Chapter 81: Wrongness
As the final syllables left his lips, Kael raised both of his hands and curled his fingers into tight fists, the knuckles whitening with pressure before his body launched forward, almost at the same instant the monster mirrored him with its own lunge.
The Hollow-Tongue's arms shot out with frightening speed, yet Kael noticed something crucial even amidst the chaos: the creature's movements were slower than before, dulled somehow, and within that faint slowness lay a single chance for survival. He seized it. Tilting his head sharply aside, he let the claws cut through empty air. At the very moment the attack missed, he dropped low, his body folding downward, and from that crouched position his fist, small yet brimming with every ounce of strength he could muster, drove upward into the monster's lower jaw.
The impact reverberated through his arm with a brutal shock, his knuckles slamming against that grotesque, unyielding bone. Yet even though he had poured nearly all of his strength into that one blow, the monster barely shifted, its hulking frame refusing to move an inch. Instead, the pain returned to him, blooming across his knuckles so violently that the flesh flushed red, the skin tearing into raw scratches that stung with every heartbeat.
The Hollow-Tongue's baleful gaze dropped on him again, merciless and unblinking, and though Kael's instinct screamed to pull his battered fist back for another strike, he could not move it. His hand would not return to him.
In that instant, the black, jagged protrusions, like blades twisted into cruel shapes and grown out from the monster's neck, slid into motion. They shifted with an almost unnatural fluidity and pressed down upon his trapped hand, pinning it mercilessly.
"Agh..." The groan slipped past his lips before he could stop it.
The jagged protrusions resembled knives, yet despite their edges they lacked the true sharpness of a blade. If they had possessed it, Kael knew his hand would have been severed in a blink. Still, blunt as they were, the force they exerted was monstrous.
"So, these things of yours aren't just for show after all," he thought.
They pressed against his flesh with a pressure so vicious it felt as if the bones within were being slowly ground to dust. His breath caught as waves of pain rolled through his arm, the kind of agony that blurred vision and threatened to wrench his focus away.
With desperate will he swung his free hand and drove his fist into the creature's grotesque face. This time the monster's head tilted back under the force, yet the jagged protrusions remained unmoved, mercilessly clamped around his hand. He realized then that the only advantage he truly held was the creature's reduced speed, a fleeting mercy that if absent would have spelled his death already. One hand was trapped, his body ached with strain, yet surrender was a word that did not exist in him.
Then came the tongue. That revolting tongue, long and serpent-like, flickered through the air, glistening with saliva, and Kael's stomach churned at the sight alone. It lashed toward him, wrapping around his neck with a swift, slithering motion. At once it tightened, constricting his throat with vice-like pressure.
Kael's chest heaved against it, every breath caught and strangled, while at the same time the monster raised one clawed hand high above to strike him down. Kael's mind raced, only to realize a new horror: the other claw, too, was rising, prepared to strike in unison.
"Damn... just how smart is this thing?" His thought cut through the haze of pain. "The way it learns so fast... I cannot keep up with even half of it."
The monster's arm descended and Kael moved with it. He blocked with his own palm, not by grasping the wrist this time but head-on, for he had already understood the danger of that mistake. The jagged protrusions would have caught him again. Last time he had been spared only because he had seized the creature's forearm midway between the wrist and the elbow, but this time he had no such chance.
The claws raked against his palm with cruel sharpness, digging bloody furrows into the skin, while the sheer force behind it drove through his bones like the weight of a falling boulder. His injured shoulder screamed in protest, broken bones grinding within him, but he refused to let go. His grip trembled, his body quaked beneath the strain, yet his will held fast.
"I have to win... no matter what."
And yet the creature's tongue remained, coiled tightly around his neck with unrelenting pressure. In that moment Kael noticed something crucial: unlike its arms, the tongue did not possess the same crushing strength. It constricted, but it could not break his neck outright. That realization flickered through his mind like a sudden spark.
"So that's why you use it so rarely... it cannot truly crush anything... only drain, only lick the way a human tongue does. You use it solely to draw blood... to feed yourself, to grow stronger."
The thought lingered, then escaped his lips in a whisper, "Suck blood?"
A crooked smile curved his lips, even as his body screamed in pain.
The monster's other hand sliced down with the same merciless speed, and both his hands were trapped. Yet instead of thinking too much, he slowly, almost deliberately, jerked the hand caught at the monster's neck.
The jagged protrusions were not sharp, yet their shape was slim and knife-like, and he believed he could pull his hand free, since the monster could neither control them like limbs nor shift their position. He knew, however, that he would have to endure unbearable pain to do so.
But the moment he jerked and pulled his hand back, the jagged protrusions pressed even harder than he had expected and cut mercilessly, stripping skin and muscle from his fingers as he wrenched himself free. His hand tore loose, but the price was agony beyond words, his fingers left limp, mangled, and almost useless.
"Tch... It hurts like hell."
However, he had no time to breathe. The monster's other strike was already upon him, and both his hands were now injured beyond measure. Desperation seized him. With no other choice, he leapt upward, raising his ruined arm across his shoulder like a frail shield. The blow landed. The claws struck between his elbows and wrists with such terrible force that the sound of bone shattering cracked through the air like breaking timber.
"Arghhh!"
The scream tore from his throat against his will, the sheer violence of the impact ripping it out of him. In that instant he knew with chilling certainty: not only his arms, but his shoulders too had shattered under the monster's strength.
The blow hurled him away like a ragdoll. His body spun violently through the air, weightless yet crushed beneath the echo of pain, until he slammed into the trunk of a nearby tree. The collision was brutal, the bark splintering and the trunk quivering from the impact. His torso struck hard, crushing the breath from his lungs, before his battered frame slid downward, collapsing heavily against the earth.
Before he even realized it, a thick stream of blood spilled from his mouth and dripped onto the ground below, and for a brief and terrifying instant it seemed as though he had caught a glimpse of death itself. His entire body was engulfed in pain so deep and consuming that he could not have put it into words even if he tried. Both shoulders felt broken beyond repair, his left palm was torn and ruined from the monster's claws digging into it, while his right arm was worse, far worse... it was not just injured, it felt shattered completely, numb to the point he could not even sense whether it still belonged to him at all.
And still, when his eyes lifted through the haze of blood and pain, he saw it. That hideous face, that pair of cold, merciless yellow eyes, closing in on him once again. The Hollow-Tongue was not finished yet. It seemed it was just getting started.
However, he could not let it end like this. He could not allow himself to die sprawled in the dirt like a broken doll. He had a plan, he still had a chance to win, but to do so he needed to rise, he needed to force this broken body to move. He had to wake himself, he had to stand, he had to survive.
Yet his body betrayed him. His limbs felt like heavy chains that refused to respond, and though he willed them, though he shook and trembled and thrashed against the ground in desperation, his body would not obey. His legs twitched, jerking uselessly against the soil as if trying to push him upright, yet he toppled sideways every time, unable to lift his own weight.
"Stand up... damn you... stand up... stand up," he muttered, his voice hoarse, cracking against the blood in his throat.
But his body did not listen. His head swam, his vision clouded at the edges, and the more he forced himself the more he felt his strength slipping away. His eyelids grew heavy, haziness spread across his sight, and yet he kept trying, again and again, refusing to surrender.
Was there truly no way left to rise?
Was there no way to sit up, no way to resist?
His eyes finally shut, and in that darkness a single tear, laced with blood, slipped down his face. He had not even noticed it until he felt its warmth sliding past his cheek. Yet before despair could consume him, something strange stirred.
A sensation, faint at first, brushed across his scalp, like the soft glide of a hand through his hair. It was impossible, perhaps nothing more than the wind itself playing tricks upon him. Perhaps wind, yes, perhaps only the wind. And yet… it did not feel like wind at all.
The touch was tender, familiar, almost as if someone were truly there, trying to soothe him. It carried comfort, and more than that, it carried memory.
"Whose hand was it? Could it be Seraphina's? No." He rejected the thought instantly.
Seraphina's touch, he knew, would be cold, her long and slender fingers precise and elegant, and this was not the same. This was something gentler, warmer, a touch that sought to comfort rather than command.
The world around him seemed to still, time itself slowing to a halt as the realization struck him. This touch did not belong to Seraphina, but to another one.
To a girl... a girl he believed he had once known, long ago. The very same girl who had indirectly forced him, through a memory, to heal Arienne... the one who resembled her. She was the very girl he had once told Arienne he loved, though he had never dared speak her name aloud in front of Arienne.
But how could he speak a name when he did not even know it himself? That was the cruel irony. Actually, he had no memory of her name, no recollection of what she looked like, not the color of her hair, nor the shade of her eyes, not even the sound of her voice. All of it was lost to him, blurred away into a haze of time.
Yet despite this emptiness, he knew... he knew in his heart that she had been precious to him, more precious than anyone else in this damned world. Though he was certain that she must have been beautiful, so very beautiful even, and gentle as well, he could not explain how he knew such things. There was simply a weight inside him, a quiet certainty that told him she had mattered, and that was enough.
However, he did not wish to seek her out. He did not wish to chase shadows of a past he could no longer hold. Because somewhere within himself he believed she was long gone, dead perhaps, and to search would be meaningless. And still, she lived in him, a fragment of memory without a face, without a name, without a voice, but with a presence that felt eternal.
When he tried to summon her in his mind, what appeared was always the same: a blank face, only the vague outline of its shape, devoid of any color or detail. Yet bruises marred it, shadows of pain etched across it, and when her lips moved, though he could not hear the words, his mind always filled in the same sound on its own. A whisper that echoed like a nightmare. "Kill me."
He had carried this phantom for so long that it no longer frightened him. Instead, it gave him strange comfort. Even if it was nothing more than a nightmare, he was grateful, because at least it was something of her that remained. At least it reminded him that once there had been someone precious, someone who mattered.
But now… now something was different. This time, when the memory rose, it did not feel the same. There was a wrongness to it, an unease that twisted itself through his thoughts like a shadow that refused to disperse. Why was it different now, in this very moment, when it had never been so before? What exactly was it that made his chest feel so unsettled, so strangely heavy, as though a pressure rested upon it without any visible weight?
He had no answer.
As Kael blinked, his vision swayed with dizziness, and through that haze he saw the monster advancing, though its steps appeared slower than before, its movements oddly off, as though some weight dragged it down. But even with danger so near, his mind remained lost in thought, and strangely enough, it felt to him that thinking was the only way to escape the tremendous pain that coursed through his body. It was as though the act of reasoning, even in confusion, could shield him from the torment, as if pain itself became dull and meaningless when compared to... uhm, compare to what exactly?
Was it his past pain? Could that be the measure by which he now judged all suffering? Yet when he tried to recall what kind of pain he had once endured, no answer came. The memories slipped away like mist, fogging over the moment he reached for them. Had he ever suffered pain like this before? No… he had not. He was an assassin, after all, and a strong one.
'An assassin.'
The word echoed strangely in his mind. How had he even become an assassin in the first place? When exactly had he been strong? How, and why?
As he pressed further into memory, nothing came. Nothing at all. And the harder he tried to remember, the more his head throbbed with unbearable pressure, as though something inside him was pushing back, shoving his thoughts aside whenever he drew too close to the truth. Even so, the urge to think grew stronger, the desire to unravel this wrongness within him grew heavier, and his thoughts would not leave him alone.
"What is happening to my mind today… why does everything feel so foggy and confusing…"
It seemed he could not remember his childhood at all, nor how he had grown up. He could only recall fragments of his life as an assassin. Yet even those fragments were strange, for he could not remember how he had grown strong in the first place, nor why he had chosen such a life. More importantly, since when had he been an assassin? In this chaos of thought, the question repeated itself until he could no longer hold it back.
"Why can't I remember anything? I shouldn't be forgetting everything. I'm sure I don't have amnesia or anything like that, so why? Why? Why does it feel like pieces of my memory are missing?"
"Wait... missing memories?"
Yes… missing. That was the actual word. He couldn't remember those moments, not because he had forgotten, but because his memories were missing or lost.
However, it seemed they were not gone completely, only missing in parts, like pages torn from a book, leaving gaps where the story should have been whole. At first, he wasn't sure, until a memory came to him suddenly.
It had happened two days ago. Kael had been preparing to make dinner, a dish he had made before, though not often. He had gone to gather the ingredients, placing them together just as he had done once before. Yet when it came time to cook, he realized he could not remember the recipe at all. It was as though the knowledge had never existed within him. And yet, why then had his hands gathered the exact ingredients, if not from memory? He had stood there, unable to recall the steps, unable to make sense of why his body remembered but his mind did not. At the time, he had pushed the thought aside, cooking something else because Seraphina was waiting. But now, in this moment, the memory of that day returned, and with it came a sharp, undeniable clarity.
Since he had prepared the ingredients before, how could he not know how to use them? Forgetting a recipe was possible, yes, but this was not the same. This was different.
"It all makes sense now… everything."
And with that realization, a strange clarity washed over him, clearer than it had ever been. His memories were fractured. That was the truth. That was why he could recall certain details with perfect certainty, such as the existence of an important girl in his life, knowing her beauty, knowing fragments of her personality, and yet her name and her facial details eluded him completely.
That was also why his body reacted instinctively with impressive reflexes, why his hand suddenly formed a dagger grip. His body remembered what his mind had forgotten. After all, experience is the truest memory, not what you merely read or learn. Now he was certain that he must have once used a dagger, though for some reason he no longer did.
But still, the greater question remained. What exactly had caused this loss of memory? He could not know, but deep inside he suspected the headache. It had to be linked, it had to be bound to this wrongness that twisted through his thoughts. He was certain of it.
Everything felt so clear now… yet in the very next instant, clarity broke apart.
Suddenly, blood filled his mouth and spilled past his lips. This time, however, it was different. It was not from the blow he had taken from the monster. It came because his heart lurched in a slow, long beat and paused as though it had stopped entirely. His head spun violently, and it felt as if the weight of mountains had been dropped upon him. Thought itself became impossible. His mind refused to hold together. He tried, but could not. It was hard... so hard, almost impossible.
And yet, through the blur of pain and confusion, one truth remained clear: the monster was still coming. It was still walking toward him, ready to kill.
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(Chapter Ended)