Elias Thorne was an average seventeen-year-old from Ohio.
He liked video games, complained about math homework, and somehow, miraculously, had the coolest girlfriend on the planet.
Her name was Dee. She was a pale, beautiful goth girl who always wore a silver ankh necklace, possessed an endless supply of black tank tops, and had a surprisingly upbeat, perky personality.
Elias didn't know much about her family, just that she had a bunch of weird siblings she occasionally mentioned—a brooding older brother who loved ravens, a younger sister with rainbow hair, and a pair of twins.
He didn't care about the family drama. He just loved Dee. And Dee, for reasons Elias could never fathom, loved him back with a terrifying, cosmic intensity.
"You're stuck with me, Eli,"
She had whispered to him a week ago while they were stargazing on the hood of his beat-up Honda.
She had pressed her cold lips against his forehead. The kiss had felt strange—like a rush of absolute peace, a warm light settling deep into his bones.
"I made sure of it. You're never going to leave me until you're absolutely, positively ready."
Elias had just laughed, thinking it was a sweet, slightly morbid goth joke.
He had no idea that Dee was literally Death of the Endless.
And he certainly had no idea that her kiss was a literal mark of immortality, tying his soul to existence so firmly that the universe itself couldn't force him to clock out early.
It happened on a Tuesday.
Elias was walking home from school, texting Dee about whether she wanted to get pizza or burgers for dinner.
He stepped off the curb. He didn't see the massive, speeding delivery truck blowing through the red light until the horn blared.
The impact was immediate.
CRACK.
Everything went dark.
In a realm beyond time, an apartment filled with goldfish, comfortable armchairs, and floppy hats suddenly grew very, very cold.
Dee dropped the teacup she was holding. It shattered on the floor, but the sound didn't echo.
The sound had stopped.
In fact, across the multiverse, an uncountable number of dying souls suddenly found themselves stuck in the waiting room, shivering as an unfathomable cosmic pressure descended upon creation.
Dee's dark eyes widened, and then narrowed into voids of absolute, terrifying nothingness.
Elias's soul hadn't come to her.
He hadn't died—she had made absolutely sure of that with her gift of immortality.
But he had been forcefully displaced. Snatched. Isekaied. Some rogue dimensional anomaly, some careless pantheon's reincarnation mechanism, had fired off and ripped her boyfriend out of his native reality without filing the proper cosmic paperwork.
"Someone,"
Dee whispered, her usually cheerful voice dropping into a register that made the foundations of the universe tremble,
"Took my boy!"
She closed her eyes, reaching out through the tapestry of existence.
She felt the distinct, stubborn pulse of her ankh's mark. It was incredibly far away, shoved into an obscure, magically dense pocket dimension heavily populated by devils, angels, and dragons.
The barriers of that universe were notoriously stubborn, layered with the fading magic of a dead biblical god.
She couldn't just walk in. It would take time to pick the cosmic lock without shattering that entire reality into dust.
Dee picked up her black umbrella and placed her top hat on her head.
Her cute, perky demeanor was entirely gone.
"Hold on, Eli,"
She murmured, a terrifying smile playing on her pale lips.
"You can't die, so I know you're safe. But whoever is running the transit system in that dimension is about to have a very, very bad day."
Elias gasped, his eyes flying open.
He shot up, patting his chest, his face, his legs.
"Whoa. What? Am I...?"
He wasn't roadkill. In fact, he didn't have a single scratch on him. He wasn't on the streets of his hometown in Ohio, either.
Elias was lying in the middle of a meticulously manicured park, surrounded by cherry blossoms drifting in the evening breeze.
He stood up, brushing dirt off his jeans. He checked his phone. No signal. The screen was cracked, but it still displayed the picture of Dee smiling by a fountain.
"Okay, Elias,"
He muttered to himself.
"Don't panic. You got hit by a truck, and now you're in... Japan?"
He looked up. In the distance, silhouetted against the setting sun, stood a massive, European-style school building.
And hovering just above one of its towers, briefly illuminated by the dying light, was a silhouette with massive, leathery bat wings.
Elias rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, the winged figure was gone.
"Great,"
He sighed, shoving his phone into his pocket.
"I'm either hallucinating, or I'm in some weird anime world. Dee is going to be so mad if I miss dinner."
Unbeknownst to the stray devils lurking in the shadows of Kuoh Academy, who were already eyeing the strange new human with the uniquely potent life force, Elias Thorne was the single most dangerous prey they could ever choose.
He couldn't be killed, and the ultimate cosmic force of the universe was currently putting on her boots to come get him back.
Elias walked away from the park.
The sun was completely gone now, and the streetlights flickered on.
The streets were quiet. Too quiet. Back in Ohio, there were always cars driving by or dogs barking.
Here, the silence felt heavy.
He rubbed his arms. It was getting cold.
"I just need to find a police station or someone who speaks English,"
He told himself.
He passed a dark alley. A strange, wet sound made him stop. It sounded like a large dog eating wet meat.
Elias slowly turned his head.
A pair of glowing red eyes looked back at him from the shadows.
A monster stepped into the light. It was horrifying. It looked like a mix between a giant wolf, a spider, and a man.
It had too many arms, thick black fur, and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. Drool fell from its jaws and burned holes into the concrete. It was a Stray Devil.
Elias froze. His heart hammered in his chest. He was just a normal seventeen-year-old kid. He didn't know martial arts. He didn't have a weapon.
The monster roared and lunged at him. It was too fast. Elias didn't even have time to scream.
Pain exploded in his side. The monster's jaws clamped down on him. In seconds, the terrifying creature tore him apart and swallowed him whole, piece by piece.
Everything went black. Elias felt the cold, empty feeling of death pull him down.
But the darkness didn't last.
Suddenly, Elias felt a warm, familiar light on his forehead. It was right where Dee had kissed him.
The warmth spread through his chest, down his arms, and into his legs.
He opened his eyes. It was completely dark, and the smell was awful—like acid and rotting garbage.
The air burned his lungs. He was surrounded by soft, crushing walls.
I'm inside its stomach, Elias realized, panic rising in his throat.
The monster's stomach acid was burning his skin, but the warm light from Dee's kiss flared up. Before the acid could melt him, his skin healed.
His broken bones snapped back into place. His torn muscles knitted themselves together. It was painful, but the healing was faster than the damage.
He remembered Dee's words:
"You're never going to leave me until you're absolutely, positively ready."
She hadn't lied. He really couldn't die.
Tears mixed with the gross slime on his face. He was terrified, but knowing Dee's love was protecting him gave him a sudden burst of courage. He wasn't going to spend eternity as monster food.
"I have to get out,"
Elias whispered.
He pushed against the fleshy walls.
He started punching, kicking, and clawing with everything he had.
His hands found something hard in the dark—a sharp, broken bone from someone else the monster had eaten.
Elias grabbed the bone and stabbed it into the stomach wall.
Outside, the Stray Devil let out a horrible, ear-piercing scream. It fell to the ground, thrashing in pain.
Inside, Elias kept fighting. He ripped and tore his way through the thick muscle.
He was covered in blood and stomach acid, but he didn't stop. He pushed harder, driven by the need to see the sky again.
With one final, desperate push, Elias burst out of the monster's side.
He fell onto the hard concrete of the alley, gasping for fresh air. Behind him, the Stray Devil gave one last twitch and died, killed from the inside out.
Elias dropped the sharp bone. He looked at his shaking hands. They were perfectly fine, not a single scar.
He had done it. He had survived. But the fear and the exhaustion hit him all at once. His mind couldn't handle the shock of dying, healing, and fighting his way out of a monster.
The street spun in circles. His knees hit the ground. He couldn't keep his eyes open.
As the world went dark for the second time that night, he heard footsteps.
"Oh my,"
A soft, gentle voice said.
Elias forced his eyes open just a tiny bit. The streetlamp cast a warm glow on two figures standing over him.
One was a beautiful woman. She had long, dark hair tied in a ponytail and wore a traditional Japanese shrine maiden dress. She looked down at him with kind, worried eyes.
Hiding behind the woman's leg was a little girl. She had the same dark hair and big, curious violet eyes. She held onto the woman's dress tightly.
"Mama,"
The little girl asked in a soft, sweet voice.
"Is he hurt?"
The woman knelt down next to Elias. She didn't seem to care about the blood or the dead monster behind him.
She reached out and gently touched his shoulder.
"It's going to be fine, Akeno,"
The woman said softly.
"We are here now."
Elias wanted to say thank you, but he had no strength left. He closed his eyes and finally let himself drift into a deep sleep.