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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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Something moved beneath Ren's skin.
His Umbral Gentleman attire began to twist and writhe as if something underneath was trying to claw its way out. The fabric bulged in places it shouldn't, stretched by movement that had nothing to do with muscles or bones.
"Ekkk—"
The sound came from Ren's throat, involuntary and wet.
Then the pressure hit.
It wasn't physical. It bypassed the body entirely and went straight for the mind. The air in the operating room became thick and heavy, pressing down on consciousness itself.
Adrian, still standing by the operating table, stumbled. His mouth opened to speak, but blood poured out instead. Crimson streamed from his nose, his ears, the corners of his newly regenerated eyes.
"Doc... tor..." he managed to gasp.
Then he collapsed, unconscious before he hit the floor.
Ren didn't notice. He was too busy trying to understand what was happening to his own body.
His form began to change. Not shift. Not transform. Change. His body lost coherence, stopped being a solid thing with defined edges and became something fluid, something that existed in states matter wasn't supposed to achieve.
"Fuck," Ren gasped. "Why does it hurt so much? Fuck, fuck, FUCK!"
The pain was indescribable. Every cell in his body was being torn apart and rebuilt simultaneously. His bones liquefied and reformed. His organs rearranged themselves into configurations that violated anatomy textbooks. His skin rippled and bulged as things moved beneath it that had no name in any medical journal.
Ren screamed.
The sound wasn't human. It started human, but by the end it had become something else, something with too many harmonics, something that hurt to hear.
His consciousness began to slip away, pulled into darkness by the sheer magnitude of the transformation. He felt himself dissolving, his sense of self fragmenting into a thousand pieces.
No. NO. I will not disappear. I survived a horror dimension. I am not going to be consumed by my own rank advancement.
He held on. Barely. His grip on consciousness was tenuous, fingers slipping on a cliff edge, but he refused to let go.
The walls of flesh around the clinic began to bleed. Blood seeped from every surface, running down in thick rivulets that pooled on the floor. The smell of copper filled the air, overwhelming and nauseating.
Then Ren's mouth opened wider than it should be able to. His jaw dislocated with a wet crack, stretching impossibly wide.
Two pale hands emerged from his throat.
They were not his hands. They were larger, the fingers too long, the joints bending at angles that defied skeletal structure. They gripped the edges of his mouth from the inside and began to pull.
The flesh of Ren's face tore like wet paper.
Something crawled out.
It emerged slowly, deliberately, pulling itself free from Ren's body as if his entire form had been nothing but a cocoon, a shell to be discarded. The being that emerged was tall and gaunt, its porcelain skin stretched tight over an emaciated frame.
Long black hair hung in wet strands around its face, framing features that were beautiful and terrible in equal measure. The face was human, but not quite. The proportions were subtly off, the angles too sharp, the skin is like porcelain dipped in milk. Its eyes were dark and empty, void like pits that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.
From the crown of its head, thin metallic spikes radiated outward in a perfect halo, each one sharp as a needle, gleaming in the operating room lights. The spikes pierced through the scalp without bleeding, as if they had grown from within rather than being attached.
The being's torso was exposed, pale flesh stretched over visible ribs. Around its waist was a simple silver band, and from the waist down it wore flowing black robes that seemed to move independently of any breeze. Its hands were long-fingered and graceful, but each finger ended in a black nail sharpened to a point.
The creature stood over what remained of Ren's body. The Umbral Gentleman coat lay in tatters, torn in half during the emergence. The plague doctor mask had fallen to the floor. Between them lay the ruined remains of Ren Hector's human form, split open like a discarded chrysalis.
The being looked down at the corpse with those void like eyes.
Then it began to eat.
It knelt beside the body with fluid grace, its movements almost ceremonial. The mouth opened, revealing teeth that were too sharp, too numerous. It bent forward and bit into the corpse's shoulder, tearing away flesh with surgical precision.
The sound was wet and crunching. Bones breaking, flesh tearing, tissue dissolving. The being consumed everything: muscle, bone, organs, blood. It ate with mechanical efficiency, each bite calculated, each swallow purposeful.
Within minutes, all that remained were the Umbral Gentleman coat and the plague doctor mask, lying in a pool of blood and digestive fluids.
The being stood upright and tilted its head back.
Then it screamed.
Ten tentacles burst from its back in an explosion of crimson tissue. They were bright red, almost luminescent, each one as thick as a person's torso and covered in what looked like exposed nerve endings. They writhed and lashed through the air, destroying surgical equipment, gouging chunks from the flesh-covered walls.
The creature's head began to change.
The black hair started to move, each strand separating and thickening. The scalp split open in radiating lines from the center, peeling back like petals of some grotesque flower. Beneath the hair and skin, another ten tentacles emerged. These were thinner, more precise, each one tipped with a smaller mouth lined with different types of teeth.
Twenty tentacles in total. All of them convulsing violently, moving in patterns that seemed random but weren't, following some alien geometry that human eyes couldn't quite process.
The being began to laugh.
It was a sound that should not exist. It contained madness, yes, but also joy, and hunger, and something else that had no name in human language. The laughter echoed off the fleshy walls, multiplied, harmonized with itself until it became a choir of insanity.
Yellow fog poured from the creature's mouth with each exhale. The mist was thick and acrid, smelling of sulfur and decay. Where it touched the flesh walls of the clinic, the tissue began to necrotize. The red meat turned black, then grey, then crumbled away into dust. The rot spread rapidly, eating through the organic material like acid.
And then the walls responded.
Thousands of eyes opened simultaneously across every surface. They were human eyes, animal eyes, insect eyes, eyes that belonged to creatures that had never existed. They all focused on the being in the center of the operating room.
A sound began to fill the air. An eldritch mantra, words in a language that predated human speech, syllables that hurt to hear.
"Ul'thra ven karesh.
Shaen vel thuun.
By the Y+๑๔ู฿๕ king, I command—
yield."
"Koruun ir ash'kara.
Crowns unfasten.
Masks fall."
"Ul'thra.
Yield."
The being froze. Its tentacles stopped moving. The void-like eyes widened.
Then injuries began to appear on its body.
Cuts opened across its torso, deep gashes that wept black ichor. Burns manifested on its arms, the pale flesh blistering and peeling away. One of the tentacles from its back simply fell off, the tissue at the base rotting until it couldn't support the weight anymore.
The being screamed again, but this time in pain.
It staggered backward, crashing into the operating table, knocking it over. More injuries appeared. A chunk of flesh tore itself from its chest. Several of the head tentacles withered and died, dropping to the floor like dead worms. The metallic halo began to rust and flake away.
The walls of the clinic responded.
The flesh began to move, detaching from the walls in great sheets. It flowed across the floor like a living tide, converging on the being from all directions. The tissue wrapped around it, layer after layer, covering the creature completely.
The being thrashed and fought, but more flesh kept coming. It was being devoured by the very clinic it had transformed, consumed by the biological structure it had created.
The sound was horrific. Crunching, tearing, wet sucking noises as the flesh absorbed the being. It struggled, tentacles whipping frantically, the beautiful terrible face contorting in silent agony as more and more tissue piled on top of it.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Finally, the movement stopped.
What remained was a massive cocoon of flesh, pulsing with internal movement. It was roughly spherical, about three meters in diameter, covered in veins that throbbed with each beat of some unseen heart.
Then the cocoon began to shrink.
Slowly at first, then faster. The flesh compressed, condensing down, getting smaller and smaller. The veins retracted. The pulsing slowed. Within minutes, the cocoon had reduced to something roughly human-sized.
Then human-shaped.
The flesh peeled away like wet paper, falling to the floor in strips. Beneath it, a figure lay curled in the fetal position.
It was Ren.
Naked, covered in blood and other fluids, but unmistakably Ren Hector. His body was intact. Human. No tentacles. No extra mouths. No metallic halo. Just a man lying on the floor of his operating room.
His eyes snapped open.
"WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!"
The system voice then chime in.
Rank A achieved.