Chapter 4: Regrets
Everything started trembling inside the rift; it felt like it could crumble at any moment. The black mist suddenly began to envelop the entire interior of the rift.
"hey, tana—"
Tanaka suddenly dashed towards Takeda with a pickaxe. Takeda was bewildered; his body refused to respond, leaving him paralyzed. All he could do was wait, helplessly anticipating his demise at Tanaka's hands.
Alan yanked Takeda toward himself, the unexpected tug causing the weapon to slip from Tanaka's grasp and hit the ground with a heavy thud.
"Mr. Tanaka, What are you doing?"
Alan exclaimed confusion etched on his face. He couldn't comprehend why Tanaka was acting this way; it usually took a lot to provoke him.
"I don't think someone weak like you could move; did I perhaps hold back too much? Never mind, I should make it more fun."
A loud, sinister voice echoed throughout the rift.
"What is this? Whose voice is this?"
Alan shouted, desperately scanning for the source of the voice, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't pinpoint its location.
He checked if Takeda was injured or not, but to his surprise, Takeda lost consciousness. He tried to wake him up so many times but he didn't.
His action abruptly stopped when Teruya, who had been standing still, suddenly leaped towards them with a shovel in his hand.
Alan tried to move from that place but couldn't because the unconscious Takeda suddenly started moving and gripped him tightly.
As Teruya reached near him, he held the shovel's blade with his both palms, kicked him in the gut, and with his elbow, hit the chin of Takeda, which took him by surprise and gave Alan enough time to free himself from his grip. He moved swiftly far from that place, preparing himself if they attacked him, but all of them suddenly stopped moving, standing like dolls there.
He looked at them confusingly and couldn't understand why they suddenly stopped behaving like a mad dreadmind. But it has given him enough time to calm his breathing, and now he has finally had the opportunity to breathe, and the first thing he did was to observe them after calming himself.
He scanned them intently, his gaze sweeping over each individual, and finally, he found something: their eyes, which had no life left; their eyes turned into the same hue as the black mist that enveloped the entire inward part of the rift.
And he could tell that because he has a power, or, call it, an intuition from childhood, which helped to know about other people's emotions and feelings. Now that intuition is telling him they had all become emotional shells stripped of their emotions, their feelings, and everything that made them human.
"Why are they behaving like this? They were all fine a moment ago, but suddenly started behaving like lunatics; now they stopped and are standing like a puppet."
He muttered to himself, trying to decipher the mystery behind it.
"Could it be that ominous voice from earlier or the black mist doing the reason?"
"Bravo! Peasant, you guessed it right, that's the least I should expect from my top entertainer."
An eerie voice that he was familiar with echoed again across the rift, but this time he didn't have to find where it came from.
A monster is the only word that escaped from Alan's mouth. He had never seen or read about this type of creature in his life, but he was sure it was not a dreadmind; no dreadminds are even worth mentioning in front of this creature. The sheer pressure emanating from it is proof of that.
Even the Carter clan, who oversaw this area, their patriarch, whose might he had seen one time, isn't even worth comparing to this monster; the difference is like heaven and earth. He was glad that this pressure was not aimed at him; otherwise, he was sure he would perish in an instant.
The creature's entire body is pure gray, adorned with iridescent scales, while his eyes possess a hue that seems to capture pure darkness. It towered over Alan, standing at twice his height, and with two big black horns in its head bending backward, the black mist swirling around him gave off an air of danger.
As the monster walked towards him, all his teammates promptly kneeled in respect, as if their master had returned.
Fear loomed over as he gulped and took a step back instinctively.
At an astonishing speed, the creature materialized before him, and with chilling precision, it grasped Alan's chin between two of its fingers.
Alan couldn't move. His entire body is shaking; he had a premonition something bad was going to happen.
It opened his mouth, and Alan's fear intensified as he realized that instead of teeth, there were sharp thorns. Its long black tongue shot out from its mouth, slithering over every inch of Alan's face with a cold, unsettling touch.
"Aah! This scent of yours, the taste of your body, is giving me the ecstasy I've never felt before. Please, Lord, help this soldier of yours stay strong; I can't control myself."
This sudden revelation made his entire world crumble, and it was not because of fear; the voice sounded like a man; it made his entire body feel disgusted.
He tried to kick him, hit with a punch with all his might, and the monster didn't even flinch; it didn't even feel anything.
"Why are you so stubborn? You are ruining our time together." He elevated Alan by the right hand, making the contact between his legs and the ground vanish, and then hurled him to the nearby wall, sending him crashing into it.
Aarghh!
The sudden impact on the wall sent a jolt of pain through his body, and it hurt even more because of the previous injuries.
"That's a nice reaction; please give me more. Shove me with those expressions."
The monster was dancing with sheer ecstasy, clapping its hands, and bouncing around like a child who had just stumbled upon their favorite toy.
It didn't give him a moment to catch his breath. He threw his big, thorny gray scales towards him, which impaled his entire body.
Arghhhhhhhh!
An agonizing wail rang out across the whole rift.
"This is it; more; I need more."
Alan's sorrowful cry excited it more, and it summoned countless scales towards him, but this time it was different than the previous ones; they were the size of needles. Alan watched all of this with a frightful expression; he couldn't even move from there to protect himself.
All of it moved towards him; thorns didn't pierce his body like last time but entered his body through his nose and ears.
After a moment, he felt mind-numbing pain all over his body, all the thorns stabbing his brain at every second, causing bleeding from the brain, and this time he couldn't handle this pain anymore.
"Please stop, arghhhhhhh! I'm begging you."
He cried, begged for his life, or at least stopped this torment, but it didn't listen and threw big thorns towards him again.
After numerous excruciating cries, Alan stopped; he didn't have an ounce of energy to raise his voice anymore.
"Tch! You have ruined our precious time; why don't you show me those expressions any more? Show me again." Voice laced with annoyance It again repeated all the things he did to him, but to its surprise, his expressions were blank; it was like he didn't feel pain anymore.
"It's disheartening, but I have to kill this precious toy of mine now that he won't be able to cure my boredom anymore." It muttered in a sad voice.
Alan was cursing his fate for all the things happening today, surviving all the mocking towards him because he couldn't awaken, brutally beaten every day, now an appointment with this crazy being, who is just using him as a tool to experiment with its sadistic fetish, and he is going to kill him too.
Now he realized the meaning: the more you greed, the more it will drown you; if he hadn't accepted, all of this wouldn't have happened.
He feared that he would not be able to meet his grandma and siblings anymore; he regretted that he couldn't be a grandson that his grandma was proud of or a person that his siblings could rely on.
"My life was full of regrets; I couldn't become what I once dreamt of. All I wanted was a life where I could live happily with them, and the worst of all, I was going to die a virgin. I also wanted to have a sugar mommy for myself like those novel protagonists have; it turned out I was a mob character."
[Fear not all of this will happen because your sexy, cool, beautiful, mighty plot armor is here.]
A robotic voice rang out in his mind just before he blacked out.