Volume 1: Path—[Awakening Arc]
Chapter 11: Madness
Inside the stomach of the thousand-faced monster, an ocean of flesh twisted and convulsed like a living nightmare. The air was thick with the stench of bile and rot, a humid fog of acid vapor that clung to the lungs. Slimy walls pulsed around Caelus, coated in a black mucus that squelched with every quiver. Muffled screams echoed from every direction, like the thousand faces had merged into a single cacophony of torment; the sounds of fractured souls swirled around him.
Caelus writhed in agony. His arms and legs were restrained by veiny tendrils that fused into his skin as flesh pierced flesh, nerves intertwining with foreign tissue. Each breath scorched his throat as each blink stung with salt and despair. His body was no longer his own; it twitched and convulsed, spasming against his will.
"No... No..." he sobbed, tears streaming down his face, blending with the blood and ichor dripping from his temples.
He was still trapped in denial, his mind utterly broken by the reality that he had massacred them. Over ten thousand people, lives reduced to twitching, mangled corpses beneath his feet. Families, children, lovers, etc... as the people's screams haunted his ears. Hands reaching out, pleading, and their mouths open in terror. The memory looped in his mind, devouring his sanity.
"You murdered us..." screamed a girl's voice.
"You butchered my baby," snarled another.
"My whole family is dead... You killed us..."
Each word etched guilt into his mind like burning brands. Their voices overlapped, pierced him, and gnawed at the edges of his sanity. His ears bled as his soul howled in pain.
And then, as if in mockery, the monster's stomach contracted with a deep, wet gurgle, pulling him deeper and deeper.
The walls tore open, and from the exposed folds, barbed tendrils slithered forth and plunged into his chest, his legs, and his spine. He screamed as his ribs cracked outward, as hooks of meat tore into his muscles and dragged him apart. Twitching limbs struggled, but more hands, which were some tiny and some grotesquely large and disembodied, screamed as they clawed onto him and dragged him down.
They latched to his skin, nails digging into his nerves, tearing sanity from bone. Their screams became a storm, a choir of agony as they shouted at him with words, "Murderer... butcher... monster...!"
His chest heaved as his mind was about to collapse. His body was enveloped by the grasping limbs, cocooned in writhing limbs and haunted voices.
A pupa-like structure formed, not a true cocoon, but a sphere of compressed trauma and flesh, shaped like a swollen egg of anguish. Inside, his soul was chewed slowly, each memory being unraveled, replaced by screams of the innocent. The faces of those he killed emerged in the fleshy walls, blinking, sobbing, and gnashing their teeth as they bit into his consciousness.
Each accusation the screams were making felt like a dagger being pierced into him. The limbs tore at his essence, peeling away the layers of his soul.
In the end, he couldn't stop it, so he had to give up and accept his fate of being devoured, but even when he gave up, the pain was so much he was screaming that his throat started to become sore.
His will to live shattered beneath the weight of guilt. His thoughts bled out, his screams reduced to internal sobbing, and within the deafening silence of his fading spirit, as the final pieces of Caelus began to dissolve, a voice whispered in his mind.
"Don't you want revenge for Uriel?"
"Don't you love Uriel?"
"Don't you want to kill the one who killed her?"
"So, these strangers who are dead, are they truly more important than the one you loved more than life itself?"
"If she saw you like this, would she smile knowing you chose to give up rather than live as she asked you to?"
"Didn't you promise her? That you'd live? That you'd go on?"
"Then what happened to that promise, Caelus?"
For a moment, the silence cracked as something stirred inside Caelus's mind.
Caelus, within the broken shell of pain, whispered back, his voice hoarse, trembling, and brittle yet burning with furious emotions, "I want to kill the person who did this to her... every last one of them. For what they took from me, for what I lost, for the way they ripped her away. I couldn't protect her; I didn't even see how she died. I was blind and pathetic, but if I get even a sliver of a chance... I will burn the world to ash for my revenge. In that process of getting my revenge, I don't care what I become; I just want to make them pay for what they did to Uriel, every single one of those fuckers."
"Then, what are you waiting for? Make it out alive from this place."
As the voice faded into silence, something deep within Caelus ignited. As Caelus' shattered soul, still hanging by threads, lunged forward and bit into the squirming, blood-soaked wall of the pupa-like tomb. The texture was hideous and spongy, sinewy, and oozing with rot. It tasted like envy of grief made flesh.
He ripped off another piece, then another. He gnawed like a beast, like vengeance itself had teeth.
Each bite forced the structure to writhe and moan, voices screeching in agony, distorted and warped: "Nooo... stop...!"
With each shred of meat consumed, his thoughts returned to himself for a moment, but the thoughts he got back were all about revenge, so only his agony, his purpose, and his blinding wrath have returned. The pulsing mass recoiled, its membrane splitting as tendrils snapped apart like torn nerves.
The pupa exploded in a torrent of black mist and blood-threaded fluids. Caelus erupted from the corpse-shell, dripping with gore, his eyes wide and wild, glowing like blood moons. His mouth was smeared with flesh, teeth clenched, growling.
He didn't look like a human anymore; he was like vengeance itself.
He stood inside the stomach of the beast. The space was vast, at least ten feet tall. The walls of the stomach pulsed like bloated muscles, coated in bile, mucus, and twitching veins. The ground was layered with half-digested limbs, twitching nerves, and chunks of bone.
Everything was alive, yet looked dying.
The thousand-faced creature who sensed him coming out by eating out the sphere of faces instantly made a decision to send thousands of faces inside its stomach to kill him. When they came in and attached themselves to the walls of the stomach, they shrieked with a chorus of mouths, each face crying with a different emotion: joy, sorrow, rage, or terror.
Then all of a sudden all the faces lunged at him as the faces got a human body with limbs.
Caelus roared as he lunged back. He bit into the mass of flesh and faces and mouths and tore it apart.
He chewed them down one by one as the nightmare's limbs whipped around him, but he caught them with bare hands and ripped them off. He bit through cheeks, tongues, and temples. He devoured the abomination with a berserker's hunger.
He charged through the stomach chamber. The flesh rippled and tried to close behind him, but his rage was unstoppable. Each step was met with soul-attacks, shrieks that split his mind, visions of guilt, and hallucinations of Uriel dying again and again.
But he didn't stop. He howled through them as he was bitten by madness and carried by wrath. He tore through guts, nerves, and sinews as his arms plunged into meat walls, ripping them open to find arteries.
He kept running, climbing, chewing, and screaming as faces still tried to stop him. They sang lullabies, whispered curses, and hissed lies. But he ignored them all.
He didn't know where he was going. All he knew was to follow the instinct burning in his soul, feral and relentless.
Time became meaningless as he trudged through fleshy terrain that stretched and squirmed like a living labyrinth, the bile-soaked floor sucking at his every step. Every inch he moved, more distorted faces tried to latch onto him, wailing, laughing, crying, and shrieking, but he silenced them with his teeth.
Finally, after what felt like an endless crawl through intestines and slithering membranes, he stopped.
Behind him lay a mountain of corpses, limbs tangled, torsos twisted like pretzels, skulls split and peeled open, and faces gouged beyond recognition. Some still twitched. Some still blinked. Some mouths still moved, whispering broken things. The pile toppled in slow collapse, revealing what they hid.
In front of him, he saw a tunnel pulsing, convulsing, and lined with twitching veins and nerve endings like a living esophagus that beckoned him.
Driven by fury and a mindless state, Caelus didn't hesitate as he tore through it, his hands clawing at the moist, quivering meat until he broke through into a chamber bathed in pulsing red light.
A massive spherical core floated mid-air, suspended by thick cords of veiny flesh. It was the size of a carriage, and every inch of its surface was covered in faces—like ten thousand of them.
Their mouths moved in discordant chaos, their eyes following him.Caelus grinned with his teeth bloody and eyes glowing red. As he lunged towards it, his jaw widened unnaturally, and he sank his teeth into the sphere. His teeth shattered at the contact, the surface of the core impossibly hard, like biting into a star forged from agony. Yet he didn't stop.
Blood gushed from his gums, but the pain only fueled his frenzy. He bit again as a tooth cracked. His bones screamed. But with every failed bite, his determination burned hotter. Then, something happened. One of his shattered teeth began to regrow tougher and sharper, like a predator reforging its weapon.
He bit again. This time, the outer crust dented. The core quivered, faces on its surface warping in agony. They screamed, chanted, and hissed in thousands of broken voices. "Monster! Demon! Murderer!" But he didn't flinch even in the face of these voices that are manipulating his mind.
His teeth kept breaking and regrowing like an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth. His mouth bled rivers as his tongue was a shredded mess, but he kept gnawing.
Bit by bit, he tore into it. Strings of red muscle, cords of memory-laced flesh, and globs of dreamlike matter were ripped free and swallowed.
The core trembled violently, voices screaming louder with every chunk consumed.
After a few minutes of time, there was nothing in that space except a man covered in blood standing on the ground, his chest rising and falling with slow, heavy breaths. His eyes glowed faintly under the dripping filth, the whites long gone, replaced by a deep, infernal red that pulsed with a hunger not yet satisfied.
Chunks of flesh still clung to his lips. His fingers twitched slightly, still curved as if gripping a throat that was no longer there. From his hair to his ankles, he was drenched in gore, and some of it was his, but most of it wasn't.
He looked like a devil, not the imagined kind with horns and pitchforks, but something like that was born from grief, vengeance, and soul-ripping wrath.
[End of Chapter 11]