by zlurex
Grave Ashcroft has one dream: a quiet coffee shop with a bell above the door. He was three months away from the down payment. Then the sky cracked open, a sentient cosmic entity called the Verdict branded every human on Earth with supernatural powers, and the corpse of a dead god began bleeding into reality as a predatory dimension that hunts everything inside it. Grave's Brand: the power to erase anything from existence and chain what he kills. Grave's curse: if he doesn't kill every 72 hours, his own power eats him alive. And the cruelest part? The more he cares about someone, the shorter the timer gets. His little sister — the girl he raised alone since she was one — has been silently shaving hours off his life since before the apocalypse began. Now she's across a monster-infested city. Between them: mutated beasts, rival factions, the reawakened headmaster of the orphanage that sold children when Grave was seven — now armed with chains of his own — and a predatory mirror dimension whose dead-god corpse is slowly regenerating. If it fully wakes in seven years, it devours everything. The only way to stop it might be reaching a rank of power no being has ever achieved. The universe chose the wrong man. He doesn't want to save the world. He just wants the bell above the door.
