Chương 88: Insane Smile

Having exerted every last bit of effort, Lloyd finally managed to pull himself upright, his body trembling from the strain, every muscle screaming with sharp, throbbing pain, his knees threatening to buckle again at any second. The ground beneath him was cold and damp, soaked with the smell of smoke and blood, dark spots of exhaustion still drifting across his vision.

The Creature, meanwhile, simply watched his pathetic attempts with a wide grin on its dark semblance of a face, as though savoring the sight, as though he were nothing more than an amusing bit of entertainment before bedtime, a bored spectator at a show whose ending it already knew. Lloyd took a step, staggering, and a second later he was already running — unsteady, stumbling, but driven by desperate, reckless resolve — straight at the Creature.

It, in turn, spread its many arms wide, as though with mocking, theatrical warmth, waiting for Lloyd to throw himself into its embrace, like a child running to a beloved parent, its red cloak rippling in anticipation. Lloyd closed to within a meter of the Creature. He swung his right arm, and it flared with those familiar neon lines, blazing with a pulsing emerald light that cast flickering glimmers across his own exhausted face.

The Creature seemed startled for a moment, all three eyes widening slightly, but within a fraction of a second, that same mocking grin bloomed across its face once more. Lloyd touched the Creature. Suddenly he found himself in some vast black expanse, without even the faintest hint of light — not a single spark, not a single glimmer.

He spun his head around, desperately searching for anything resembling a soul, that same pulsing, fragile essence he'd seen before in the bodies of other opponents, but all that surrounded him was darkness, absolute and thick, darker than ordinary black itself, as though this void swallowed even the very concept of light, the very possibility of its existence.

A white petal drifted past Lloyd, then another, and another — falling from somewhere above, spinning in some invisible, intangible current of air, slow, almost lazy, as though gravity itself worked differently here. Lloyd immediately looked up, staring into the endless darkness above him. There, high overhead, an enormous white flower was blooming, resembling a rose, unfurling its petals slowly, almost ceremonially, as though performing some ancient, otherworldly ritual.

Suddenly a hand emerged from its center, followed by another, and another — an entire procession of hands crawling out of that grotesque, unnatural flower, writhing like tentacles. And then, among the petals, three achingly familiar eyes appeared. The Creature was rushing straight at Lloyd, but it no longer looked the way he was used to seeing it — all its former colors were gone, the red cloak, the dark skin.

Now it was black and white, as though pulled from film reels of some long-forgotten era, from times that predated even Lloyd's own birth, from days whose very existence modern people had already forgotten, as though this creature itself had torn its way out of some archive of forgotten nightmares. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

But Lloyd suddenly stopped moving — his entire body had gone numb, no longer obeying him, as though some foreign will had taken hold of every cell in his being, binding him as though in invisible chains.

The Creature was already right in front of him; it gently brushed one of its many fingers against Lloyd's cheek — the touch coming out surprisingly tender, almost affectionate, cold as ice — and then softly took hold of his chin, turning his face toward it, forcing him to stare directly into those three unblinking, black-and-white eyes, devoid of even the faintest trace of warmth. Then thousands of voices rose up — no, millions.

Women, men, the old, the young — all speaking at once, layering over each other in an endless, tangled roar, but Lloyd couldn't make out a single word, not a single phrase, amid this deafening chaos pressing down on his mind, wrapping around him from every side like thick fog. All of them fell silent at once.

The Creature leaned in close to Lloyd's ear, and all those millions of voices, merged into one, whispered a single phrase against his ear, quiet but chilling straight through to the bone, echoing somewhere deep within his own mind. — You're just like me. How amusing.

Suddenly Lloyd felt the invisible ground beneath his feet vanish, as though the floor itself had simply ceased to exist, and he began falling into the darkness — this new darkness seemed even thicker, even more absolute than before, or perhaps it only seemed that way, distorted by a mind teetering on the very edge of panic, losing all sense of up and down.

Everything before Lloyd's eyes began to blur, to fog over, and in that moment he found himself back in his own world, thrown from the Creature a good ten meters away, tumbling across the ground and leaving behind a furrow of crushed grass and ash, his body rolling over several times before finally coming to a stop.

He slowly rolled onto his stomach, coughing up a thick clot of dark blood that splattered across the grass in front of his face, and with great effort lifted his gaze toward the Creature, every movement of his neck sending a fresh wave of pain through him. It stood in the same spot, as though nothing had happened at all, but something about it had shifted, subtly but unmistakably.

The air around the Creature seemed to darken, to thicken, growing even more oppressive than before, as though the clearing itself were holding its breath. Lloyd slowly shifted his gaze to its face — or rather, to the closest thing it had to a face — and a heavy, choking lump rose in his throat. All three of the Creature's eyes stared straight at Lloyd — frozen, motionless, devoid of any sign of life, like glass beads set into the lifeless shell of a doll.

And the Creature itself was smiling — a mad, ear-to-ear grin that stretched its nonexistent mouth into a horrifying, unnatural grimace, one that turned everything inside Lloyd to ice.

That smile bore no resemblance to its usual, familiar smirk — now it looked like the smile of a genuine lunatic, torn straight from the deepest reaches of some otherworldly nightmare, and from its mouth trailed a long, viscous thread of drool, dripping onto the red cloak and leaving dark, wet stains on the fabric that spread wider with every passing second.