Bloon tower defence 3 | | A place for Fantasica players to gather

Current build is below. My leading idea is to go with a 2x16gb kit and replacing RAM along with a Ryzen 7 5800x and a Noctua NH-D15s for the cooler. I originally was going to just get the 5950x but it was double the price of the 5800x, which just doesn't seem worth it to me. I am also going to upgrade storage, probably a 4tb NVME drive.
[PCPartPicker Part List](https://pcpartpicker.com/list/s9Qxvj)
TypeItemPrice
:----:----:----
**CPU** [AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (12nm) 3.2 GHz 6-Core Processor](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/8HqBD3/amd-ryzen-5-1600-12nm-32-ghz-6-core-processor-yd1600bbafbox) $120.00 @ Amazon
**Motherboard** [ASRock Fatal1ty B450 GAMING K4 ATX AM4 Motherboard](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/Pq97YJ/asrock-fatal1ty-b450-gaming-k4-atx-am4-motherboard-b450-gaming-k4) -
**Memory** [Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2400 CL16 Memory](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/tPVBD3/corsair-memory-cmk16gx4m2a2400c16r) -
**Storage** [Corsair MP300 240 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X2 NVME Solid State Drive](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/XXGxFT/corsair-mp300-240gb-m2-2280-solid-state-drive-cssd-f240gbmp300) -
**Storage** [Gigabyte GP-GSTFS31240GNTD 240 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/cDVD4D/gigabyte-240gb-25-solid-state-drive-gp-gstfs31240gntd) $30.11 @ Amazon
**Storage** [Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/mwrYcf/seagate-barracuda-computer-2-tb-35-7200rpm-internal-hard-drive-st2000dm008) $65.83 @ Amazon
**Video Card** [Gigabyte EAGLE GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB Video Card](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/j89wrH/gigabyte-eagle-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-8-gb-video-card-gv-n406teagle-8gd) $390.99 @ Amazon
**Case** [Phanteks Eclipse P300 ATX Mid Tower Case](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/FCs8TW/phanteks-eclipse-p300-tempered-glass-atx-mid-tower-case-ph-ec300ptgbk) -
**Power Supply** [Corsair CX500 500 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/hgGkcf/corsair-cx500-500-w-80-bronze-certified-atx-power-supply-cx500) $299.97 @ Amazon
*Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts*
**Total** **$906.90**
Generated by [PCPartPicker](https://pcpartpicker.com) 2024-05-01 02:03 EDT-0400

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor	$499.99
CPU Cooler	Lian Li Galahad II Trinity SL-INF 61.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler	$184.95 @ Amazon
Motherboard	Gigabyte B650 GAMING X AX ATX AM5 Motherboard	$0.00
Memory	G.Skill Flare X5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory	$0.00
Storage	Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	$169.99 @ Amazon
Video Card	NVIDIA Founders Edition GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER 16 GB Video Card	-
Case	Lian Li O11D EVO RGB ATX Mid Tower Case	$159.99 @ B&H
Power Supply	MSI A1000G PCIE5 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	$159.99 @ Amazon
Case Fan	Lian Li Uni Fan SL-Infinity 61.3 CFM 120 mm Fans 3-Pack	$84.00 @ iBUYPOWER
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	$1258.91
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-05-01 01:54 EDT-0400

Is this a good build ? Anything that you would change or add ? Thanks for the help

So I am a lowly Legend 5/Ancient 1. I enjoy ranked for the competitive aspect and I am not the upset by the loss of MMR that I can grind back, but I just can't possibly understand how every game I played today could be this bad. I am 12k behavior and communication score just for the added info, so it's not like the games had ragers or griefers.

We lost every lane. Hard. It felt like the enemy could just walk at whoever they wanted to kill and were able to do so. I'd buy extra regen just to stay in lane while getting dove by 4 heroes under tower at minute 5. Every game was a bloodbath and laning as a core left me shut out of last hits. I just finished up a game where the enemy Axe had a 12 minute blink + blademail and it feels like there's just nothing you can do at that point.
Every game ended with some score like 32-2. 15 minutes in we're locked inside our base and it really does end up being a defense of the ancient. Most of my teammates still had pretty good morale and tried to make a comeback but it never once felt possible during the entire game.
I do almost exclusively play pos 1 and every one of these games feel like I can't even get a farming item before the enemy is roaming as 5 knocking down T2s. I am not really a greedy player, but it feels like you're only allowed to buy a wraith band and pray you got level 6 in time to fight.
Are the only viable heroes in this bracket tanky strength heroes or ones with healing abilities? It feels like every agi/int core or support is completely useless against Axe, abaddon, doom, or wraith king. My entire hero pool is like sub 45% WR on dotabuff. It feels so bad struggling to lane as a PA or a Luna just to get solo killed by an offlaner that doesn't need farm or levels to do it's job. I know I love finally getting to my BKB just to see every spell goes through it now and all a tanky Strength hero needs is blademail to counter your entire networth.

Maybe gambler's fallacy that I would gain the MMR back by continuing to play, but I can't understand how not a single game today went in my favor. Better luck tomorrow I guess.

Planning an event can be an exciting endeavor, but it often comes with a significant price tag attached. From venue rentals to catering and decor, the costs can quickly add up, leaving many hosts feeling overwhelmed. However, with strategic planning and cost-effective measures, it's possible to create a memorable event without breaking the bank.
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While hiring a professional event management company can streamline the planning process and ensure a seamless event execution, it may not always be feasible for those working within a tight budget. However, there are several cost-effective strategies that hosts can employ to manage their events efficiently without compromising on quality.
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Conclusion
Hosting a successful event doesn't have to break the bank. By adopting a strategic approach to event management and implementing cost-effective measures, hosts can maximize value and create memorable experiences for their guests without overspending. Whether it's negotiating with vendors, DIY decorations, or optimizing logistics, there are plenty of ways to manage events efficiently while staying within budget. With careful planning and creativity, every event can be a resounding success, regardless of the size or scope. With Light Tower Events by your side, you can elevate your event to new heights of excellence and sophistication.

The traitor generals (like spearos, wrathnar, etc) all created their beliefs like the way of the sword, bow, and spear so it would make sense that after they left the order empire they and the soldiers that left with them would try to differentiate themselves from the others, so it gave me a few ideas.

The Greatswordwrath, they are wrathnars personally trained elites who have higher health and damage at the cost of being slower and more expensive and instead of their iconic jump attack I thought about an ability where they did a wide sweeping attack that could shred hoards down to size.
The Spartadon, they are spearos’s frontline fighters who have less health but more damage with the ability to throw their spear and use a sword until they either pick up their thrown spear(or one thrown/dropped by another spartadon or spearadon) and also the ability to headbut enemies.
The Crossed Archadon, they are archis’s head marksmen who use crossbows instead of a normal bow and these crossbows would have longer range and damage but would have to reload, to compensate I thought of a bash ability for them where if a melee unit gets close they’d bash them back and as a fun trick if they bash while they have a bolt loaded they will fire the bolt immediately into the bashed enemies head.
The Vampmeric, they are mera’s sadistic “healers” who would drain the enemies around them and then heal themselves or their allies, the damage would be low but if one sticks around long enough they could practically insta heal a unit but it would take a while and they’d have to survive.
The Scholar, they are magikill who have studied a multitude of magics and depending on you own spells and enchantments, they’d get abilities such as if you have burning bolt, Tesla tower, and Spirit Spearadons the Scholar would have a fire bolt attack, a chain lightning attack, and would summon mini spearadons, their downside is their poor hp and that they are somehow slower than a normal magikill.

Slinger - It is similar to princess tower damage but lower attack speed and hp, BUT it has a longer range (3 more extra tile after the bridge range), making it a counter to siege wincons.
What I imagine him to look like: A typical Rural boy archetype with 2 big tooth in the front

This seems to be the most repeated line in the game so I just want to gather all of the instances together. As far as I remember, there are the following ones:
1) During the first counter with Lady Butterfly
2) In the Moon-Watch tower by Kuro's remnant
3) A variation of it when remnant Kuro and Genichiro converse: "I don't know yet... what it is I should do"
4) After defeating Owl, when questioned by Kuro.
5) After eavesdropping on Kuro for Purification Ending.
6) During the conversation with Emma for Purification Ending
7) After the second resurrection against Genichiro at the end of the game.
What are the others that I have missed?

edit: Apparently the Reddit button on PPPicket is displaying strangely so I went with text instead.
PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LMy3Jy
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 4100 3.8 GHz Quad-Core Processor ($68.98 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Thermalright AXP90-X47 42.58 CFM CPU Cooler ($22.90 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock B450M PRO4 R2.0 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard ($80.18 @ Amazon)
Memory: Patriot Viper Elite II 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-2666 CL18 Memory ($116.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: PNY VCQM2000-PB Quadro M2000 4 GB Video Card ($104.29 @ Amazon)
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 ATX Full Tower Case ($129.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Asus TUF Gaming B 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($50.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $574.32
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-05-01 01:03 EDT-0400
I'm successfully running that with 6 HDDs and an SSD boot. But the point of the case is the eight other HDDs installed and trying to get them to behave normally so I can use the full system.
I'm posting here because I've been through two SATA controllers and one LSI HBA in IT, any of which should have worked (as far as I know), but none of which have actually ended up functioning properly. It's not an unusual OS; Proxmox or TrueNAS if Proxmox won't cooperate enough.
I'm open to open box, used (in fact, I'm probably stuck there as I can't flash to IT so I need to buy a card after it's been flashed), etc. I'm just tired of being really careful about checking for compatibility, confirmation of reports that say the cards work in my configuration and then ended up with another $100 or so worth of garbage so I was wondering if someone who had a better understanding of system compatibility and IT flashed HBA at 8 or 16 port, that will fit into this motherboard's PCI (the x16 is stuck so it's a little restrictive) and which brand/model you would recommend. I'd prefer LSI just because they have a really good reputation, but ultimately my goal is:
SSD Boot + at least 16x HDDs that will all show up nicely in the system so that with IOMMU everyone can behave nicely and I can go on to being frustrated about something new.

I'm writing this with over 350 hours played, and I play relaxed on 7, and mostly enjoy Helldiving on 9 with my group.
I'm going to pass some information on to you to help you understand how to Helldive effectively against bugs of different varieties, and what to do when you encounter overwhelming odds like multiple elite spawns or hunter swarms, shriekers, stalkers and spewers all ganging up on you.
First up, loadouts.
Very little is not viable in this game. You can run pretty much any primary you want (save yourselves the arguments that some guns aren't viable, you can literally run any of them and do just fine on Helldive - I do this all the time just for variety,) so I'm going to categorize them into 4 broad groups for ease of understanding, and I'll explain what they're for so you don't waste time pumping 2 mags from an AR into a bile spewer and then complaining that it isn't fair.
Armour
Mobility is key. Light armour is preferred, medium armour at most. Heavy armour is a death sentence against bugs unless you have a very capable team already. Your main defence against the bugs is simply running. A lot. Heavy Armour is slow and stamina draining. This means death.
Weapons

Bullets - Anything that fires bullets is for dealing with small enemies. This means hunters and shriekers on Helldive. AR's, Snipers, Submachine Guns, Shotguns.
Lasers - For cutting down enemy mobility. You don't need to kill a spewer, just cut its leg off and carry on with your life. Same with brood commanders and hive guards.
Explosive - This is for punching mid enemies like Hive Guards, Brood Commanders and Spewers. If you're running the Jar-5, Crossbow, Eruptor, or Shocker, Explosive rounds are great for popping the armoured targets. The Plasma Punisher is also good for medium enemies, and not good for Chargers.
Arc - Blitzer shotgun is an extremely good all purpose weapon. It will kill anything less than a Charger. I recommend using this as your primary while you learn how to position properly on Helldive, then start toying with the other options.

Your secondary is for backup, take what you like. I prefer the Senator because it can plug medium armour foes, however it usually takes the entire clip so it's on par with the Redeemer that way.
Grenades
I recommend only 2 grenades for helldiving. Impact and Stun at your preference. I typically run impact, and I'll explain why below, but Stun has a similar effect for a lesser cost, plus it helps you learn to position.
Strategems
You need the ability to bust heavies on Helldive on demand. To this end I recommend taking the 500kg bomb strikes, Orbital Precision, and Orbital Railgun. For your last strategem slot, something like Quasar, Recoilless Rifle, Spear or EATS. I prefer the RR personally, because in a pinch you can drop the backpack for multi-heavies and have a teammate quick load you to drop them in rapid succession. We'll get to this.
Positioning
This is your most important skill to master. Chargers and Bile Titans are an asset to a Helldiver. Chargers don't give a shit what's in their way, and Bile Titans will automatically try to spit on you when they get within 20 meters. That bile will melt ANYTHING, including other bile titans. Learning to use these to your advantage will help with clearing the swarms.
When you run into a pack or breach that has multiple elites like 4 to 6 Chargers and 2 Biles, you will undoubtedly be tempted to start popping them. Wait a moment and assess. What is the position of the Titans in relation to the Chargers? More importantly, where can you move so that you can get them to cross each others paths? Bile Titans are reckless, so running between their legs while Chargers chase you invariably results in Chargers getting crushed to death. Even better, if there's a 2nd bile and you hear or see it rearing for it's spit, diving to the side will spare you while letting it paint the chargers and other titan, doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
When there's multiple elites, they tend to get tangled up in each other. Chargers smash into each other relentlessly, and are VERY poor at turning circles. If you've got 4 or 5 chargers all chasing you, start running circles until they're smashing into each other. Then drop the 500 kg in the mess and watch one bomb delete 4 of them simultaneously.
But Reaper, while I try to do this, Hunters are all over my shit. I can't move!
That's what your primary is actually for. Dispensing with the garbage mobs. The elites are where you control your movement, and you save your ammo for the little guys because you do not focus the tanks. Tanks are meant to take damage so the dps can wreck you. Nuke the DPS, kite the tanks.
But Reaper, they brought supports, and the spewers are screwing with me too! Like the bile titans, the spewers can also be coaxed into spitting all over their friendlies. Unlike the bile titan, the Chargers don't give a shit that spewers exist and will happily pop them for you. So long as you're moving at least 45 degrees at a run, the spewers won't hit you, so keep using those Chargers to delete the big pimples. And if you're getting too crowded, grenades are your friend here too. One impact for nurses, two for bile (usually, sometimes you luck out with one.)
And hey, if you're just truly overwhelmed and the numbers are insane, I can't stress this enough: Run away. Pick a direction that isn't filled with the enemies and just GO THAT WAY. Don't stop. Keep running until you run out of stamina, then take a look behind you. If there's a small amount chasing, clean them up. If there's still a horde, keep running. They won't keep coming. You will get clear.
How to use grenades effectively
There are 3 situations in which you should be using your grenades on bugs. Big clumps, spewers, and stalkers. If you've got stalkers, don't hesitate. Nade them immediately. This is why I prefer impact. Higher risk with those, but they explode on contact. Totally worth it. Big clumps of enemies are easy to clear for obvious reasons. And spewers are simple to pop with nades. On top of all this, the Impact grenade can kill Chargers effectively with some good tosses right under it. I tend to do this after dodging a charge. I'll plant one or two right under it's ass and watch it struggle to limp towards me. I don't recommend wasting grenades on Chargers, but if you've just got the one, it's better than burning a strategem.
Stun grenades: These are absolutely fantastic for setting up your strategems. Drop an Eagle, then toss a stun at your targets. Watch them just stand there as the 500kg impales their skull and detonates their dreams. Works equally well on bots.
But I really like the Auto-cannon, grenade launcher, AMR, Laser Cannon, etc
Great! Just understand that your role will not be busting heavies with those weapons. You'll have to rely entirely on your strategems and positioning to do that work for you instead. Those weapons clear crowds quickly. Use the proper tool for the job and you'll find things get easier. If you're manning a grenade launcher, focus the mediums and below. If you're running the Auto-cannon don't waste ammo on Chargers and Bile Titans. If you've got an AMR, delete those brood commanders so they don't keep popping warriors.
Stay mobile
Treat it like you would Doom. Stay mobile. Bugs biggest weakness is your mobility. Repositioning, making sure not to get caught in the open with no rocks to impede Chargers and Titans, and strategically positioning are the keys to success. With practice, you'll be solo clearing heavy nests while 6 bug breaches are spawning all around you.
And don't worry if you die. Practice makes perfect. Break the habit of trying to always get back to your stuff. You just died there. It's hot. Deal with something closer to where you got called down, then circle back to get your gear and finish up that hole. Repositioning and being flexible in your tactics will stop you from going on full tilt as you rush in head first into the same swarm that's already killed you 4 times. Stop doing that.
Specific enemy types and their weaknesses

Swarmers/Hunters/Shriekers - Weak to everything, just shoot them. Shriekers are especially susceptible to Incendiary Breaker
Both Spewers - vulnerable to having legs cut, and they explode when hit by explosive weapons (I mean, right?)
Hive Guards and Brood Commanders - Cut off the legs, really easy to do with bullets or lasers. Both are very weak to Arc as well, either Blitzer or Thrower.
Chargers - Weak to bile and other chargers. Positioning will get them killed more than anything. They traverse terrain pretty well now, but it takes them extra time to move around it. Orbital Rail Cannon will usually one shot them. Headshots with any rockets will kill them.
Bile Titan - Weak to weirdly enough, bile. Get a bile titan to spew towards another bile titan and it will melt it immediately. And if they're close enough, the front ones legs might ninja kick the other one to death in its death throes. Otherwise, this is where your heavy busting stuff comes into play.
Stalkers - The deadliest of enemies. Tough and fast, two impacts grenades takes them out immediately. A mag dump from a shotgun will also usually do it. One shot from an Eruptor deletes them. Explosive weapons are extremely effective against Stalkers, and Arc staggers them so you can keep them stunlocked while you kill them. The problem with explosives is that Stalkers will usually close before you have the chance to use it, so it's a double edged sword. These are your highest priority target at all times.

Good hunting Helldivers.
If you're interested in some hands on training, send me a DM and I'll invite you to our discord. I play almost every day, so I'm happy to help people out.

As you all well know, the current way of changing and dealing with overuse of specific stratagems is for AH to generally just nerf them. This leaves a bad taste in players mouths and overall does not feel good.
On of our fellow helldivers recently has been posting the "Real life patch notes" where they find real reasons for stratagems to be nerfed or buffed.
For example:" Due to supply line issues railgun strikes are now made with a more malleable metal, Helldivers be advised this will impact penetration on more durable enemies"
This got me thinking, Rather than overall nerfing/buffing things. Creating MO's that impact the usefulness of weapons could be really cool! Some examples below:
1) Our quasar cannon factories are under attack, defend X planet to be able to use this stratagem. (Heck, the planet could even have random quasars or similar littered around, so those planets are the only place to use it till the MO is over!"
2) Supply line issues have caused us to lose access to extended magazines. X weapons will currently be impacted until the end of the MO (This ones a bit more stupid, just spitballing)
3) A malfunction in our crystal system has caused impurities in the crystals used to power shield generators. Shield backpacks and portable shield towers are less effective until X days of regrowing new, purer crystals. (Maybe even capturing a specific planet can speed this up?
4) In relation to the spawns changes "Termanid/Bot radar is less effective versus groups of helldivers, solo divers be advised that in order to decrease enemy effectiveness, enemy radar towers/radar growths(Maybe similar to spore spwers) must be dealt with to reduce terminid/bot patrol density.
What do yall think? I feel like things of this nature can help foster build variety, while also not necessarily gutting people who use them regularly (Especially the first example, You want your quasar back? Well you better help with the mission!)

I had a terrible idea, a deck that is filled with ONLY lands, save for the commander(s). There are a fair number of commanders that can potentially helm this deck
Going through scryfall looking for legal commanders with "land" in their description provides the following commanders, and for the sake of convenience, any that are simply "X/X, where X is equal to the number of lands you control" with no other abilities are left out. I will also not take into account the lands you might have, and will assuming the only lands are basics. Obviously in practice this won't be true, but it does set a baseline.
[[Budoka Gardener]] / [[Dokai, Weaver of Life]] - Problem is it will take you 6+ turns to flip them, with no way of speeding it up or anything to do in the meantime. Plus you basically cant attack with it or you'll risk losing it. Good news is that once you hit the 10 lands once, flipping it in the future is much easier.
[[Bristly Bill, Spine Sower]] - You get one creature that gets bigger every turn, and you're guaranteed to get them out turn 2. Once turn 5 hits he's just going to get exponentially bigger (turn 5 he becomes a 10/10, turn 6 is a 22/22, turn 7 is a 46/46, and so on). He will eat so much removal once your opponents realize whats happening, and there is very little chance of you winning. If you reach the point where you can activate his ability twice in one turn...he'll probably still be stopped by a 0/1, thus ineffective. Big cactus though!
[[Bruse Tarl, Roving Rancher]] - 2/2 creatures are very small and easily dealt with, and there is zero scaling with this. Your opponents are getting bigger and better spells & creatures, while you just keep your small herd of oxen.
[[Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald]] - Exact same issue as Bruse Tarl, but in gruul instead of boros.
[[Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer]] - Biggest issue right out of the gate is the inability to do ANYTHING before turn 5. However once they are out, they're a 5/5 getting bigger each turn, while getting 3/3s every turn Greensleeves is on the field.
[[Hazezon, Shaper of Sand]] - Extremely reliant on deserts, and there are only 25 deserts within his colours. Honestly, probably the worst option so far.
[[Jolrael, Empress of Beasts]] - See now this is something that actually uses the lands well. Having to discard two cards to make your lands into creatures is the biggest flaw, especially since turning your lands into creatures makes them easier to remove. You'll be going through lands pretty quickly, with little to no way of getting them back.
[[Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir]] - An objectively better version of the previous Jolrael. Flying means its harder to kill in combat, and the X/X will almost always be 7/7 or 8/8, making the birds even harder to kill. Biggest problem is that Jolrael has zero protection, and 3 toughness is very easy to kill. However so far this is one of, if not the, best options.
[[Kamahl, Fist of Krosa]] - Biggest flaw is that it requires a whopping 6 mana to get out, which means you have nothing to do before he's out. The activated abilities only lasting until end of turn means it'll be a lot more turns until you can get a lot of 1/1s on the field before getting worth out of his second ability. Plus 3 toughness again means he's easy to kill, however his first ability being at instant speed means he has protection from spells/abilities forcing you to sacrifice a nonland permanent and/or creature. Plus all those lands you spend to actually activate his abilities cant attack. By far the slowest commander in this list so far, and by the time you can potentially get going with him, the game is over and you died like 10 rounds ago.
[[Kamahl, Heart of Krosa]] - Honestly a flat improvement over the prior Kamahl. He has a higher mana value, but partner means you can combine him with something else so you have something to do while waiting for him to come online. His former card's second ability was baked into him as a passive, leaving you with more lands left untapped. The lands he turns into creatures are also invincible and vigilant, so the lands cant be destroyed in combat, and can still be used as lands afterwards. So far potentially one of the top commanders on the list, depending on who you partner him with.
[[Maja, Bretagard Protector]] - Same problem as all "expensive" commanders, you're left doing nothing before you can cast them. The creatures they create aren't worth mentioning, even with Maja's passive +1/+1 to your other creatures. 3 toughness again means they're easy to squash. Somehow still not the worst on this list, but definitely near the bottom.
[[Meloku the Clouded Mirror]] - Only real benefit this one has compared to the other commanders that make tiny creatures, is that everything has flying. 4 toughness is also SLIGHTLY harder to deal with, but not by much. Same "expensive" problem as half the commanders on this list.
[[Nissa, Vastwood Seer]] - You need to wait until turn 7 to flip Nissa, and even then you're still not doing anything but land drops and passing. Even after she's flipped, she needs to stay on the field for another 4 turns before you can use her ultimate, or 5 turns if you dont want it to kill her. Thats a minimum of 11 turns just to do anything, and lets be real she's not staying on the field that long. Her -2 making a legendary token means its barely worth using, since you cant make multiple, and even if you could each time its used delays her ultimate an extra 2 turns.
[[Ob Nixilis, the Fallen]] - Oooh a mono black commander is definitely something different. He has the same "expensive mana cost" and starting 3 toughness problems as many other commanders, however his landfall ability means the second problem is quickly solved and you're doing a flat 3 damage to an opponent every turn he's on the field, while he becomes more dangerous in combat. I don't know if he's the best commander, but hey mono black is definitely something different!
[[Obuun, Mul Daya Ancestor]] - Its another land-creature commander, but this time both the commander and creature scale every turn. In the top half of commanders with similar abilities, and the land getting trample means if Obuun lives long enough the lands will get harder and harder to block. Not the best, but still good.
[[Omnath, Locus of Rage]] - He's 7 mana. Thats it. As good as his abilities look, they dont matter before he's on the field, and he takes 7 turns to get out. Can't make more elementals until turn 8. You might as well not even play the game if you choose him, because the game will probably be over before he's even out.
[[Phabine, Boss's Confidant]] - [insert 5 mana comment here]. Her parley ability guarantees you at least 1 creature every turn, because you'll always reveal a land. 6 toughness makes her a bit harder to deal with when it comes to cards that do damage, but there are other means of removal to deal with her. How good she ends up being pretty much comes down to what your opponents reveal, and her usefulness drops as people get eliminated.
[[Phylath, World Sculptor]] - At 6 mana they're very expensive, and you won't even get that much worth out of them on cast. Then once your tokens are gone, its a sitting duck with an inability to get more tokens until Pylath re-enters the battlefield by whatever means.
[[Radha, Heart of Keld]] - Between being cast and hitting your 5 mana, Radha has nothing of note to offer. The lack of trample also means they're easily stopped by blockers, and the buff means they're essentially defenceless between your turns. As such they're worse than all of the commanders that get +1/+1 counters from lands, and arguably worse than the "x/x where x is equal to the number of lands you control".
[[Skeleton Ship]] - Look its a fun idea, problem is you will never deal any actual damage. I'm mostly including them as a joke, because in practice I dont see this working.
[[Slogurk, the Overslime]] - Requires sac lands to even function, but at least you get some of the sac lands refunded when Slogurk dies. Your luck in card draws will make or break this deck, as its nothing more than a 3/3 without lands going to the graveyard.
[[Soramaro, First to Dream]] - 6 mana is already expensive, but a flying 7/7 isnt TERRIBLE. The issue is actually getting them out on the field. It also wont go above 7/7 longer than a turn unless you have a [[reliquary tower]], and it falls to any opponents that force you to discard. Not worth trying.
[[Soul of Windgrace]] - The indestructible is by far the best feature, especially considering its at instant speed and you dont need to tap him to use it. Still falls to exiling effects or cards that reduce toughness, but is one of the harder to remove commanders once he hits the field.
[[Tatyova, Steward of Tides]] - You need to wait until turn 7 to get them going, but at least the land elementals dont revert at the end of the turn. Slow with little benefit.
[[The Gitrog Monster]] - Its a 6/6 with deathtouch for 5, and thats it. No scaling, and takes too long to get out.
[[The Wise Mothman]] - Once its out, the rad counters do all the work. If your opponents only mill land cards you gain zero benefit, besides potentially slowing them down. Not a terrible commander, but too heavily reliant on luck to make work consistently.
[[Titania, Protector of Argoth]] - Another commander reliant on sac lands, only refunding 1 sac land when she enters the battlefield. In all likelihood you won't gain much out of her, and isnt worth the wait it takes to cast her.
[[Titania, Voice of Gaea]] / [[Titania, Gaea Incarnate]] - She requires [[Argoth, Sanctum of Nature]], and it not being a forest makes it harder to tutor out. Not impossible mind you, but extremely hard. Then even if you do manage to meld her, if she dies you probably wont get the chance to meld her again as her front has no way of getting lands out of the graveyard or exile.
[[Toggo, Goblin Weaponsmith]] - An average commander brought down by the artifacts being equipment. To get the most worth out of him, you would likely need to partner him with something that makes creature tokens to help ensure you have creatures to active the rocks. 2 toughness means he will get deleted pretty quickly with just about any damaging spell, and the commander tax makes him less and less worth the cost.
[[Uurg, Spawn of Turg]] - Finally a commander that both cares about lands in the graveyard while also helping to put them there! 3 mana is relatively cheap, while the 5 toughness affords him a decent amount of protection from damage. His scaling power also makes him stronger every turn, but that does make him more of a target. Good news is that once he gets back onto the battlefield, he's just as strong as when he left it. His ability to sacrifice lands also helps with your longevity. By far the best graveyard commander on this list purely because he doesnt need to worry about luck. Sac lands only make him stronger, but he doesnt rely on them.
[[Yuma, Proud Protector]] - Alas, the potentially most expensive commander on the list is also our last commander. If you get lucky with sac lands his mana cost does come down, but if you're unlucky he remains at 8 mana. The good news is that once he's on the field he does become cheaper, and you can even reduce or remove potential commander tax. However his high base cost is simply too high to worth the risk of not getting any sac lands before you can cast him.
So unless I missed any, thats the entire list of potential commanders for a "lands only" deck. 31 commanders is honestly more than I was expecting, but most of them also are not worth using. Out of all of them, the only ones potentially worth using are "Bristly Bill", "Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir", "Uurg, Spawn of Turg", "Soul of Windgrace", "Obuun, Mul Daya Ancestor", and "Kamahl, Heart of Krosa" if you get him a good partner.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

My build (First PC bought off a friend)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.7 GHz 8-Core Processor Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-AX370M-DS3H Micro ATX AM4 GPU: Zotac ZT-T20700A-10P GeForce RTX 2070 8 GB Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Storage: ADATA Ultimate SU650 240 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive -Additional Storage: Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower GX2 600 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Windows 10 Home. Case: WHITE CYBERPOWERPC ONYXIA MID TOWER GAMING CASE
I’ll be the first to admit I’m the farthest thing from a PC expert. I’m a console guy at heart and this is my first PC that I got from a buddy after he upgraded so I picked it up to get into some Pc gaming. I’ve played mainly Tarkov and COD for about a year and I’m looking into doing some upgrades. If it’s as simple as someone looking at my specs and saying “ Get X gpu and it’ll be night and day difference in frames” then perfect but just any advice will help I’m lost when it comes to trying to make sure everything’s compatible and fits right it’s like a different language. Sorry if I sound like a idiot lmao, I just want all the FPS XD

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Embiid is 12/32 FG (3/11 3P) when guarded by Robinson so far in this series.
Embiid is 30/54 FG (6/13 3P) when guarded by Hartenstein so far in this series.

He made an error in the last quarter (like multiple other players) but without his defence on Embiid we wouldn't have been in a winning position. Our fans are passionate and I love it but ffs they turn quickly on a player.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Hey all, If there's already a good resource for this and I missed it, I apologize. Looking to get some info & possibly a buying recommendation. I'm not totally new to the file server / networking space (I've been running a headless Unraid server from an old PC tower for years) but never owned a "real" NAS before.
I'm looking to migrate to a setup where the brains is an M1 Mac mini, and the data is housed in a dedicated NAS. (why the complexity? bc NASes w/ really powerful cpus seem pricey, and the Mac mini was free) So:

M1 Mac mini running Plex server app, and all the *arr's in docker containers
a NAS dedicated only to hosting files for this Mac Mini - won't be accessible to any other computers, and won't be running any apps

Ideally, my setup would have:

4 bays + 1 or more ssd
1-disk failure redundancy
enough disk I/O to satisfy 2 simultaneous 4K streams out, and ~400mb/s in
software support for ... at least 5 years?
a cache & mover system similar to Unraid's offering, if this is possible

My assumption is I don't need to get the most powerful NAS unit, since it (presumably?) doesn't take much cpu or RAM to just serve up files w/o transcoding, etc. But I still want decent I/O performance, and maybe a ssd cache if possible? So looking at current lineup I'm guessing my requirements put me in the DS423+ range; the DS423 is out only because no SSD, the 923 is probably overkill.
I've been looking at used unit since fb has a lot in my area, but not sure what makes a good buy:

I'm not clear on how to read model numbers. are the last 2 digits their release year? So a DS920 would be from 2020? What's the significance of the other digits, if any?
if that's accurate - how much of a performance hit is there if I get a used unit say 3-5 years old, and how much does that matter given I'm delegating all the "hard" work to the Mini?
if I get a really old used unit, am I correct that the security implications of using an unsupported software version are less significant since this NAS won't be visible outside of my network at all?

Thanks in advance (edit: spelling)