Ryven didn't stop until the last streetlight guttered out behind him, bleeding into the void. His lungs burned and his calves ached. He never was the most athletic kid, yet he definitely wasn't fat.
Slowing down, he hunched over, sucking in heavy breaths. The silence pressed against his ears, heavy and endless. He forced his legs to move again, slower this time, each step echoing faintly across nothing.
'Whatever's out there has to be better than what's back there,' he thought, the image of the massive spider sending a cold sweat down his spine.
He kept walking. For minutes. Hours maybe. It was impossible to tell. The void stretched forever, no horizon, no sky, no ground, yet his feet always found something solid beneath them.
His thoughts began to grow restless in the emptiness, echoing in the silence, seemingly louder than his footsteps.
Continuing to walk, he spots a faint shape appearing in the distance
'It's so strange, there's no light, nor sun, yet I can see a building far in the distance.'
At first, there was just a faint outline. Then walls. Then windows.
A flagpole guarded the entrance. It was crooked, and its flag swayed as if there was wind.
"You gotta be kidding me." Ryven cried.
It was his school.
Slowly encroaching upon the building, a sense of dread began to form in his chest.
Standing outside the school gate was none other than his school's security guard, Mr Pitts.
He was a tall, old, well built man with dark skin and long braided locks.
Seeing Ryven approach, he released a small, warm smile.
"You're late." He commented, looking down at the teenager before him.
Ryven's chest heaved, the knife trembling in his hand. Mr. Pitts' calm smile gnawed at him, a cruel mockery in this place where nothing was as it seemed.
"I'm sorry."
Mr Pitts stares at him for a moment, his brows knitted in confusion.
"Sorry about wha-"
Interrupting the man, Ryven lunged, plunging the knife deep into Mr. Pitts' chest. The older man gasped, a strangled, unnatural sound, but the black substance, thick, and inky spurted out in a grotesque arc, coating Ryven's hands and the cracked asphalt beneath them.
Pulling out the knife, Ryven watches as the creature crumples to the ground like a ball.
"How repulsive."
The school bell rang. Loud, jarring, like the toll of some cosmic clock.
Hundreds of students began filing through the hallways inside. Not one of them spoke. Not a whisper, not a laugh. Just the shuffle of shoes, bodies moving like cogs in a machine.
They didn't even glance at him, standing there with his knife still dripping black. Or maybe they did notice, and simply didn't care.
Ryven's fists clenched, jaw tight. His heart thumped in his ears, yet it no longer really felt like fear.
He was tired. Tired of being scared and powerless. If this was indeed hell, then that means that he has already died.
'What comes after hell?' He wondered, roaming through the now empty and pristine halls. 'Whatever it is, it can't possibly be much worse.'
Climbing up the stairs at the end of the hall, he finally found it. His chemistry class.
Ryven pushed open the door to the chemistry room. The hinges gave a long, metallic groan, far too loud in the suffocating silence of the halls.
Inside, the room was exactly as he remembered. Rows of desks. The faint marker stains on the whiteboard. The windows fogged from some light that didn't exist.
Walking up to his teachers desk, Mrs Garcia who was just writing on the chalkboard gave him a stern look.
"You're late. Get to your seat." She ordered coldly.
Ryven didn't respond. He just sighed, knowing whom he'd see next.
Moving to the second row, his seat was right against the window. And next to it sat a blond haired, red eyed girl wearing sweatpants and an oversized hoody. His oversized hoody.
"Evylen." He muttered, squeezing behind her towards his seat.
The girl turned, a mischievous smile plastered across her face.
"Why are you so late?" She asked innocently.
He merely ignored her, taking a seat.
'There's so many people here.' he thought, wondering why no one flinched at the black substance on his clothes nor the knife in his hands.
"Don't ignore me, please baby." She pouted, making a sad face.
'Should I just try and kill them all?'
"Hey!" Evylen shouted, repeatedly pushing his shoulder.
"God, what?!" He screamed, slamming his palm on his desk.
The class froze. Dozens of heads turned in unison, their eyes wide and glistening with that same uncanny shine. Pens stopped mid sentence. Hell, even Mrs Garcia on the board seemed to pause, the chalk motionless in her hand.
Evelyn only smiled.
"Oh nothing." She said sweetly. "I just missed you, and now that you're here, you're being so cruel to me."
"This is why we broke up." Ryven mutters, leaning back in his chair.
She doesn't quite like that.
Evelyn gives him a look of anger before pulling back, slapping him across the face.
Taking a deep breath, he rose from his seat, pulling her hair and bringing down his knife.
He didn't often act out in anger, but the fact that these people who weren't even human and were trying to play the ones he loved seemed to send him over the edge.
To his surprise however, the blade never reached its target.
As Ryven brought the knife down with all his fury, it simply… dissolved. The metal crumbled like ash against Evelyn's perfect silky skin.
Evelyn's laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep and wrong, her red eyes gleaming with malicious delight. "Oh, baby," she purred, her voice distorting as her body began to shift and ripple. "Did you really think it would be that easy?"
The familiar, sickening transformation began again. Her blonde hair darkened to an oily black that seemed to absorb light. Her limbs stretched and cracked, bones popping as they extended into sharp, jointed appendages.
The oversized hoody, his hoody, tore apart as her torso collapsed inward, reforming into the same nightmarish carapace that he'd seen before.
Evelyn's face remains intact, just like how his mother's was. Her distinct red eyes multiplied until 6 crimson orbs stared back at him with a predatory hunger.
"You can't kill me with something that never existed in the first place." She hissed, her voice echoing from multiple throats.
The other students hadn't moved. They sat frozen in their desks, their heads still turned toward him, watching with those same glassy, lifeless eyes. Even Mrs. Garcia remained motionless, chalk still raised to the board.
Panic overcame him as he realized that he was stuck between a window and the nightmarish creature in front of him.
Without thinking, Ryven grabbed his chair, spinning around and hurling it against the glass window.
The window exploded outward in a shower of crystalline fragments that caught nonexistent light, each shard seeming to hang in the air for a moment before scattering into the void beyond.
Behind him, the creature laughed.
"That's right you fucking coward! Let your fear consume you!" She screamed as Ryven leaped out of the second floor window. For a moment, it felt as if he was both floating and plummeting at the same time, the ground being nowhere in sight.
When his feet finally bit solid ground, or whatever counted as solid ground in this place, he ran. He didn't know how or why he didn't take any damage for falling, but at the moment, he didn't seem to care.
Deep down, he didn't feel any pain, only fear.