Chapter Five: On the Third Floor
※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※
Beneath the intermittent lighting of the lamps, the third floor seemed like a dance floor for hell. A forest of thick concrete pillars stretched into the darkness, and long shadows danced wildly with every flash of light, deceiving the eye and concealing monsters.
Kage Sora stood in the center, his chest heaving painfully, and the improvised bandages on his hands stained crimson with blood. The two knives in his reverse grip were an extension of his exhausted body, his last line of defense against a nightmare that refused to die.
As for the nightmare... it was changing.
The Crawler, that abomination that minutes ago was just an instinctual monster, now stood before him, something different having occurred. The previous battle, the chase, the scent of Sora's blood... all seemed to have stimulated something dormant in its mutated genes. Its muscles had bulked up slightly, and its skin had grown darker, as if its natural armor was thickening.
The monster did not attack immediately. It began moving slowly in a circle around Sora, its long, powerful tail striking the concrete floor with a rhythmic tock... tock... tock, like the pendulum of the clock of death.
"Is it assessing me? Well, let's focus."
Sora recalled the Aikido principles he had trained in for years. Don't meet force with force. Be like water. Let your opponent defeat itself. Against a muscular mass capable of shattering walls, a direct clash meant suicide. His only option was to flow, to lure, and to exploit the environment.
"And this place is suitable for showing my hybrid style."
Suddenly, the sound of the tail stopped.
The monster's muscles contracted, and in a fraction of a second, it vanished from its place.
The monster appeared right beside Sora, its claws slicing the air horizontally to cut his torso in half.
Sora dropped beneath the strike, allowing the claws to pass millimeters over his head. He used the momentum of his descent to spin, aiming a double stab toward the monster's exposed flank.
Scratch!
The blades slid off the tough skin as if striking an armored truck tire.
Before Sora could retreat, the monster's split mouth opened wide.
A pink, viscous tongue, long as a spear, shot out of its mouth at bullet speed.
Sora instinctively tilted his head to the side.
Thwack!
The tongue pierced the concrete pillar directly behind Sora's head, carving a small hole before retracting at lightning speed into the monster's mouth.
"He has a long-range attack now!" Sora's mind screamed. The safe space had just shrunk.
The Crawler didn't give him a chance to catch his breath. It charged again, this time opening its terrifying jaws. Sora tried to use a concrete pillar as a shield, circling it to make the monster collide.
But the Crawler didn't collide. Instead, it clamped its jaws onto the edge of the concrete pillar.
CRUNCH!
"Damn it, am I really fighting the same monster?"
A horrible grinding sound filled the hall.
The monster's needle-like teeth sank into the reinforced concrete, and with a savage twist of its neck, it ripped out a massive chunk of the pillar and spat it aside as if it were a biscuit.
The strength was beyond imagination. One bite from those jaws would end it.
"I have to get it stuck," Sora planned desperately. "If I can pin its claws for just one second..."
Sora started running between the pillars, using parkour to jump over low obstacles, intentionally exposing his back for moments to provoke the monster to attack.
The plan worked. The Crawler lunged, extending its arms forward, its claws ready to pierce.
Sora slid across the dusty floor, passing under a thick metallic support beam that was part of the building's structure.
The monster followed, slamming its claws into the spot where Sora had been a moment before.
CLANG!
The long black claws penetrated the thick metal of the beam. And for a moment, the monster seemed stuck, trying to pull its claws out of the embedded steel.
"Now!"
Sora leaped from his sliding position, aiming all his force in a precise stab toward the monster's exposed shoulder joint, the theoretically weakest point.
But before the blade reached, something impossible happened.
The monster didn't yank its arm. Instead, Sora heard a strange clicking sound from inside the abomination's arm.
The claws that were embedded in the metal... retracted.
The claws shrank back into the monster's fingers like a cat's, freeing its arm with perfect ease from the metal trap.
Sora's eyes widened in terror.
"It's adapting..."
The freed arm moved with lightning speed, and the solid heel of its hand struck Sora's chest.
Sora flew several meters through the air, his back slamming into another pillar with a force that knocked every bit of air from his lungs. He fell to the floor, struggling to breathe, his vision blurry.
The monster wasn't finished. It spun toward him, and instead of lunging, it turned its body half-circle and swung its long tail like a whip.
Whoosh-CRACK!
The tail struck the floor right beside Sora's head, creating a fissure in the cement. Had it hit him, his head would have burst like a melon.
Sora agonized as he crawled to his feet. His ribs screamed with every movement. He had made a fatal mistake. He had underestimated this entity. This was not just a zombie; this was a biological killing machine evolving in real-time.
He looked up. The monster was no longer on the floor.
It had jumped to the ceiling. Its claws, which had reappeared, were embedded in the concrete above his head, and it was crawling upside down at terrifying speed, defying gravity, its white eyes fixed on its prey below.
The monster began leaping from the ceiling to the tops of the pillars, and from pillar to pillar, closing the distance with demonic movements that exceeded anything a human could do. It was using Sora's tactics against him.
When it reached the nearest pillar, it jumped down.
But Sora, driven by sheer survival instinct, jumped too. He used the pillar as a launch point, pushing himself high into the air, trying to rise above the monster's attack level.
They were in the air together for a moment, Sora above, and the monster below with its jaws open.
But the monster had one more weapon...
As Sora reached the apex of his leap, the monster's tail shot up from below like a precisely aimed spear.
The tail struck Sora right in the middle of his chest.
CRACK!
Sora clearly heard the sound of his bones breaking. The pain was overwhelming, instant, and crippling. The force of the blow stopped his momentum in the air and hurled him violently toward the solid floor.
He hit the ground with a force that made the world go dark for moments. He tasted warm blood in his mouth. He tried to move, but his body refused to respond. His broken ribs were pressing on his lungs, and breathing was torture.
"I'm... going to die here."
It was a quiet thought, devoid of panic. Just a simple fact. He had gambled his life against something beyond human capability, and he had lost the bet.
Thick white dust spread around him from the impact. And through the dust cloud, he saw a shadow approaching.
It wasn't crawling...
The monster stood perfectly on its hind legs, erect like a demonic statue, two and a half meters tall, its tail twitching nervously behind it.
In that moment, it looked terrifyingly human, and incredibly beautiful.
"Replacing the old with the new..."
The monster raised its right hand high. With a slow, measured motion, its claws began to grow longer, and sharper, until they became like gleaming black sword blades under the red light.
Sora closed his eyes and smiled. There was nothing else he could do with this broken body.
"At least, I tried..."
He heard the strong movement of the air as the hand plunged toward him.
He waited for the pain. He waited...
CLANG!
A tremendous, deafening, ringing metallic sound cut the silence of waiting.
Sora felt no pain.
He slowly opened his eyes, disbelieving that he was still capable of doing so.
The image before him was so surreal that he thought he was hallucinating in his final moments.
The monster's terrifying face, those white eyes and the split mouth, was centimeters from Sora's face. The long claws had stopped in mid-air, just short of touching Sora's neck.
They were stuck.
Stuck in a silver metallic baseball bat that had appeared from nowhere to intercept the fatal strike.
"Oi, scarf kid..."
A deep, annoyingly familiar human voice cut through the battle noise and dust.
"They say when a person is close to death, they see their life flash before their eyes. Tell me later, was it a good movie? Or just boring shots of you having fun?"
Sora moved his head with great difficulty toward the source of the irreverent voice.
Standing there, right next to the monster, as if he had sprung from the ground, was that man from the elevator. The same Hawaiian shirt, the same ridiculous sunglasses in this darkness, and the same smile that hinted at insane confidence.
He was holding the bat with just one hand, blocking the force of a monster capable of crushing concrete, without showing any sign of effort.
"Oji-san?" Sora whispered, blood seeping from the corner of his mouth with the word.
The man's eyebrow twitched above the sunglasses. "Oji-san?" (Uncle?)
The metal bat shook in his hand for a moment.
And in the next instant, with a move Sora didn't see, a second metal bat appeared in the man's left hand.
"The age difference between us is only a few years, brat!"
The man yelled, and with a swift double-handed motion, he swung the second bat with all his might toward the monster's ribcage.
BOOOOOM!
The force of the strike defied common sense.
The Crawler's body, that invincible entity, bent around the bat as if it were made of rubber.
The monster lifted off the ground and was hurled into the air like a ripped rag doll. It flew across the hall, piercing the dust, and slammed into a concrete pillar twenty meters away. The pillar didn't stop its body; the pillar shattered from the force of the impact, and the monster continued its flight until it disappeared deep into the floor.
A profound silence descended upon the hall. Only the sound of Sora's painful gasping, and the sound of some pebbles rolling.
Sora ignored the pain and the man standing beside him, and looked in absolute shock toward the direction the monster had flown.
He had tested the creature's strength himself. He knew its durability. Seeing it fly like a kite with a single blow was something the human mind couldn't comprehend.
"Oi, scarf kid. Were you listening?"
The man lightly tapped Sora's hypothetical helmet with his bat.
Sora looked at the two-bat "Uncle" blankly, his mind trying to reboot itself.
"He's... he's a monster..." Sora mumbled.
"Yes, yes, an ugly monster," the man waved his hand dismissively, then placed the bat on his shoulder and sighed.
"Well, that effort made me thirsty. Hand me a bottle of water."
It was automatic. A pure instinct that had solidified over the past days.
Without thinking, without consciousness, Sora moved his trembling hand in the space before him.
He focused his thought for a moment.
A cold mineral water bottle materialized in the palm of his hand out of nowhere.
He reached out to give it to the man.
The moment the man's fingers touched the bottle, Sora froze.
Cold blood rushed through his veins, overriding the pain of his broken ribs.
He had done it. He had revealed his biggest secret—well, not his biggest secret, but his only ability that kept him alive and unique.
He cursed his luck, cursed his stupidity, and looked slowly toward the man.
The man was looking at him through his sunglasses. Despite the darkness, and despite the black lenses, Sora could see that wide, victorious smile on his face.
He wasn't surprised.
The man took the bottle, opened the cap with an audible click, and said in a calm yet terrifying tone:
"You know, seeing this with my own eyes is much better than seeing it through a static black and white screen."
Sora's heart stopped beating for a moment. "Screen...?"
The man took a long swig of water, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Alright, I don't want to scare you more than you already are," the man pointed his bat toward a dark corner of the ceiling. "But there are many surveillance cameras in this building still running on emergency batteries. Man, who thinks about jumping between floors like that? You're not very careful."
Sora stared at the man in total bewilderment. How could he forget that? In the midst of running and fighting, he forgot the first rule of survival in modern cities: You are always being watched.
This man had been watching him the entire time, from the moment he leaped from the ninth floor, and perhaps before that.
Sora tried to sit up, ignoring the burning pain in his chest. He looked into the man's eyes (or where they were supposed to be behind the sunglasses) and said in a hoarse voice:
"So... Oji-san. What do you want from me?"
After finishing the water down to the last drop, the man tossed the empty bottle onto Sora's lap with precision.
"I told you not to call me Uncle," he said with a playful warning. "Anyway, as I was saying. I watched you. You have good skills, a nonexistent survival instinct, and a very interesting ability."
The man leaned his torso slightly toward Sora, and his smile became more serious.
"You are gifted, but you are weak. So weak that you almost died at the hands of an oversized lizard."
Suddenly, from the depths of the darkness where the monster had disappeared, an angry and horrifying roar erupted, shaking the hall again.
It wasn't dead.
The sound of claws striking the ground at frantic speed began to approach.
The monster was returning, and it was now in a state of blind rage.
The man completely ignored the sound, as if it were an annoying fly, and continued talking to Sora:
"I want to recruit you. And your first salary is making you stronger, so you don't die the next time you face something like this."
The man reached up to his face and slowly took off his sunglasses.
Beneath the shades, there were sharp eyes, the strange color of molten gold, gleaming in the dark with an inhuman brilliance.
The man tossed the sunglasses toward Sora, who caught them with difficulty.
"Store these for me. I don't want them to break," the man said as he turned his back to Sora.
The man raised the two metal bats high, and struck one against the other forcefully.
CLANG!
The metallic ringing sound was an declaration of war, an explicit challenge to the approaching abomination.
The man gave a savage smile, the muscles of his back and arms tensing beneath his colorful shirt.
"Alright, ugly... here we go for Round Three. And this time, it won't be gentle."
※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※