Prologue: Death by Sacrifice

She'd never admit it; would rather choke on a cock and die than utter the words, but Athena Satori was tired.

All she's ever been given in life were bits and pieces of a good thing, while somehow never having control of her life the way she wished.

Her childhood innocence was lost, dragged away like a criminal in chains.

Later, her adolescence thrust head-first into every possible scenario that would break her being.

There was no care for what it would turn her into.

Now just barely breaching adulthood and grasping life by its reins. Life seemingly has other plans.

She was done.

It had taken exactly two hours and thirty-eight minutes for her life to go to shit.

In that time, she has smiled, cried, angered, and despaired. Dazedly, she wonders if life truly plans to take the next thing she holds dear in the process.

What has she ever done to go through such punishments since birth, to be sentenced to a life that no one her age should've lived?

A resounding bang echoes around her as if responding to her anger and the grief she has borne.

The stifling weight of her friends' bodies accompanying that grief fuels her turbulent emotions as she pushes through ash and smoke.

Billy Graham once said, "Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs and the most gripping stories."

She truly wonders what story will come of her pain. Will it be of a hero who stared death in the face and rushed into the flames, or a coward who ran head first into the fires in hopes of a final act of greatness?

She might never know, and honestly, she hates that.

There seem to be a lot of things she didn't know these days.

Xavier James, one of her friends, mumbled before losing consciousness.

How one man, a dead man at that, had come to be such a constant thorn in their sides. Athena has yet to know.

She owned three death certificates from varying continents that verified his premature and instant deaths, respectively. So how is it that she continues to find herself in near-death situations because of him?

She's pretty sure that, despite the world she lives in, people weren't supposed to come back once you killed them. No matter how good or skilled they deemed themselves, their artifacts, or their weaponry to be.

So how was it that no matter how many times they left him at death's door, he somehow returned to them unharmed and unscathed, like a persistent little house rat?

Bullet to the head.

Bullet to the Heart

Dismembered, tortured, drowned, and crushed, he was even hit by a train at one point, and yet somehow this man still manages to crawl his way out of the shithole that is hell to torment the sanity of her and those she cares about.

Her friends Malia and Nathaniel—those two may as well be as immorally insane as she was, given how much this one man has imbued his parasitic little presence into their lives and tortured them with it.

The fact that they were all still, according to medical professionals, mentally sane after everything that's happened to them is a mystery in and of itself.

So knowing all this, imagine her surprise when she answers her phone and hears shit exploding in the background; imagine her surprise when, in a panicked frenzy, she finds their house aflame with the two still inside; imagine her fucking surprise when she finds the two have been bombed and are having a damned tea party at death's door.

She resists the urge to laugh or cry, or even both; it doesn't really matter at this point.

Her friends, the ones who've been through hell and back with her, are going to die because some dead man threw a glass bottle in their house and it exploded.

Athena just wanted this arc of their lives to be over.

Then again, if this arc was so quick to end, then she wouldn't get to slit the poor man's throat.

She spares a calm glance at the bodies on her shoulders despite her racing heart. Gaining a running start before bodily crashing through the flaming piece of wood that was once their front door.

She stumbles onto the grass, hissing at the sudden exposure to sunlight and toppling over the unconscious bodies of her two friends as she slowly chokes on ash.

Vain attempts at taking in oxygen fall flat as a spasming pain floods her chest.

She was going to die a long, slow death of lack of oxygen right in front of her house, but surprisingly, despite her body slowly giving out on her, she feels a chilling calm envelop her mind, as if what she was going through now wasn't her death but just another obstacle to get through.

It was fine; in her mind, she's accepted that this is how she's going to go out, as sad as it may seem.

That doesn't mean she and her friends will have died for naught. If she knew anything, it was that even if they died today, people good and bad after this instance would hunt him like the dog he was.

The two people at her side are all she's ever known, all that's left of a broken family. Her father is dead, and she can't fathom relating herself to the others with whom she shares blood after all they've done.

Before she had seen them, Athena had stood in front of a growing inferno and cried, holding the belief that her two best friends; her family had died and left her in a broken world.

Life and its endless realities did not seek to make the situation better, instead gifting her this lone act of kindness. To join them in their final moments and move on with them.