Eternal Cage: King of Ash

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. Easy money, they said. I was the American wrecking ball. Silva was past his prime.

They were wrong.

The bell was an air horn some drunk kid blasted. We met in the center. I threw first—a straight right that should’ve taken his head off. He slipped it like he’d seen it in slow motion and buried a left hook into my liver that felt like a crowbar. Air left my lungs in one violent whoosh. The crowd roared louder.

I clinched, trying to buy thirty seconds, but Silva kneed me in the balls so hard I saw stars. No ref to call it. The crowd just laughed. I shoved him off and swung wild. He ducked again and cracked me with an overhand that split my eyebrow open. Blood poured into my left eye.

I tasted copper and panic.

That’s when I noticed something off. Silva wasn’t breathing hard. Wasn’t even sweating. His eyes were flat, black, calm. Like he already knew how this ended.

He rushed me, lifted me clean off the ground, and slammed me so hard the concrete cracked under my spine. Something popped in my lower back. I tried to bridge, to scramble, but he mounted me like a python and started dropping elbows.

One.  

Two.  

Three.  

Each one landed with the sound of a sledgehammer on raw meat.

The crowd was feral now, chanting for blood.

Fourth elbow split my nose. Fifth cracked my orbital. Sixth turned the world red.

I remember thinking: This is it. This is how I go out.

Seventh elbow never landed.

Silva paused, looked up at someone in the shadows above the cage, and nodded once.

Then he wrapped his massive forearm around my neck from behind, sank the rear-naked choke, and cranked.

I felt my spine creak. My legs kicked uselessly. Vision tunneled.

Last thing I heard was the air horn blasting again and six hundred voices roaring as one.

Then nothing.

Black.

Cold.

And suddenly—light.

I gasped awake on the sagging mattress in my shithole apartment, lungs burning like I’d been underwater for hours. Same cracked ceiling. Same flickering fluorescent bulb. Same half-empty bottle of Jack on the floor.

The digital clock on the microwave blinked 4:17 p.m.—exactly twenty-four hours before the fight.

My hands shot to my face. No blood. No broken nose. No split eyebrow.

I stumbled to the bathroom mirror.

Same ugly mug staring back. Scar over the left eye from a bar fight in high school. Crooked nose from a different fight. But nothing new. No damage.

Heart hammering, I grabbed my phone.

Date: Friday, December 10, 2025  

Time: 4:18 p.m.

The fight was tomorrow night.

I died. I know I died. I felt my neck snap.

But I was back.

A sound like a system notification pinged inside my skull—sharp, metallic, impossible to ignore.

Blue text flickered across my vision, floating in the air like a hologram.

[Welcome, Jax Harrow, to the Eternal Cage System.]  

[You have died 1 time.]  

[Time remaining until next death: 23 hours, 59 minutes, 42 seconds.]  

[Objective: Become the undisputed underground champion.]  

[Reward for completion: Freedom from the loop. One wish. Immortality.]  

[Penalty for failure: Relive your final death forever.]  

I blinked hard. The text stayed.

Another ping.

[Skill retained from previous loop: Iron Liver (Rank F)]  

[You can now take 15% less damage to internal organs.]

I laughed. It came out manic. Then I punched the mirror just to feel something real. My knuckles split, blood dripped, pain shot up my arm—real pain.

This wasn’t a dream.

I had twenty-four hours to figure out how not to die tomorrow night.

Round one of the loop had begun.

I spent the first three hours testing reality like a lunatic.

Pinched myself until I bruised. Jumped off the third-floor fire escape (landed fine). Held my breath until I passed out (woke up gasping, still 7:19 p.m.). Cut my forearm with a kitchen knife (watched it heal in real time to a thin pink line within an hour).

The system was real.

Every time I focused, the blue panel floated back up.

[Host Stats]  

Name: Jax “Gravedigger” Harrow  

Age: 29  

Height: 6’4”  

Weight: 260 lbs  

Strength: 89/100  

Speed: 67/100  

Durability: 92/100  

Technique: 71/100  

Killer Instinct: 94/100  

Deaths: 1  

Loops remaining: Infinite (until objective complete)

Below that, a skill tree with hundreds of locked nodes. Only one glowing faintly: Iron Liver.

I had one day to git gud or die again.

First stop: the gym.

I trained like a man possessed.

Heavy bag until my knuckles bled (and healed). Sparred with three different guys at once until they begged off. Ran ten miles in combat boots just to see if my cardio improved (it did—dramatically).

Every rep, every sprint, every punch earned tiny system pings.

[+1 Strength]  

[+2 Durability]  

[New Skill Unlocked: Adrenaline Surge (Rank F) – 20% speed boost for 10 seconds, 2 minute cooldown]

By midnight I was a different animal.

But I knew it still wouldn’t be enough. Silva had toyed with me. He’d known exactly how to take me apart. And that pause before the choke—he’d looked at someone. Someone who told him to finish it.

There was more to this fight than money.

I needed answers.

2:00 a.m. I rode my Harley to the one man who knew every dirty secret in the Pittsburgh underground: Tommy “Numbers” Ricci.

Tommy ran the books for every illegal cage, dog fight, and back-alley poker game from here to Philly. If something smelled rigged, Tommy knew who paid for it.

His office was above a strip club called The Pink Pony. Bouncer knew me, waved me up.

Tommy sat behind a steel desk counting cash, cigar glowing like a firefly. Bald head shiny with sweat, pinkie ring the size of a golf ball.

“Jax. Thought you was dead.” He didn’t even look up.

“Funny.” I dropped into the chair across from him. “Tomorrow night. Silva fight. Who’s paying him to throw it—or to kill me?”

Tommy finally met my eyes. Something flickered there. Fear? Respect? Both.

“You already lost, didn’t you?” he said quietly.

I froze.

He leaned forward. “Word is, some rich fuck from New York put up half a million for Silva to put you in the ground. Permanent. They want the Gravedigger title vacant.”

“Who?”

Tommy glanced at the door, lowered his voice. “Vincent goddamn Moretti. Runs the whole East Coast circuit now. Word is you knocked up his baby sister five years ago and left her. She killed herself last year. He’s been waiting for his shot.”

My stomach dropped.

Lana Moretti. I hadn’t thought about her in years. One summer. One mistake. She’d been seventeen. I’d been twenty-four. I told her I wasn’t the settling type. She cried. I left.

I didn’t know she was Vincent’s sister until after she was already in the ground.

Vincent wasn’t just rich. He was connected. Old-school Sicilian money. The kind that made people disappear.

Tommy slid an envelope across the desk. “Ten grand. My cut if you win. But Jax… nobody beats Silva when Moretti pays the other side. Walk away.”

I stood up. “I can’t.”

He sighed. “Then die pretty, kid.”

Back in my apartment at 4:00 a.m., I stared at the system panel.

23 hours until the fight.

I opened the skill tree again. Thousands of nodes. Most grayed out. But a few new ones pulsed faintly after today’s training.

[Path Unlocked: Berserker’s Wrath]  

Cost: 500 Death Points (Current: 100)]

[Path Unlocked: Phantom Step]Cost: 800 Death Points]

I only had 100 points from one death. Not enough.

I needed to die again—on my terms—to farm points.

Crazy? Yeah. But I was already insane.

I rode to the worst neighborhood in the city. Found three gangbangers who looked eager to earn stripes.

Took four bullets and a switchblade to the kidney.

Died in an alley at 5:47 a.m. smelling piss and gunpowder.

Woke up screaming at 4:18 p.m. Friday again.

[+500 Death Points]  

[New Skill Retained: Bulletproof Skin (Rank F) – 25% reduced damage from firearms]  

[Title Unlocked: Martyr – Gain 20% more Death Points when killed by multiple enemies]

Loop two had begun.

I farmed deaths like a psychopath.

Loop 3: Walked into a police station, pulled a knife on six armed cops. Died in a hail of gunfire. +800 points.

Loop 4: Picked a fight with an entire biker bar. Thirty-on-one. Axes, chains, pool cues. Died smiling. +1200 points (Martyr bonus).

Loop 5: Jumped off the 10th Street Bridge at rush hour. Splat. +300 points.

Loop 6–12: Got creative. Drive-by (twice). Drive-by while on fire. Russian roulette with a loaded revolver. Swallowed drain cleaner. Each death faster, cleaner, more efficient.

By loop 13 I had 18,000 Death Points and a body that barely resembled human.

Stats:  

Strength: 142/100 (transcended)  

Speed: 189/100  

Durability: 198/100  

Technique: 167/100  

Killer Instinct: 199/100 (MAX)

Skill list longer than my arm:

- Iron Liver (MAX)  

- Bulletproof Skin Rank A  

- Adrenaline Surge Rank S  

- Phantom Step (teleport-like lateral movement, 3 uses per loop)  

- Pain Nullification Rank B  

- Blood Rage (strength doubles when below 10% HP  

- Death Echoevery kill grants minor stat boost  

- And the big one I bought with 10,000 points:  

  [One-Time Use: Perfect Recall – Relive any previous death in slow motion, study every mistake]

I used Perfect Recall on my first death.

Watched Silva’s fight from a third-person view, frame by frame.

Saw the man in the shadows he’d nodded to: Vincent Moretti himself, ringside, smiling like a shark.

Saw Silva’s footwork—tiny tells before every strike.

Saw the exact moment he switched from “fight” to “execute.”

I memorized everything.

Loop 47.

Saturday night. The mill. Same six hundred animals screaming for blood.

But this time I walked in different.

Shoulders squared. Eyes dead. Skin humming with power most men can’t dream of.

Silva stood in the opposite corner shadow-boxing, same calm stare.

Vincent Moretti sat in the same VIP chair, sipping bourbon, smirking.

The air horn blasted.

We met in the center.

This time I smiled.

Silva threw the same liver shot.

I absorbed it like a breeze, stepped inside, and whispered, “Your boss says hi.”

Then I unloaded.

First punch broke his guard. Second shattered his nose. Third lifted him off his feet.

The crowd went silent.

Silva tried to clinch. I slipped, Phantom Step behind him, locked rear-naked choke of my own.

He flailed. I cranked.

Vincent stood up, face purple.

Silva tapped frantically.

No ref. No rules.

I didn’t let go.

Thirty seconds later Silva went limp.

I dropped the corpse and turned to Vincent.

The crowd lost their minds—half cheering, half running for the exits.

Vincent’s bodyguards pulled guns.

I smiled wider.

[Death Points +10,000 – First Champion Kill]

Blue text flashed.

[Loop Objective Updated]  

[New Objective: Kill Vincent Moretti and every man he brought tonight.]  

[Reward: Advance to Regional Circuit – New Loop – Stronger Enemies]

I cracked my neck.

“Let’s dance.”

Guns barked. I moved like smoke—Phantom Step, Phantom Step, Phantom Step.

Bodies dropped.

Ten minutes later the mill was silent except for dripping blood and my breathing.

Vincent knelt in the cage, both legs broken, begging.

I crouched in front of him.

“Lana was a mistake,” I said. “But she chose to leave. You don’t get to choose for me.”

He spat blood. “You’ll never—”

I ended him with one punch.

System pinged one final time.

[Regional Circuit Unlocked]  

[Relocating host in 10… 9… 8…]

The world faded to black.

I woke up again at 4:17 p.m. Friday—new apartment, new city, new scars that hadn’t been there yesterday.

A new blue panel floated.

[Welcome to Chicago, Jax Harrow.]  

[Next figh

t: 24 hours.]  

[Opponent: Ivan “The Bear” Volkov – 43-0, 39 KOs]  

[He has never been hit clean. Fix that.]

I stood up, rolled my shoulders, and grinned at the mirror.

Forty-seven deaths to become champion of Pittsburgh.

I wondered how many it would take to become champion of the world.

Round one was over.

The real war had just started.