The air was thick with bloody and metallic scent which coated the back of his throat, jolting him awake.
The stench of blood was the first thing he noticed as he came to his senses.
Zeref's jolted awake and looked at the dark sky over his head, swirling like storm clouds of smoke and ash.
He could see torn-down battleground banners at a distance, their symbols unrecognizable. With the sun sinking in the background with clouds covering it completely.
Beneath him, the ground squelched—warm, wet, and disturbingly soft for some reason.
This.. it wasn't dirt. It was flesh mixed with something incomprehensible.
He stood up straight with ragged breaths looking ahead and focusing a bit just to look at the corpses spread as far as his eyes could see, twisted and broken, their faces frozen in masks of terror.
Some were heavily armored while some being barely clothed, but all of them shared one common feature within them which was their face with their mouths stretched wide, as if they had seen something horrifying at the moment of their deaths.
As he gazed at the battlefield he heard a small voice in his head.
"…Hungry…"
Zeref spun around, his heart pounding faster as he shouted. "Who.. who's there?!"
Only silence answered his voice.
The whisper didn't come from behind him—or the front. It came from everywhere, like something was crawling in his head and speaking from within. He pressed a trembling hand to his temple, only to freeze.
He.. he was wearing an armor a heavy armor, just before her was in his office working on project and how this. "Is this some kind of a joke."
He said while looking around, again trembling as the terrifying truth crashed down on him which was reality and in this reality he had come to a strange place.
Especially His gauntlet… wasn't whole.
The blackened armor was riddled with cracks ran that along the neck to his chest, glowing faintly with a pulsing red light. Something shifted beneath the surface, writhing like… muscles? No, like mouths. Tiny, tooth-lined openings flexed inside the gaps, tasting the air.
His breath hitched. "This... this body… isn't mine. What—what the hell is this?!"
"…Devour…Hungry...Eat.."
The whisper came again, stronger that before, accompanied by a some more faint sounds and ragged breaths.
Just as he was trying to calm himself down the temperature around the battlefield suddenly started to plummet. Mist began to seep between the corpses, curling around his legs and the battlefield.
And then he saw it.
From the sea of bodies rose a something both shapeless and solid—which was peeling itself free from the grasps of darkness and coming in the real world. The thing didn't walk. It crawled, its limbs bending the wrong way, its face an empty blur with just a mouth of jaggered teeth. As it moved, the corpses around it twitched, mouths opening in unison to scream voicelessly but he was still able to hear the scream with his soul.
Zeref fell backward, his chest quickening with the pace of his breath. Every instinct in his body told him to run, but his legs wouldn't work. It was like someone had frozen him in place from fear.
The thing was coming for him… and the whispers in his head had begun to speak louder.
The shadow thing lunged towards him crawling at an alarming speed.
Its form blurred from time to time as if had not yet completely entered the world making its form even more grotesque. One second it possesses many twisted limbs and next moment its has none.
It was like some nightmare with flesh and as it crawled towards him the ground in its was was corroded.
As it came more closer Zeref's body finally obeyed him.
He got up and ran with all he had in the opposite direction. "I don't want to die.. I don't want die"
He sprinted over dead and lifeless bodies, his lungs burning from a sudden rush of adrenaline, every breath feel like a broken glass through his chest. The silent scream followed him, ringing in his skull until it began to drown out his own concern.
"…Run. Run. Run."
He tripped.
His knee slammed into the corpse of a soldier, its jaw moving as if it were alive. The dead man's eyes rolled to meet Zeref's for a split second, and then screamed silently, mouth opening wider than humanly possible.
Zeref scrambled back in sheer terror and ran again—only to slam into something solid and cold while falling again.
The spirit was behind him.
"No… no, no, no!" His voice cracked as he tried to crawl away, nails tearing against frozen flesh beneath him.
The being came down low, right up against his face, morphing from a blank face with only a mouth to spark of agony and hunger. Its very existence felt suffocating to even look at. It left Zeref gasping for air, like being buried alive in never-ending darkness and despair. Zeref's own will buckled under the weight of this entity pressure.
And then it spoke.
Not with words, but with something more horrifying Fear.
At this moment his memories fractured, flashes of his past life flashing before his eyes—a computer screen glowing in a dark room, laughter from friends of past, the warm smell of coffee… then blood, endless blood.
The thing's whisper filled every crevice of his mind:
"You will feed my hunger." As it said the mist grew thicker.
Zeref screamed in fright.
At this moment the mouths on his armor ripped open, dozens of them, jagged teeth gnashing wildly. A torrent of black mist erupted outward being drawn from the corpses on the battlefield surrounding him. But the mist didn't flow into the spirit… it flowed into him.
His body convulsed as raw terror flooded his veins. The fear of tens of hundreds of souls was seeping into his body making his already broken mind reaching the point of end but was pulled back from it as a new sensation filled his body.
At this moment strength surged through him—unnatural, alien like strength—but so did something else -- a hunger so primal it terrified him more than death itself. This hunger was so dreadful that it made him forget about the monster in front of him for a moment.
With a loud roar, Zeref swung his arm with broken gauntlet at the spirit.
The blow didn't kill it.
In fact didn't even truly hurt it.
But the sheer force behind the attack knocked it back, buying him a heartbeat of space.
That heartbeat was all he needed.
Zeref turned and ran blindly while stumbling through the mist and crashing through corpses until his legs finally gave out.
He tumbled down against a collapsed boulder, his chest rising and falling heavily, the surrounding air freezing with each panicked breath while he attempted to breathe normally.
The battlefield was silent behind him.
Too silent to be true.
He didn't know if the creature had gone… or was merely waiting.
But he didnt have the courage enough to look behind the boulder as it was too horrifying to look at.
Zeref stared at his trembling hands. The cracks in his armor were wider now, the mouths slowly closing but still twitching hungrily. His reflection in a pool of blood made his stomach turn.
One eye glowed a faint, sinister crimson.The other was a void of absolute black.
His breath hitched, throat dry. "What… what the hell am I?"
The whispers in his head didn't answer his questions.
They laughed only – a low and distorted sound, carrying vibrations through the very essence of his being.
Eventually the laughter died down and Zeref was alone with the burden of silence on the battlefield.
Only then did he realize that he had been pressed into the body of a fallen soldier.
The corpse's mouth opened… and a single word hissed out, carried on a dying breath that shouldn't exist.
"Devour…"
Zeref screamed while jumped to the side and falling backward.
His chest felt like it was burning inside out as he looked at the corpse which had spoken those words and his vision was a mix of pain and fear.
Tiny tears that he wasn't aware of also streamed down his temples as if the truth had hit him like a mountain.
He hadn't defeated the creature.He hadn't even escaped it.
It had marked him.
As dawn's pale light broke over the carnage, Zeref limped away, one shaky step at a time.Each whisper followed him like a chain he could never break.
"You ran today… but tomorrow, you will feast."
And somewhere deep inside, beneath his fear and revulsion,a part of him hungered for it.