Chapter 1 Herald

Inside a coliseum that was made of black metal, a metal platform was currently floating in the center of it, with two people inside a blue dome fighting. One was a giant man with a full white set of armor that was skin-tight and not bulky, while the other looked like a high schooler and wore an all-black version of the same armor.

The giant man wielded a sword and shield, while the younger man wielded a regular longsword.

This was a common sport in this world, and it was basically a free-for-all in types of weapons, and the match only ended when one person died.

"Quit! Fucking! Dodging!" The grizzly-sized man roared while constantly swinging his sword. The fight had been going on for a few minutes, and so far the man hadn't landed a single hit on his young challenger.

"Quit being shit, Mr. Champ." Throughout the match, the challenger had landed multiple light slashes on the champion, but he was clearly not taking any of this seriously.

The challenger's name was Dante, and he had randomly joined on his 18th birthday. He started off rough, but very quickly all of his matches became one-sided. Despite being homeless and alone his entire life, he managed to quickly grasp how to use weapons over time and became a jack of all trades.

The crowd was deathly silent while watching the match unfold; the so-called champion was currently being played with like a child, while the challenger clearly didn't care how badly he humiliated his opponent.

"I guess I'll just go ahead and end this." Dante quickly parried the man's swing and very quickly and accurately pierced the man's throat.

The man slowly collapsed to the ground before finally breathing his last.

"AND WE HAVE A NEW WORLD CHAMPION!" Yell!yelled the announcer as the platform the two men were fighting on began to descend back to the ground.

After a few seconds, the stunned crowd began to wildly cheer. They had seen many matches where it was a one-sided beating, but nobody would've thought that a world championship match would ever go that way.

Once the platform landed, an entourage of staff loaded up the dead body before wheeling it off somewhere else.

"How does it feel to be the new champion?" The announcer said it enthusiastically.

"Boring," Dante said before walking away. As he began to walk away, everything around him turned gray and stood motionless.

In the distance, all Dante could hear was a faint clapping from the sky, and when he turned, all he could do was raise an eyebrow.

"Dante Wolfe, 18, no family, no attachments, no friends, and a new world champion." Said Lucifer.

"Creepy," said Dante.

"I like this one," said Yog Sothoth.

Dante just stood there, dumbfounded by these entities that were casually defying physics.

"If you're bored, Dante, why don't you just come with us?" Lucifer creepily said

"For what?"

"Entertainment, of course!"

"Fair enough." Dante shrugged his shoulders and resigned himself to his fate.

——present moment

"Dante, my boy, you're going to be our herald!" Lucifer said.

"Herald?" Dante wasn't the most intelligent man, but he had no idea what to expect from this meeting of very different people.

"First things first, you're probably wondering what brought about this group." Lucifer pointed towards the other beings at the meeting. Many of the beings were blurred out by a black haze, while some were all white, and you could only see the color of their eyes.

"Typically none of us would ever come together, but some survivors and I managed to get together and form this ragtag group. Your job is to enact our plan where we can't reach it yet." Lucifer walked up and threw his hand up, and the room they were sitting in became visible.

It looked like a modern-era office, but the room itself was a blindingly bright white, very simplistic considering what kind of people were inside the room.

At the front of the room was a screen that began showing what Dante was going to have to deal with.

Images of the abominations that Jevan witnessed began to appear, but in more variations, the hellish landscapes they created looked like the world was slowly being corrupted.

"We don't really have a name for these abominations, so we just call them corrupted. Your mission is to simply fuse with the vessel we created for you and just live." Lucifer said it very flatly.

"Live? That's it?" Dante was bewildered by how simple Lucifer made it out to be.

"If I'm being honest, you're going from a world with no magic to a world where magic is a part of your daily life. We don't want to overwhelm you too much, but don't sit around doing nothing."

"Hold up, magic?" Dante immediately interrupted.

"Oh yeah, I forgot that part; magic is indeed in this world, and you'll have to get acquainted with it quickly. Thankfully, you have photographic reflexes and memory, so learning all of this should come more quickly." Lucifer stated it plainly.

"Okay, so can you explain?" Before Dante could finish his sentence, the entire room they were in began to shake and fall apart. A giant piece of rubble almost fell on Dante, but right before it landed, Bahamut shot a ball of fire at it, completely disintegrating it from existence.

"No time, get going!" Lucifer walked up to Dante and began channeling some sort of unknown spell.

Before Lucifer finished casting his spell, he walked forward towards Dante and said, "The body you're going to be inhabiting is special, so don't fuck up." And with that, Dante immediately found himself looking up at an unfamiliar roof.

One thing he immediately noticed was that he wasn't in his own body; he was stuck inside an infant's body.

"They did say vessel, but they never said sh*t about this baby body." Dante was internally frustrated, but he was incredibly used to dealing with whatever cards he got.

Slowly, he began to crank his neck as much as he could to get a feel for the room. The room was incredibly simple and looked like your typical cabin in the woods. The wood it was made from was a light gray color, and it did have some windows that looked fairly intricate for the setting Dante thought he was in.

Out of Dante's peripheral vision, he could see a woman folding clothes. She wore a brown dress that went all the way down to her ankles, and her blonde hair reached her buttocks.

"Nice view," Dante said to himself.

The woman stopped folding clothes before settling her eyes on Dante, then slowly walked over and picked him up.

"You stink!" The woman said this before placing him on a table and undressing him.

"This is going to be a long couple of years." Dante had already resigned himself to his fate and the fact that the woman he just checked out was probably his mother.