All Chapters of Eternal Cage: King of Ash: Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
40 chapters
Chapter One
The first thing I ever died was on a Saturday night in an abandoned textile mill outside Pittsburgh.The air stank of rust, sweat, and cheap bleach someone had used to scrub old blood off the concrete. Six hundred men screamed around the chain-link octagon they’d built in the middle of the floor. Phones up, cash changing hands, beer cans crushed under boots. No refs, no rules, no mercy. Just two men until one stopped moving.They called me “Gravedigger” Jax Harrow because I used to dig graves for a living back when I still had a life. Six-foot-four, two-sixty, fists like cinder blocks. I’d won twenty-seven straight in the underground circuit. Tonight was supposed to be twenty-eight.My opponent was a Brazilian monster named Rafael “The Reaper” Silva. Six-foot-six, prison tattoos crawling up his neck, cauliflower ears that looked like they’d been chewed off and sewn back on. He’d killed two men in the cage before. Everyone knew it. Nobody talked about it.The bookies had me at +350. Ea
Chapter Two
I woke up in a body that wasn’t mine yet felt like home.Chicago. South Side, third-floor walk-up above a shuttered pawn shop. The mattress smelled like mildew and gun oil. My new reflection stared back from a cracked mirror: same height, same scars, but the eyes were colder. Hungrier. Forty-seven deaths colder.The system panel hovered the second my feet hit the freezing linoleum.[Regional Circuit – Chicago] [Time until fight: 23 hours, 58 minutes, 11 seconds] [Opponent: Ivan “The Bear” Volkov – 43-0 (39 KOs, 4 deaths ruled “accidental”)] [Venue: The Meatpacking Plant 17 – Red Hook District] [Special Rule: Fight continues until one fighter is dead or carried out on a stretcher. No surrender accepted.] [Hidden Objective Detected: Discover why the Circuit wants Volkov dead. Reward: 25,000 Death Points + Unique Title.]I exhaled slow. Someone upstairs was moving pieces on a board I couldn’t see yet.First things first: recon.I stepped outside into a January wind that could s
Chapter Three
I tore the IV from my arm and painted the glass wall with my own blood just to watch it run.The speaker crackled again, but this time the voice wasn’t Anastasia’s.It was mine.“Loop 49 initiated. Enjoy the show, Jax.”Every time you break, we learn.”The mirrors dropped away like theater curtains.I wasn’t in a basement.I was standing in the exact center of the Meatpacking Plant 17 cage, naked under the floodlights, with eight thousand people screaming my name.Saturday night. Fight time.The clock on the scoreboard read 00:59 seconds.Ivan Volkov was already walking toward me, grinning like Christmas came early.I looked down. My body was unmarked. No scars from the darts, no bruises from the chase. Fresh as the first loop.But my stats were still there, glowing in the corner of my eye, higher than ever:Strength: 211 Speed: 247 Durability: 289 Deaths: 48 Death Points: 87,300 unspentAnd a brand-new red notification pulsing like a heartbeat:[True Loop Objective Revealed]
Chapter Four
I sat in a cracked red-vinyl booth at the South Side 24-hour diner called Mama June’s, wearing a dead security guard’s coat that still smelled like cordite and fear. The waitress (a tired Black woman in her fifties with a name tag that read “Delores”) didn’t blink at the blood on my knuckles or the fact I was barefoot in January. She just poured coffee black as tar and said, “You want the lumberjack platter, baby?” I said, “Three of them. And keep the coffee coming until I float.”While I waited, I counted what I had left in this world:- One body (the original, miraculously). - Forty-nine lifetimes of muscle memory and murder. - Zero dollars, zero ID, zero phone. - One mission: burn every name that ever paid to watch me die.Delores slid the first mountain of pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, and hash browns in front of me. I ate like a starving wolf. Between bites I stole a pen from the check holder and started writing on a napkin.The List.1. Anastasia “Ice Queen” Volk
Chapter Five
I crossed the Pacific the hard way.No passport, no visa, no name on any manifest. Just forty-seven hours in the belly of a rusted Korean freighter that smelled of fish and diesel, curled up between crates of frozen squid while the North Pacific tried to kill us with thirty-foot swells.The crew left me alone after I broke the cook’s arm for trying to steal my duffel. Word travels fast on a boat with twenty men and one bathroom.We docked in Yokohama just after midnight on a Wednesday in February. I walked off the gangplank into neon rain that tasted like electricity and exhaust.Tokyo.The city that never sleeps, never forgives, and never forgets a face.I had no yen, no contacts, and only one lead: Anastasia’s dying confession. “Tokyo lab is buried under Roppongi Hills Mori Tower. Ask for Subject Zero-Alpha. They call him ‘Oni’.”So I asked.First night I slept in a capsule hotel in Shinjuku, paid for with cash I lifted from a drunk salaryman who thought I was a homeless vet
Chapter Six
We left Tokyo on a private fishing trawler that smelled of salt, diesel, and revenge.Oni (real name Kenji Sato, though he hated the surname now) stood at the bow for three straight days, letting the Pacific wind scour the last of the red pigment from his skin. By the time we hit the equator he looked almost human again. Almost. The horns had retracted into thick bone ridges under his hairline, and his eyes still glowed faintly when he was angry, which was most of the time.I spent the voyage teaching him everything I knew about living without a System HUD in your head. How to feel pain again. How to sleep without nightmares instead of respawning. How to be mortal and still choose to be a monster.He learned fast.We made landfall in northern Brazil on a moonless night, thirty kilometers south of Recife. A rust-red cigarette boat dropped us on a deserted beach with nothing but the clothes on our backs, two duffels of weapons we’d taken from the Mori Tower armory, and Dr. Sat
Chapter Seven
We crossed into Russia the way wolves cross borders: quietly, illegally, and with blood already on our teeth.The jeep died somewhere south of Ouarzazate, radiator cooked by Djinn’s unconscious wind bursts. We abandoned it in a wadi and walked the last hundred kilometers to the coast, four shadows moving through moonlit dunes. A fishing trawler out of Essaouira—captained by a man who owed Rei more than money—took us north along the Atlantic, past Gibraltar under fog so thick even the Spanish radar couldn’t see us.From Lisbon we flew commercial, scattered across three different flights, fake passports printed on polymer that wouldn’t trigger alarms. Djinn traveled as a mute Moroccan kickboxer with bandaged hands. Oni as a sumo wrestler on a cultural exchange. Rei and I as boring European businessmen in off-the-rack suits.Moscow greeted us with a knife to the throat.Minus twenty-eight Celsius the night we landed at Sheremetyevo. Breath froze in beards before it left the mouth. The ci
Chapter Eight
We came to Dubai the way sins come to the desert: quietly, extravagantly, and impossible to wash away.The Mi-8 ran out of fuel over the Black Sea. Djinn caught us on a thermal updraft he pulled from nowhere, wind screaming around the rotors until we glided dead-stick into a deserted airstrip in northern Iran. From there we paid a smuggler in gold bars to fly us across the Gulf in a twin-engine Cessna Caravan stripped for cargo runs. He asked no questions when five silent men climbed aboard smelling of cordite and winter.We landed at dawn on a private helipad in the middle of the Empty Quarter, two hundred kilometers from anywhere. A convoy of blacked-out Land Cruisers waited—Rei’s last favor from a Saudi prince who’d once owed him his life in a Rio back alley. The drivers wore shemaghs and mirrored sunglasses and never spoke.We drove north along empty highways that shimmered with heat mirages even in December. Dubai rose out of the haze like a fever dream: glass towers stabbing the
Chapter Nine
The desert night swallowed us whole.We walked south from Dubai along the empty coastal highway, four burned silhouettes against the glow of a city that would never sleep again. No one spoke for the first ten kilometers. The wind carried the smell of scorched metal and ozone from the Burj Khalifa, still visible behind us like a frozen torch against the stars.My skin was raw, blistered in patches where Sol’s heat had kissed too deep. Oni limped, one horn cracked from the fall. Rei’s golden scars had dulled to bruised bronze, flickering only when he clenched his fists. Djinn kept glancing back, eyes haunted, as if expecting the sky itself to ignite again.Kholod walked apart from the rest, barefoot on burning asphalt that should have seared flesh. Frost trailed from his steps, leaving a thin white line across the black road like a scar.We abandoned the highway at Al Marmoom, cutting inland across dunes that rolled blood-red under moonlight. Somewhere past the camel farms we found an a
Chapter Ten
Five years passed like smoke.We scattered as planned.Sol took a fishing boat north from the Maldives, vanished into the Andaman Sea. Last anyone heard, he was living on a remote atoll in Myanmar, teaching children to read by firelight he kept small enough to warm, not burn.Kholod walked into the Arctic night. Word came through ham radio operators: a pale giant seen on the pack ice, guiding lost research teams through blizzards that parted for him like curtains.Djinn returned to the Sahara. Nomads spoke of a man who brought rain to dying oases, then disappeared before thanks could be given.Oni went home to Japan. Not Tokyo. A quiet mountain village in Tohoku. He bought a small dojo with cash, taught children sumo and the meaning of restraint. His horns filed down to nubs, hidden under a knit cap.Rei stayed in South America. Not Rio. A cattle ranch in the Pantanal, thousands of hectares of wetland and sky. He raised Brahman cows and silence, the golden crown tattoo faded to scar t