The night sky stretched wide, cloaked in silence—an eerie, suffocating stillness that wrapped the world in a velvet shroud. The moon hung above, once a gentle guardian, now glaring down with a hateful red hue. It bled across the heavens like an open wound, pulsing with raw, seething rage.
Where once the silence offered peace, it now festered into a void—an ocean of unease. The school campus sat in darkness, its lights extinguished to conserve power, casting long shadows that swallowed the weary students whole. Even sleep came with reluctance, disturbed by the mist that clung like a second skin.
Beneath that thick veil of fog, things moved—lived. Abominations crawled and stumbled, figures distorted by something not meant to exist. They whispered and skittered, unseen but felt, like breath on the back of your neck.
The tall, sickly-green perimeter fence trembled—not from wind, but from terror, as though it too could sense the presence of something wrong, something vile pressing in from beyond.
A wet, sloshing sound broke the quiet, like meat torn fresh and dragged across gravel. It echoed faintly, too rhythmic to be random, too organic to ignore.
And in the heart of it all, the mist slithered toward a lone, black cubic structure—the isolation building. It stood weary, walls streaked with age, as if it too was being devoured by the creeping grey.
Inside, a boy lay asleep. Pale. Thin. His disheveled, shoulder-length hair spilled across a crude mattress. He breathed shallowly, twitching now and then, unaware of the shadow that loomed over him—silent, uninvited, watching.
Kerckekrck
A wet, screlching sound scraped through the stillness—a horrible, meaty noise that filled the room like a scream with no mouth. Its source was a shadowed figure, half-shrouded in mist, its form writhing and wrong. A mass of heads—goat, feline, something like a distorted bat—all grotesquely arranged, as if nature had once attempted to erase this creature but failed halfway through.
It stepped forward, and the floor creaked with the weight of its existence.
The noise jolted Xu-er awake. He snapped to consciousness, his instincts flaring like a struck match. Without thinking, he rolled off the mattress—clumsy but fast—his shoulder hitting the cold floor. He scrambled to his feet, breath ragged.
Before him stood the thing.
A lump of flesh stitched with madness. It heaved, barely breathing, its body a mangled fusion of man and beast. Canine heads snarled beside malformed human faces. A wolf's snout, a dog's whimpering expression, something almost human but too smooth, too stretched. Limbs jutted from odd places, twisted and backward. Its stomach gaped open, split like rotten fruit, intestines spilling across the floor in a glistening trail of gore.
The room filled with a stench like rust and bile. And still, the creature moved.
Xu-er's mind raced—but it wasn't chaotic.
Every heartbeat pulsed like a metronome, feeding thoughts into motion.
Front-heavy. Weight centers on the forelimbs. It's coiled. Waiting to pounce.
He lay curled on the floor, knees tucked, ready to burst sideways. Just to his right—the desk. The chair. His eyes darted, calculating.
Chair legs are rusted steel. Hollow. But sharp. Could lodge. Could distract.
The creature twitched.
Its twisted forelimbs cracked as they bore down, the floor beneath them groaning under its impossible weight. The blood had soaked through to the concrete, slickening every surface. Its dozen faces shifted—goat's skull to feline sneer to the grotesque, sobbing mask of a human child.
And then—it lunged.
Xu-er rolled, a breath from death, skin torn by the edge of a broken tile as the beast's claws raked past him by mere millimeters.
He slammed into the side of the desk, teeth gritting through the impact. His hand shot up—
His fingers found the chair. With a grunt, he hurled it
It spun through the air, and the steel leg drove into the goat's eye, lodging deep. Flesh tried to reject it, melting around the intrusion, but not before—
KRRRRKACCCCCCCCCH.
A shriek ripped through the creature, wet and layered, like a choir drowning in oil. It flailed, limbs spasming.
But Xu-er was already moving.
He darted beneath it, slipping across entrails, ducking low under a descending claw. The blow—The floor cracked,concrete shattered like glass.
Zixu snatched one of the jagged shards, a splinter of the broken tiles he had just stood on—now his desperate weapon.
"Desperate. Enraged. Not thinking now. I can use that."
His body ached. His lungs burned. But he smiled through blood.
Then—he ran. Not away, but toward the wall.
The far wall. The one behind the bed. The wall with the deep cracks, warped by the beast's previous strike.
"Push it harder. Collapse it?"
He skidded to a stop near the wall and turned, the floor tile shard raised.
the sharp edges front facing .
He took a deep breath. Drawing the shard back, he flung it with all his might. The small scrap, neither rotating nor tumbling, cut through the air in a perfect line—aimed straight at what might have once been the creature's human face: stretched, warped, and disturbingly childlike.
But before it could make contact, the beast's body began to shift. Its raw, fleshy form lightened in shade, paling until it turned a translucent mist-grey. Then, like smoke catching the wind, it slipped aside—its form unraveling into a smoky haze that coiled effortlessly around the shard, letting it pass through harmlessly.
Still, the creature lingered. Though it had avoided the blow, it harbored a deep, festering grudge for Xu-er's earlier defiance.
"HEY!" he screamed, voice raw, blood-flecked. "COME ON, THEN!"
The beast turned—all of it—and screamed back.
It charged.
Its claws tore into the floor as it moved. Heads roared in unison. Wings flared but didn't lift. It crashed toward him with the weight of a falling house.
Xu-er didn't move.
At the last second, he dropped, sliding on the blood—low, under its legs—just as the creature slammed headfirst into the wall.
BOOOOM.
The entire wall cracked inward, the concrete crumbling beneath the beast's raw force. Dust rained from above.
Then the ceiling groaned.
A spiderweb of fractures raced across the roof. Beams buckled.
"Yes. Yes—"
Collapse.
The structure began to fall. Ceiling. Pipes. Support beams.
With nowhere else to run, Xu-er dove into the one place the rubble might not crush—inside the monster itself.
Instead, he threw himself at the now-screeching beast, wrapping his arm around its tangled viscera—dragging himself into the thing's gut as it spasmed.
He dove through coiling intestines, ducked under a spine looped like a cage, curled against the dense muscle of its fused ribcage.
And then—
CRASH.
The world above him shattered. Steel and stone came down like judgment.
Dust blinded everything.
Xu-er stayed buried inside the monster's ruined body, gagging on the stink of rot and bile, his lone hand gripping what felt like a lung fused with a liver.
Outside, the world groaned to stillness.
Dead silence.
His ears rang. He could hear his own heartbeat, throbbing behind his eyes.
Then—shifting.
The flesh above him moved.
Xu-er's face twisted. "No. No no no—don't you dare—"
But the beast was dying. Not regenerating. Its mist tried to rise—but the body was too broken. The AER had scattered. The mist flickered and died.
It was dead.
Truly.
Xu-er clawed his way forward, through slime and bone, pushing through ruined muscle with gasping, choked breaths.
And then—daylight.
He pulled himself free from a split in the beast's belly, its blood pouring out like foul molasses.
He collapsed onto the fractured concrete, chest heaving.
His entire right side was red.
His humble abode—his home—half-demolished, half-swallowed by ruin. a ruin of dust and steel. His body ached in places he hadn't known existed.
He didn't move.
Not yet.
Just stared at the sky above—what little was visible through the cracked ceiling.
The light flickered through the settling dust.
And slowly, a crooked smile touched his lips.
"...I lived," he whispered. "I actually lived."
The creature's bloody entrails clung to his delicate and beautiful face, despite the imperfections that marred it. The blood and bile turned a misty hue, a shade of eerie mystery, collectively flowing like a stream toward his neck. As it did, it formed a pattern—a hand angled at an unnatural curve. The hand was made up of two distinct letters, their origins as mysterious as the wall, the cage that had trapped both the campus and these creatures.
The liquid mist settled, its essence merging with Xu-er, imbuing him with something—the wall had deemed him ill-suited for, though what exactly, he couldn't yet understand. The hand marks lay bent at an unnatural angle, pressing against his throat. From an outside perspective, they seemed as if they were attempting to choke him, to restrict his very existence.
"This is … a scripture?"