I managed to save myself one more day. Here are the rest of the entries.
ENTRY 19
My heart’s pounding. I don’t know where I am, and I can’t say for sure whether I’m safe.
After I set out with my group, we bypassed the guards by tunneling under Heaven until reaching the sewers. I guess the devil thought the sewers would be mostly unguarded, but once we set foot in them, shouting started coming from both directions. Glowing men. My heart dropped. There was nowhere to duck. I shot at the men, relieved to see them combust.
As we trekked through the dimly lit sewers, I took note of how horrible it smelled. It didn’t matter so much every time we neared a corner. My adrenaline level skyrocketed. Would there be glowing men waiting for me? Would I live? I resorted to just shooting blindly around the corner. It worked five times.
Eventually, we reached a drain one of my group members claimed was the first one from “the city.” She told me to follow behind. Since they could hover, they’d just fly up out of the sewer. Since I couldn’t hover, I’d climb. But I’d be guarded in a circular formation. From there, I’d shoot any angel coming overhead.
Easier said than done. I need to stop expecting ease of force from my end.
Once I climbed up to the street, the sonic booms began. A dozen angels flew above the street. I opened fire for my life, taking out each angel as they flew close enough for me to hit. I barely paid attention to what was happening on the ground around me. All I heard were booms, shattering glass, car alarms, and shouting from all directions. At one point, I needed to take cover. I looked around and saw all the chaos. I ran through a shattered shop window and hid behind a table. An angel landed on the ground. I shot at it. It combusted.
As I anticipated the second another angel revealed itself, a deep male voice hit my right ear.
“Hey! ‘You from the kingdom of the devil!? Or are you of God??”
I looked to my right and saw an elderly man pointing a double barrel shotgun at my head.
Some shouting echoed in from outside. I looked and saw two angels sprinting towards the shop.
“Are you of God!? Answer the question!”
I jumped out from behind the table. The two angels’ eyes widened. They aimed their guns right at me. I grabbed the shotgun wielder by the hips and pulled him in front of me. He combusted into white flames while I jumped behind his desk for cover. I jumped up and fired at both of the angels. Both of them combusted as well.
The war went on for weeks. Those weeks weren’t so different from weeks I spent fighting wars in the past. In the middle of week four, I woke up as the sun began shining and noticed how silent the city was. Perhaps all the civilians had evacuated. During my journey through the war torn city, I came across a restaurant with shattered windows. I took a look inside. The tables were all lying on their sides. Food was strewn all over the floor.
As I looked around, a wet screeching noise echoed from the sky. I looked up. A giant ophanim was about to fly overhead. My heart sank. I jumped through a shattered window to hide in the restaurant.
I knew it took several bullets to take out a small Ophanim, but I couldn’t imagine what it would take to bring down a giant one. The dreadful sound of the ophanim peaked, but once it began to pass, I took note of a television on the far end of the room. I walked up to it and switched it on, hoping to get some news updates.
I flipped through the channels until I found a broadcast showing a giant Ophanim hovering above a city I couldn’t recognize. Many of the skyscrapers in the city were on fire. Then explosions rocked about 10 or 15 of the skyscrapers, taking each of them down. Meanwhile, fires were spreading like crazy across the surrounding forest.
“And with that… Heaven’s final option is hammering the city at the center of Hell. The destruction of evil, in the name of God, has begun.”
I watched in horror. Heaven’s final option? Innocents are dying! People are being tortured!
As I fumed, I heard the sound of somebody stepping on a piece of glass outside. I didn’t have time to turn my head before I blacked out. I woke up in someplace dark. Feeling around, I felt a cold hard tiled floor. What room was I in? Who captured me? I felt around some more and found a lamp. I switched it on, revealing the room I was in. Torn up papers, photos, and posters were strewn all over the ground.
ENTRY 20
After writing up the last entry, I looked through the torn up papers. Some of them depicted God, Jesus, and different angels. Others were pages from the Bible. I held one of the torn pages and read half of what was on it. I crumpled it up and threw it at the wall.
The door creaked open. I jumped, hoping it wasn’t one of those glowing men. I grabbed my gun and aimed it at the door. I was relieved to see it was a non-glower. She had black hair and looked to be in her mid or late twenties. Her eyes widened.
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I’m on your side. Your fellow soldiers are going to be back soon.”
I was relieved, but I didn’t know who she was. Was she associated with the devil? Or was she someone else entirely? I asked her.
“Eve,” she said. “Your fellow soldiers need you.”
“I know they do,” I said. “We have creatures to eliminate.”
“You’ve already pretty much won the war. Don’t let your guard down, though, because the angels avenging God are destroying Hell as we speak. Your soldiers need you to help them bring in a bomb you and them call the Parakuzma, according to them.”
The Parakuzma was an atomic bomb we were developing as part of the construction of anti-anomalous weaponry following the accidental death of God. I told her this. But, I also informed her of the fact we hadn’t tested it due to our efforts to conceal our war on Yahweh’s spirits. We’d only test it in the most dire of times. Times when a war with the west wouldn’t sound so threatening.
She told me I was ordered by the words of my commander to help bring the bomb into Heaven. I told her I needed to be shown something official just in case, even though she already knew of the weapons development project at all. She brought me out into a large room with shiny marble walls, a high ceiling with three skylights, and a marble-tiled floor. Several of my comrades were conversing with each other in the corner. Some recognizable from previous missions, and others not. One of the ones I recognized, Dimitry, told me the order was legitimate. Then he told me we needed to get back to the portal.
A pit formed in my stomach.
“Is it still open?” I asked. “How far away is it from here? Where are we?”
“Yes, it’s still open,” Vladimir said. “The devil has our backs, though. Don’t worry. Now get prepared.”
My comrades left the room, leaving me alone with Eve. Eve walked over to a gold plated chest that sat a little over to my left. She opened it up, reached into it, and pulled out a stone with words engraved into it. She placed the stone on the floor. In front of her.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“They’re the ten commandments,” she said. “Well, five of the ten. The other stone is still in the chest. I’ll be taking care of that one right after I take care of this one.”
She brushed her hair back with her hands. I wasn’t sure what she meant when she said she’d be taking care of them. That was until she pulled a jagged rock out of her pocket, bent down towards the stone, and began to scrape the first commandment where it was engraved in the stone, leaving white scratches.
“I don’t know if you’ve read my story, but I was the one who was manipulated into eating an apple,” she said. “Adam was responsible for me… ew… and blamed me for him failing to be responsible. Adam was punished. And so was the serpent. But so was I.”
She began to scratch out the second commandment.
“All that apple contained was knowledge on how to separate good from evil. That’s what God wanted to keep hidden… and he expected us to know any better? The devil wants to set up a new kingdom led by a new leader, and there’s been some talk of me most likely being the next leader. If so, I’m going to undo all the terrible things Yahweh did.”
She moved on to the third commandment, scraping it like no tomorrow.
“Job refused the position. He said he just wants his livelihood back. Adam finally realized what he was doing when he blamed me for him not taking responsibility, and the devil told me he doesn’t plan on being the next leader… so that leaves me.”
“Isn’t the devil very powerful too?” I asked.
“Not as powerful as you may think,” she said as she began to scrape the fifth commandment. “He’s not the exact opposite of God. He just worked for God. At some point, he realized how shitty God was and rebelled against him and his order. He’s more of a political influence. But anybody can be God with a specific piece of knowledge.”
My comrades entered the room. I walked up to them, determined to get the rest of the fight over with. One I was more familiar with, Dimitry, looked into my eyes.
“You ready, Artem?” he asked.
“Yes. This place is very chaotic. Almost everything here has thrown me off guard… but if I keep up my willingness to fight and defend, I should be able to defend myself against those atrocious creatures.”
My comrades all nodded their heads in agreement.
Despite the agreement, there was something else on my mind. My location. Where the hell was I? I asked my comrades as I heard the second stone be placed on the floor.
“You’re standing in God’s mansion,” Vladimir said. “We wiped out most of the guards and low level employees. We hoped Noah would be here as well, but we did not find him. Still, they had some pretty powerful guards. It took minutes to kill some of them, but we pulled it off. We can now sincerely say the Throne of God is occupied.”
“Where’s the devil?” I asked.
“He’s hiding out on Earth,” Vladimir said. “He believes we can pull this off, but we also need to get the four giant Ophanim creatures to hover in one spot.”
“Wiping out their guards and low level employees should do it,” I said.
“It will not,” Vladimir said. “They can be replaced. There needs to be a big enough distraction to get all four of them in the same area. The devil has a plan he hopes will work. He didn’t tell us what it was, so it must be a job for a smaller set of higher up individuals.”
“He hopes?” I asked.
“There’s a 60% chance it will, he says,” Vladimir said. “We are dealing with powerful beings.”
“How powerful is the Parakuzma?” I asked. “Is it anything like AN602?”
“It’s twice as powerful, comrade,” Vladimir said.
“Are the devil and Eve going to be hiding in a shelter?” I asked.
“The devil told me he, Adam, and Eve will be hiding out on Earth, watching Heaven’s central city get vaporized,” Vladimir said.
“Well alright then,” I said. “Let’s continue.”
“We must wait for the devil’s comrades to arrive,” Vladimir said. “Remember…”
“I know,” I interrupted. “We’re bags of flesh going up against anomalous beings. But now that we have more time to discuss things… what do you think the effects of this will be? We’ve discovered inter-dimensional travel… it happened to be this dimension of all the possible ones… and if the west finds out what we’ve been doing, they’d hold it against us.”
“We’ll see where we go from here,” Vladimir said.
I nodded my head in agreement. This did feel like the beginning of something, and I was going to experience it.
I turned towards Eve, who was reaching into the golden box. Both stones were sitting on the floor, all scraped up. Nobody needed those commandments if they were also commanded to do things that contradict them.
“Eve?” I asked.
“Yeah?” Eve said, pulling an object out of the box.
“Thank you,” I said. “This will all be over soon.”
Eve was holding in her right hand a golden goblet cup adorned with red diamonds close to the rim.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
Eve tilted the cup. A red liquid spilled out onto the floor. Once all the liquid had been poured out, Eve set the cup on the ground and stomped on it, making a sizable dent. She stomped on the cup again and again and again until it was pretty much flat. Then she looked at us.
“You guys need to leave,” she said. “This room is off limits now.”
“Alright, let’s go,” Dimitry said. We stepped out of the room, leaving Eve to her business. In the lobby, we met up with the devil’s comrades, who asked us if we had everything we needed. We each told him yes. With that, we were on our way to finish this.
We marched down the deserted main road. Past all the abandoned shops with blown out windows. We were expecting just a few angels, but then that noise came back. That wet growl. I looked up and saw a giant ophanim slowly appearing in the sky. The clouds separated for it, and I felt terrified at it. My heart sunk so deep, I froze for a second.
“Get to the sewer!” I yelled.
It was our only way out of this one. I couldn’t stress it enough either. It had to have seen us out in the open. One of Satan’s men ran to the nearest sewer drain and pulled it right off. My comrades and I were told to go first. I sped down there. Then I began jogging south. I looked behind me, seeing my comrades all having made it down and the devil’s comrades floating in. However, only half of them were in the sewer when a blinding white light beamed through the manhole. One of the remaining comrades shouted, telling us to run.
I expected it to take at least an hour for us to get to the portal, but two hours had gone by and we still weren’t there. The smell was unbearable, I had no idea if a horde of glowing men were about to swarm us, and we only had half the devil’s men we were supposed to have.
My fear turned into reality when I started hearing familiar shouting echoing from both directions.
Great…
It happened so quickly. My memory is hazy, but what I can say is… when we heard the voices, the devil’s comrades shielded us. Once they rounded a corner out in front of us, it was just deafeningly loud booms for five seconds. We waited silently, then before we could count to ten, a couple more rounded the corner. They were shot and killed.
One of the devil’s men, David, signaled for us to remain quiet some more as he walked towards the edge of the intersected sewers. Before he reached it, a black rectangle with moving eyes peered around the corner and shot David with a beam of light.
Dread overtook me. There was a fucking Ophanim down here. Why was I so afraid of them? Other than because they were killer creatures… their appearance was just terrifying… creepy… all those eyes… I aimed my gun at it, waiting for it to peer around the corner again. Another of the devil’s men started towards the spot the ophanim was. When he neared the spot, he tossed a grenade. It exploded. The Ophanim hovered out from behind the corner while making the worst screech I’ve ever heard. A third of it had been blown off. It was leaking heavily, and was barely able to stay up. It landed on the ground, continuing to screech. I opened fire at it. One shot. It was gone.
Eventually, David told us to stop moving. He pointed to a drain up ahead and told us that it was the nearest drain to the portal.
This was almost over. Good.
But then David told us we were miles away from the portal, so we needed to be quick. As he told us the giant Ophanim were probably hovering around the central city, he got a call on his radio.
“This may be shocking, but the devil’s plan has failed. We need to get through the portal before any angel finds out what our intentions are.”
That couldn’t be too hard, right?
We climbed out of the sewer. The sweet smell of fresh air was delightful… a great break from the stench. All we needed to do was hurry through the forests.
We ran for what felt like an hour. We avoided buildings, we avoided farmhouses, we avoided everything. It was going to take a while to reach the portal, so we discussed hideouts for when we needed to sleep. At some point, we came across a bunker. David told us to get inside. Before I could step in, somebody was shouting in our direction.
“What are you people doing with my shelter?”
I looked to my left and saw a farmer.
“Training,” I lied.
He picked up a shotgun and aimed it at me.
“You guys look like those invaders! Get out of here or I’m calling the police!” he shouted.
In defense, I shot him. He combusted. I stepped into the bunker, where I met up with my comrades.
After we woke up, David told us we could pile into the pick-up truck in the driveway and proceed with the rest of the trip. He insisted on protecting us on our way there. There were six Soviets, including me, so two could sit in the front, and four could sit in the bed of the truck. Seemed simple enough.
After breakfast, we made our way to the truck. My comrades and I hopped into the truck while the devil’s men took their positions around the truck. Then we began our journey down the roads of the farmland. Adrenaline rushed through me as I thought about the possibility of being found and vaporized by a giant Ophanim.
About ten minutes away from the portal, the truck broke down. We pulled up to the side of the road and made the rest of our way on foot across the calm forest. Some moments into the walk, I saw a white light shining in the distance. That was it.
Shortly after I spotted the portal, I heard it again… That echoing growl. I looked up for a quick second and saw a giant Ophanim. I picked up my pace until I was running as fast as my legs could take. Once out of the forest, my adrenaline spiked. If the Ophanim couldn’t see me in the forest, it could see me out in the open field of grass.
It took me a few seconds to realize the Ophanim hadn’t harmed me… although it seemed like it would’ve already. I could still hear it growling up there. Worse, I felt its stares. They burned my psyche and were chilling as hell. I reached the portal and, without looking back, sprinted through it. I didn’t at all mind the transition from the warm climate to the snow and freezing air.
The second before I ran through the portal, I felt four sets of eyes staring at me from behind, followed by four thuds behind me as well. The air got warmer too. I didn’t have much time to think about it, as I needed to get to the arsenal in which the Parakuzma missile was housed. I was then ordered to guard the portal, so I went over and stood by it.
While on guard, a gruesome and terrifying statement was made to my comrades and I. It didn’t change what I thought about Heaven or God. Not at all. In fact, it made it all a whole lot worse. It happened so suddenly. I happened to be glancing at the portal when a human skeleton covered in ash was wheeled out by a flaming man. It’s hard to describe where his flames began and his body ended… The air heated up like an oven in his presence though. He gave me a smirk, then he said…
“Let this be an example of what will happen if any of you step into Heaven again. The flame consumes the wicked.”
He turned around and stepped through the portal, back into Heaven. The air began to freeze, but my disgust wasn’t going anywhere.
Once my comrades arrived with the missile, it was pointed out the portal was in the wrong position to fire a nuclear missile aiming for the center of Heaven, so we put the machines powering the portal up on a platform then connected the platform to a helicopter. Once the helicopter had lifted the portal high enough, we carefully aimed the missile at the needed angle.
Within minutes, we got three of our commanders to vote on the decision to covertly launch the missile. All three of them voted to proceed with the launch.
It was time.
Not a minute after the vote, the missile was launched. It flew through the air without an issue, gliding perfectly. It flew through the portal, then the portal closed. The platform was slowly lowered back to the ground, the disconnected from the helicopter.
It was determined the city would be far enough away to make a quick observation from the Heaven side of the portal. However, remembering what the flaming person presented, my heart dropped. I didn’t want my comrades to be incinerated. I showed them the skeleton. I told them what happened.
“What was his name?” asked my commander.
“I wasn’t told,” I said. “But the fact we can’t recognize them says enough.”
“How will we know if we’ve succeeded?”
I had enough with this. If this was where traveling through portals was going to take us, I might as well go back to my regular life. The one already full of near-death experiences.
“I’ll go take a look,” I said. “If I don’t come back out, we probably failed.”
I stepped up to the portal. Expecting to be met with excruciating pain, I stopped. Wanting to let my comrades know we won, I stepped through the portal. The first thing I saw was a huge mushroom cloud. The wind was still blowing from the explosion, but it had clearly died down by the time I arrived. Two giant Ophanims were lying still on the ground, burning up in flames. Their eyes were lifeless and grey. A third Ophanim floated erratically through the air. Left to right. It too was up in flames, but not as much as the other two were. The flames were definitely spreading, though.
I smiled for the first time in months. The wild beasts were dying. As I looked up in relief, a flame caught my attention. Four separate fires were spreading across the grass. Adrenaline rushed through me. The giant Ophanim let out an echoing screech chilling enough to catch my full attention. I looked up and saw the colossal creature hurling towards me. My heart sped up. I leaped backwards through the portal, tripping and falling backwards into the snow. My comrades cheered.
Despite the fact I was still alive, I was still in a panic. I got up on my feet and shouted at my commander, telling him to shut the portal. I explained what I had seen, then everyone grit their teeth. The portal was then shut before any fires or Ophanim debris could get through.
ENTRY 21
I can finally start a new entry. I took a break from writing for a couple days after the end of the war. The central government is going to cover up the loss of 1.5 Million soldiers for the sake of not heightening tensions with the west. It’s not something we would usually do, but the situation we went through was nothing usual. It was an incident we don’t want to talk about. The mechanics are just too confusing.
ENTRY 22
I never thought I’d pick up this journal again. Today is November 16, 1964. Minutes ago, I found a film in my basement that I didn’t see yesterday. All set up and everything. The film was in color and began in a field of grass. In the distance was a forest. Further off in the distance was the skyline of a metropolis that lined up the horizon. Then, there was a flash of light. The light dissipated, and in the distance was a growing mushroom cloud. The film ended with a total run time of 15 seconds.
It was amazing to see the actual explosion. That was a major historical moment for them.
The film came with a letter. This is what it read:
“Artem, thank you for assisting my people in the uprising. The new God in power has sealed off my reality from those entering with malicious intent, so I can let you know what I wanted you to know, but waited for the right time to tell you. I knew the right time would be any time after I recieved your help, as you would’ve likely taken criticism terribly.
What I want you to know is… you and your fellow Soviets need to know torture is never okay. I’m not sure if you’re guilty of it yourself, but if you are, please change your view on it. The Soviet Union is guilty of many of the things it criticizes.
Sincerely, the one they call The Devil.”
All I’ll say is… I’m glad I started out as a draftee rather than a blunt psychopath.
I wonder how things are going in Heaven, Hell, and Earth. Hopefully everyone’s in a better place than they were before.