Chapter 2
Immediately after the head stood fully upright, the man's chest cavities—or whatever entity now inhabited them—split open without a sound.
Not a physical rupture, but as though two invisible gates had swung wide, opening onto another realm entirely.
From within, wave after wave of dense gray vapor poured forth.
It was not mere smoke, but a substance that appeared solid, dusty, yet at once fluid and turbulent, filtering the lamplight until the room resembled a dark chamber illuminated by a desolate dust storm.
The human eye struggled to look upon it directly, for the vapor seemed to twist perception itself, causing surrounding shapes to waver and lose certainty.
The gray air did not merely fill the room; it carried with it a plunging temperature and the scent of ancient metal and long-buried wet earth.
Moments later, like the exhale of a giant long restrained, a cataclysmic gust erupted.
The air pressure exploded outward from the center of that gray mass—not as ordinary wind, but as a dense and destructive shockwave.
The apartment walls groaned in agony, the windowpanes fractured into webs before shattering outward into the night.
Nirmala Surdaya, still seeking a foothold of understanding, had no time to think.
Her body was hurled backward like a rag doll, flipping through the air under an unstoppable force.
The heavy wooden chair she had sat upon was violently flung, smashing against the wall before being cast through the already shattered window, plunging eight stories into the darkness below.
With reflexes honed through battles across eras, Nirmala twisted her body within the vortex of chaos.
Rather than resisting the current, she allowed herself to be swept downward, then with all her strength clung tightly to the trembling wooden floor, like a climber gripping a cliff face battered by a typhoon.
From her prone position, hair and clothing torn by the mad wind still raging, Nirmala forced her eyes to glance upward.
What she witnessed was a vision of domestic hell, grotesquely distorted.
Dozens of apartment furnishings—the heavy oak table, armchairs, a bookshelf filled with 1950s novels, a gramophone spinning in mute persistence—rose from their places as though stripped of weight.
They floated, whirling within the vortex of gray vapor and unseen force, before being hurled one by one through the ruined window frame, vanishing into the abyss of night to crash upon the pavement far below.
The continuous chorus of impacts, crashes, and shattering fragments formed a symphony of destruction accompanying the monstrous transformation unfolding at the room's center.
Each object suspended above her head was a reminder of how fragile reality had become, and how powerless ordinary flesh was before the force now awakening.
The dense gray vapor that had filled the room like a solid fog suddenly changed its nature.
It ceased expanding and began pulsing in a steady rhythm, as if drawn by an unseen gravity emanating from within the man's body itself.
With horrifying speed—like air being sucked into a colossal vacuum—the gray cloud curved inward, collapsing into itself, spiraling back toward its twin sources in his chest.
Its reentry was not gentle absorption, but as though solid material were being forced into a vessel too small to contain it, producing a low, grating rumble like distant earth trembling.
Each particle that entered seemed to add immeasurable mass and pressure within his hollow frame.
The effect was immediate—and dreadful.
The man's abdomen, still wrapped in a torn, bloodstained 1950s shirt, began to swell.
At first slightly, then with unnatural acceleration, like a balloon inflated by a high-pressure compressor.
The fabric stretched until its fibers became visible, then tore apart, exposing the skin beneath.
That skin itself tightened, thinning and turning pale like overstretched parchment, and beneath it there were no visible organs—only a churning mass of gray ash and violent energy, flickering with pale blue static sparks.
The swelling continued, rendering his figure grotesquely disproportionate: a still-slender upper torso crowned above an enormous, monstrous belly, as if it contained a storm—or even a dark, turbulent universe—within.
When the violent gale finally diminished into a menacing hiss, Nirmala Surdaya struggled to her feet.
Dust and shards of glass fell from her tense shoulders.
Her gaze, piercing through the lingering haze, fixed upon the figure at the room's center.
What she beheld next surpassed even the wildest boundaries of nightmare.
The man's head—or what remained of his human form—was no longer singular.
From the same neck, like poisonous fungi erupting under insane acceleration, head after head emerged.
They burst forth, stretching skin and bone with cracking sounds of splintering skull, until twenty-eight heads had sprouted in total.
Each bore the same pale, expressionless face, eyes glowing with a cold blue light, yet each stared from a different angle and intensity, as though possessing individual consciousness observing Nirmala from every direction at once.
His arms underwent a distortion even more horrifying.
His right and left hands had mutated into biological nightmares.
Some fingers remained as nothing but long, porous bones—white, naked, devoid of flesh or muscle—extending like the roots of death.
Other fingers retained flesh, yet that flesh writhed in eternal torment.
Upon them clustered evolving creatures, feasting in grotesque delight.
Bats with needle-like teeth and wings lined with tiny blinking eyes gnawed at tendons.
Rainbow-hued tapeworms with circular rows of teeth tunneled through meat.
Miniature piglets with eyes dangling from elongated stalks squealed as they devoured fat.
Transparent-winged cockroaches with spider-like legs crawled along every contour.
Yet even these parasitic beings were unstable.
They shifted forms rapidly, evolving into stranger, more terrifying, more repulsive shapes with each passing second, as though infected by the same anomalous energy transforming their host.
His swollen abdomen had now reached truly monstrous proportions, bulging like a gigantic balloon several meters tall, dominating nearly half of the ruined chamber.
The skin stretched over it had become translucent and membrane-thin, revealing a horrifying panorama within.
Not organs, but a vortex of ash and copper-and-violet static energy roiling endlessly, like a miniature storm imprisoned beneath fragile flesh.
Across the outer surface of that immense belly crawled thousands of evolving creeping creatures.
Beetles with gleaming shells reflecting eerie light clung to the membrane with needle-like legs, while their funnel-shaped mouths sucked yellowish fluid seeping from the pores of the stretched skin.
To be continued…