The last thing he heard in life was the sound of his own gun clicking empty.
It was a small sound. Almost insulting.
After everything—the screaming engines, the bursts of automatic fire, the concussion of grenades—his final moment came down to a hollow click.
Across the ruined courtyard, the man behind the overturned pickup truck grinned when he heard it. The mercenary saw the flash of teeth beneath a dust-coated beard. The man lifted his rifle.
There was no time to reload.
No time to move.
The mercenary leaned back against the cracked concrete wall behind him and let out a slow breath.
So this is how it ends.
He had always imagined something different. Maybe a quiet death in some cheap motel decades later, lungs ruined by cigarettes. Maybe a knife in the dark from someone holding a grudge.
Not this.
Not in the middle of a contract gone sideways in a half-bombed industrial yard somewhere nobody cared about.
The rifle fired.
The world exploded into light.
Then darkness swallowed everything.
At first, he thought he had survived.
He could still think.
That alone confused him.
There was no pain. No weight. No sound of breathing. But his mind was still moving, still forming thoughts.
Did I black out?
He tried to move.
Nothing happened.
Not because he was paralyzed.
Because there was no body to move.
Panic rose immediately, sharp and cold.
What the hell is this?
He tried again—reflexively flexing muscles he had used all his life.
Still nothing.
But something else happened.
The darkness around him shifted.
The mercenary slowly became aware that the blackness surrounding him wasn't empty.
It was vast.
Endless.
Like floating in the deepest ocean imaginable.
Except there was no water.
No gravity.
No direction.
And then he noticed the lights.
At first they were faint. Tiny flickers scattered across the void like distant stars.
But as his awareness sharpened, he realized they weren't stars at all.
They were… fragments.
Thousands of them.
Millions.
Each one glimmered with faint colors—blue, gold, crimson, violet—like broken shards of glass drifting in a cosmic sea.
Some were tiny sparks.
Others were larger shapes, glowing dimly.
And among them…
Shapes moved.
The mercenary felt something cold slide down what would have been his spine—if he had one.
They were souls.
He didn't know how he knew that.
But the knowledge slammed into his awareness with absolute certainty.
They were souls drifting through an endless void.
Some were barely coherent wisps.
Others looked almost human, ghostly silhouettes drifting through the darkness.
Fragments of memories flickered within them—images, voices, emotions bleeding into the surrounding emptiness.
He saw flashes of battlefields.
Ancient cities.
Spaceships tearing through starfields.
Castles burning under storm clouds.
A knight raising a sword.
A woman crying in the rain.
A soldier dying in a trench.
They were stories.
Lives.
Entire existences reduced to drifting remnants.
And they were everywhere.
The mercenary tried to scream.
But without lungs, the panic came out as something stranger—a violent ripple through his awareness.
Am I dead?
The answer came instantly.
Yes.
The realization should have brought fear.
Instead, something else rose inside him.
Hunger.
It appeared suddenly.
Brutally.
Like a starving animal waking up after centuries.
The mercenary froze.
What the hell is that?
It wasn't normal hunger.
Not the kind he had felt after days in the field surviving on ration bars.
This was deeper.
Primal.
It clawed through the core of his existence.
Every fragment drifting nearby suddenly looked… edible.
The thought horrified him.
No.
But the hunger intensified.
One of the wandering souls drifted closer.
It was faint—barely more than a hazy outline of a man in ragged armor. Memories flickered across its surface like broken film reels.
A battlefield.
Steel clashing.
A final desperate charge.
Then death.
The mercenary tried to move away.
Instead, he drifted closer.
Not because he wanted to.
Because the hunger pulled him.
The soul seemed to notice him.
Its faint shape twisted, trying to retreat.
But it was too weak.
The mercenary felt himself reaching for it.
Stop.
He tried to resist.
The hunger roared louder.
STOP!
Too late.
The moment their essences touched—
Something snapped.
The soul shattered like fragile glass.
Its fragments poured into him.
Memories exploded across his awareness.
A lifetime of experiences—training, battles, laughter, pain, regret—flooded through him in an overwhelming torrent.
The mercenary screamed silently as the foreign life burned through his consciousness.
Then it ended.
The fragments were gone.
Consumed.
Silence returned to the void.
The hunger eased.
Not gone.
Just… satisfied for the moment.
The mercenary floated there in horror.
I just ate someone.
The thought twisted inside him.
He tried to justify it.
It was already dead.
But the truth felt uglier than that.
He hadn't simply absorbed memories.
He had devoured the soul itself.
And deep inside, something whispered:
More.
Time didn't exist in the void.
Minutes.
Hours.
Centuries.
It all blurred together.
The mercenary drifted through the endless darkness surrounded by fragments of countless lives.
Some came from worlds he recognized.
Others were completely alien.
He saw flashes of a boy with spiky hair battling monsters with a giant sword.
A masked ninja standing beneath a red moon.
A god wielding lightning on a battlefield of giants.
Stories.
Myths.
Legends.
And stranger things.
Alien empires.
Reality-warping beings.
Cosmic wars.
Some fragments carried names he recognized from books, games, or movies he had known in life.
Others belonged to worlds he had never imagined.
All of them drifted through the same endless void.
And every time one came too close…
The hunger surged.
At first he resisted.
He tried to move away.
Tried to ignore it.
But the hunger didn't fade.
It grew.
Stronger.
Sharper.
Eventually another soul drifted close enough.
Then another.
Each time he devoured one, the same thing happened.
Memories.
Skills.
Fragments of identity merging with his own.
He began to change.
Slowly.
Subtly.
The boundaries of who he had been in life started to blur.
The mercenary still remembered his name.
His childhood.
His years as a soldier.
But now those memories were surrounded by dozens of others.
Lives that had never been his.
It frightened him.
But the hunger kept winning.
Until one day—or moment, or eternity—something different appeared in the void.
A soul unlike the others.
It drifted among the fragments like a dark star.
Dense.
Powerful.
Ancient.
Its shape was almost human.
Tall.
Elegant.
Long hair flowing like shadows in the void.
And its eyes…
Burned crimson.
The mercenary froze the moment he sensed it.
The hunger inside him didn't just stir.
It howled.
Violently.
Like a predator recognizing the most perfect prey imaginable.
The other soul noticed him immediately.
Its crimson gaze locked onto his presence.
For a moment, neither moved.
Then the soul spoke.
Not with words.
But with thought.
"…Curious."
The voice was calm.
Cold.
Refined.
The mercenary felt something ancient within it.
Something dangerous.
"Another devourer in the void?"
The mercenary didn't know how to respond.
He barely understood what was happening.
The hunger surged again.
Stronger than ever before.
The crimson-eyed soul tilted its head slightly.
"Interesting…"
Images flickered around it.
Castles beneath moonlight.
Armies of night creatures.
A pale woman smiling gently.
A man cloaked in darkness seated upon a throne of terror.
Recognition slammed into the mercenary's mind.
No way.
He knew that world.
He had played the games.
Watched the series.
Read the lore.
The name formed instantly.
Adrian Tepes.
Better known as—
Alucard.
Son of Dracula.
The dhampir protector of humanity.
The being before him studied the mercenary's essence with clear curiosity.
Then its expression shifted slightly.
"…You are not supposed to exist."
The mercenary didn't get a chance to respond.
Because the hunger finally broke loose.
It lunged.
The moment their souls touched—
Reality shattered.
The devouring was nothing like the others.
It wasn't a simple absorption.
It was a war.
Alucard's soul erupted with overwhelming power the moment the mercenary tried to consume it.
Ancient magic surged through the void.
Memories spanning centuries exploded outward like a storm.
Castlevania.
Battles against Dracula.
Loneliness.
Immortality.
Grief.
Love.
Rage.
All of it flooded into the mercenary's consciousness at once.
Alucard fought back.
His will was immense.
For a moment, the mercenary thought he would lose.
That the dhampir would tear his fragile existence apart.
But the hunger inside him was something else entirely.
Something older.
Something darker.
It swallowed the resistance like a black hole.
Alucard's final thought echoed through the merging storm of souls.
"…So this is oblivion."
Then his essence collapsed inward.
And the mercenary consumed him.
The transformation was instantaneous.
Power surged through him like a supernova.
Memories spanning centuries settled into his mind.
Swordsmanship.
Magic.
Vampiric physiology.
Superhuman senses.
Regeneration.
Shapeshifting.
Knowledge of ancient alchemy and dark creatures.
But it wasn't just abilities.
It was identity.
Fragments of Alucard's personality merged with his own.
His calm.
His melancholy.
His quiet sense of duty.
The mercenary struggled to hold onto himself as the fusion stabilized.
Eventually the storm subsided.
Silence returned to the void.
He drifted there—no longer the same being that had died in a gunfight.
He understood something now.
Something terrifying.
The hunger.
The devouring.
The endless void filled with souls.
It wasn't random.
It had a source.
A fragment buried deep inside his essence.
A presence so vast and ancient it made Alucard's power feel insignificant.
A name surfaced from memories he had once known in life.
Marvel Comics.
Cosmic entities.
Primordial chaos.
The mercenary whispered the name into the darkness.
"Amatsu-Mikaboshi…"
The Chaos King.
Avatar of Oblivion.
A being that existed to devour creation itself.
And somehow…
A fragment of that entity lived inside him.
The realization sent a cold wave through his consciousness.
"I'm… a piece of that thing."
Not the Chaos King himself.
Just a shard.
A broken sliver of the primordial darkness that existed before the universe.
But even a fragment carried the same fundamental nature.
Devour.
The void around him suddenly looked different.
Not empty.
Not random.
But full of sustenance.
Endless souls.
Endless fragments.
Entire worlds of existence reduced to drifting prey.
The mercenary—now something far more than human—closed his eyes.
Alucard's memories whispered inside his mind.
Humanity.
Compassion.
Control.
But the hunger remained.
Patient.
Eternal.
Waiting.
Slowly, he opened his eyes again.
The void stretched infinitely in every direction.
Countless souls drifted through the darkness.
And somewhere beyond them…
He felt something else.
Worlds.
Realities.
Universes.
All filled with life.
All filled with souls.
The fragment of the Chaos King inside him stirred with quiet anticipation.
The mercenary exhaled a slow breath that didn't exist.
"I guess…"
His voice echoed softly through the endless void.
"…this is my afterlife."
Then he began to drift deeper into the darkness.
And the hunger followed.