~ Void ~
~ Amatsu-Mikaboshi, the Chaos King - POV ~
There was no light in the prison between worlds—only the endless heaving of something ancient and angry.
Amatsu-Mikaboshi, the Chaos King, writhed against chains of creation older than the first dawn. Once, he had devoured suns and unmade gods; now he lingered in a cage built from his own entropy, locked within the deepest gulf of the Void.
He did not sleep. He seethed.
Every few eons, when reality trembled, he would stir. The Void would convulse, its silence breaking with echoes of forgotten screams. His hatred rippled through the nothingness, and the boundaries between stories—between universes—shivered like spider silk in a storm.
This time, his rage tore something loose.
A single sliver of his essence, a splinter of true chaos, peeled away from the god's bound form. It drifted free—mindless, hungry, and searching for anything that could hold it.
And far away, in a dying world of smoke and gunfire, a man was drawing his last breath.
~ ??? - POV ~
The battlefield was a ruin of flesh and thunder.
Tracer rounds sliced the night like fiery comets; shells burst with metallic screams. The mercenary crawled through the mud, chest heaving, one arm limp from a shattered shoulder. His squad was gone. The contract was meaningless. All that remained was survival, and even that was slipping away.
He tasted blood and iron and the sour stink of fear.
He raised his weapon one last time, shot a shape in the dark—and a return burst of bullets tore through his chest.
As his body fell, he thought of nothing. Not the money, not the lives he'd taken, not even the faces of those he'd lost. Only the absurd, cold thought: So this is it.
And then the world broke apart.The instant his heart stopped, his soul was pulled free—not upward, not downward, but inward.
Through a thousand veils he fell, through layers of light and shadow, through the dying embers of universes. And as he tumbled into the liminal black between worlds, the sliver of chaos found him.
It struck like a spear of molten night.
The soul screamed as it fused, chaos burrowing into his essence, branding him with divine ruin. He became something new—neither mortal nor god, neither alive nor gone. A flicker of hunger opened within him, vast and endless, echoing the hunger of the god who had spawned the fragment.
When he woke, there was only darkness.Countless lights drifted through the emptiness—souls, memories, fragments of stories from a thousand realities. Some still glowed with purpose. Others were hollow shells, whispering names of heroes and monsters long forgotten.
He floated among them, wordless, weightless. His hands were not hands, his body not flesh. He was thought, instinct, will—and hunger.
A whisper coiled in his mind, not from outside, but from within: "Devour… or be devoured."
He did not understand at first. But when the first stray soul brushed against him and dissolved into his being, filling him with warmth and clarity, he understood everything.
He was not in heaven, nor hell. He was in the crossroads between every story ever told.
And he was no longer merely human.He drifted through the void for what could have been seconds—or centuries. Time was a corpse here.
The darkness whispered. Not in words, but in meaning. Fragments of dying worlds, echoes of legends long ended, brushed against him as if testing what he was.
They recoiled.
He did not yet understand what he had become, only that the emptiness around him felt alive. The chaos within his soul pulsed faintly, a slow heartbeat in a body that no longer existed.
Every pulse carried a whisper: Hunger. Hunger. Hunger.
He saw other souls—millions of them—drifting like pale embers. Some were bright and warm, shining with the weight of names once worshipped. Others flickered faintly, stories forgotten by the worlds that birthed them. And yet, all of them called to him.
He did not breathe. But he ached.He felt something else then: awareness.
A presence older than memory, faint but intelligent, watching him from the void's endless black.
"Newborn," it murmured, voice like the rustle of dry leaves. "Chaos's orphan. You should not be here."
He turned—if such a thing had meaning now—and saw a shape forming out of drifting light. Pale skin. Silver hair that shimmered faintly like moonlight on still water. Golden eyes that burned without cruelty, but with endless weariness.
The name came to him unbidden, whispered by the fragment of chaos coiled inside him: Adrian Fahrenheit Tepes. Alucard.
A soul out of myth, born of shadow and sunlight both. Half man, half monster. The son of Dracula.
The mercenary—he did not remember his own name now—stared, entranced. Here was a being who understood hunger.
Alucard's voice was low, thoughtful, carrying the calm of one who had seen too much.
"You are not supposed to be awake yet," he said. "Few are. The Void takes us all in the end. It dulls the mind until nothing remains."
The mercenary tried to speak, but his words came out like thought instead of sound.
"Where am I?"
"In between. This is the marrow of existence. Every story that ever was ends here. Every soul, once forgotten, drifts into the dark."
"And you?"
"I refused to fade." Alucard smiled faintly. "But even my will wanes. You will learn soon that the hunger inside you is not your own. It is the Void's."
The mercenary hesitated. "The hunger… can it be sated?"
Alucard's eyes flickered crimson. "No. But you can feed it. For a while."
He stepped closer, his aura brushing against the mercenary's. For a heartbeat, their essences touched—
—and the hunger roared.
It was not choice. It was instinct, deeper than fear or reason. The fragment of Mikaboshi's chaos flared like a black sun, and the mercenary's soul lunged forward, devouring the light that was Adrian Tepes.
Alucard gasped—then laughed, softly, bitterly. "So… the curse finds another host."
And he was gone. Consumed utterly.
It was agony. It was ecstasy.
The mercenary's essence ignited, shot through with the bloodlines of darkness.
Strength like molten silver filled him. He felt teeth and flame, shadow and sorrow. He tasted ages of war, solitude, and hunger—Alucard's eternal struggle, his restraint, his damnation. But most of all, he felt power.
The chaos inside him purred, satisfied for the first time. And when it faded, he was no longer just a drifting echo.
His form solidified—faint, spectral, but real enough. Pale skin. Eyes red as spilled wine. A silhouette of a man who had long since died, reborn in the image of what he had consumed.
He stared into the dark, trembling. He should have felt guilt. He felt only hunger.
Whispers rippled through the void as the other souls felt what had happened. A new predator had awakened among them. A being of chaos and blood.
"Devourer," they named him in a hundred tongues.
"Progenitor," whispered others.
He said nothing. He simply drifted forward, the darkness bending around him, his senses stretching far beyond their mortal limits.
Each soul was a spark.
Each spark, a feast.
But a part of him—a thin, dying part—still remembered the man he had been. The mercenary who bled out in the mud. The soldier who wanted only to live another day.
He would not die again.He would consume the stars if that's what it took to never be forgotten.