He turned the corner at the end of the hallway and froze. It was almost impossible for him to comprehend how this could have happened. He stood petrified, staring at the walls and floor slick with blood; the ground was carpeted in the scattered entrails and torn viscera of four soldiers.
Brutally slaughtered and ripped open, they had been reduced to a warm, foul-smelling, chewed-up pulp that made the scene look like some macabre decoration.
The blood was still fresh. Victor walked through it, unable to avoid it, and it felt like stepping into a shallow pool.
The urge to vomit grew stronger, despite his efforts to suppress it. Everywhere he turned, he could only see the mangled, unrecognizable heads of the soldiers. It felt as if they were watching him, even though some of their eye sockets were hollow—eyes torn out, hanging, or exploded. They seemed to be laughing at him with sadistically malignant expressions, judging him, asking: "Why you and not us?" They were wishing him a death more painful than theirs, laughing and despairing all at once, creating a cacophony in the boy's head that made his mind spin as he staggered through the lake of blood.
"Enough..." Victor covered his eyes with his hands, pressing his palms hard against his face to blot out the horror. Then, he clamped his hands over his ears, because hearing those souls damn and insult him was making him lose his mind.
Suddenly, the world seemed to shake around him. A violent, aggressive vibration trapped him like a cage, an invisible wall from which the fixed, gruesome eyes of the corpses stared back—voids illuminated by pale white corneas, their irides deeper than the darkness itself.
"I'm sorry... it's my fault..."
Victor let out a sob. He wasn't crying; something was preventing it. Meanwhile, more eyes manifested around him, closer and closer, smaller and more horrifying, reveling in the sight of Victor's descent into madness.
The boy began to drool, grinding his teeth. The vibrations became stronger, more present, more real.
Then, he fell. His hands landed firmly in the lake of blood—warm and wet, a sharp contrast to the cold floor. There, too, eyes manifested one by one, just as the voices and screams intensified.
Victor began to have violent, repeated spasms. The air seemed to vanish; the stench of blood raped his nostrils, further massacring his psyche and reducing it to the same pulp as the corpses around him. Those bodies, unlike the boy, now seemed to stand tall, looking down on him with macabre, satisfied smiles. They began their metamorphosis, further disfiguring their bodies and faces, seeing through infinite angles, their skin filling with those white corneas, expanding around Victor until he was completely surrounded—alone, suffering, eternally watched in the frozen, tyrannical darkness of his own guilt.
Then, a sudden roar ripped Victor back to reality.
That distorted, metallic noise echoed for a few moments, just enough to bring the boy back. He was confused and dazed, yet strangely no longer terrified, even as his hands remained soaked and dripping with blood, some of which had already crusted onto his skin.
A second roar followed shortly after, followed by a shrill, piercing shriek.
"Toria..."
Victor sounded as if he had just emerged from a coma. His voice was extremely weak, brittle in places. His movements as he struggled to his feet were battered and uncoordinated. The higher he stood, the less capable he seemed of staying upright. Every step, marked by the "squelch" of his boots in the blood, felt deader than the last.
He stopped halfway before the end of the hall, turning back toward one of the corpses on his left, slumped against the wall with limbs splayed. Its right side was pinned against the blood-stained masonry. It still clutched a KBW rifle in its grey hand.
Victor stepped back, approaching the weapon, and wrenched it from the dead man's grip. He checked the action to see if it was loaded, flipping it to inspect the magazine—a heavy, flattened black cylinder nested inside the bulky rifle. The weapon was so massive his arm trembled from the effort of holding it by the warm barrel with one hand. it emanated a sharp aroma of iron, intensified by the blood smeared over it. The gun was still warm, contrasting with the boy's cold hand as he pressed the release button, waiting for the "beep" to extract the magazine.
Once removed—the surface feeling rough and matte to the touch—he turned it over to check for damage and, more importantly, to see if it was loaded. He peered into the feed lips at the grey bullets, stacked neatly atop one another.
"Shit... it's almost empty."
He stared at the magazine for a few seconds before turning his gaze toward the other rifles—four, like the number of corpses. He rushed toward each one, examining them one by one, pulling magazines only to be met with growing disappointment.
"Nothing... empty... damn it, this one too!"
In the fourth one, however, seven rounds remained. Combined with the fifteen from the first, he had twenty-two in total.
Victor nodded. His gaze was hesitant, filled with doubt, terrified of how the imminent confrontation might end.
His focus was entirely on where Toria might be. Despite the fear and exhaustion, and the helplessness slowly closing in on him, it was as if an external force was pushing him to react and fight, forcing him against his own will. He seemed mentally absent as he slammed the seven rounds into his magazine and clicked it back into the rifle. To him, it all felt like a flash. He was only a few steps from the corner, a corner polluted by those horrible sounds and agonizing scratches that were growing louder and more frequent.
"What kind of fucking creature makes those sounds...?"
Victor didn't waste another second. He rounded the corner rapidly, rifle raised and aimed. At first, he didn't fire. He intended to—he wanted to kill that giant, dark, tentacled mass. A mixture of flesh and iron filaments, it dripped blood from every pore, staining the floor with gore and fallen scraps of meat. It moved and contorted as if it were waves of an ocean pushed by a gale, faintly reflecting the flickering light.
"Uom..."
Only a few meters separated the Ijo from the boy. The beast was enormous, nearly ten feet tall, its shape twisted and far from humanoid. It was composed of at least eight main tentacles; two of them seemed to be playing with a wooden door, as if to terrify someone inside, scratching repeatedly in a slow, sadistic manner with the talons at their tips. The limbs were a composite of metal filaments and putrid, violet flesh, nearly dry of blood yet still leaking onto the floor.
Once again, Victor froze. But he refused to stay that way. Within him, a growing tension toward the monster, the disgust of seeing it breathe, and a rising homicidal instinct were slowly changing him. He was barely trembling now, gripping the weapon as if hanging onto the edge of a cliff, his right index finger locked, feathering the trigger. His breath grew heavy, matching the air around him, which seemed to compress under the weight of his building rage. His body stiffened, but not from fear. In that moment, all he wanted to see were the monster's guts ripped open. Only that would satisfy him, bringing an indescribable joy—a powerful, repressed, almost sinful desire. His mind was fixed on one thought: Toria was behind that door. He didn't know for sure, but something was making him believe it.
That was enough to unleash his wrath.
"Die..."
Suddenly, with the rifle aimed dead-center at the creature, he unleashed a hail of bullets—the few he had. For that fleeting moment, what looked like a dark, infernal corridor seemed purified by a rain of holy fire, a manifestation of divine will, a punishment for the creature's very existence.
The rounds ran out instantly.
"What the...?"
The creature remained still. It didn't move. And yet, the boy felt watched, judged, caught in the Devil's crosshairs.
"Uom..." The creature, completely unharmed, opened an eye. It was entirely white, with dark nerves visibly creeping through it. It opened slowly on one of the tentacles, staring fixedly at the boy.
Then came a row of five more, directly above the first, at a steadily increasing speed. Then there were twelve, twenty-four, one hundred and ten, nine hundred and forty-seven—all tiny, looking like a series of holes clustered together.
It began to tremble, just like Victor, emitting violent, gruesome grunts—animalistic, yet calculated. It was an open challenge, a brutal declaration of war.