Chapter 17

Beep—beep—beep—beep...

Deep within his consciousness, a ringing, sharp tone blared through—faintly at first, but growing louder and clearer as time passed.

"God damn it."

Realizing what it was, his eyes shot wide open, and he leaned up from his bed with the vigor of a bedridden patient.

He stared blankly at the thing, half awake yet still exhausted. As he leaned to reach his hand over, memories came flooding back in from the night before one after another.

The spilling of blood from the gut. The final gasps of air from the girl whose throat was slit. Three inquisitors who were out to get her. The sensation of the knife in his hand as he rushed in for the kill.

Jumbled and in a mess, as if they were all different events, in disarray they flashed by. Before he could make sense of any of them, they'd already disappeared from his mind.

Yet what he didn't forget were those expressions. How quickly they turned from confident, to horror and grief, until only moments later ending up lifeless.

And that moment where he felt his life could have ended. Instead having been faced with her head being cleanly slashed off, falling lifelessly to the ground. As if it was merely a ball falling off a cup. The horrifying sight etched deeply into his mind.

Beep—beep—beep—beep...

Another series of rings dragged him back to earth. He had been staring unfocused at his alarm clock for God knows how long, the numbers on it staying an unrecognizable messy blur.

...What was that... about?

"A dream...?"

An unsettled feeling welled in the pit of his stomach as a layer of cold sweat covered his nape. He told himself it was made up, yet that ominous feeling remained.

Perhaps out of self-preservation, or out of an ingrained habit, he dismissed it as a nightmare and turned off the obnoxious alarm. His mind, in a desperate bid to forget, focused its attention on something else.

"R-right, I need to go to work—ah, fuck!"

The clock's hands clearly indicated that it was 10.30 p.m., three hours past the time he would usually prepare to get to work. And even when he woke up at his usual time, he struggled often not to be late.

His boss in Fukushi Village had probably been blowing up his phone with voicemails berating and yelling at him at this point. The elderly senior worker had an obsession with respect, seniority and dignity, especially when it came to the younger workers like Yasou. His only would be to call his boss and apologize profusely. At best, he could count his lucky stars for a pay cut or a demotion. At worst, there wouldn't be any food on the table for the next upcoming while.

He tried to locate his phone, though his mind kept wandering back to that nightmare, distracting him from what he was supposed to be doing. For some reason he couldn't stop thinking about it. It was just too vivid—too real.

The acrid smell of blood, the warm and sticky sensation as the puddle of blood that had reached his feet, the unsettling cracking sound of fractured bone—they all pervaded his sense of hearing, smell and touch as if he was still witnessing it firsthand inside that dream.

Not only that, the way the nightmare was presented, it was as if he had already seen it before.

As if—as if…

Those thoughts he tried to shake off to the best of his ability, yet the trouble at hand does not hold a drop to the flood of anxiety and fear he got from what he'd seen.

It took him a while to manage to find his phone, which had fallen onto the floor due to the tossing and turning in his sleep.

He tried to press the button to the side to turn on the screen, but somehow couldn't. His fingers were shook back and forth, as he kept mistaking it for the volume buttons

It's a dream...!

It's just a dream—it has to be...!

His mind was far too unfocused to even do as much as merely turn on a phone.

Instead of thinking about his boss, his job, the pressing matters at hand, his mind was still dead set trying to convince himself of those experiences having all been a dream.

"You seem to have witnessed something terribly frightening. I've never seen you quite this pale before."

A chipper, yet callous voice called out. His gut feeling, the thing he feared most, appeared to be reality.

It was the voice of a girl— something that doesn't normally belong in this downtrodden man's rundown shack of a house.

He slowly turned around, hoping to affirm he was hearing things, making up voices.

But there she was.

A young girl with long, charcoal-colored hair sat on the couch.

When their eyes met, she showed him a smile that embodied the word 'innocence.' 

Though he knew the true depth of depravity one such smile came from.

"I wouldn't bother with that phone. There's nobody worth calling."

Her tattered and ripped clothes he was seeing, as she relaxedly leaned back, removed the last bit of doubt in his mind.

This was real. It wasn't a nightmare.

What he saw just now were his memories.

Then, in an instant, he collapsed to the ground.

"Urgh—"

The nausea welling up in the pit of his stomach had risen up all of a sudden. A burn scratched at the back of his throat, sweat breaking off as his face grew hotter.

He bowed over, facing the ground. A vile liquid spewed out from his mouth.

A weird clear, stingray liquid was expelled from his gut, reminding him that he hadn't eaten anything a while before last night.

Last night.

The memory of it resurfaced, but this time, he could make sense of it.

He had welcomed The Devil into his house.

Amidst the dry heaving, he desperately struggled to crawl to his feet. His arms trembled weakly, barely holding his body weight. It took him everything just to look into her eyes again.

Meanwhile, the girl was still sitting leisurely, confident and uncaring. If anything, her smile only deepened, appearing almost like one expects from a merciful angel.

She took her time standing up, slowly approaching him, and bending over to face him.

"There's no need to look so afraid. You're safe now, as I promised."

Even though she was the main cause for everything, the fear, the danger, the insanity of it all.

He took a hold of her shoulder with every inch of his power, his arm clutching onto it like it was his last lifeline.

The girl maintained a smile on her face, yet her eyes no longer bore any trace of light.