It was a cold winter night during the Christmas holidays. Zephyr Griffiths, a 17-year-old boy, was walking on the pavement through his village, simply because he enjoyed the dark and cold winter nights. He would take walks like this every night, but because of school he didn’t have enough time for it anymore. When he was younger, he had always ignored his grades, but now he had realised that that was stupid. Now that he took school seriously, his free time had become much shorter.

Though, that didn’t mean he had to stop his nightly walks. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. It was only during these walks that he felt free. Free of stress, free of work, and free of all his problems. The crunching sound of the snow beneath his feet calmed his mind and the dim surroundings took him to another world of his own.

While he was enjoying his walk, an animal-like shadow crossed the street to his side. His steps halted and he carefully looked at where the shadow had disappeared to. While he was debating wether he should continue walking forward or turn back, the shadow reappeared and stopped only 4 meters away from him. The boy could now clearly tell that this wasn’t a native animal. In fact, he had never seen an animal with such a shape, and he had seen a lot of different animals in his life. Though, one look at it was enough to tell him that this was a predator. Its body was well over 2 meters tall, but it was too slim to be a bear. Bears didn’t even live in the forests near his village, but it would have been more realistic and normal than this. The beast’s claws were at least 30 centimetres long and its razor sharp teeth were longer than his arm was thick.

He slowly started to back away while keeping his eyes on it, but that didn’t help. The beast suddenly sprung at him, ripped his torso open and devoured his insides. The boy could do nothing but scream for the first few seconds and he quickly died a painful death.

The feeling of having his stomach ripped open was not something he had wanted to experience in his life. As the life faded in his eyes, he could think about nothing but how disappointing his life was. Aside from his nightly walks, he couldn’t remember a single moment where he was truly happy. He had never experienced the feeling of love, even though he had tried. Despite that, he still held his life dearly. Not because he was happy with it, not because he had high hopes for the future, but because no living being truly desired death, even though death may be the goal of all life. After all, life wasn’t about reaching the goal as fast as possible, but as late as possible.

He may had died a quick death, but it felt as if it had taken hours. At the end, shortly before the last spark of life left his body, he accepted his fate. That’s how he had died. That’s definitely what happened, there was no doubt about it.

‘So why the FUCK am i walking down the pavement again?!’

That’s right, the boy had died, but now he was standing on the pavement again as if nothing had happened.

While he was pondering and coping with what was going on, he suddenly heard the steps of a certain beast again. Its horrible, hell-like growling sent shivers down his spine. He was back to the point of time, just moments before he was eaten alive.

This time, he didn’t back off slowly, but ran away with all his might as soon as he heard its steps. Though that wasn’t very effective either. The beast pounced on him again and bit his neck off. This time, he died immediately. He was definitely dead now.

Or so he thought. He was back to where he stood just moments ago. He thought he was going insane.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!”

Again, as he was pondering about his situation, the steps of the beast resounded in the dark and cold winter night and he started sprinting at full speed once again. Just like before, the beast pounced on him and ripped his head off.

Now, this time, he didn’t question what was going on and immediately fled. Unfortunately for him, the monster started chasing him and snapped at one of his legs, ripping it off as a result. He screamed at the top of his lungs. Unlike before, he actually had to suffer for a longer time. Due to the fact that he suffered for a longer period of time, this felt much more painful than his first death. He was crying, while trying to crawl away into safety, only to be stopped by a huge paw being slammed onto his back. His spine broke beneath the pressure, but he was not dead yet. Unfortunately. Luckily, the monster wasn’t a sadist and quickly bit his neck off once again.

Once more, he stood on the snowy pavement, ran away again and was killed by the hellish monster. This repeated itself a few dozen more times until the boy had enough. After dying so many times, he had become duller to the pain and the fear. This time, he didn’t run. He didn’t try to survive. Instead, he ran straight at it and threw a punch. Needless to say, it wasn’t very effective and he died and revived again. Naturally, he died the same thing again. He didn’t really have any other option but to kill it, so he continued trying to kill it. After helplessly dying to it again for few dozen times, he started to improve. Instead of dying from its first strike, he was able to dodge and hit one more time. Though he still died in the end. Yet, he continued to improve. With every new try, he came closer and closer to beating it.

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Sometime around his 100th try, his movements started to become more and more like that of a beast than human. He threw no more punches or kicks, but, instead, clawed at it with his nails and bit it with his teeth. Obviously, that didn’t do shit against it either, but he continued.

On his 371st round, he managed to claw out one of its eyes. On his 652nd round, he was able to wound it so much that it went into some sort of berserker stage. On his 913th round, he actually almost won. Finally, on his 1,195th round, he won. He actually won! The monster was dead.

Before him lay the body of the beast that had killed him over a thousand times. Its teeth were broken, its tendons were torn, its eyes were clawed out and its throat was bitten out. Aside from that, there were also many other, smaller wounds on its body.

He had killed the beast, but he had not won. He only barely managed to kill it, but his own body was just as, if not even more injured than that of the beast. He fell down and died soon after. The hell-circle continued.

It took him much longer to survive while killing the beast as it took to just kill the beast. The reason for that was simple: his entire fighting style developed itself into one based on completely neglecting his own well-being. It happened naturally. After all, if you died over a thousand times, you wouldn’t care much about dying or getting injured either. Now, he had to change his entire fighting style so he would survive. It took him almost 1,500 tries to do so. At the end, his fighting style had become a mixture of martial arts and beastial instinct.

On his 2,601st round, he finally beat the beast and survived, but it was already too late. He had changed too much. He was less of a human than even an ape. He had also gotten used to dying and reviving too much. As he waited for everything to restart, his legs suddenly gave in. He had burned too many calories in his death-match with the beast. The way he had moved his body, as well as the strength and speed he had used, were too much for the human body to handle. Especially an untrained one. If he had walked back to his house to eat and drink, he would have definitely survived, but he didn’t. He hadn’t realised yet that he was free. He could finally go back and continue his life. Without realising his freedom, he died again. His 2,602nd life started off completely different from all the others before. The beast didn’t attack.

The beast hadn’t come to this village for a specific reason. It simply left its territory to find a new one with more prey in it. While it was looking for prey it found this village. A place that was filled with more than enough prey for it to feed on for months, if not an entire year. As it was looking around, it saw one of its new prey all alone and off guard. The perfect taste-test.

It more or less stealthily creeped up on its prey and approached it, when suddenly something changed. The prey had disappeared and in its stead was a monster. The beast instinctively knew that the thing in front of it was much more dangerous than it could ever be. As soon as it had realised its mistake, the beast fled. It sprinted as fast as it could and did not look back. It didn’t need to. It could feel the monster following it.

It had come to this village to prey and feed on its inhabitants, only to get the table turned on it. Now, it was the one being preyed on by a much fiercer and scarier monster it had ever seen. As it ran, it jumped from tree to tree and moved in a zig-zag to confuse and lose its hunter, and it worked. Its predator wasn’t as fast on his feet as the beast. What did he do in response? Give up? No! He started picking up stones from the ground and shot it at the fleeing beast. He quickly noticed that his attempts were unsuccessful and changed his tactics. He picked up bigger rocks and threw them at the branches that the beast jumped used as footholds. His efforts quickly paid off and one of the branches broke while the beast was still on it, resulting in its downfall. Before it could regain its balance and start fleeing again, its predator caught up with it.

It tried to defend itself, but to no avail. He was too swift. At one moment, he was right in front of it and in the next he was already on top of it, biting its neck. After a few minutes of struggling, the fell from exhaustion and blood loss. Before it passed the gates of death, it could feel its predator feasting on its flesh and blood.

When the beast was finally dead, he continued eating it. He was hungry. Very hungry. He did not stop until nothing but bones and the blood on the ground was left. After he was done, he immediately fell asleep. Both his body and his mind were completely exhausted. If he had continued dying and reviving for just a dozen more times, his brain would have shut down. It was nothing sort of a miracle that it was able to stay active for this long.

When he woke up again a few hours later, the sun was already up. He stood up and observed his surroundings. Then, he started moving, but not back home. To him, it was no longer his home. Over the course of over 2,000 lives, the boy’s mind had changed from that of a human to that of a beast. He was no longer the human teenager that went to school in hopes to find a good job as an adult. He was now a monster of the night that would devour anything that got in his way.

A few days later, a rumour would circulate among the villagers about a night-active blood-thirsty monster in the forest. Later on, people tried to hunt it down, but failed. Following them was a military unit. After more than half a dozen failed attempts, the government forbid entrance to the forest and built a wall around it. The monster escaped and slaughtered over a dozen soldiers. From then on, no one ever heard of it again, but they all knew it was still out there, somewhere. A hundred years later, the rumour had turned into a folk tale.