Lord-Campione
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Chapter no.57: Inner Monster
🕑 Added 2024-12-19 02:58:59 +0000 UTCKozen’s eyes snapped open. His vision swam for a moment, but he instinctively knew something was wrong. His body felt unusually heavy, his limbs sluggish, and for the first time in months, he felt groggy. The feeling was foreign, alien, and distinctly unpleasant. Ever since he had started his ubermensch sleep schedule, his body had adjusted to efficiency. Waking up always felt sharp, immediate, like flipping a switch. But now? Now, it felt as if his body had been submerged underwater and dragged back to the surface.
He blinked, his breath steadying as he sat up slowly in bed. His room surrounded him, its familiar layout a strange comfort despite the unease gnawing at the back of his mind.
The room was… exactly as he remembered it. His desk sat to the side, littered with old notebooks, a USB flash drive, and a half-empty can of soda from last night’s “research” session. His ergonomic chair spun lazily from the force of him standing up. His bed, unkempt as always, was shoved against the wall, it's dark gray sheets crumpled from his restless sleep. The posters on the wall hadn’t moved either: a faded movie poster from The Raid and a weathered map of Hyrule. Even the small crack near the baseboard by his nightstand was still there.
It was perfect. Too perfect.
Kozen’s stomach twisted. He rubbed his face, trying to shake the sensation of wrongness creeping into his thoughts. “Was all of that just… a dream?” he muttered to himself, his voice rasping from disuse.
He shook his head and moved toward his desk. “Alright, let’s figure this out.” Sliding into his chair, he booted up his computer, the familiar whir of the fan grounding him for a moment. His desktop flickered to life—just as messy as his physical desk, cluttered with shortcuts and files. He opened his browser and started typing into the search bar.
Nothing.
The search didn’t load. Neither did the homepage. In fact, it didn’t even look like the browser was processing anything. No spinning icon, no buffering. Just… static. As if the entire system was stuck in time, a perfectly rendered but lifeless simulation.
Kozen frowned, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. This doesn’t make sense. The computer’s running, but it’s like the internet doesn’t exist. He glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. The time read “00:00.”
“Great,” he muttered. His eyes narrowed in frustration. The sterile silence of his room pressed in on him, the absence of even the faintest hum of life outside growing more noticeable by the second.
He turned to his window, gripping the edge of the blinds tightly. Something inside him hesitated—some primal instinct warned him not to look. But curiosity, or maybe defiance, won out. With a sharp tug, he pulled the blinds open.
And froze.
A massive, pulsating ball of flesh hung outside in the void. Countless eyes of varying shapes and sizes dotted its grotesque form, unblinking, fixed solely on him. The flesh itself writhed like it was breathing, expanding and contracting in slow, uneven rhythms. Veins, thick and branching, pulsed beneath its surface with an unsettling glow, like blood was being pumped through it by some unseen heart. The eyes blinked sporadically, their movements asynchronous, as if each one had a mind of its own.
Kozen’s breath hitched. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. His mind screamed at him to process what he was seeing, but he couldn’t. The longer he stared, the more the air seemed to hum with a low vibration, a frequency that rattled his bones and made his teeth ache.
He shut the blinds quickly, the motion almost violent. His hands trembled slightly as he stepped back from the window. The hum stopped the moment he cut off the view. Silence returned, but the pressure in his chest didn’t ease.
He waited. Waited for the thing outside to do something, anything. But nothing happened. The blinds didn’t shift. The air didn’t move. The eyeball… the thing didn’t react.
Kozen swallowed hard, forcing his breath to slow. “Okay,” he muttered to himself, his voice low and steady. “So I’m still stuck in this damn place. But what happened to the class? Why am I here? Why is this… my room?”
He turned to the door, reaching for the knob. The moment it clicked open, his stomach sank again. Instead of the familiar hallway of his house, he was staring into an empty school hallway, the fluorescent lights flickering overhead. The tiled floor stretched on endlessly in both directions, littered with scattered papers and overturned chairs.
“No,” Kozen whispered. He stepped back into his room, his chest tightening. He spun around, his eyes landing on his cupboard. He yanked it open, revealing a small compartment he’d carved out weeks ago.
Inside was his secret stash—a sleek black handgun and his retractable staff, carefully hidden beneath a false bottom. He reached for the gun, his fingers brushing the cool metal as his heart raced. It was all here, exactly as it should be. The weight, the texture, everything felt real.
He paused, gripping the staff tightly. “This has to be a dream, right? My room’s a perfect replica, but this… this is too much.” He turned the staff over in his hands, the familiar mechanism clicking as it extended. “If it’s a dream, why is everything so damn physical? I can feel everything.”
His thoughts spiraled. Where the hell am I? What is that eyeball outside? Where is everyone else?
The sound of a door creaking open shattered his thoughts.
Kozen’s body tensed, his instincts kicking in as he turned toward the hallway. The sound echoed faintly, distant but growing closer.
“Shit,” he muttered, gripping the staff tighter. His eyes darted toward the door, his muscles coiled like a spring. Whatever was coming, it wasn’t friendly.
Kozen didn’t hesitate as the monster crashed through the door. Instincts honed by countless hours of training kicked in. He jumped back, his movement fluid and controlled, landing lightly on the balls of his feet. His breathing stayed steady.
The thing staggered into the room, and Kozen finally got a good look at it. From its size and height, it was definitely human—or had been. The body was greyish, the flesh stretched taut over exaggerated muscles that bulged grotesquely, pulsating like they had a mind of their own. Its head was missing, or at least most of it. The part above its nose was entirely gone, replaced with smooth, shiny skin that seemed to throb faintly in time with the rest of its body. There were no eyes, no upper skull—just a twisted abomination of flesh and jagged bone.
“How the hell is this thing moving without a brain?” Kozen thought. He tightened his grip on his retractable staff, his gaze locked on the creature’s every movement.
The thing moved erratically, like someone who had lost all balance or sense of direction. Kozen watched its arms sway as it staggered forward, and realization hit him. It’s moving like a blind person trying to find their way. The lack of eyes meant it was blind, likely relying on sound to navigate. That gave him an edge—if he could stay quiet, he could outmaneuver it.
The creature stopped, sniffing the air with sharp, animalistic movements, and then it spoke. The words were garbled, distorted, like they were being forced through shredded vocal cords. “I… am Musashi…”
Kozen’s eyes widened as recognition dawned. The voice—it was warped and guttural, but he remembered it. It belonged to that idiot from his first day at school, the one who pretended to be Musashi, the martial arts champion. The bully who tried to intimidate everyone and failed miserably when Kozen exposed him as a fraud.
No way… is this him? Is he one of these things now?
The monster staggered forward, the wet squelching of its flesh filling the air. “I hate… you…” it muttered, each word dripping with venom. “I hate… you… for telling… everyone I’m… not… Musashi…”
Kozen’s mind raced, piecing it together even as his body stayed perfectly still. It wasn’t just a monster. It remembered him. It carried a grudge. The thought chilled him, but he didn’t let it show. Instead, he quietly reached for his phone, gripping it firmly before flinging it onto the bed.
The phone hit the mattress with a dull thud. The monster’s head snapped toward the sound, and its arm shot out. Tendrils erupted from its hand, sharp and wiry, piercing straight through the phone and shredding the bed into a tattered mess of fabric and foam. The spikes retracted just as quickly, leaving behind a mangled crater where the bed had been.
Kozen crouched low, steadying his breathing. Calm. Controlled. Wait for an opening.
“Kozen…” the creature hissed, turning its head back and forth. “Is that… you?”
Kozen didn’t answer. He didn’t move. But inside, his heart raced as the thing’s voice grew louder, angrier.
“I’m strong now… look… at me…” the monster growled, stumbling closer to where Kozen had been. “You can’t… stop me… anymore…”
Kozen moved fast, stepping silently around the thing as it approached the destroyed bed. He raised his gun, aiming for the back of its half-missing head. The perfect angle. He pulled the trigger.
Click.
His blood turned to ice.
No bullets?! Shit!
The monster’s head snapped toward the sound, its lipless mouth twisting into a wicked, unnatural smile.
Kozen rolled immediately, hitting the floor and tumbling away just as a tendril shot out toward him. It pierced the spot where he had been, embedding itself deep into the wooden floor with a sickening crack.
Thank God for rolling drills, Kozen thought grimly as he came to a crouch. Rika’s voice echoed in his memory from training: “You roll silently by using your body weight, not force. No noise, no wasted energy.”
The monster’s tendrils retracted, and Kozen kept low, his movements silent as he crept toward the bathroom. The creature stood still for a moment, its head jerking slightly as it listened for any sound.
Kozen reached the bathroom door, his fingers gripping the handle. He slowly, carefully turned it, pushing the door open just wide enough to slip inside. The faint creak of the hinge made him wince, but the monster didn’t react. He grabbed the gun from his belt and hurled it into the toilet with a loud splash.
The sound was instant bait. The monster’s tendrils shot toward the noise, smashing into the toilet and shattering porcelain. Water sprayed everywhere as the thing lumbered into the bathroom, its body hunched and twitching.
“Come on, you bastard,” Kozen thought, watching as the creature moved closer. The tendrils were still embedded in the toilet, writhing and coiling like angry snakes.
This was his chance.
Kozen lunged, his retractable staff snapping open as he rammed it straight into the monster’s gaping mouth. The force of the blow drove the staff deep into its throat, the metallic clank reverberating through his arms.
The monster reeled back, its tendrils flailing wildly. One of them shot toward him, but Kozen twisted the staff, forcing the monster to stumble forward as it missed by inches. He drove his weight onto the staff, bowing it downward, and the monster toppled, its own momentum dragging it to the ground.
Kozen didn’t hesitate. He slammed the staff down further, feeling the creature’s throat give way beneath the pressure. There was a wet, gurgling noise as blood poured from its mouth, thick and dark. The tendrils twitched violently, then went still.
Kozen pulled the staff free, breathing hard. The monster’s body convulsed once before collapsing entirely, blood pooling around it in thick, viscous waves.
“Definitely hit something important,” Kozen muttered, wiping the staff on his sleeve. He stared at the lifeless body, his chest heaving as the adrenaline slowly wore off.
The silence that followed was deafening.
[ Monster Kozen Fought ]
