Nightmare Game
Copyright© 2025 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 115
Tonight?
A wave of foreboding crashed over Ethan, growing thicker by the second. Evening was drawing near, and if The Fire of Judgment was set to consume all sin tonight, did that mean he and the other Testers would burn too?
He needed to probe deeper.
With a grunt of feigned dissatisfaction, he snarled, “Finally got some prime cuts in here, and who knows what’ll become of them.”
Then, shifting gears, “What about those two humans outside earlier? What happened to them?”
The purple jumpsuit seemed puzzled himself, but he answered anyway. “I saw one slip into this cell, but then he just ... vanished.”
His eyes darted toward Ethan, evasive and uneasy.
Ethan glared back, his gaze fierce, laced with killing intent; the air around them seemed to drop a few degrees, sharp and cold. “What’re you looking at me for? If I’d seen him, why would I ask you?”
The purple jumpsuit shrank under his pressure, silent and cowed. Ethan pressed on, impatience coloring his tone. “Never mind. What about the other one? What’s his story?”
The man replied cautiously, his words tentative. “My comrades chased him down. He ran straight to the one masquerading as a guard—the Fire of Judgment. He’s probably ash by now.”
Ethan’s heart sank. So it was true: The Fire of Judgment didn’t discriminate, scorching anyone labeled a “prisoner,” even visitors like them just here to test the waters.
“This isn’t good,” Ethan growled, anger creeping into his voice.
“Not good at all.”
“If they all get torched to nothing, what’s in it for me?”
He leaned in closer, eyes blazing with fury, then reined it in, his question coming out cold and flat. “Any way to stop them from burning in The Fire of Judgment?”
The purple jumpsuit recoiled, shaking his head. “I don’t know. When The Fire of Judgment arrives, we burn too—our sins stripped away in the flames.”
“It’s an iron rule, an unbreakable order, the end we all crave.”
Ethan kept his face blank, but inside, the words struck him as odd. It sounded like these purple jumpsuits were almost yearning for death.
Yet they clearly feared facing him as The Sanitizer.
That didn’t add up.
A guess formed in Ethan’s mind: maybe they didn’t fear death itself, but dying outside the embrace of The Fire of Judgment?
Or perhaps—
He recalled a line from the journal.
Without a word exchanged, we felt it—a crushing sense of hierarchy, our instincts screaming that they were deadly predators, to be avoided at all costs.
Hierarchy.
These purple jumpsuits weren’t afraid of dying. It was the instinctual dread, born of that hierarchy, that made them cower before the pig-headed creature as The Sanitizer.
“No way around it at all?” Ethan pressed one last time.
The man shook his head, uneasy.
Shapeshift wouldn’t last forever. Ethan figured he’d squeezed all he could from this one, so it was time to part ways. But maybe he could stir up a little surprise for Julian, test the man’s depths while he was at it.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.