Zimo Banks found himself surrounded by a ring of faces that he thought he knew. Well, it was very clear now... He had no idea who these people were. 

There was one question in his mind. How did it get to this point?

As they put him down at a location he knew very well, Zimo tried to lift his arm but remembered that it was completely gone, having been removed from his body recently, leaving nothing but a frozen bleeding stump in its place. 

It was not one of them, but both his arms and his legs. Everything was gone.

Looking at those faces, which had now turned into demonic visages of what he once viewed them as, their expressions hostile, their weapons glinting in the dim light of the moon as they stood over him, laughing and making fun of his situation, Zimo wondered what the hell he was thinking trusting these people.

"Do you think they'll eat his left stump or his right stump first?"

"They'll probably eat his face first, in all honesty. After all, it's not that bad looking."

"What about his legs? Oh yeah, we removed them too, didn't we, pfft!"

"Remember how he was screaming when we did that? Please~ Don't do this~ AHH~"

"Pfft, Hahaha!!"

"Sorry, Zimo. My Beast needed to eat. I hope you can forgive me, and let me repay you with an early death."

"Hahahah!!!~~"

"Eww, What are you saying, Maya?!~~"

"What? That's what he gets for being a hard-ass."

"Zimo, be proud, you're going to be used as bait for the good of our futures! Isn't that nice? You're going to be helping out your old friends! Isn't that wonderful?" said Jacques before kicking Zimo roughly at his waist, causing him to grunt and roll forward, all to the happiness and laughter of everyone around him.

Zimo coughed out loud, some blood leaking from the side of his mouth as he looked at these people, who once used to be his coworkers at his company. There was no resentment in his gaze. Only a cold apathy.

They were once his peers, people he would spend every day with, helping them and getting advice from them. 

It was amazing how things had changed in such a short amount of time…

These people had changed, going from the warm people he thought he knew to nothing more than spectres of the people they once were. They had taken his arms and legs off, promising to feed them to the Beasts they were going to tame in the future.

Utterly evil. Utterly base and low. 

And yet, as Zimo sat there, he could not hate them. It seemed this was the kind of world the world had turned to. He had not adapted fast enough to it. It was all his fault.

That was why he kept his eyes closed as they began dragging him away, laughing as they did, watching him bleed out on the floor. They had even used the Beast's magic to freeze his wounds, all just to keep him alive long enough to hear him scream to death due to the Deadspawns that were going to eat him up.

Their eyes held a coldness that was indisputable, chilling him to the bones so much that he forced himself to keep his eyes closed even while he was being dragged away, as they continued pulling him along to the position they were pulling him to.

What they were going to do to him was obvious to Zimo by now… He was going to be used as bait for the ravenous horde of Daadspawns, people that had turned into things that looked more like zombies than anything. All so that they could lure them away from the supermarket they wanted to raid.

"Why are you doing this? Why me.. all this time..." said Zimo, his voice weak and wavering, a trace of fear and disbelief in his words.

"It's only fair," one of them, a man named Jacques sneered, a glint of malice in his eyes as he spoke. 

"You were nothing more than a junior employee, too big for your britches. You should have listened to our advice and just fit in, but instead, you did your own thing. Now look at you. You had no idea you were expendable, did you? Well, it's about time to let you know now…

"Be happy that you're sacrificing yourself for our well-being, boy! And don't worry about your limbs, these things seem to like flesh a lot, so we figured even after your death, you could still make yourself useful to us. Isn't that great?!"

"He's definitely 'employee of the month', haha!"

"Didn't he get fired already? It's too bad though... Too bad he can only get his bonus in hell!"

"Hahaha!! That is so sick!"

Zimo let out a bitter laugh, the sound hollow in the impending doom. Sacrifice himself? How ironic. Had he not been sacrificing himself all this time now?

For years, Zimo had toiled away in the suffocating confines of WebStorm Technologies, a soul-crushing company where his talents were exploited and his dreams were stifled even before coming to fruition. Despite graduating with honours in Software Engineering, Zimo had found himself trapped in a cycle of overwork and underappreciation.

It was a hellhole. Calling it a hellhole was being nice because it was much worse.

As a web developer tasked with game development, Zimo's days blurred into nights as he grappled with endless debugging and coding challenges. As a new employee, he used to think that everything was being handed over to him, thus making his life difficult and giving him sleepless nights, which he spent at the office.

But soon enough, he realised that there was something wrong. A colleague of his, Maya, was not under any obligation to do heavy work even though he and she had joined at the same time. Even though they had both signed the same contract.

What did that mean? Why was that? 

He had been new for 2 years and yet he was still being overworked and underpaid, and all of it had to do with the company politics.

Sleepless nights became the norm for him as he struggled to meet impossible deadlines, all while his colleagues basked in the glory of their political manoeuvrings and bribery tactics. He was not that type of person. But everyone else was exactly like that. He was not going to be taking off like that and that was a fact.

There was a company culture which advocated doing favours for higher-ups to get favours done for you, and people would use this to get off work, having it passed to people who refused to bend their knees or did not do enough to make their higher-ups happy.

Zimo was one such person.

He refused to stoop to their level. He refused to partake in the corrupt games of office politics, unwilling to sacrifice his integrity for fleeting rewards. And so, he bore the brunt of the workload, his efforts overshadowed by the scheming machinations of his colleagues.

He hated his job and despised the soul-crushing monotony of his existence. Yet, he persevered, clinging to the hope that one day he would escape the clutches of WebStorm and forge a brighter future for himself.

That hope was shattered when the world was plunged into chaos by an oily black rain—a harbinger of the apocalypse that transformed ordinary people into mindless zombies. 

Civilization crumbled, and Zimo's once-dreary existence became a nightmare of survival in a world gone mad as he was soon exposed to the hearts of the people around him... It was something strange that he had never seen before.

Now, as he stood on the precipice of oblivion, betrayed by those he once called coworkers, Zimo couldn't help but wonder if this was his punishment for daring to dream of a better life. 

But amidst the darkness, a spark of defiance flickered within him—a determination to defy fate and carve out his destiny, no matter the cost.

And right at that moment, the horde was near, the air was thick with a smell of acrid stench of death and decay. And each time, the laboured moans of Deadspawn that were solely approaching came to him, scraping against his revolve. 

Zimo gritted his teeth. The bodied stump of his arm twitched beside him as adrenaline coursed through his veins. He would not give those bastards the satisfaction to hear his screams. 

If he was going to die, he would die like a man. With dignity.

But just as despair threatened to consume him, he heard a sound. It was a low guttural growl. And it cut through everything, like a mad blade through the undead groans. And then he saw them. A pair of eyes, green, dead and evil, glowing in the unnatural luminescence of the darkness.

The creature stepped into view, sleek, and predatory, its fur shimmering faintly with a strange oily sheen. It was as though that black oily rain had given it not a curse, but a blessing. It did not charge. It did not lunge. It simply stared at him, titling its head to the side in interest as if it wanted to see what was going on in his head.

And then in the next moment, they faltered. Their movements began stuttering. And then in the silence, Zimo felt it, a pulse. Not in his chest, but in his mind. It was a faint thing, that he barely understood, but it was undeniable.

The Beast… At that moment it seemed to be reaching out to him. And he wanted to reach back.

— A Few Days Back —

Zimo remembered it like it was yesterday.

He was at the office as always, having been up for almost 54 hours straight, running on fumes and the will to live as he submitted the latest feature update and sighed, leaning back in his seat.

"Ah… I need to sleep," said Zimo to himself, leaning back in his seat and looking up. Dozing off in the next moment only to have someone slap his back, waking him up, Zimo turned in shock and confusion only to see a face he did not necessarily like seeing.

It turned out to be Jacques, his coworker and Team Leader. Although he was the team leader, his skills were inferior to Zimo's, and all he knew how to do was use Google to get to Stackoverflow to search for ways to solve bugs or implement features.

An incompetent, who just had a little bit more Social aptitude, thus landing him the position of team leader and taking all the credit for the accomplishments of everyone on the team. 

Jacques knew that Zimo was better than him, and that was probably why Zimo was always getting work handed to him. It was because Zimo stood out too much.

"How dare you sleep at the office?! It's early in the morning, we have to start work! And what's that smell?! Is it you?" said Jacques, his face turning darker as he took an exaggerated amount of steps back away from Zimo to prove his point.

"Team Leader Jacques, what's wrong?" said someone coming into the room and seeing the two. Although he said it in a way that seemed like he was concerned, he had a smile on his face, knowing that it was just that time of the day again. Time to pick on the eternal intern.

"Phil, you better not step anywhere close to the vicinity of this guy. He smells like he has not touched water in days!!" said Jacques, dragging Phil back away from Zimo and eliciting a fit of laughter from the plump man.

Zimo sighed and stood up, heading to the door and leaving the room amidst more jokes on his dark circled eyes and sick-looking facial expression, knowing that if he stayed there, he would never hear the end of it.

He was used to this already. That was just how they were around him.