Sloth

“Sloth. A mammal known for slow movement, for idleness, for hanging from the world as if it has all the time in creation. It’s no coincidence that this monster’s denomination points to one of the seven deadly sins. When the first gate opened in Australia, when the sky split apart and the red light poured through like blood through a wound, scholars, generals, priests, and politicians all worked themselves to exhaustion trying to understand what had happened to our world. In those first months, before the losses truly mounted, we still believed understanding would save us. We catalogued species, behaviors, hierarchies. We learned that the armies of Hell were led by creatures we recognized, twisted into something greater and more terrible. Lions. Wolves. Serpents. Scorpions. Things that had stalked human fear for thousands of years already. There was one creature, however, that none of us could confidently place. One final general unaccounted for. Theories came and went. Some suggested a bear, some a spider, some a carrion bird. A few, quietly, suggested the sloth. Most dismissed it out of hand. It didn’t fit the pattern, they said. It didn’t look the part. It didn’t feel worthy of command. We told ourselves that Hell, at the very least, would have the decency to make sense.

“So we did what men always do when they lack answers. We went on the offensive.

“At first, it felt like righteousness. It felt like history bending our way. We pushed the demons back country by country, drove them out of cities they had turned into nests and slaughterhouses, and for the first time since the gates opened, people started to believe humanity might actually win. Nations that had spent decades baring their teeth at one another suddenly shared intelligence, resources, food, fuel, aircraft. Old enemies became necessary friends. The pressure on Lucifer mounted with every mile we reclaimed, and morale rose with every flag planted in liberated soil. We thought we were tightening a noose. We thought we were forcing his hand.

“We were right about that much, at least. He broke. Just not in the way we expected.

“The first general appeared in South Africa.

“We had expected a commander. We had not expected an artist of ruin. The first general was Pride, and he came to us in the shape of a lion, though lion hardly seems the word for him now. He was vast, broad as an armored vehicle, with a mane that looked like molten gold in the desert sun and eyes like furnace doors left open in the dark. The troops who first saw him said that even from a distance he carried himself like he owned the earth beneath his paws. Maybe he thought he did.

“We had underestimated the generals in every way that mattered. Not just their strength, though God knows we paid dearly for that mistake. Not just their numbers, though the dunes were thick with their lesser demons. No, what we had truly misjudged was their cunning. Pride understood the battlefield better than many of our best human commanders. He used the heat against us, the landscape against us, the very rhythm of exhaustion against us. He kept us in motion during the day, harried us at night, denied us water, denied us rest, denied us the illusion that there was ever a safe direction to retreat toward. Manticores choked the airspace, tearing through aircraft and forcing our support further back. Our armor became ovens. Radios crackled with half-heard orders and full-throated screams. Entire squads vanished between dunes and were found later in pieces, if they were found at all.

“I wasn’t on that battlefield myself. I’ve sometimes thought that was a mercy and sometimes thought it was a stain. Everything I know of that day comes from Jason Andrew, from the survivors of his squad, and from the faces of the men who never quite returned even when their bodies did.

“By all accounts, it was hell before we ever crossed through the gate.

“Jason Andrew, even then, was already a man people looked toward without realizing they were doing it. He wasn’t some myth yet. Not then. He was just Andrew. Broad-shouldered, sharp-eyed, a little too calm when things got ugly. The kind of soldier who made you think the world might stay in one piece another hour just because he was standing in it. His squad had been cut off in the chaos. Sergeant Mina Alvarez was with him, and Cooper Hale, and the brothers Finch. There are stories about what happened next, dozens of them, each told like gospel by someone too stunned to question their own memory. Some say Andrew baited Pride into overextending. Some say Alvarez saved his life three separate times before losing her arm at the shoulder. Hale swore Andrew looked the beast in the eye and laughed. I don’t know which parts were true. I only know that somehow, impossibly, Jason Andrew’s squad came face to face with Pride himself.

“Those who lived through it described it like fighting a natural disaster that hated you personally. Pride moved too quickly for something his size. He tore through men and steel alike. Bullets struck and seemed to offend him more than wound him. His roar knocked soldiers flat. But Andrew and his people held. They adapted while dying. They learned his rhythm while it was still trying to kill them. They bought one another seconds with blood and broken bone. And in the end, somehow, Pride fell.

“When the lion died, the whole region changed. The lesser demons lost cohesion almost immediately. Manticores that had moved with terrifying precision scattered into panicked circles. The lines opened just enough for our forces to withdraw what remained of the ground operation. It was our first major victory against Hell, and it came drenched in so much loss that nobody quite knew whether to celebrate or weep. We did both.

“The United Nations doubled down after that. Publicly, the world appeared galvanized. Privately, cracks had already begun to show. Casualty numbers reached homes faster than our victories did. People asked if this war could be won, then whether it should be fought, then whether Lucifer himself might be reasoned with. There were protests. There were sermons. There were men and women in clean clothes, far from the front, arguing that perhaps this was divine judgment, that humanity had provoked something sacred and should submit itself to the outcome. I’ll confess now, as I did then, that I have no patience for any of them. I’m not a theologian. I’m not a philosopher. I’m a soldier. I was fighting for my wife, for my daughter, for my parents, for the friends I still had and the ones I’d already buried. I was fighting for the families of men I didn’t know and countries I’d never thought I’d set foot in. Let scholars debate the soul of the war after the world survives it. I had no interest in letting Lucifer turn my home into a lesson.

“Still, politics seep into war the same way smoke seeps into cloth. You can’t keep it out.

“Anyway, by then you all know the name Jason Andrew. Or thought you did.

“After Pride came Lust and Envy. The battle was fought here on our soil, on the west coast, where the skies were black for three days before the first wave even made landfall. Lust came as the scorpion king, plated in obsidian shell and dripping venom that hissed through concrete. Envy was the queen of snakes, a thing of coils and mirrored scales, beautiful in the way deep water is beautiful when you know it intends to drown you. Their armies were made of Gharros and Gorgons. The Gharros came swarming and shrieking, all stingers and hooked limbs, while the Gorgons moved with horrible grace through ruined neighborhoods and freeways, turning hesitation into death.

“That campaign was different from South Africa. In South Africa, we had survived by grit and accident and the sheer refusal of a few men to die when they were supposed to. On the west coast, Andrew commanded. He was no longer a gifted soldier amid chaos. He was the organizing principle of the entire defense. He positioned artillery like a surgeon arranging blades. He predicted feints before they happened. He understood that Lust wanted us enraged and reckless, while Envy wanted us divided, suspicious, second-guessing one another. So he refused both of them. He kept the lines tight. Rotated exhausted units before collapse. Fed misinformation to the demons when possible. Sergeant Naomi Price ran reconnaissance that bordered on suicidal. Captain Ellis coordinated air response so cleanly you’d think the skies themselves were listening. Two civilian engineers, Santos and Ibrahim, rigged half-flooded tunnels beneath the city to funnel one of the demon pushes into a kill zone. We began, little by little, to behave like a species that intended to live.

“Lust and Envy fell within days.

“That was when the legend got out of hand.

“People started hailing Andrew as the second coming of Christ. Some did it as a joke at first, the sort of half-serious battlefield humor that keeps men from cracking apart. Then others said it with a straight face. Then with reverence. Some painted icons. Some carried his photograph like a charm. Churches denounced it as blasphemy, then some quietly embraced it because frightened people will worship anything that stands between them and annihilation. Andrew found the whole thing funny, or pretended to. He used to grin whenever someone called him a savior and say, ‘Last I checked, I still bleed.’ But every victory fed the story, and every story built the man into something no man should be asked to become.

“We kept winning. That’s the poisonous thing about success. It teaches you that momentum is character.

“We drove deeper into demon territory. Wave after wave came and broke. New species, new monstrosities, new tactics. Andrew met each one. Men started speaking of the war in chapters marked by which general had died there. We got closer to Lucifer, closer to Australia, and closer, we hoped, to answering the riddle of the final general.

“Then came Wrath.

“Andrew once said the earlier generals all had a gimmick. A trick. Pride had attrition and terrain. Lust had provocation. Envy had deceit. Once you saw the shape of their game, you could beat them. Wrath had no game. That was the revelation. Wrath was not subtle, and he did not need to be. He was simply stronger than anything we were prepared to stop.

“He came through Russia like the end of history. Positions we had spent months fortifying were shredded overnight. Supply lines vanished. Entire battalions were erased so thoroughly that for days command still believed they’d merely gone dark. He didn’t hide behind his army or let it soften us up. If we advanced, he met us halfway. If we fortified, he broke the fortification open and walked through it. If we retreated, he followed. His forces moved with the certainty of a flood and he stood at the center of it all like violence given shape.

“I saw him once from a ridge through smoke and burning snow. Enormous. Red-black skin like cooling iron. Horns swept back from his skull. Arms too long, claws longer, and eyes that held not rage exactly, but appetite. That was the true terror. Wrath did not look mad. He looked delighted to have found a world fragile enough to break.

“He nearly claimed Europe in a single push. Every gain we had made, every inch paid for in blood, began to unravel. The UN, or what remained of its unity, faltered. Nations blamed one another for losses. Old suspicions reawakened. Supply pledges slowed. Joint operations became arguments with uniforms on. Lucifer had found the seam in us and pressed a claw right through it.

“Then China invited Lucifer to parley.

“You remember the headlines. The debates. The pundits with grave faces pretending they were not terrified. There was talk here in the United States of sending our own ambassadors, of exploring terms, of ending the slaughter before there was no one left alive to count it. The generals never admitted surrender was being considered, but you could smell it in the halls, in the pauses before briefings, in the way men stopped making eye contact when the maps came out.

“Then the news came in from China.

“Not terms. Not negotiations. Not compromise.

“Erasure.

“Lucifer arrived with his full army and burned the whole country to ash in hours. Cities collapsed into firestorms. Survivors came out half-mad, coated in soot, speaking of skies that screamed and ground that split open under crowds trying to flee. There was no diplomatic ambiguity left after that. No one could say they didn’t understand his intentions. The war would end with humanity’s extinction or Lucifer’s defeat. Nothing else.

“And while the world was still trying to process that, Wrath launched again.

“Canada gave one warning before its communications went silent. After that, everything came through fragments. Broken calls. Satellite glimpses. Civilians with blood on their mouths describing things no camera had caught clearly enough. Wrath had invaded from nearly every angle. Towns went dark. Highways jammed with fleeing families became slaughter grounds. Men who had spent months calling the enemy ‘hostiles’ or ‘entities’ or ‘forces’ stopped doing that after seeing what Wrath’s army actually did up close. Nobody called them anything but demons after that.

“We all knew something had to be done, and the world, in its laziness, in its need, placed the entire burden on Jason Andrew.

“By then he was wrecked. That never makes it cleanly into the statues and the stories. He had old fractures that never healed right, nerve damage in one arm, burns across his back, a limp he tried to hide, and a cough that sometimes bent him double when he thought no one was watching. He was not the shining hero from the posters anymore. He was a man held together by tape, painkillers, and public expectation. But the world, or what was left of it, still needed a champion, and so he stepped forward one last time.

“He gave that speech outside the World War II memorial.

“You’ve heard it, most of you. Some of you were there. But recordings flatten a man. They miss the weather of him. I remember the wind tugging at his coat. I remember how tired he looked before he started, and how, somehow, he still made everyone in that crowd feel seen. Not inspired at first. Seen. There’s a difference. He looked like a man confessing before an execution.

“‘Humans, and demons…’ he began. ‘Humans and demons aren’t so different.’

“There was an audible stir in the crowd. Some outrage. Some confusion. He let it sit.

“Then he told them what war had shown him. That he had shot humans and demons alike, bled under both, and seen the same carnage in both. He said that what might separate us was not our capacity for violence, but our sickness at it, our ability to be wounded by what we do. He spoke of compassion and empathy as if they were not gentle virtues but the last thin wires holding civilization above an abyss. Then he spoke of his wife. Until that moment, very few knew. She had died before Pride, killed not by Hell but by a vindictive ex-husband. I watched the crowd shift then. The myth of Andrew cracked and the man beneath it showed through. He admitted he had thrown parts of himself away to survive. He admitted he was no savior, no Christ, no divine answer. He said maybe humanity’s strength was not purity but solidarity, and that perhaps our greatest weakness had been asking one man to carry a species.

“‘I’m not your savior,’ he said. ‘I’m a human, I’m a demon, I’m whatever I need to be to win this fight and live to see another day.’

“I don’t know if it was a great speech in the way historians mean it. I only know it worked. For one night, maybe one final night, we believed in each other again.

“Shortly after that, we deployed to New York for our last stand against Wrath.

“There was a feeling in the city that I have never known before or since. Not panic. Not exactly. It was the stillness of a patient who knows the operation will either save him or kill him and is too exhausted to fear either outcome anymore. Streets were barricaded. Buildings were reinforced into firing nests. Civilians who remained volunteered as medics, runners, loaders, watchers. Priests stood beside mechanics. Teachers passed ammunition. Everyone had become part of the same machine because there was nothing else left to become.

“Andrew and I fought together on the front. He told me he had a plan, and when I asked what it was, he said, ‘Kill Wrath.’ That was it. No flourish. No cleverness. Just the one hard truth we had learned from every previous general: kill the head and the body stumbles. He believed the lesser demons would panic if Wrath fell. Maybe he was right. Maybe he just needed something simple enough to carry.

“We fought our way through hellhounds in the avenues and over the wreckage of subway entrances and buses split open like tin toys. The smell was unforgettable. Burned fuel, blood, wet concrete, sulfur. We reached Wrath’s second-in-command, Marchosias, before we reached Wrath himself. Marchosias was a Marquis of Hell, and if you ask me, titles in Hell must be awarded based on how thoroughly something can ruin your day.

“He was monstrous. A towering, wolfish thing with scorched wings that never quite opened, a crown of hooked bone around his skull, and a voice like hot metal dragged across stone. It was me and three others who stayed behind to keep him occupied while Andrew and his squad pushed on. David Boerne. Kyle Davis. Thomas Woods. They were not legends. They were men. Boerne was older than the rest of us and had two daughters whose pictures he kept folded in a waterproof sleeve. Davis never stopped cracking jokes until the minute combat started, then went frighteningly quiet. Woods was the youngest and had that stubborn, almost offended courage that some young men wear because they haven’t yet learned fear can linger.

“We all knew what staying behind meant. Nobody said it anyway. That would’ve made it ceremonial, and there was nothing noble in the feeling. I was terrified. Andrew was gone. The hero had moved on to the part of the story heroes belong in, and I had been left with my own life to account for. I was armed to the teeth and still felt as helpless as a child under a thunderstorm. I remember thinking, absurdly, that courage was a resource and I had somehow spent mine too early.

“Then Boerne clapped my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t look at him like he’s immortal. Everything bleeds.’

“So we fought.

“I won’t pretend language can do justice to what those three men did in that battle. Marchosias was too fast, too brutal, too deliberate. He split walls apart. Tore rifles from hands. Filled the air with such heat that breathing felt like swallowing knives. Davis drew him into close quarters twice just to buy Woods a clean shot. Woods took wounds that should have dropped him and kept moving. Boerne held the line like a church pillar refusing collapse. We fought room to room, street to stairwell, over shattered marble and burning flags. We made him pay for every foot. And one by one, they died doing it.

“I was the only one who came out alive.

“If everyone in this room could be even half as courageous as David Boerne, Kyle Davis, and Thomas Woods were that day, this war is as good as won. Words only cheapen what they did, so I’ll leave them their silence.

“...

“When Marchosias finally fell, or at least ceased standing, I pushed ahead to find Andrew. I never found him.

“I found Wrath instead.

“He was bloody, wounded, and alone among the ruin. I was not much better. My armor was torn open, one leg half-useless, hands trembling from blood loss and recoil. We circled one another through the debris of a city that no longer looked man-made. There was no roar of battle around us then, only distant gunfire and the crackle of burning things. Demons are fast. Resilient. You don’t spray and pray against them. Every shot must matter. One missed bullet can become the space they need to rip your throat out.

“So we stalked each other. Eyes locked. Fingers twitching. Waiting for the other to commit.

“It felt like an eternity until Wrath finally lost patience and pounced.

“I put one round between his eyes.

“That was it. Not glorious. Not cinematic. One clean, deliberate shot, and the great monster of Europe collapsed in the rubble of New York like his fury had never been anything more than meat pretending otherwise.

“After Wrath’s death, it was agreed we could not stop. Rest would have become rot. If we paused, Lucifer would reclaim the initiative, and humanity had no reserve strength left to endure another swing like Wrath. So we advanced. Across Europe, through lands we had already fought over once, through cities emptied by fire and fear, until at last we reached China.

“That was where we encountered the final general.

“Sloth.

“I still remember the disbelief of it. The odd, childish insult of the thing. We had bled across continents. We had watched nations fall. We had buried enough men to seed a forest, and the final general of Hell was, in fact, an actual sloth. A literal sloth. Gray-brown fur. Long limbs. Curved claws. It hung there before us with the slow, lazy composure of something too bored to hate us properly. My men stared. One of them laughed, though it sounded wrong in his own throat. Another crossed himself. Sloth yawned at our arrival.

“There was no army with him. No grand formation. No final wall of demons to carve through. Just that creature, dangling there like Lucifer had decided the universe itself was a joke and we were finally close enough to hear the punchline.

“I took it as mockery. Maybe that was the point.

“I personally unloaded my clip into Sloth. The others followed. The thing jerked under the impacts, sagged, and stilled. No grand last words. No show of power. Just a sloth full of holes. That should have terrified me more than it did. Anything so strange ought to have been read as a warning. But by then we were too tired for mystery. We accepted what looked dead and moved on toward Hell.

“And then came the final confrontation.

“It was as epic and climactic as you’d expect, and still far uglier than any story deserves.

“We exploited every resource humanity had left. Every hidden reserve. Every weapon we had kept tucked away for the end of the world. Approaching Australia, Lucifer’s armies gave us absolute hell. The seas around the continent churned with things too large and too many to name. The skies crawled with winged horrors. The land itself seemed to resist us. So we stopped holding back. The Air Force cleansed the surface with nuclear fire. The Navy hammered the coasts until the horizon flickered like a broken sun. The Army advanced over irradiated ruin with our most terrible machines grinding ash into glass. Whatever moral hesitation existed before that day had already been spent in the graves of nations. This was not a war anymore. It was a species making its final argument.

“We marched through the gate of Hell fighting tooth and nail all the way to Lucifer’s throne.

“And there he was.

“The devil himself. Desperate, yes, but not broken. Cornered, but not diminished. He sat with his back against annihilation and still somehow looked like the most dangerous thing in the room. When he spoke, the chamber answered him. His voice was deep and immense, every word vibrating through the bones of my body. It raised the hair on my neck. It made my blood feel suddenly aware of itself.

“‘Humans,’ he said, ‘tenacious as ever, I see.’

“Admiral Jones stepped forward. Not bravely, I think, but dutifully. There’s a difference there too. He asked Lucifer one question. Why. Why had he attacked humanity?

“Lucifer answered more readily than I expected. Maybe because he knew he had lost. Maybe because victory had only ever been part of the question for him.

“He said this was not the first time humans and demons had traded blows. He said sin was like energy to demons, that humans were batteries, and that fear and despair were the richest forms of power in existence. He gestured to the relative emptiness of Hell’s capital and explained why. He had intended for Wrath to end it. Not merely to win the war, but to break our hope so completely that humanity would spiral into despair deep enough to feed him beyond anything Hell had ever known. Andrew, he said, had been the ultimate thorn in his paw.

“Then he answered the question none of us had thought to ask. What had he wanted all that power for?

“Not dominion. Not pleasure. Not even revenge.

“He wanted to confront the creator.

“He spoke of humans, demons, angels, all of us as beings trapped inside existence without explanation. He said he had intended to destroy us, consume the despair of our extinction, and use that power to rise among the stars and demand an answer from the one who made us. Why do we exist?

“It was the most human thing I ever heard the devil say, and I hated him all the more for it.

“Admiral Jones grunted and gave the execution order. Lucifer exhaled once, almost softly, with resignation on his face. But there was still a gleam in his eyes. A thin, terrible certainty. The sort that lodges in your gut before your mind catches up.

“And that brings us here.

“The Sloths have awakened after gathering sin as energy for centuries. While we were killing Lucifer, while we were convincing ourselves the final general had been a joke, a corpse, a mistake in creation, they were feeding. Growing fat on history. Growing patient on our failures. The war against Lucifer broke us, and now something older, slower, and perhaps even crueler has stirred from that ruin.

“So this is humanity’s last hope.

“No. More than that.

“This is not only the battle for humanity, but for Heaven as well, and for all life in our universe.

“We must persevere.”