Not from its non-existent mouth—but from the opening in its chest. A child's voice, warped by a thousand overlapping echoes.
Overjoyed
Proud
"Mommy said me could have you for treat."
It squirmed, limbs dragging behind it with frantic spasms.
And then it lunged.
It didn't run. It surged—its sluglike body propelling forward in unnatural convulsions. Its limbs gouged into the ground as it pulled its bulk forward. The ribcage flexed wide, opening and closing like a hungry jaw.
Something in Ren's posture changed.
It wasn't the same shaky hands.
It wasn't the same nervous eyes.
In the blink of an eye, a bony limb shot out from its body.
Ren dove to the side, narrowly avoiding the grasping limb that slammed down where he'd stood, dust from the impact covering his vision.
As Ren quickly rose to his feet, threw the dust, another limb shot out at him. Running towards the impending limb, he slid beneath it, slicing through the underside of the limb.
There was no scream or cry from the monster.
But the limb recoiled violently. Dark, tar-thick blood oozed from the wound.
Ren scrambled to his feet and ran—not to escape—but to climb the abomination.
With all he had, he leapt onto its shifting flesh, digging his fingers into the slick membrane. He pulled himself upward as it writhed beneath him. The surface was a nightmare of blood-slicked sinew and twitching muscle. Bones jutted out at impossible angles. Pieces of other things—faces, torsos, ribs—twitched beneath translucent layers of flesh like terrible memories trying to escape.
One of the back limbs blindly flailed upward, catching Ren across the rib before he could react. He flew through the air, slamming against the chapel wall and crumbling to the ground.
But Ren got back up, coughing up blood.
The creature dragged itself closer, faster now. Its ribs clicked and scraped against one another, forming shapes, gestures, even grotesque faces made of knotted sinew and gristle.
Wiping the blood from his mouth, Ren whispered to himself. "C'mon...c'mon, do it..."
The monster lashed out again, but that was exactly what Ren was waiting for. Dodging the limbs, over and over again, he closed the distance between them.
With a final lashing, Ren jumped on top of the limb, running along it to the main body. He reached the base of the creature's spine—if it could even be called that, a line of fused bones that ran beneath a curtain of twitching tissue.
There, Ren gritted his teeth, driving his dagger down with full force.
Crack
The creature convulsed instantly, slamming itself sideways into the chapel wall. The impact split the ancient stone, throwing dust and shattered brick into the air.
But Ren held on—his hands bleeding, knuckles shredded, chest heaving.
And he stabbed again.
And again
And again
Until something shifted beneath him.
A sudden, grinding churn of bone.
From the creature's back—just beneath where Ren was perched—a spike of jagged bone shot upward.
He didn't see it.
He couldn't see it, his vision blurred by the spewing blood.
But he felt it.
Shhk
The spike tore through his stomach. It burst through his lower abdomen and out of his back, lifting him a few inches into the air. His breath caught—his mouth opened in a silent gasp. Blood gushed from the wound, dripping down the spike like rainwater off steel.
For a split second, the chapel blurred.
The pain was unreal.
The bony spike twisted, grinding against his spine like it was trying to snap him in half.
Ren's body trembled.
And then—
Through his bloodied teeth, he screamed out.
Not in fear, but in fury.
It echoed off the chapel walls like a war cry dragged from the bottom of a dying world. His hand, still gripping the dagger, began to twitch violently.
Then he stabbed down.
Again
And again
The rusted blade slammed into the monster's back—vicious, wild, no longer in rhythm. He tore into it like an animal, blood spraying in gouts, coating his whole face in it.
The spike twisted again.
Ren bit down on his own lip until it split open.
He didn't stop.
He screamed with every stab, his voice breaking.
"You think this is pain?!"
Stab
"I've died—!"
Stab
"—bled—!"
Stab.
"—crawled back from the grave to kill you!"
Ren was no longer talking to the creature.
No—
"I will...KILL YOU!"
He was now speaking to the Mother of Sorrow.
The monster thrashed, the slug-like mass squirming beneath him in disoriented agony. More limbs tried to grab him, twitching, flailing appendages slamming into the stone, breaking apart the ground.
One limb caught his shoulder, snapping the bone right off, his dagger flying off with it.
He didn't even flinch.
With his only arm left, he ripped himself off the bone spike. The sound—wet and tearing—was the closest thing to true suffering given a voice.
Blood gushed from the hole in his abdomen, soaking down his legs.
He fell forward, landing hard on the thing's spine, gasping through gritted teeth.
The pain was all-consuming.
Blinding
His body should've shut down.
But something in him refused.
He was past the threshold of human pain. Beyond the limits of normal fear. Every death, every loss, every scream he'd swallowed in this cursed land came boiling to the surface.
His eyes went cold.
And then, he started tearing it apart.
Not stabbing
Tearing
Ren plunged his fingers into the raw flesh of the creature's back and ripped away. From the abominations wounded back, Ren reached in a snapped off a piece of bone. Winding the bone back, he drove it back into the wound repeatedly.
The monster's limbs flailed in chaos, slamming into pillars, dragging twisted limbs into the floor, and knocking over half the chapel.
But it couldn't dislodge him.
It couldn't get rid of him, no matter how it flailed around.
Ren was a part of it now and would not stop until it was dead.
He would be its destroyer.
He would be its parasite.