Orti Anima Sanguineque( three gamers reincarnate as the Hechatoncheires with Fromsoft games powers): chapter 3: OTHER PEOPLE

POV: ELIJAH "GYES" DOE

Even though it sounds crazy, I say we go for it.

The words leave my mouth—mouths? and I feel them settle into the air like seeds into soil. Chris's plan is objectively mad. Suicidally ambitious. The kind of thing that heroes attempt in the third act after extensive montages and character development.

It feels as if We're still at best in chapter three.

But madness and I are old friends. We've shared apartments. Compared notes. Traded secrets in the dark.

And there's something else. Something I've been feeling since we fell. Since we landed. Since we became.

A doubling. A layering. Like I'm standing in two places at once, like I'm two people wearing the same skin, like someone took my soul and ran it through a photocopier but the copies didn't come out quite identical.

"More than that," I continue, letting my voice carry into the strange acoustics of this place, "more than us being reincarnated, I feel like we were isekaied with additional cheats. I am Gyes."

The world reacts. Of course it does. I’ve learned that when the name Briareos was said. Names have power here. They're not just labels. They're declarations. They're existential statements. I AM, and reality has no choice but to acknowledge it.

But I'm not done.

"But more than Gyes," I say, and I'm reaching now, reaching into myself, into the strange doubled consciousness that's been whispering at the edges of my awareness, "when I search, look deep, there is something that feels familiar and at the same time not. Another name. Another title."

I find it. Hook my mental fingers around it. Pull.

"And this one is the Hunter."

The word twists.

That's the only way to describe it. The word twists like a knife in a wound, like reality having a seizure, like existence briefly questioning all its life choices.

The air thickens. Not with moisture. With meaning. With too much meaning. More meaning than three-dimensional space should be able to contain. It folds in on itself, origami of concept and flesh, paper cranes made of screaming.

The walls pulse, not like a heartbeat, like wrong. They ripple and distort and for just a moment I can see behind them, see the machinery of reality, the gears and teeth and things that squirm in the spaces between what is and what isn't.

My brothers stagger. I see Chris's hundred arms buckle. I see Niko's cathedral-body shudder.

And I'm changing.

Not growing. Not shrinking. Condensing.

It feels like being reverse-born. Like going backward through existence until I find a shape that makes sense again. My impossible geometry folds, collapses, compresses. The excess of me, the dozen limbs, the multiplied features, the sprawling wrongness, it all pulls inward like water down a drain, like smoke being sucked back into a bottle, like God taking a deep breath and holding it.

I feel my bones reorganize themselves. Feel my flesh learn new patterns. Feel my skin remember what it was like to be human.

Almost human.

The transformation doesn't hurt. That would be too simple. Instead it feels like remembering. Like I've always been this shape and just temporarily forgot.

When I open my eyes, just two eyes now, what luxury, I'm standing at human height. Human scale. Human proportions.

But I'm not human.

I wear a long coat, black leather aged to grey in places, patches darker than others like old blood that never quite washed out. It hangs to my ankles, weighted with purpose. Beneath it, layers of clothing that might be Victorian if Victorian knew how to dress for nightmare. High collar. Buttoned vest. The kind of outfit you wear when you're hunting things that don't die easy.

On my hands: leather gloves, worn thin at the fingertips. At my hip: weapons I don't remember drawing but recognize intimately. A saw cleaver, folded in its compact form. A Victorian like pistol, one looking crude and brutal.

In my other hand, when did I raise it? a torch, but the flame burns silver-grey, the color of moonlight filtered through smoke.

And the hat. Leather tricorn, brim curved just so, casting my face in shadow.

I am the Hunter. Capital H. Not a hunter. The Hunter. The paleblood seeker. The one who walks through nightmares and asks them to move aside.

"If I am not wrong," I say, and my voice is different now—rougher, older, carrying echoes of blood and insight and things witnessed in the depths of a mad dream—"if what I suspect is right, on top of the new abilities we gained by being reincarnated as deities, we probably gained powers related to our favourite Soulsborne games. I mean, what kind of isekai doesn't give cheats to the protagonists?"

Chris and Niko are staring at me. Not with fear. With recognition. With the sudden understanding that we've stumbled onto something interesting, possibly advantageous.

I watch as they both go still. As they turn their attention inward. As they reach for that same doubling I found, that layering of soul and memory and fictional legend made flesh.

Chris moves first. He always does.

His transformation is violent. Sudden. Like reality giving up and letting him do whatever he wants because it's easier than arguing.

His massive form, the hundred-armed monstrosity doesn't shrink so much as refocus. The arms collapse inward, merging, condensing into something more deliberate. More human-shaped. But there's still that sense of too much. Of excess barely contained.

When the light clears and there was light, dark light, the kind that makes shadows stand up and pay attention Chris stands changed.

He's human-sized now. Tall but not impossibly so. Broad-shouldered. Built like someone who's made violence into an art form.

He wears armor but it's wrong. Segments of plate over leather, but the plates don't match. Some are tarnished silver. Some are bronze gone green. Some are blackened iron. It's a patchwork, a collection, a museum of wars fought and survived. Over it all, a cloak. Dark. Heavy. The kind of cloak that billows dramatically in wind that isn't there.

At his hip: a sword. Greatsword, really. Too big for one person. The blade is dark, nearly black, with a faint red glow along the edge like coals in a dying fire. The hilt is wrapped in leather that's seen too much use.

But that's not all.

As I watch, Chris reaches up, casual, practiced and pulls his hand through the air. And the air responds. It ripples and tears and suddenly he's holding a different weapon. A massive club, crude and brutal. Then it changes again. A spear. Then an axe. Then dual swords.

He's cycling through them like changing loadouts in a menu. Testing. Feeling.

"Weapon arts," he mutters, and grins. "Holy shit. I can switch weapon arts. I can—" He pauses, concentrates, and his cloak billows outward. For a moment, just a moment, I see the shadow behind him. A massive shape, hunched and many-armed, the god-form he just compressed into human skin.

The Lord of Hollows. The Unkindled. The one who ate the dark and made it a kingdom.

"Yeah," Chris says, and his grin is sharp enough to cut. "Yeah, this'll work."

Niko is next. His transformation is slower. More deliberate. Like he's negotiating with reality instead of demanding.

His cathedral-body doesn't collapse so much as fold. Like origami. Like sacred geometry teaching itself humility. The impossible angles smooth out. The excess arms retract or merge or somehow become implied rather than explicit.

When he solidifies, he's tall. Taller than Chris, taller than me, but human-proportioned. Elegant in a way that's somehow still monstrous.

He wears robes. No, not robes. A coat. Long, dark blue-grey, with golden embroidery along the hems. The patterns are astronomical. Star charts. Constellations that don't exist yet. Under it, formal attire. Almost priestly. Almost scholarly.

On his head: a crown. Or the memory of a crown. Or the idea of a crown. It's hard to look at directly. It shifts between iron and gold and stone and light.

In one hand: a staff. Tall, gnarled, topped with a crystal that glows faint blue. In the other: a seal. A talisman. The kind you use to cast miracles.

But it's the eyes that give it away. Multiple pupils, nested within each other like Russian dolls. They glow faintly, the color of grace, the color of golden order, the color of erdtrees and ancient laws.

"Tarnished," Niko says softly, testing the word. "I'm Tarnished. No—" He pauses, concentrates. The crown on his head solidifies, becomes more real. "Elden Lord. I'm the Elden Lord. The one who reunited together the pieces of the great rune. The one who made a world make sense again."

He lifts his hand and light pools in his palm. Not fire. Not lightning. Something older. Fundamental. The kind of light that existed before there was anything to illuminate.

"I have incantations," he whispers, awed. "I have—" He makes a gesture and suddenly there are golden blades in the air around him, floating, waiting for targets. "Holy shit. I have like, everything. All the builds. It's like having access to the entire spell list."

"Show-off," Chris mutters, but he's grinning.

I look at my hands. At the torch in one, the cleaver in the other. I can feel other things waiting. The threaded cane. The stake driver. The holy moonlight sword. Weapons I've used and loved and mastered across a hundred playthroughs.

But more than that, I can feel insight and its effects. The stat that measures how much you've seen, how much you know, how close you are to understanding the cosmic truth.

My insight is very high.

I can see things my brothers can't. Things moving in the walls. Things watching us from the non-sky. Things that exist in the spaces between spaces.

Tartarus is not empty.

It's very, very full.

Most things here probably never saw and probably would never see such. I guess I was the lucky one.

Joy.

"You know what," Chris says, and his voice pulls me back from the edge of seeing too much, "you're right. Let's make hell our bitch. Which means one thing: let's try to find a way to make Tartarus submit."

He says it casual. Like he's suggesting we order pizza. Like he's not proposing we dominate a primordial dimension of suffering.

I love him for it.

"Before we start conquest," I say, and I'm trying to be the reasonable one here, trying to channel that diplomatic energy that kept us from imploding a hundred times before, "we should probably understand what we're working with. Niko, you said you know this place. What do we know about Tartarus? Not the myth. The actual place. The layout. The threats."

Niko straightens. I can see him sliding into research mode. Into the comfortable space of knowing things and explaining them.

"Right," he says. "Okay. So. Tartarus. Based on what I remember and keep in mind this is mostly stuff recorded after the fact, after Zeus and the Olympians already won, so some of this might be different, Tartarus is both a place and a person. A being. The primordial deity of the deep abyss itself."

He starts pacing. His staff taps against the ground with each step, leaving small glowing marks that fade slowly.

"As a place, Tartarus is... massive doesn't cover it. Cosmically massive. It's supposed to be as far below Hades A.K.A the underworld as Earth is below the sky. And the underworld is already underground. So we're talking about a prison dimension at the absolute bottom of existence. The basement of reality. The pit where even gods in myths are afraid to look, the place where gods fear to tread."

He gestures at the walls, the impossible distances, the things moving in the dark.

"The geography is... fluid. Inconsistent. It depends on the source because one says one thing and one says another and the ones I read in our first life could even be said to be incomplete with how many Hellenic cults didn't deign to record their so-called mysteries, knowledge. Some sources say it's surrounded by bronze walls and bronze gates. Others say it's just endless void. Some say there's a river, the Phlegethon, river of fire. Maybe also the Cocytus, river of wailing. Possibly the Styx flows through here too, though that's mostly an underworld’s thing."

He ticks off points on his fingers. He has the normal number of fingers now but I can see the ghost of more, the suggestion of dozens, flickering at the edges of perception.

"As for inhabitants... well. The Titans will be here. The ones Zeus will overthrow. Kronos, Atlas, Hyperion, Iapetus, the whole crew. They'll be imprisoned deeper in, locked away in the darkest parts. That's our supposed job in the original timeline, keeping them locked up."

"Supposed job," Chris mutters. "Fuck that."

Niko grins. "Yeah. Fuck that. But they're not the only things here. Tartarus is where gods put the things they can't kill but don't want free or just want to suffer or find unsightly like our asshole of a father. Monsters. Criminals. Cosmic mistakes. If it's too dangerous or too embarrassing for the reigning gods, it gets thrown down here."

He pauses, considering.

"There are also... entities. Things that are part of Tartarus itself. Guards, maybe. Or immune systems. The texts aren't clear. But there are supposed to be storms that aren't weather. Darkness that hunts. Walls that eat. The place itself is hostile."

"Great," I say mildly. "Wonderful. So we're in cosmic Australia."

Chris snorts. Niko tries not to smile and fails.

"Basically," Niko admits. "But here's the thing we're not exactly tourists. We're Hecatoncheires. This place was literally made to shape us in a way. We're... we're from here in a weird way. This is our origin story. Our beginning. Maybe that gives us an advantage."

"Maybe," I echo.

"Definitely," Chris says firmly. He's not pacing anymore. He's still. Focused. The way he gets when he's running numbers in his head, calculating optimal paths, finding the exploit in the system.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. Here's what we're dealing with: hostile environment, unknown threats, possible god-tier prisoners, and a location that's literally sentient and hates us. Standard souls game setup, honestly. We've dealt with worse."

"Have we?" Niko asks.

"Okay, we haven't dealt with worse. But we've dealt with similar. First thing any souls game teaches you: don't fight what you can't beat yet. Scout. Learn. Find safe zones. Establish respawn points."

He's in tactician mode now. I can see the gears turning behind his eyes.

"We need a base," he continues. "Somewhere defensible. Somewhere we can return to when—not if, when we get our asses kicked by whatever nightmare lives in this place because we may have broken powers but we're still new to them. Elijah, you said we need a refuge. You're right. That's step one."

He turns to me, and I nod. "Before we can conquer, we need to survive. Before we survive, we need shelter. It's basic Maslow's hierarchy except the pyramid is upside down and made of screaming."

"Poetic," Niko says dryly.

"I try."

Chris continues, building momentum. "Step two: reconnaissance. We map this place. Figure out the layout. Find the threats. Identify the resources. In Dark Souls, you don't run straight to the boss fog. You explore. You find the shortcuts. You learn the enemy placements."

"Step three," Niko picks up the thread, "we find the power sources. We can’t only rely on what we already got. It's a good beginning sure but good won’t cut it if we want to fucking thrive. This place runs on something. Divine energy, maybe. Primordial power. Whatever it is, we learn how to tap into it. Or steal it. Or redirect it."

"Step four," I say quietly, "we decide what 'making Tartarus submit' actually means. Are we trying to control the place? Escape it? Reshape it? We need a clear win condition."

Chris grins. "All of the above. We make this place ours. Not because some fuck ass god says so. Not because we're guards or prisoners or tools. But because we choose to. We turn hell into home. We turn the prison into a fortress. We take the thing meant to hold us and make it our weapon."

"That's..." Niko pauses, searching for words. "That's extremely ambitious."

"Yeah."

"It'll probably get us to deal with a lot of bullshit."

"Yeah."

"We'll be fighting against the natural order of the cosmos."

"Yeah."

"...I'm absolutely in."

"Yeah."

I look at both of them. My brothers. My friends. My party members in this new game we've found ourselves playing.

They're insane.

I love them.

"One more thing," I say, and they both turn to me. "We need to be careful. This place... I can see things. Insight, remember? I've got enough insight to see behind the curtain. And there are things in this place that aren't just hostile. They're aware. They're watching everything. They're watching us. They've been watching us since we landed."

"Can you tell what they are?" Niko asks.

"No. Not yet. But they're old. They feel old. Older than fucking dirt, maybe. Older than

a lot of things. And they're interested in us."

Chris's hand drops to his sword hilt. "Interested good or interested bad?"

"Interested complicated. We're anomalies. We're supposed to be here but we're not supposed to be... us. Not like this. It's like a look into the abyss, the abyss look back kind of situation. It's probably because we're glitching the system just by existing."

"Good," Chris says firmly. "Let them watch. Let them be confused, wonder if they can. Confusion is a tactical advantage, is a good thing as long as that stops them from coming after us for a while.

He draws his sword currently in greatsword form, dark and heavy and plants it in the ground. The impact rings out like a bell, like a declaration, like a flag being staked into soil that's never been claimed.

"Here's the plan," he says. "So to recapituale, in the short term, here are what we need to focus on. Step one, we establish base. We find a defensible position in this immediate area. Somewhere with visibility, limited approach vectors, something we can fortify."

He points with his free hand, gesturing at the cavern around us.

"Step two, we do short-range reconnaissance. Stay within sight of base. Map the immediate area. Learn what's hostile and what's ignorable."

"Step three, we practice. We test our powers. Figure out what we can do. You don't go into a boss fight without knowing your moveset."

He looks at each of us in turn. Making sure we're following. Making sure we're with him.

"Step four, we push outward. Carefully. Methodically. We expand our territory inch by inch. We make Tartarus forget it was ever supposed to hold us."

"And step five?" Niko asks.

Chris grins. Savage and beautiful and completely unhinged.

"Step five, we break the game."