Jason awakened with a start. Taking a moment to orient himself, he sat up where he had laid down and breathed for a moment. Except he couldn’t.

‘What?’

He had been disoriented after being flung away into the darkness by that damn Devil, and after being unconscious for who knows how long, he had been disoriented. But now, he realized something was off.

He looked down.

Instead of his flesh and blood body, what greeted his sight was a compact mass of black gas.

“What the fuck??!”

After panicking for a few seconds, he forced himself to be calm, taking his rampaging emotions and locking them up deep inside himself. Right now, he was in an unknown situation, and he could not afford to panic.

‘Alright, then. First of all, where am I?’

He took a cursory sweep of his surroundings. The landscape was a blasted wasteland of grey and black rocks, the only light sources being burning pits of lava and a muted, blood-red light dimly shining through the red mist that made up the sky of the damned place he was in. Suffice to say, he was in Hell, as that damn Devil said he would be.

Jason observed his surroundings more carefully. Being in Hell, the most immediate concern was his safety. Scanning the rocks jutting out of the plain he was on, he thankfully found no foul creature waiting to devour him.

‘Alright, my surroundings are secure for now. Azazel said I would be reborn as a devil in Hell. So I should determine my exact nature and the capabilities of my new body to ascertain my abilities and decide my next actions.’

He looked down to observe what he felt was his own body once more.

He saw a compact, shifting mass of black gas that he could feel was his own body. Strangely, the gas that his body consisted of did not escape but was held together somehow in the shape of his body. Closing what he assumed to be his eyes, he felt out the limits of his body and limbs.

After poking and prodding his own body, and moving his limbs around, he discovered that he had, thankfully, a humanoid body. He possessed two arms and two legs, a head, and a tail. He noted that the proportions of his limbs were different from that of a human’s.

All of his limbs were much longer while they were of a normal width, but he could not determine his exact size for now. His tail was thick and rope-like, protruding from the small of his back. Its width was the same as his forearms, and twice as long.

The addition of a tail was slightly confusing as the feeling of controlling it felt strange and unwieldy. Jason frowned. He would have to train himself to use it later on. He also had the vague sensation of having four fingers on each hand, and a strange feeling on his feet he could not quite describe, but his exact shape was not definite as the gas kept shifting around.

He had also discovered that he now had a new sense. As he was observing his new body earlier, he was shocked to be able to sense an entity within him, which turned out to be his soul!

It felt strange, like closing your eyes but still being able to feel the presence of objects near you. A sort of static presence that he was aware of.

‘My soul? So it seems that I can sense souls now. Not a very surprising ability for a soul-devouring devil. What’s the range of my soul sense, then? If I can sense souls in a significant range, this would be a valuable skill to detect other lifeforms nearby..’

As he was testing the range of his soul sense, Jason suddenly noticed a new soul approaching him from the edge of his ‘vision.’

‘Shit!’

Faster than he anticipated, a hideous devil with red skin leapt at him, its tattered leathery wings allowing it to pounce at him from the air.

Bang!

Jason grunted in pain as the devil crashed into him, knocking him over as its razor-sharp claws tore at his chest. Somehow, the devil managed to scratch his gaseous body, as he felt burning pain bloom all over his torso.

He struggled to get it off of him, but it had grasped his wrists tightly in its hands, the claws at the end of its digits digging painfully into his smoky flesh. It reared its ugly head, bloody fangs dripping with saliva extending from its impossibly wide mouth to bite at his neck.

At the last moment, Jason managed to control his unwieldy tail to smack the thing, knocking it off him. It righted itself almost immediately, its two, dark-red canine legs bending as it crouched low in a predator’s stance, its shining, circular eyes gazing into, no, at his soul, salivating over it.

Jason felt what he assumed was adrenaline rushing all over his body, battle instincts belonging to his body guiding him as he himself crouched low, eyes wide to observe his opponents every move.

It did not wait long before it made a terrible sound, howling as it rushed at him. This time, he managed to dodge to the side, but its claws raked his chest once more, mist spewing out of his wounds all over the rocky ground.

He growled in pain as he panicked. ‘Damn it, if only I had a weapon! That thing and I are both devils, and it has claws, so where are mine??’

As soon as he thought that, he somehow felt a strange sensation on his fingers. He focused on that feeling, and he watched, fascinated, as his gaseous fingers somehow condensed to form metallic, razor sharp claws the same shade of black as the rest of his body.

As he watched his fingers transform, the devil pounced at him once more, sweeping its claws wide to catch him this time. He snapped out of his trance as the devil dug its claws into his shoulder. He screamed in agony, and swept his claws in retaliation. The creature’s other arm blocked one of his hands, but the other dug into its throat, and he flicked his fingers and tore it open.

The creature’s eyes bulged, gargling in its own blood as it stared at him with hatred in its glowing yellow eyes. He kicked it over, and it collapsed onto the ground.

With one final cry of rage, it shuddered, and fell limp.

“Haah, haah, haah.”

Jason stared at the devil he had just killed for a moment. The adrenaline rush slowly faded, and the searing agony of his wounds and the exhaustion of the battle flared up, and he too, collapsed onto the rocky ground.