"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it's the law"
-Friedrich Nietzsche
***
Grunting softly, Adam pushed his upper body up; while doing so, his mangled foot jolted with sharp spiking pain that almost made him tear up and wince.... almost.
Gritting his teeth tightly, he pushed himself up while balancing his entire body weight on his only good foot.
'So this is it for me.'
From the growls coming from downstairs, he realised that he wasn't in safe waters just now; there was still a more harrowing and most probably lethal predicament to come.
Even thinking of a way to escape this situation gave him nothing but blanks...
He was done for if any other creature targeted him now. Alas, this was exactly what happened. As his stiff body was tensing, ready for either fight or flight, a shimmering black claw punctured the extended rooftop's wooden beams.
A loud noise came from it, and at that exact moment, another claw came flying and embedded itself into the roof.
After that, the eldritch hound, which was a tangle of hairy mess while half of its body was beaten and bloodied, pulled itself across the ledge and slumped on the rooftop.
Crimson blood flew from its toothy mouth, the crimson droplets splattering on the wooden tiles in a gory mess. The sight was horrendous to say the least; Adam was terrified, but his resolve was stronger.
Clearing his mind of any distractions, he bit the inside of his cheek in anxiety and let out a faint exhale.
Not faltering for a second, he opened his mobile and set a timer for 10 seconds, and threw it to the side gently.
As the sound of an object hitting the wooden roof echoed in the scene, the hound snapped its neck towards it and got ready to pounce at any second.
Threatening growls came from its maw as it began approaching the place where the mobile fell.
After hitting the wooden tiles, the mobile began sliding down slightly as the roof wasn't on the same elevation, but extended upwards like a mountain's peak.
It was a strange mixture of a Japanese and Chinese traditional roof.
As the mobile reached the eldritch hound's hind legs, it faced down while crouching slightly as if to examine the sound. Just then, the timer blared, and a loud beeping sounded from it.
The hound got startled, but it recovered fairly quickly, and then it flashed its hand towards it.
This was the time, the slight second of surprise he could come up with in the moment to take his chance.
His hand moved with startling dexterity as he grabbed one of the shorter knives from his bathrobes and hurled it straight to the abomination's face.
While reaching for the mobile, the knives nicked the hound's face and drew blood.
The eldritch hound screeched in rage while checking the wound made by the knife. The hit had connected; unfortunately, it wasn't a killing blow.
Looking straight forward, the eldritch hound threw the sound from the mobile out of its mind and blurred forward in a flurry of action.
Adam also darted to the side, but after taking a step, he faltered and almost tumbled down.
His foot was going to drag him down. Realising this and seeing no other option, his mind went aflame with a single thing.
The instinct of fight or flight; he was almost incapacitated due to his foot, and now, only one thing remained. That being said, to eliminate the cause of the crisis.
His body moved on instinct as the hound drew nearer and lunged at him.
Adam tilted a bit and let the hound take a bite at his left arm.
An agony so heavy, it bombarded his consciousness like waves of a tsunami shook his mind as his arm was almost torn in two; feeling the clarity amidst the horrendous pain, he grabbed one of the only remaining knives in his remaining hand tightly and plunged it into the hound's skull with a ferocious look on his face.
It was a face of wrath, pain, and murderous glee mushed together in a mangled mess.
'die...die...die...die...just fuc*ing die.'
The hound trembled and then convulsed, and just as its life was about to be snuffed out, it pushed itself off the roof in a final act of desperation and mutual destruction with a ferocious leap that took all of its might.
The mangled left arm of Adam was still stuck in its teeth, and Adam could only watch himself getting dragged over the ledge he had worked so hard to get up off.
While falling, Adam was in a daze, having a bitter smile on his face while his eyes still gleamed with a murderous fury.
"He...heh.... at least I ki...killed o....one of these things."
Looking down at the courtyard, he could see the tall, lanky figures extending their shrivelled hands up as if reaching for the heavens... reaching for him, the sight was eerie as heck.
That made him tremble, and then he did the most idiotic thing in his life.
He gambled with his life based on someone else's words; in his mind, that was the most foolish thing he could have ever done.
He reached for the still buried knife in the hound's skull and pulled it out, and just a metre or two above the fast approaching ground, he pushed the knife with trembling hands through his neck. Slicing his throat open.
Just as he did so, the ground, the mansion, the hound and the entire manor vanished in a foggy mess, and he could only see the still brightly shining moon and a sense of falling endlessly.
It was as if the world had flipped upside down, while all the colours in existence had been converted into smells and all the sights in the world had become flavours.
The feeling was weird at a fundamental level, as if he was never meant to see the strange sight ever, and it truly made Adam's weary mind finally hit its limits.
The stuff happening right now was so overwhelming to his senses that his body slumped, and he fainted while falling into the hazy depths, till time made no sense whatsoever. Meanwhile, the moonlight kept on decreasing till nothing but pitch darkness was left.
This plane of existence was rarely experienced by anyone in the real world because this was one of the shattered realms of the forgotten souls that amalgamated together to form a scene of their previous life, namely, the manor and the woods, where the night reigned till eternity as a mark of something abnormal, something unnatural, something unimaginable.
The only people who could enter this place were those who had a faint connection with both the living and the dead, and what better subject for this than a human who's half dead and barely clinging on to life.
And as for the only way to leave these realms, that was to do what the souls present here didn't imagine doing, that being, taking their own life willingly.
Because the connection between the living and the dead is much thinner than what most people wish to believe, and only the truly insane ones who have the madness necessary to defy the natural order of their life could leave this place to continue their existence.
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[A/N]
Yeah....the next one will be the last chapter for this short story, and then I'll write either romance/slice of life/action.
Comment down what you want.