"I see them..."
The whisper came from inside his own skull, or perhaps from the walls of flesh besieging him.
SQUELCH... SQUELCH... SQUELCH...
The sound echoed, wet and nauseating, every time his old boots landed on a surface resembling a giant tongue. He could feel that gaze. Not just on his back, but on every inch of his bones. This universe didn't just have eyes; this universe was an eye. The ceiling, made of a giant iris membrane, blinked slowly, watching him with an intimate hunger.
Almost. He had to keep moving.
SLASH!
His cutlass blade glowed blue, cleaving through the curtain of veins blocking the way. Warm blood spurted, bathing his bones.
A little more... Just a little more..
.
SLASH!
He slashed again. And again. Carving a path through the forest of flesh that grew back faster than he could destroy it.
"This... Must end... RIGHT NOW!"
CRUSH!
He stomped on a heart growing on the floor, exploding it into arterial pulp. However, the heart kept beating even though it was destroyed, its vibrations traveling up his leg, mocking his efforts.
...
...
...
Until in that struggle which lasted who knows how long—was it an hour? A century? Or just a single blink of God's eye?—his movements slowed. His joints felt heavy, as if the air around him had turned into dense gelatin.
The voice descended from the ceiling of flesh, soft yet absolute.
"Ludwig... You shouldn't be here, should you?"
The voice was a chorus of millions of girls speaking in unison.
"Your pages are finished. You just can't accept the fact that you never found your final page."
The flesh walls around him started closing in, pressing down, forming a narrow corridor that forced him to kneel.
"So... you have no right to tear our pages."
Sheepman Sailor's knees hit the warm, churning meat floor. He didn't kneel out of surrender; he knelt because gravity in this place had been manipulated to force him to submit.
Before him, from a clump of meat resembling giant rose petals, the figure bloomed. Polgha? No. It was the Faceless Girl. Her body was naked, perfect, her skin milk-white amidst this blood-red world, but her face was flat—a blank canvas without eyes, nose, or mouth.
Sheepman Sailor looked up, his dark eye sockets staring at the void in the girl's face.
Sheepman Sailor: "You are also a victim of 'Him', aren't you? That damn Author?"
The Faceless Girl tilted her head, a movement innocent yet terrifying.
Polgha?: "...."
Polgha?: "If so... why?"
Her voice echoed directly inside Ludwig's brain.
Sheepman Sailor: "Then why do you... let this stage run? The Magnum Opus must die. This script is poison. We can end this cursed Script forever, burn the stage, and let everything return to a peaceful void."
The girl stepped forward. Her feet didn't touch the ground, but rather merged with the flesh floor every time she stepped. She stood right in front of Ludwig.
Polgha?: "That 'God' is not my God. He is just a coward hiding behind the cover, trembling outside the boundaries of the reality he wrote himself."
Her delicate, cold hand touched Ludwig's skeletal jaw, lifting the bone face upwards.
Polgha?: "Among millions of Oldreds in millions of possibilities... there is only one lover of mine. And only one lover of his. Forever... A lover will never have meaning without their partner. I don't care about the script, Ludwig. I care about his role."
Her fingers crept down to Ludwig's bone neck, gripping softly but possessively.
Polgha?: "No matter how hard your resolve, killing my husband will never stop God. None of us can. We can only hijack his script, cross out his lines, and rewrite it with our own blood."
Her flat face leaned in, as if to kiss Ludwig's skull.
Polgha?: "I remember you, Sailor. But your book hangs in limbo, expired without certainty, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf. Closing another book won't make yours open again."
The words were a final verdict.
Suddenly, the floor beneath Ludwig became liquid. Sheepman Sailor's body began to be sucked down, as if sinking into quicksand made of internal organs. The blue sphere behind his ribs beat weakly, its light dimming, suffocated by the dominance of the red color surrounding it.
Thousands of small hands emerged from the meat mud, grabbing his coat, his bones, and his sword. Long red hairs wrapped around his neck and wrists. Faceless girl bodies emerged waist-deep from the floor, hugging his legs, trying to pull him into the eternal sleep of assimilation.
"Sleep... Become one..."
Sheepman Sailor felt his consciousness drifting away. But at the last second, a spark of resistance ignited within his chest cavity.
He refused it.
He refused to be ink for someone else's story. He refused to be nutrients for this defective fetal world.
If he couldn't create a dimensional rift to get out of here physically... then he would exit conceptually.
He released his grip on his cutlass. He spread his skeletal arms.
Suddenly, Sheepman Sailor's form glitched.
His three-dimensional body shook violently, then... flattened.
His volume vanished. Depth disappeared. He shrank drastically, not getting smaller, but getting thinner. In a confusing blink of an eye, the imposing skeletal figure turned into a two-dimensional image—like a paper sticker pasted over the background of flesh.
The flesh hands trying to grab him only grasped empty air, because there was no "body" left to hold.
Then, the 2D image condensed again. Thinned again.
Zrrrt.
He became a line. A single thin vertical line, one-dimensional, splitting the red space. A pencil stroke on an oil canvas.
And finally...
TING.
The line vanished. Erased.
Sheepman Sailor disappeared completely from that cursed reality, leaving the universe of flesh howling in disappointment at losing its prey. He didn't run to another place; he ran out of the dimension's perception itself.