Chapter 29

The First Encounter

Part 4A

Warning Gore and bloody, readers discretion is advised.

The monster that came out of the cube was over two meters tall; what makes its humanoid shape totally odd is not its height but everything else. Although he was standing at two feet, his arms were taller than anything else, and they reached blew his knees. His torso was naked, with nothing covering it, and was almost one meter wide. Each one of his arms was as thick as my full body size, bulging with thick mussels. His head was round like a ball, and huge on top of it were two silver-colored horns extending from each side of his temple and then curved towards his forehead. Below the horns were two round ears, each bigger than the palm of an adult human, and his eyes were each as big as a fist without any eyelids; their color was as crimson as the color of the blood. Below the center of the eyes, there were two holes, probably the nose, that he or it could breathe from.

The mouth was the scariest thing to me because it was U-shaped, didn’t leave any space for the cheeks, and was open all the times that I saw it. It was like it was smiling, and the only thing anyone could see was two raw teeth. When he closes it, it looks like two sets of chainsaws tangled together. It never carried any weapon when I used to use it in my dreams, and it always killed everyone by its own bare hands. The last time it was so close to me, I remember seeing it cutting the head of a young man with its fingers in a one slash then cutting the body of the young man into two equal pieces from the neck down. It took a minute for the two parts to fall down to the sides, and what organs inside fell into the ground piece by piece.

And the blood that splattered around a few liters of it ended on my body, starting from my head, and that was what woke me up from that nightmare. Now that same creature was down there in front of me and was looking straight at me, the me who is watching this dream, not the me who is down there who seemed to be frozen with fear. The next thing I saw when my eyes left looking at myself and back to where that monster was standing was that I was not able to see anything there. What brought me back to where the group was standing was the screaming that shuttered the thick silence that was covering the atmosphere from the location that was high enough for me to see everybody at once without the need to turn around. I saw one of the young women, one I couldn't even recall or memorize her name; she was cut into two equal halves like the young man that I saw in the dream, and actually that was a signature move of his to use his bare hand to cut people like he was wielding a sword. I guess his finger nails or claws I don’t know what to call it, it was that sharp, or even it was sharper than any sword or knife, and I could tell that by the ease with which he was cutting the flesh and bones of the people he was killing without any effort.

I don’t know how to describe what I was watching with my eyes; it didn’t take him even two seconds, and four of the people that I was with were in halves, neither vertically nor horizontally. This was not the only dream that I wished to wake up from, and it was not the scariest one of them all, but it was the one that shook me the most for once. This was the first time I saw myself inside the dream instead of being a watcher from the outside, and second, all those people I feel I had a connection with, not just because I knew them, although not for long, but because I knew them never the less. I might not even remember most of their names, but still, I could recall them if I tried hard; at least they are much different than the total strangers in my previous dreams.

Stolen story; please report.

At that time, two men and the emperor entered the fight. It was wrong to call it a fight; it was just a one-sided massacre done by the monster. At least it was not too late to give some fight, and it didn’t take them too long to wake up from whatever condition they were in for the couple seconds it took the monster to kill four of them. In my opinion, it was a futile movement since I never saw anyone that was able to stand up to this monster for more than two seconds, but no one will lay his life to be taken without trying to do something about it. I looked at myself once more, thinking, Why wouldn’t I move or run from this place? Because for sure, I know that they can't stand up for this monster for long; it's only a few seconds maximum, and I had that horrendous feeling that it was getting worse at any time soon.

As I predicted, it didn’t take long for the monster to finish the three men, although it really took a few more seconds than I predicted, but the outcome was the same at the end. For some reason, the eyes of the monster were looking for something or someone while it was fighting the three men, actually not fighting but killing slowly, and that thing happened to be me. As its eyes ought to see me, it left everybody else and came towards me, and I could swear that I saw a smirk, something that looked like a smile, at the corner of his mouth for a split second, like he was saying, “Here you are, do you think you can hide from me?” And as usual, I was frozen in my place, and usually that is my Queue to wake up from the nightmare. When he usually comes looking for me, which he does sometimes and ignores me other times, previously he rarely notices me, but recently, for the last few times, he started to notice and give that horrific glare, but this smirk was totally new.

I couldn’t tell how many people were left in the group I was with. Because of the terror, my mind stopped functioning at some point, apparently. Eventually, I will wake up. That is what keeps me going. Did I get used to this continuous nightmare that I see almost every night since I ever developed memory? Maybe you can, but I couldn't. Still, there was nothing I could do about it, and since I can't change anything, why bother? Just keep going. One of the reasons I took this suspicious offer that brought me here was that maybe, just maybe, if I had some extra cash, I would be able to get treatment in the neighboring countries. That was one of the reasons that brought me to this moment. So my hope for salvation was just a hope, then I closed my eyes. That was the only thing that I could do. I am not a fighter, and I know how weak I am, so there was no reason for me to even try to fight back. Yeah, giving up was the only option. One second passed, then two, then three. After the fourth second, I opened my eyes. Since I didn’t get the hit I was expecting to come, not that I wanted it, but there was no other way around it, what I saw when I opened my eyes was totally something else.

I was sleeping on the ground, maybe on something soft that I couldn’t tell what it was; it was under my body, and something else soft was also under my head, the only good thing. I really always appreciated that when I wake up, there are no other lingering feelings or other side effects of my night mare; the most common is that I wake up with a little headache or some small bruises that happened when I fell down. or I wake up sweating if there is a hot environment in my dream, or I feel chill and cold sometimes. That was all, and all of those things are things that I could prepare for if I was at my house, but sometimes I couldn’t avoid them because they could simply happen to me while I was just walking down the street for any reason.

But this time it was somehow different; I couldn’t tell how, but I never woke up this relaxed before. Is it maybe because I gave up on life or something else? I couldn't tell; I was in fact relaxed, but at the same time, I had this ominous feeling that there was something wrong, and something really bad was going to happen soon.

He didn’t know, or he couldn’t even imagine, that what he used to think was just a nightmare hunting him would become the reality of his life.