CHAPTER 15: GRUDGE
Sensing the violent shockwave of wind slamming into his face, Subject 198 acted completely differently from his previous passive encounters. He had rigidly prepared his mind for an imminent assault. Instead of executing a standard, reactive dodge, he chose to lock his stance, combining a sudden muscular brace with an explosive kinetic thrust from his newly forged muscle sheets to catapult his frame violently to the side.
Missing its mark, the mutated stalker skidded to a halt and pivoted its mass back toward him. Aside from the множество eyes that had been forcefully split down their centers to form jagged rows of human-like teeth, a handful of normal eyes remained scattered across its flesh, all locking their focus directly onto Subject 198. Those split ocular slits rapidly calcified, shifting into an interlocking array of teeth resembling a human jaw, clattering together with a sickening, rhythmic tempo.
Subject 198 locked his vision onto the creature. It could no longer be classified as a standard hand-cluster monster; structurally, it was now an apex, crustacean-tentacle abomination. This was a cataclysmic evolutionary leap. The massive meat core at its center writhed with fluid violence as if an immense, volatile current of energy was surging beneath the skin. Strands of its outer dermis ruptured, forcing up sharp, white-grey chitinous protrusions that resembled petrified wood grain.
Before the crustacean-tentacle beast could fully stabilize its stance, Subject 198 lunged forward with a bare spear gripped in his hand, thrusting the shaft directly toward the nearest functional eye. However, before the fanged tip could pierce the sclera, that specific split eye transformed into a human-like jaw with impossible velocity. Its structural mutation rate completely outpaced the remaining eyes across the creature's frame, its teeth snapping down violently to clamp the wooden shaft. Caught off guard by the reflex, Subject 198 channeled his full somatic force to wrench the weapon free, but the locked jaw held absolute, pinning the spear in a vice grip.
He could distinctly perceive the remaining eyes across the beast's body rolling toward him, their gaze laced with a cunning, mocking arrogance—as if the creature was actively laughing at his mechanical futility. It whipped one of its muscular tentacles forward; despite its outer architecture being fortified by dense bone plating, the limb tracked with reality-defying flexibility, launching a high-velocity arc designed to bind his torso.
Right at that exact micro-second, Pain, who was actively operating Silas from within his bloated midsection, violently drove the belly-hand upward.
Clang!
A resonant, metallic impact echoed across the clearing as the stone mallet held by Silas struck the incoming bone tentacle, forming a flawless intercepting guard. Capitalizing on the mechanical opening with perfect synchronicity, Subject 198 gripped his own hybrid axe with his primary upper hand, delivering a devastating counter-strike directly into the trapped limb. The localized force generated by his new muscle framework, when concentrated into the narrow perimeter of an axe head, packed a destructive kinetic weight equivalent to a high-speed vehicular collision.
Crack!
A sharp, resonant fracture reverberated through the air. The sound didn't originate from his fanged axe, but rather from the interior of the monster's calcified tentacle. The external bone carapace remained entirely unmarred, but the cataclysmic kinetic shockwave of the blow traveled straight through the armor plate, detonating deep within the underlying soft tissue. The abomination unleashed a jagged, frantic shriek of intense agony.
Exhilarated by the structural impact, Subject 198 prepared to chamber another strike when a secondary tentacle violently erupted from his blind spot, coiling tightly around his lower leg. He had committed a critical tactical oversight: this specific mutation possessed far more bone-plated limbs than its baseline kin. The tentacle hoisted him into the air, suspending Subject 198 upside down before contracting with crushing force.
The restriction didn't end with a kinetic crush. The multiple eyes that had mutated into jagged human-like jaws aggressively clamped down on his leg to lock his somatic frame in place. Initially, Subject 198 calculated the raw tissue damage as manageable, but he had misread the creature's mechanical intent. The outer rows of teeth functioned strictly as an anchoring brace; an instant later, a gauntlet of needle-sharp fangs deeper within the throat passage initiated a powerful, vacuum-like vacuum contraction. The beast began drawing his flesh down its internal channel, systematically grinding his leg to pulp.
A wave of peak, stomach-turning torment blasted straight into his hyper-sensitive nervous system. Suspended upside down in mid-air with crimson blood spilling continuously from his frame, Subject 198 gripped his weapon with a boundless, echoing hatred. He initiated a frantic, relentless hammer sequence targeted directly at the tentacle devouring his lower limb.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
A chaotic storm of broken wind and metal-on-bone impacts rattled across the plateau. The trauma wasn't restricted to Subject 198; the crustacean-tentacle beast convulsed under the assault, unleashing a massive, piercing shriek from the hollow maws lining its remaining limbs as they swung wildly toward his position.
Sensing a manic surge of gratification from the monster's agony, Subject 198 accelerated his striking tempo, his arm whipping the mallet down with feverish, violent momentum. Within his neural pathways, Pain began continuously looping and replaying the precise memory files of every agonizing trauma he had endured since the moment he arrived in this hellish world. Pain was aggressively fusing with his consciousness, unlocking a manic state far more volatile than any feral breakdown he had previously survived.
Concurrently, the dense neural networks synthesized during his single day of physical conditioning fired with chaotic intensity, shattering his baseline biological threshold and multiplying his pain perception manifold. Yet, Subject 198 registered no agony; his peripheral eyes flared into a manic, laughing grin as he swung his weapon with multiplied mechanical force, targeting the exact segment of the tentacle crushing his foot.
Bam! Bam!
Every individual blow radiated a sharp, supersonic xé gió ring, sending kinetic shockwaves rippling out across the clearing. Visible fractures began spider-webbing across the calcified sừng carapace of the monster's limb. Subject 198 maintained the barrage, entirely unconcerned by the fact that the violent recoil was systematically shattering his own upper hand; his muscle fibers were tearing to ribbons and his own reinforced skeletal structure was fracturing under the feedback. His bone structure, tempered through the grueling self-surgery of the previous cycle, was exponentially denser than a standard human shell, but the kinetic feedback of this clash was sheer butchery.
Yet, instead of collapsing under the trauma like the baseline specimens, the crustacean-tentacle abomination operated with a cold, unrelenting intent. Despite absorbing far more critical damage, it pressed the offensive, launching its remaining limbs in a synchronized assault to impale his core.
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Subject 198 successfully used his mallet to pulverize a massive crater into the anchoring tentacle, chipping away the shell fragment by fragment until he breached the raw flesh within. But the cost was absolute: his primary striking hand was reduced to a mangled, non-functional mass of crushed tissue. Without stalling, he instantly transferred the mallet to his secondary upper arm to sustain his defensive guard. Simultaneously, Silas erupted from his bloated midsection under Pain’s command, driving its fangs straight into the ruptured crater of the monster’s limb, violently tearing away chunks of raw flesh and chugging the meat down its tract.
The moment the dense, raw tissue slid down Silas's throat and hit his digestive core, it ignited an immediate, volatile surge of vitality, deploying an emergency nutritional patch to his lower leg, which was currently being hollowed out by rows of teeth. The biological interaction was entirely nightmarish: one limb was ravenously devouring the predator to fuel regeneration, while another was being systematically pulverized within its maw.
The calcified beast mirrored the response. From the structural tear Subject 198 had hammered into its shell, new strands of muscle tissue began sprouting to patch the void; its somatic mending velocity was vastly inferior to his own, but the cellular bridge was distinctly visible to his panoramic vision under the guise of erratic scar webs.
Enduring the absolute peak of somatic destruction, Subject 198 remained entirely indifferent to the trauma. Both his consciousness and Pain operated in a state of absolute, manic intoxication, maintaining a flawless, fluid combat synergy. He manipulated his remaining functional upper arms to drive the heavy mallet forward, violently smashing aside the incoming tentacles that sought to breach his perimeter.
The abomination was writhing in agony, yet it continued to launch relentless, calculated strikes, reading his somatic output and recognizing that Subject 198 could not maintain this hyper-accelerated overclock indefinitely. Every time he swung the weapon, his own internal framework suffered structural degradation, and the raw energy processed by Silas operated on a completely passive algorithm—it possessed no intelligent direction, automatically channeling the vitality strictly to the coordinates suffering the most cataclysmic tissue failure.
Sensing this biological bottleneck, the crustacean stalker pressed its numeric advantage. It commanded an arsenal of eleven separate tentacles, while Subject 198 was reduced to a single arm to maintain his defensive weapon arc, trapping him in a prolonged, blood-drenched war of attrition while his lower limb was ground to pulp.
The moment his secondary upper hand was completely pulverized by the kinetic recoil, Subject 198 seamlessly transitioned the mallet to his final intact upper arm to sustain the defense. Staring directly into his own imminent termination, his eyes narrowed into an even wider, manic grin, dập-vung his weapon to shatter the tentacles closing in on his core. The calcified beast maintained flawless operational stamina, its multiple human-toothed maws opening wide to finalize his execution.
Suddenly, the crustacean-tentacle abomination froze. It violently released its grip, dropping Subject 198 into a freefall onto the petrified ground as it ngửa neck skyward, unleashing a piercing, terrified shriek. From the absolute center of the black forest, a massive shockwave of anomalous energy materialized, generating a brutal kinetic pull that forcefully dragged the monster toward the interior. A cluster of its tentacles was violently pulled back into the dark wood; in direct opposition to the force, the absolute majority of its remaining limbs dug frantically into the crystal ground, using every ounce of its predatory strength to anchor its mass and pull itself away from the core to escape the tiếng gọi.
Slamming into the earth, Subject 198 forced his frame upright, his eyes locking onto the writhing predator. He tightened his grip on his weapon. The hybrid axe had been driven into the monster's shell so many times that the fanged barbs lining its perimeter had been entirely pulverized into useless powder. But at its center, the solid glass-fruit core remained completely intact; this material possessed an impossible density, far surpassing any object in the vicinity—a substance so rigid that a baseline stalker had to expend hours of continuous gnawing just to score its surface.
The glass mallet was now warped and deformed from the catastrophic kinetic feedback. Subject 198 gripped it with his single remaining upper arm that hadn't been reduced to paste, initiating a high-velocity sprint toward the anchored beast. He channeled his remaining vitality to drive a sequence of heavy blunt strikes into the tentacles pinning the monster to the earth.
Roaring in absolute agony, the crustacean abomination made a decisive, lethal choice: it violently severed the tentacles trapped under the forest's kinetic pull to break free. It swung its gauntlet of human-toothed maws around, locking onto Subject 198's six open eyes. At that exact moment, Subject 198’s pupils were dyed a deep, pure human crimson, radiating an absolute tier of psychotic malice and unhinged hatred directly into the monster's targeting matrix. Confronted by that manic, bloodthirsty gaze, the calcified beast broke, turning its mass to flee frantically toward the open plains.
In reality, pressing the attack at that moment was a critical tactical error on Subject 198's part. The exact micro-second the predator vanished from his vision and his manic focus receded, his somatic systems collapsed. He dropped heavily onto the crystal sand. His anatomy had sustained near-fatal degradation. Three of his upper arms were completely pulverized into a ruined mass of bone and tissue fragments, and his lower leg had been hollowed out by rows of teeth; the trauma was so absolute that his limb was practically reduced to a bare bone strut, with a meager layer of red muscle filaments attempting to tằn tiện sprout around the exposed skeleton.
He managed to drag his ruined frame a brief distance away from the trauma zone before his vision blurred, his conscious nodes going completely dark. He collapsed into unconsciousness from profound stamina depletion and blood loss.
The exact millisecond Subject 198 lost consciousness, Pain instantly occupied the motor control slots. However, Pain's neural status was equally critical; the widespread tearing of his hyper-sensitive nerve endings threatened to plunge the entity into stasis at any second. Guided by a cold, primal survival algorithm, Pain commanded their three remaining legs to drag the rệu rã torso toward the two severed tentacle fragments the bloated monster had left behind.
Reaching the biomass, the specialized mouth Silas under their belly convulsed violently, dry-heaving to purge the accumulated waste and bone fragments out of its tract. The discharge was incredibly dense, manifesting as a solid mass of calcified waste rather than standard gastric acid fluid. Clearing the digestive core, Pain commanded Silas to aggressively devour the harvested crustacean tentacles.
The high-density protein processed from the mutated tissue instantly detonated through his veins. This raw vitality operated on a completely passive luân chuyển current; Pain possessed zero conscious control over its distribution vectors. Under the body’s automated survival programming, the energy funneled straight into the coordinate suffering the absolute highest tier of failure, rapidly rebuilding his lower limb. Fresh muscle sprouts erupted in rapid sequences, layering over one another to systematically re-cloak the exposed bone strut with dense muscle sheets.
The moment the leg stabilized and achieved baseline structural integrity, the passive mending current automatically shifted its vector, traveling upward to repair and reconstruct Subject 198's three pulverized upper hands.
However, the nervous system's endurance had hit its absolute ceiling; Pain collapsed, relinquishing control as the body sank into deep stasis. By this juncture, the ambient light had faded completely, leaving the clearing shrouded in total darkness.
As the moons rose high into the sky, Subject 198’s somatic shell stirred once more, temporarily occupied by Pain’s consciousness. Reluctant to leave their defenseless anatomy exposed in this high-risk boundary zone, Pain forced the three newly mended upper arms to drag the remaining tentacle biomass, hauling his frame across a grueling distance to return to the shelter of the glass stone crevice. The moment the familiar defensive parameters of the camp closed around them, Pain relaxed its grip, and the body collapsed onto the camp floor, sliding into deep stasis.
The following morning, on the forty-ninth day of his confinement.
Subject 198 snapped all eight of his eyes open under the harsh, brownish glare of the sun. Analytical clarity flooded his brain, his thoughts aligning into a razor-sharp, chilling vow that echoed through his neural channels:
“I am going to kill you.”