Reality shattered, disintegrated, tore apart.

He was a leaf before a blowtorch, dry and brittle.

Jack hurtled screaming through a nothingness, a void that was not a void. A place that was not a place. A time that was no time at all.

And then suddenly he was somewhere else. All sense of motion and momentum stopped so abruptly that he stumbled, even though he was standing perfectly still. Knowledge of his situation remained and forced him to act, to move.

He raised his weapon.

Except he didn't have his weapon. For a moment, pure panic. He slapped his chest, expecting to feel nothing but skin, but relaxed as his gauntleted hand clanked against his chestplate. He heard something groan and the panic returned. Stone surrounded him, gray masonry, torchlight flickering. He was in Hell.

As he hunted fervently for a weapon, finding his holster empty, his shoulder vacant of a rifle sling, a wave of pain did a slow roll through him and he groaned in sick agony. Had it been like this the last time he'd come to this wretched, godforsaken place?

At this point, Jack couldn't even remember. The memories were like so much paint hurled onto a canvas, mostly different shades of red, running together in a bloody ruin.

There. His double-barrel was still on him. He got it into his hands and cracked it open, saw the two shells still in there, and snapped it shut again. Jack took in his surroundings. It wasn't masonry, he saw, not exactly, but it was gray stone. There were niches in the walls around him, each holding a brass pedestal that was home to a flickering fire. When his initial sweep revealed nothing but four strange walls and no exits, the panic surged.

"Stop," he muttered. Obviously he was alone, in the immediate sense at least, and he needed to calm down. He forced himself through a few quick breathing exercises and ran multiplication tables in his head for fifteen seconds. When he was finished, he felt better. He still hurt, but the panic was abating, at least.

Jack activated his radio as he began hunting more calmly for some sort of way out. "This is Ward to anyone, do you copy?" He listened. Nothing but dead air. He repeated the message twice more before giving up and leaving his radio on. He was hoping that this time he would have appeared with his friends, even one of them would be nice, but no. The portal had seen fit to steal some of his gear and scatter them to the demonic winds.

He paused as he considered that. That was definitely new, or he thought it was. Never before had a portal been so selective. It had either been all or nothing. With this in mind, Jack quickly searched all his pockets and was frustrated to find that his gear now consisted of his uniform, his armor, his shotgun, twenty shells for it, and…

The duck? For some reason, the wooden carved duck miniature he'd taken way back at that farm was still with him.

Why?

He supposed it didn't matter for now. Jack stopped as he realized one of the corners was different from the others. It stuck out, like someone had shoved a rectangular pillar up into it, and then fixed it in place with four shiny steel beams. Two of the beams didn't reach to the floor, the inner two, while the outer two did. The missing part was about human height. He walked over and checked it out. After a moment, he kicked the pillar.

With a grinding sound that startled him, it abruptly began lowering into the floor. He kept the shotgun raised as it continued disappearing, coming down lower and lower, and then suddenly the top was there, level with the floor, and he saw the shadowy-wavery optical illusion of a Spectre. As it roared, Jack yelled and reacted on instinct, blowing it away by giving it both barrels and spraying the walls with its demonic gore.

Reloading quickly, he cautiously stepped onto the top of the pillar with the remains of the nearly invisible demon thing. With a start, it began shooting back upwards. Well, here he went. Time to face the music, whatever ungodly tune it was playing this time around. When it stopped, it did so with such suddenness that he almost fell off the thing, right into a pit of acid. A cacophony of roars forced Jack into action before he could even properly scope the situation out. He saw a stone island ahead of him, with maybe four feet of an acid moat separating them, and on it stood a Chaingunner. While it was roaring and spooling up, Jack reacted on instinct.

He took the one step afforded to him by the stone platform and leaped for all he was worth. He just barely managed to make it, but damn near fell backwards into the acid moat anyway as he blasted the Chaingunner's head off with the shotgun. Regaining his footing, he stumbled forward, then lost his footing and fell onto its remains.

Something flew over his head. Still going on his gut alone, he dropped the shotgun and instead grabbed the chaingun. It was still attached to the demonic son of a bitch, but as he ran his hands frantically over it, he saw a hole in the Chaingunner's wrist. Shoving a finger into the gory aperture, he hit something metal and suddenly the barrels began spooling up. Holding it down, Jack wheeled around, on his knees now, and aimed for a nearby wall of iron bars, behind which a trio of Imps were peppering his position with fireballs.

The chaingun opened up and he reduced them all to so much crimson mist.

Something let out an unholy shriek to his left and he wheeled that way, screamed as he saw that it was a Revenant that had launched a pair of rockets his way, and connected the barrage of lead with the incoming rockets, detonating them. The stream of bullets continued and began pounding the Revenant, which made an admirable attempt to stand against the lead tide, but fell as its skull cracked into pieces and it became a pile of bleached bone and shiny armor. More roaring, now behind him. Jack jerked in that direction and sliced and diced not only another Chaingunner that had stumbled out from its hiding place, but a trio of Demons.

Finally, the chaingun ran dry.

Jack dropped it and began groping for his shotgun, not sure if he was alone again. Something shrieked overhead and he looked up just in time to see a Lost Soul diving for him. His heart stopped. His gut dropped.

Yet again, pure instinct.

He reached up and grabbed the Lost Soul.

And it didn't disappear into his hands. He actually grabbed it.

It was painfully hot and difficult to hold onto, but he was actually holding it. Jack let out a wild laugh and then smashed the thing into the stone he knelt on. It let out a shriek, and then burst into charred bone bits as he did it once more.

Jack looked at his gauntleted hands. What the hell did that mean!? Was it some fluke, a freak accident? Did the Lost Souls have to hit you a certain way, or maybe at a certain time during their attack? Was he somehow unique? Was that Lost Soul just not up to par? Way too many possibilities, and he knew he shouldn't count on it happening again, but in that moment he felt next to invincible. Snatching up his shotgun, he reloaded and then looked around. He was alone, for now, standing on an island surrounded by an acid moat.

He took a quick look around, weighing his options, but his choice was soon made for him. He saw the iron bars the now dead Imps were behind, a couple of other openings in the walls that were too far away to make it, and one that he could probably jump. Which he did. He took a running jump and leaped back over the acid moat, landing on the other side where the shredded Demons and Chaingunner lay. A quick survey of the area revealed just an ascending, broad stairway cast in faded brown brick. So, up he went.

As Jack proceeded, keeping an eye out for anything else lethal that was lurking nearby, he kept going back to the Lost Soul. He had actually touched a Lost Soul and killed it with his bare hands! That felt impossible and there was a part of him that was genuinely concerned he might have hallucinated it. But he still felt pretty here, in the moment. If only he wasn't alone! If only there had been just one other person there to witness it.

He reached the top of the stairs and flipped the switch he found there. The broad wooden door opened up and his presence was revealed to a quartet of shrieking Imps.

"Fuck off," he growled, raising the shotgun and squeezing the trigger.

He blew them away, painting the walls with their guts and gore. One of them survived the initial blast, though its arm had been blown away in the process and it was bleeding out fast. Jack finished reloading, walked up to it, and looked down. The creature stared up at him with malevolence in its gaze, hissing and reaching for him with its remaining arm.

He raised his boot and then brought it down, hard and fast, onto its skull.

A spray of demonic ichor and brains, (if what they had could even be called brains), splattered in a two-foot radius around it.

"Fucker," he growled. His good invincible feeling was already fading in the face of these things, of being here again.

If there was one thing in the entire universe that he didn't want to do, it was come back here. As much as he reassured everyone that it wasn't really Hell, it wasn't truly the place of biblical damnation and eternal torment, it still bothered the shit out of him. On a practical level, because everything about the place was either painful, disgusting, or just flat out disturbing, but on a deeper level, too. What if he was wrong? He didn't think he was, but maybe this was where you went when you died if you were bad. But what the fuck was bad anyway?

There were definitely bad things that bad people did, and it was obvious. But the more time went on, the more he realized there truly were shades of gray.

And should people really end up in infinite agony just for taking God's name in vain? For wearing clothing of mixed cloth or whatever it was? For eating certain foods? Losing their temper on a bad day? Having some casual sex?

He shook his head as he marched on after clearing out the room at the top of the stairs and finding a hallway extending off to the left. There was something hanging on the wall at its end, and he wasn't sure he wanted to see it up close, but it wasn't like he had much choice. In the end, he came to the same conclusion he always seemed to about religion: if people were given infinite or even insane punishment for inconsequential things like cussing, banging before marriage, and enjoying one too many good meals, then whoever ran that religion didn't deserve praise, let alone worship. Fuck, if flying the wrong flags, religiously speaking, could get you put into Hell, then whatever called itself God could fuck right off for such a petty position.

It wasn't something he shared all that often, because a surprising amount of people were still at least somewhat religious, and tended to get pissed.

Jack realized he was right: the thing hanging from the wall wasn't something he wanted to see up close. It had once been a person, but now it was just a skinned torso chained up by its wrists, a huge amount of blood beneath it, having run down the wall and pooled on the floor. Red pedestals with flickering red flames sat to either side of the corpse. Jack made double sure it was dead, (he no longer trusted death in this place), and then moved on, following the hall as it made a left turn. Nothing down that stretch, but at another left-hand turn, he found some zombies milling about. Two of them were unarmed but the third, a former Marine, wasn't.

Thankfully, the guy was in bad shape and only in uniform, not armor. And also he wasn't anyone familiar. Jack ran forward and broke the pistol the Marine wielded out of his hand, snapping his wrist in the process, then stuck the business end in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The back of the poor bastard's head blew out in a pulped spray of rotting gore. The other two zombies, civilians, snarled and came for him, and he put them down hard and fast, capping each in the dome with a single shot. He checked them all over. The civilians were unarmed, but the Marine had enough ammo on him for two full magazines when combined with what was left in the pistol.

"Semper Fi," Jack muttered as he stood back up and slung the shotgun, wanting to save it for deadlier foes.

The pistol felt comforting in his hand as he came to the end of the hallway. It terminated in a flat expanse of brown brick that held a single silver panel with a switch. He looked around for a bit, then threw it.

Somewhere else, something grated open. He waited to see if anything else would happen, but nothing did. Retracing his route, he ended up back at the acid moat room. Checking around to see if anything had changed, he noticed that the iron bars were no longer in place. The space was open to him now. He took a running jump to leap back to the island, then did it again to jump over to this new section of Hell. As he landed, he heard a startled shout and whirled on the sound, aiming his pistol and finding himself staring down the barrel of a shotgun…

"Oh my God, Jack," Jennifer said, lowering it immediately as he did the same. "You made it through, holy shit. You're alive."

"It's good to see you too, babe. You okay?" he asked. She looked probably about as bad as he did: her armor dented and bloodied, but he couldn't really tell if it was worse than when he'd last seen her on the other side of the portal.

"Fine," she said. "Freaked, but fine." She jerked her thumb to a door in the wall behind her. "Just managed to get up some stairs. I ended up in some fucking dark hallways of stone and had to deal with some zombies and Imps and a goddamned Demon. I knew I heard some kind of combat, that had to be you."

"Definitely me. Also! The craziest fucking thing happened! I killed a Lost Soul with my bare hands!"

She stared at him for a few seconds. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. It came right at me, I panicked and grabbed it, then smashed it into the ground!"

"How did you know you'd survive?"

"I didn't! I just, you know, grabbed it! Also, I found out you can use the Chaingunner's chaingun. I don't know if it was a fluke but I found a hole in one's wrist and if you shove your finger into it the chaingun fires. That's how I managed to survive so far," he replied.

"I swear if I hadn't experienced most of the insane shit I have over the past week, I'd think you were cracking up. And I say that as someone who loves you like crazy," she said.

He laughed. "I get it. Uh...did you find anyone else?" he asked, looking around.

She frowned, doing the same. You couldn't let your guard down for very long in a place like this. "No," she said, "no one on the radio, either."

"Well, this is a start at least." He pointed to the door she'd indicated. "You're sure it's a dead-end down there?"

"Pretty confident. I hunted all over that place. If there's a secret door down there, it's really well-hidden," she replied.

"All right. Then let's keep hunting. I want out of this place." He looked around the room they'd met in. Gray stone this time. There were a few likely places to go, so they started checking them out. Mostly they were alcoves, and the room was, for some reason, divided by a quartet of large, thick, shiny steel pillars that were spaced too wide apart to actually restrict them from crossing and going to the other side.

"So what actually happened to you?" he asked as they hunted around. "In the city. We didn't get much chance to talk."

She sighed. "I mean, I covered the gist of it. It was just one shitty thing after another. Sometimes not-shitty things were happening, but really nothing I'd call actually good. Lost our first squadmate to a damned skeleton. Some big fat fucker with cannons for arms blew up our first APC and fried half my squad. Then we ran into an army of Chaingunners and they just...shredded our second APC. We killed them all, but by the time it was all said and done, two more squadmates were dead and the bomb was toast. We kept going. Things just got weirder the deeper in we got. Found a squad of survivors trying to protect some civilians...none of them made it. Found another squad, and none of them made it either. It's a miracle I made it."

"I'm sorry, Jennifer," he said quietly.

"Yeah, me too. And now we're back here." She looked around at the strange architecture. "You know, I always knew I'd have to come back here. After we made it out after killing the Spidermind, I just knew. Because we're so good at surviving in here, for whatever damned reason. I had just hoped it would be a lot longer."

He laughed bitterly. "Yeah, I know what you mean...I bet this is important," he muttered as they came to a square red button embedded in a much larger square of silver, attached to the wall at the back of an alcove. Jack pushed it and prepared for the worst. Distantly, he thought he heard something grind open, but again, otherwise, nothing happened.

"Feels like this place is just saving up for us," he said as they made their way back to the acid moat.

"That's seriously the only thing that makes me glad to see demons," Jennifer agreed.

When they got back to the original area, Jack saw that what had previously been a wall opposite his present location was now an open space he could jump to, with what appeared to be a simple room and a door waiting for them.

"Ugh, great," Jennifer muttered as she looked down at the acid.

"It's a relatively easy jump," he replied.

"I know but, ugh, God, acid. I hate this shit. We've had a lifetime's worth at this point, of acid and lava, and toxic waste, which I guess isn't all that different from acid-whatever, let's get this over with." She took a few running steps and made the jump. Jack did the same, and both of them leaped over to the other side.

Jack opened the door and found...another small room, this one longer, though it was of a very curious design. Most of Hell was curiously designed, if it was designed at all, but he'd never seen anything quite like this. It was relatively mundane, comparatively, but still...it was maybe ten feet long by six wide, though it seemed more narrow than it was because to the left and right were what appeared to be stairs or, honestly, what reminded him of high school bleachers. Well, small versions of them. For some reason, they were mirrored up on the ceiling, too.

"Weird," he muttered, making for the door at the other end. As he did, his radio suddenly sprung to life in a haze of static.

"This is Hollenshead to anyone, I need backup!"

Jack responded immediately. "Ward and Taylor here, Hollenshead! Where are you?"

"Shit, I don't know!" He punctuated his statement with a shotgun blast. "Hold on, let me see if my nav beacon does jack shit in this place."

"I activated mine but apparently it didn't ping you," Jennifer murmured.

"Completely forgot about mine," he muttered.

A faint signal appeared on his HUD, ahead of their current position, deeper into the hellish labyrinth. "There! You see anything!?"

"Got you! On the way!"

"Hurry!"

They opened the next door and raced off, deeper into Hell.