feed. Rob himself would kill for something to eat. The price of healing so quickly was the need to eat far more. When he considered what would happen to Granica when a legion of perpetually hungry monsters spewed out of the Chasm, he shuddered. If every demon had teeth like his, they'd eat it all down to the trees and grass in no time flat.

To save himself from having to deal with more monsters towering demons, Rob elected to move quickly, quietly and low to the ground. That was far easier said than done, however. With his abysmal dexterity, Rob was a terrible sneak, and his new body's stiffness made anything except a brisk strut painfully difficult. To amend this, Rob dashed from cover to cover: a loose boulder, half buried in black mud, the skeleton of something bigger than a horse, the dregs of an old shack... He stopped the longest in places that he hoped would hold something of import, never straying far from the thin blue line leading towards Sam's location. The mass of bones and dried leather housed nothing, except some of the sparkling powder that appeared from burned demons, and a handful of bones, too old and weathered to be of use. And in the dilapidated ruin of an outhouse-sized shack, Rob found the skeleton of a demon with three small horns and three arms, clutching a small black pyramid. It's empty orbits seemed to follow him around as Rob inspected the shack, and so he moved on swiftly.

How big is this place? It's so dark... How does anything live here? Is this why they're trying to get to the surface?

The demon-man observed many other travelers from the safety of his hiding spots. Everything seemed to flock towards the influx of gore and trash. There was a horse-like demon, moving on eight oddly human arms as on legs. A multitude of small, filthy crawlers. And even one of the humanoid demons, dragging a giant bag filled with rubbish and gathered materials behind it. Rob briefly entertained the idea of making contact with it. It was quickly discarded. If things turned dire, he couldn't run. And something that could survive in a place such as the world below the Great Chasm was surely stronger than a half-dead newborn like himself. The thin blue line stretched on and on, but with every landmark passed, it grew thicker and more luminous. A sign that the end of his journey drew near.

Before he could find his next destination, peeking out of another wreckage, Rob heard faint noises drawing near somewhere to his left. He firmly clutched his broken spear, and snapped to attention, turning towards the source. A vast, carpet-like thing with white, bulging eyes. It had one wide mouth filled with many long teeth, thin, translucent and jagged, like glass shards. When it knew Rob had seen it, the demon scuttled rapidly towards him on several stumpy legs.

Rob gasped when the demon's jaw dislodged and extended forward, engulfing his leg. He fell as it opened and closed it's toothy maw over him, chipping it's fangs for all the effort. Rob bent over and stabbed it between the eyes with vigorous strikes. Thick, oily blood sputtered out of the carpet demon's cranium.

With a gruesome whine, Rob's broken spear bent and turned unusable. He punched the carpet demon in the brain ten times, turning it to mush, and the creature thrashed violently until it's body stopped moving. The jaws, however, remained tightly shut on his leg. When punching out the inside of it's head didn't help get his leg out, Rob grabbed the corner of it's mouth and pulled. The joints in the carpet demon's jaws made a wet pop when he pulled the bones out of their sockets. The creature whined, gurgled and gummed his leg helplessly, unable to move. Free at last, Rob stood up and hissed through his teeth.

"Shthay qhuiehet!"

And he stomped on its back, until it went limp. He stood over it's corpse, panting.

Shit... I can't believe it! I killed a demon bare-handed. This is insane!

Rob froze up and broke into a shaking fit. Then, he fell to his knees and wept quietly for an embarrassingly long time. Of course. How could he forget this all-important fact. A regular person with 0 MP will scarcely ever level up, and they don't gain experience from killing their own species. More than that, the slaying of something reasonable, like a feral dog, only yields 5-10 points at a time. And to add insult to injury, magical curatives deplete one's experience, and EXP diminishes over time. But a demon is worth far more than a mutt, and a being that possesses MP can level up and gain experience more easily. And what this meant for Rob, was the following.

If I kill five demons, I will reach level 2. And if I just keep on killing demons, I can become strong enough to protect everyone. I can save Sam, I can save our town, if they just hold on for long enough. I'll get stronger than the Hero of Providence in no time. And I will climb and claw my way back. No one has to die. Please, please just hold on for dear life if you can. Dad, everyone... I'm coming.

Rob wiped his eyes and wrung a limb off of the Flounder Demon's body. After a bit of cleaning and peeling, it was good to go.

Victory tasted like raw chicken.