The cabin door creaked open, a familiar sound amidst the forest's majestic silence. Devon stepped onto the porch, pausing for a moment to let the crisp, clear morning light wash over him. Before him lay his quiet kingdom: the meadow, now scarred by battle and graced by a newly planted garden, a fragile promise of life. Behind him, the cabin stood steadfast, a fortress wrested from the grip of time and madness.
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips as he glanced down at his attire. He was a walking paradox, a caricature born from a gamer's fever dreams and the brutal reality of this world. The black t-shirt and heavy black leather jacket – Corvus's – fit his lean frame well, giving the illusion of toughness. His black cargo pants were crammed with pockets bulging with survival gear that now felt essential. His tall black leather boots felt solid on the porch's wooden planks, their thick soles promising silent, steady steps. A battered black fedora, also found in Corvus's closet, shaded his eyes, casting a mysterious shadow across his pale face, now too serious for his age.
But the most absurd part, the part that made him smile, was his arsenal. On each hip, slung low in hand-tooled leather holsters, were two massive, brutal Magnum pistols. Their solid weight was a constant reassurance, two anchors balancing his fragility. Across his back, secured with leather straps, rested the long, elegant Karabiner 98k rifle, its dark wood a stark contrast against his jacket. A sturdy leather backpack held his other gear, with the handle of a medium-sized axe protruding from one side and a bone-handled hunting knife strapped to his belt on the other.
"Oh, this is just great," he whispered to himself, his voice flat, almost emotionless, but with a glint of amusement in his eyes. "Like a cowboy from hell."
He stepped off the porch, his boots crunching on the dew-soaked grass. He would hunt. Or perhaps he would encounter other creatures. He no longer made rigid plans. He simply moved forward, responding to whatever the world threw at him with the cold composure that had become his default.
"Alright," he said to the silent trees. "Let's see what other critters are lurking in there."
Without hesitation, he broke into a run towards the woods. Not the panicked sprint of his first days, but a controlled, purposeful stride. He weaved between the silver birch trees, his body moving with a newfound agility born from a constant awareness of danger. He was a black shadow flitting through the green and silver landscape, an anomaly moving with unnatural speed and purpose.
As he ventured deeper, the forest's silence began to fill with sounds. Rustling in the undergrowth that wasn't caused by the wind. Wet, clicking noises from somewhere in the branches above. Dark silhouettes flitting at the edge of his vision, too quick to identify. Once, each of these sounds would have sent his heart racing, each shadow would have frozen him with terror. Now? Thanks to the cold black crystal ring on his finger, they were just data. Background noise.
"What is fear?" he wondered, a genuine, analytical question. He could recall the concept, like he could remember the taste of his mother's toast, but the actual emotional sensation now felt distant, shrouded in a fog of detachment.
Suddenly, as he leaped over a fallen log, one of those silhouettes materialized in his path. It was a Gloomsmile. The creature emerged from the shadows of a large boulder, its semi-liquid body of inky blackness pulsing softly, its pale bone-mask face displaying that eternally horrifying smile. The familiar, whispering laughter began to creep into Devon's mind, trying to plant seeds of doubt and loneliness.
Devon didn't even break stride.
As he ran past, he raised his fist in one fluid, brutal motion. He didn't aim. He simply struck. His knuckles, reinforced by Corvus's leather gloves, connected with the bone mask with a wet, sickening CRACK! The mask shattered like fragile porcelain, and the liquid body behind it exploded in a spray of black fluid that smelled like sulfur.
He didn't even glance back. He continued running, feeling the remnants of the creature evaporate behind him. It wasn't a fight. It was pest control.
He ran on, deeper into the heart of the woods. Until, finally, he slowed to a cautious creep. Something ahead had caught his attention. A sound. Not rustling. Not clicking. It was the sound of wet, choked sobs, punctuated by soft ripping noises.
He crouched behind a large bush with copper-colored leaves, peering through a gap. In a small clearing ahead, bathed in the dim light filtering through the canopy, was a sight that would have haunted his nightmares, if he could still have them.
It was a Human Chimera.
"Woah... messed up," he whispered, his cold, analytical eyes scanning every gruesome detail. "Humans stitched together."
The thought triggered a memory, an echo from another world. "What was it... oh, I remember." A movie. A long-ago night. "Umm... what was it called... oh yeah. The Human Centipede."
Humans made into a centipede. Face connected to another person's butt. I was so disgusted watching that movie.
The thought pulled him back, like an invisible hook, across the chasm between worlds.
The room was dark, the only light in Kaito's messy room coming from the large television screen, which projected horrifying images of a grimy underground laboratory. The smell of slightly burnt popcorn and spilled soda filled the air. Devon, then sixteen, sat on the floor, his back against the bed, while Kaito lay prone on the bed, his face inches from the screen.
"Crazy, crazy, crazy!" Kaito exclaimed, his voice a mixture of disgust and unbridled excitement. "He actually did it! He sewed them together!"
On the screen, a mad German surgeon was admiring his creation: three tourists, stitched together from mouth to anus.
"That's medically inaccurate, you know," Devon said, trying to sound smarter than he was, a defense mechanism against the horror on the screen. "The human digestive system doesn't work like that. They'd die of infection in hours."
"Shhh! Don't ruin the mood with your logic!" Kaito retorted, throwing a handful of popcorn at Devon. "This is art! Disgusting art! Just imagine, Dev. You're in the middle. What would you do?"
Devon laughed, a genuine, carefree laugh. "I'd bite as hard as I could, of course. Break the food chain."
"Woah, you're sadistic!" Kaito bellowed, his loud, infectious laughter filling the room. "I'd probably just cry. Cry until I dehydrated. That would be a pathetic death."
They continued to watch, joking and teasing each other, their laughter a shield against the truly disturbing images on the screen. It was a perfect moment in its imperfection. An ordinary night spent with a best friend, where the biggest problems in the world were a math test on Monday and the manufactured horrors on the television screen. Good times.
Devon leaned back, resting his head on Kaito's mattress, and stared at the ceiling. He smiled. He felt happy. He felt safe.
That's when something cold and wet landed on his cheek.
Reality slammed back into him like a physical blow. The putrid liquid dripping on his cheek wasn't his imagination. It was real. It smelled like a freshly opened grave, a mixture of decay, dirt, and chemical despair.
He looked up.
The Human Chimera was no longer across the clearing. The creature towered directly in front of him, so close that its shadow swallowed Devon whole. It had moved silently, a mountain of rotting flesh that crept like a ghost.
And now, under the gaze of its countless eyes, Devon saw it in stomach-churning detail, a detail that even the sickest movie wouldn't dare show. This wasn't three people. This was dozens. The bodies were sewn together in a grotesque parody of a centipede, an impossible structure of intertwined limbs and elongated torsos. There were men, women, old people with wrinkled skin, and children whose small bodies seemed particularly out of place in this horror.
Some of the bodies were relatively fresh, their skin pale and taut. Others were in advanced stages of decay, their skin blackened and peeling, oozing iridescent, putrid fluids that dripped onto the forest floor. And the faces… the faces sewn onto the rear ends of the people in front were the pinnacle of the abomination. Some were simply attached at the cheeks, their expressions frozen in silent screams. Others, more horrifying, had their heads completely inserted into the anal cavities in front, their matted hair mingling with the rotting flesh, only the back of their skulls visible.
The creature made a sound, not a growl, but a symphony of suffering – low moans from dozens of throats, the wet gurgle of fluid-filled lungs, and the crackle of bones as it shifted its immense weight.
Devon stared up into that labyrinth of misery.
"Umm..." he said, his voice sounding awkward in the tense air. He scratched the back of his head with the barrel of his Kar98k rifle, a gesture so human and so out of place. "I guess... this is the part where I run."
He laughed, a short, nervous, and utterly unconvincing laugh.
Then he turned and ran.
"RRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!"
A piercing shriek tore through the air, a chorus of dozens of voices merging into one roar of rage and pain. The ground trembled as the creature lumbered after him.
Devon wasn't running blindly. He was running like a cowboy in hell. He leaped over tree roots, his light, agile body a stark contrast to the lumbering mass pursuing him. He could hear the scrabbling of hundreds of fingers clawing at the ground, the ripping sound as the bodies dragged themselves through the undergrowth.
He spun around while running, an impossible move he'd seen in movies. He drew one of the Magnum pistols from its holster. Time seemed to slow.
BOOM!
The pistol's roar was deafening. The silver bullet slammed into one of the torsos at the front of the Chimera. The result wasn't a clean explosion. Instead, the already rotting body erupted like a balloon filled with grey sludge, spraying a torrent of iridescent, putrid fluid and bone fragments in every direction. The stench was so overpowering it made Devon's eyes water.
The creature didn't even slow down. The gaping hole in its body was quickly filled by another body shifting from behind, a horrifying, organic regeneration process.
"Eh, it's pissed!" Devon shouted to himself, half-impressed, half-horrified.
The fight devolved into a deadly dance. Devon would run, find an opening, then turn and fire. Each round from his Magnums tore gaping holes in the creature's mass, but it was never enough to stop it.
The Chimera retaliated with its overwhelming reach. Arms of various sizes and stages of decay lashed out at him, trying to grab, trying to tear. He dodged, rolling under the swing of a wrinkled old man's arm, leaping over the grasping hand of a small child.
He was playing cowboy, blowing imaginary smoke from the barrel of his gun after a particularly good shot. Just as he did, an arm he didn't see coming slammed into him from the side with the force of a sledgehammer.
He was thrown through the air, landing hard on his back. Every bone in his body felt like it had shattered. Blood gushed from his mouth. But then, the warmth from the green stone in his chest flared, knitting his skeleton back together with agonizing speed. The pain was real. The healing was a torment of its own.
"Okay, okay, no more showboating," he grunted, as he staggered to his feet, only to see the creature already upon him.
He had close calls. A decaying hand managed to snag his ankle, and he had to shoot the arm off to break free. He felt cold fingers brush his hair as he ducked under another swing.
He kept shooting. He drew his second Magnum, firing with both hands, a storm of fire and steel. Spent casings rained down around him, glittering like golden coins on the dark forest floor. But the creature was too resilient. Every piece he destroyed seemed meaningless to the overall mass.
He ran, his lungs burning. He leaped over a small gap between two boulders. He didn't look back, but he could hear the rumbling of the creature right behind him. He kept running, the trees blurring in his vision.
That's when he realized it. The roaring in front of him. Not the creature. It was the sound of a waterfall. And the ground beneath his feet was no longer rising. It was disappearing.
He hadn't realized there was a chasm ahead.
His running feet found no purchase. For one terrifying moment, he hung in empty air, an expression of shock frozen on his face. Then, gravity took over, and he plummeted downwards.
The Human Chimera, driven by its unstoppable momentum and its blind rage, couldn't stop. The creature also slid over the edge of the chasm, a horrifying cascade of rotting flesh following him into the void.
The wind roared past Devon's ears. He saw the rocky walls of the chasm flash past him. He was going to die. This was it. The green stone could heal broken bones, but it couldn't heal a body smashed to pieces at the bottom of a ravine (technically the green stone made him almost immortal).
Suddenly, a wrenching jolt ripped through his body. His fall stopped abruptly. He hung there, swinging wildly in the air.
He looked up. Somehow, in the fall, his backpack had snagged on a large tree root protruding from the chasm wall, its roots gripping the rock like giant fingers.
He was suspended.
Below him, he heard one last, long, agonized scream from the Human Chimera as the creature continued its descent into the mist and darkness at the bottom of the unseen chasm. The sound faded, then vanished, leaving only the distant roar of the waterfall.
Silence descended.
Devon hung there, swaying gently above oblivion. He stared down at the trees that looked like toys below. Then he looked up at the edge of the chasm, now far above him. Then he looked at the tree root that was his only lifeline.
"Oh, great," he said to the silence, his voice remarkably calm. "Now what?"