NOVEL NEXT Chapter 4: Hell’s anatomy
I could feel too well, almost perfectly how the ground felt beneath my shoes—uneven, damp, littered with fallen needles from towering pines and broken branches that seemed at this moment to whisper their quiet warnings. The scent of resin was sharp in the back of my throat, but it could not cover the reek that drifted on the breeze now that the monster had completely turned and was facing me.
There was only one word that felt appropriate as my nose felt attacked. stench.
It was one that should snaked through the forest before I even laid eyes on the monster. It was a smell of decay and rot, of meals that never should have been taken. The stench from the bloody savaged corpse or at least what remained of the child scattered like broken dolls on the roots of an old oak.
Even then the rest of the world disappeared around me. At this moment, it only felt as if the monster and I were the only two things existing in the universe.
A little part of me could not help but note that The texts, stories and books I had once read in my past life and my current one, the ones that spoke of the cyclops—yes, they called them giants with a single eye, beings of enormous strength and primal brutality. But the books had lacked truth, had not made them justice or maybe it would be right to say the books had not made them injustice when they should have. They had made them sound less twisted, less hideous, their appearance less of a crime against all that lived and more like us but bigger, stronger and with one eye. Standing before me now was a monstrosity that should never have been born.
It rose, standing to more than fifteen feet tall. Its single eye dominated the center of its vile face. Its eye looked like a mockery of vision, an orb far larger than any human head. The sclera was sickly yellow, shot through with pulsating veins. The pupil was no comforting circle—no, it was a jagged fissure, like a slash of darkness that glistened with a cunning too raw and feral to be reasoned with, one barely above the one of a bloodthirsty animal. The monster's skin reminded me of a polluted swamp: parts rough and crusted, cracked hide weeping foul liquids, other sections stretched too taut over muscles that bulged and rolled beneath. Countless scars zigzagged across its shoulders and ribs, wounds that had never healed cleanly, some still oozing a sluggish fluid. It was a body shaped by violence and hatred, as if the world itself had tried to tear it apart and failed.
The face was a gruesome parody of what we would deem human. Its mouth stretched too wide, nearly splitting the head in half when it grinned. Teeth jutted from blackened gums, so many and arranged in such disorder that the creature's grin looked like a torture device rather than something meant to chew. The flattened stump of a nose twitched and flared.
The arms were too long, each massive hand tipped with claws thick as daggers, and when they flexed, I saw old bloodstains etched into the nails. The legs were twisted and thick, supporting this beast with a steady, stalking posture.
All this would have probably driven many to cower or flinch. It probably would have been the case for me if not in what seemed to be the bottomless fury in soul. Others would have hesitated. I didn't.
Rage replaced any sensible dread, burning through my chest and heart, focusing my mind into a killing blade. My anger felt almost sharpened, almost cold due to paradoxically how hot it was. This monster dared to feed on children? It dare stand on two legs like some mockery of a person after what he's done. It was time to rectify that.
My body moved by himself d almost as if guided by an instinct etched into my bones. I felt my arms rise with the easy grace of a dancer—no wasted motion—my two railguns sliding into my palms so naturally, so smoothly, it was as though the weapons had always been a part of me. My fingers settled on the triggers with a gentleness that belied the violence, the wrath I wanted to unleash on the monster. I stopped thinking at that moment. I chose to fire.
With one press from each finger, I unleashed two slugs into the air. They were dense metal projectiles, each one shaped in such way that I knew that they would tear and rip through matter like a blade through silk.
Accelerating along electromagnetic rails, they reached hypersonic speeds , probably hurtling forward the stars of knowledge in my mind whispered at what should nearly be two and a half kilometers or 1.5 miles per second.
At such velocities, the atmosphere did not just give way; it fought back, compressed into a shockwave that rattled the leaves and warped the air. I caught a flicker of turbulence behind each slug, the very air screaming in protest as it bent and twisted around the projectiles' passage.
The energy each slug carried was immense due to the mechanics and the science behind the railguns. Each projectile might as well have been a small artillery shell. Reinforced steel would mean nothing to them. Concrete walls would shatter like dried clay. Flesh and bone—ha! They would be as paper before a flame. And so I had unleashed these twin messengers of death, their flight accompanied by a sound that could never exist in nature. Two overlapping sonic booms, then the high-pitched shriek as the slugs tore through the air, mixed with the metallic crackle of electromagnetic discharge.
Even with advanced dampeners, the recoil hammered into my muscles. My shoulders strained. I felt my spine brace as if expecting an impact. The ground under my heels threatened to crumble, cracks spreading outward in a jagged pattern beneath me. But I held firm. I was balanced. I would probably feel it later but for now, I would not falter until I had made this monster suffer.
As I fired, I saw the creature's single eye pivot. In that foul yellow orb, I found a cold cunning—no, a predatory instinct not different from a predatory animal.. It had not been standing still. It had not simply waited for my attack. The Cyclops had already begun to move the instant it spotted my railguns. The moment I raised my weapons, I watched it shifting its footing, lifting a gigantic makeshift sword hewn from metal beams and sharpened edges of some ruined war machinery. The giant blade caught the sunlight, reflecting broken shards of brightness around the clearing.
The beast was fast. Too fast. Movements that should have been sluggish for something so large were swift and purposeful. I knew at that moment deep down if I had blinked, if I had delayed my shot by the fraction of a second, I would have ended as a white mist on that blade. The cyclops was faster than me. Yet, it was not faster than the bullets I had unleashed. A fraction of timing. It was all theee was between life and death.
When my slugs connected, the sword might as well have been a sheet of brittle glass. The kinetic energy focused onto a tiny point on the blade's edge. High-carbon steel met something far beyond its capacity to resist. Metal screamed as it shattered. Shards of broken steel rained downward, spinning and glinting, lethal fragments singing through the air. The cyclops took the full brunt of it—shockwaves of force ripping through its arm. Bones within that colossal limb likely cracked under the sudden recoil. The blade it trusted had just betrayed it, bursting apart before it could even slow my shots.
Nothing stopped the slugs. They soared on, their path altered only slightly by that brief, doomed interception. They struck the cyclops's flesh and the sheer brutality of what happened next honestly put a smile on my face. The world turned into chaos the moment metal touched meat.
The first impact alone was an event. A crack like thunder blasted through the clearing, followed by a low boom that pressed on my eardrums and chest. Leaves soared upward as if caught in an invisible current. Dirt frothed into the air, creating a choking haze. Branches overhead rattled, some snapping free and dropping around us.
The slug did not merely enter the cyclops's body. It burst through it, transferring unimaginable amounts of kinetic energy into living tissue. The skin split open instantly, peeling and tearing as if it were no more than wet paper. Blood sprayed out in a fine mist, thickening the air with a metallic scent that only made my smile widen. On the side, It seems it was the same for Beryl because i could hear her gagging.
Muscle fibers separated like cords under too much tension, thrashing violently as shockwaves traveled through them. Organs ruptured—livers, guts, whatever passed for this monster's innards—shattered from within.
Bone splintered into shrapnel that tore further into the creature's body. The slug's heat scorched and seared the wound's edges, charring flesh and giving off an acrid stink that forced me to breathe through my mouth.
From where I was, I could see the exit wounds. They were colossal craters. Chunks of meat, fragments of skeleton, and slurries of tissue exploded outward, spraying the forest floor. The cyclops jerked as if struck by a god's hammer, its single eye rolling, its roar echoing through the trees. It stumbled back, the shock obvious in its trembling limbs.
One might think that such trauma would be enough to kill anything. But it seemed it was not the case for the monster. It still tried to move. I saw its wide mouth sag open, drool mixing with blood, dangling strips of flesh as it attempted to bring its massive weight into a lurching retreat. The creature that had so casually torn a child limb from limb, one that had probably done so with so many innocents now stumbled, wounded and frantic. I watched it attempt to turn its wounded flank away, trying to put distance between us.
That filled me with a hatred so pure it was like fire in my lungs. Did this thing truly think it could leave after all it had done? After what I had seen? How dare it try to run after what it did? I would not allow the monster this mercy. It hadn't screamed enough yet to my taste.
"You will go nowhere," I said, my voice low, each word honed like a blade. I stepped forward, kicking aside a mound of displaced earth. Its single eye rolled back toward me, and I thought I caught a flicker of something that might have been uncertainty now. It knew. It understood that in that moment, it wasn't him the predator, it was not standing proud and tall. It was not it, the monster. The predator here was I. The monster here was man an the monster the prey.
I refused to let it drag its wounded form back into the shadows of the forest. I refused to let it vanish into some hidden lair where it would fester and grow strong again, ready to snatch more innocent lives. Before it could think to turn fully, I aimed again. This time I lowered my aim. If the heart was armored by layers of rib and thick muscle, I would strike at what moved it forward. More than that, I didn't want it to die yet, to turn into dust. Death was too easy of an escape. I targeted the knees, those massive hinges that allowed it to stand over humans as if we were lesser beings.
My railguns hummed—no, not hummed, they snarled with electrical fury. The triggers gave beneath my fingertips once more. Two more slugs leapt out. This time, the sound felt even more immense, as though the entire forest cowered. The slugs hammered into the cyclops's kneecaps. Given what I had seen before, there was no doubt they would break bone and shred cartilage. Indeed, the beast's legs bent as if kicked out from under it by a god's foot. Joints that had supported tons of muscle and bone collapsed. Ligaments snapped. The creature fell forward with a tremor that rattled my teeth, pitching down onto its hands and knees in a posture of forced supplication.
There it knelt, this towering terror, reduced to a wretched state. I could see its massive shoulders rise and fall, each breath ragged, each movement costing it floods of blood and agony. The shattered sword lay scattered around its claws like a broken toy. Its single eye glared at me, the pupil contracting into that jagged slit full of two emotions, full of hatred and fear.
This sent satisfaction through the core of my soul and at the same time heightened my anger.
How could it look at me such way when it was minutes ago devouring the corpse of a child he had probably murdered?
I wanted it to suffer an anti-monster construct, the third star in my mind answered with everything I needed and more.
Anti-monster construct was similar to my anti divine constructs except that where the latter's only goal was to get rid of, battle the divine, the former was to do such and intentionally make monsters suffer.
Anti-monster construct recognized any being as a monster the moment they in a way or form preyed over humanity and this monster fit perfectly into this.
My gaze drifted down, finding a branch about as thick as my wrist lying half-buried in the soft earth. It looked ordinary—just another piece of dead wood, its bark gnarled and flaking. Yet I knew, with the gift thrumming in my mind, that I could shape it into something far from ordinary.
I crouched, picked the branch up, and held it before me. Its surface was rough, cold, and unremarkable. It smelled of damp earth and the faint tang of pine resin. Closing my eyes, I centered my thoughts on the radiant flare inside my mind, the star of Adaptive Material Synthesis. I pictured the structure of the wood—cellulose fibers, lignin binding them together, countless carbon chains holding it all in place. I felt the energy at my disposal, the power to reorder matter like a sculptor shaping clay. I did not need delicate tools or complex machines; all I required was will and focus.
A murmur escaped my lips: "Change."
The air around me pressed heavier, as if the world paused to watch. The branch began to quiver, the fibers unraveling at an atomic scale. Adaptive material synthesis guided me, showed me what to do. It showed me how to strip away unwanted elements—oxygen, hydrogen—leaving behind pure carbon. It showed me to imposed a new pattern, how to fold the atoms into a crystalline lattice harder than steel. The transformation rippled outward, the bark smoothing, the surface turning sleek and dark, reflecting the faint daylight. In moments, the wooden branch became a gleaming chain of interlocked links, each link fused seamlessly to the next. It looked in no way as something that had been instant ago wood. Good.
I turned, cradling this new creation in my hand, and raised my head to face the Cyclops. "Beryl," I said softly. I knew she would hear me "I'm not sure you should see what I am going to do, what I need to do."
A shimmer in the air signaled her return. She had been invisible, hiding herself from the monster, from the carnage. Now she stood beside me, pale and visibly shaken. "What do you mean by that?" she asked, voice strained. Her gaze flickered toward the ground where the small, broken body lay.
She choked on a breath, nearly retching. Her face lost all color, and she turned her eyes away, shoulders trembling. Our gazes met—blue to blue—and in that silence, we understood each other. This could have been Thalia. This if not worse was what Thalia was risking every moment she wasn't with us. It was the kind of realization that turned blood to ice.
I swallowed hard, forcing words that didn't want to come from my throat. "I don't know what Lance told you, but monsters like this Cyclops don't truly die. They are killed, yes, but they return again from their pit in Tartarus after a while. They come back as though nothing happened, free to kill again, free to tear apart more innocence. This one... it must have slain dozens—perhaps hundreds—over who knows how many decades, centuries. Allowing it it to go back to reform to come back years later isn't right. None of this is right."
I continued "The knowledge in my mind—it's told me that it's possible to destroy a monster's soul. But it requires... extremes. Pain, suffering drawn out until the soul itself frays and is erased. I have the method. I can do it. But it won't be a pleasant thing to look at."
I had not lied. I lacked the finesse a true master of anti-monster constructs might possess. If I had that mastery, I might have needed less brutality. But I did not, and honestly, I wanted this thing to suffer. The horror it had inflicted deserved an answer. Perhaps that was monstrous in its own way, but I couldn't bring myself to care, not when that monster was literally eating a child mere moments ago.
Beryl pressed her lips together, shaking, tears threatening to spill. "I won't lie. I'm horrified, confused, angry, sad. I am many things at once. But I know you. You're not Lance. You're not that beast. You're not me. You are better." Her words faltered, but her gaze held steady. "I'm not leaving. I refused in the past to face the truth. I ran. Now I see what's at stake. This is about my children, our family, innocent lives. I won't leave you, no matter what you do."
I let out a slow breath. "Do whatever you want, then."
Without waiting for her reply, I began walking toward the Cyclops. Its eye rolled to follow me, hatred and pain swirling in that diseased orb. My newly forged chain dangled from my hand, metal links clinking softly. I knew the task before me. The inspired knowledge taught me a ritual of pain-strengthening glyphs, marks that could amplify suffering to unthinkable degrees. Exactly what I wanted. Exactly what it deserved.
I raised my right hand, fingers splayed, feeling the energy crackle in the space before me. I circled my palm slowly, invoking a silent command that would shape agony into something tangible. My index and middle fingers traced sharp, angular strokes in the air, leaving faint glimmers of light where they passed. Lines and curves formed a pattern, a symbol that screamed pain. Intersecting lines to magnify torment, spirals to escalate intensity, dagger-like marks to pierce deeper into sensation. With a closing loop, I sealed the glyph with a final downward motion of my clenched fist—like chains tightening around a prisoner's throat.
At once, the Cyclops shrieked. Its voice thundered through the clearing, a raw, animalistic roar that curdled the blood. The glyph worked perfectly, not only intensifying pain by several magnitudes but preventing the victim from losing consciousness. It would feel every lance of agony as if fresh and unending. Spittle flew from its maw, droplets of dark blood flung by its thrashing head. The ground shuddered and shook under the force of its convulsions.
I watched Beryl in the corner of one eye. She did not look away. I would even say that there was some vindication in her gaze.
Still, the screams could prove themselves problematic. It was thus a good thing that anti anti-monster construct also came with a noise-dampening glyph.
The noise-dampening glyph was simpler than the first. My fingers danced lightly, forming a sign that muffled sound, trapping it within an invisible bubble. The Cyclops's howls became distant, muffled cries, no louder than a whisper behind thick glass. The forest would remain undisturbed, save for the trembling leaves and the acrid scent of fear I could almost smell coming from the cyclops.
I stepped closer to the creature, its form massive yet pitiful now. "This is your last day in existence," I told it quietly, each word deliberate. "In a way, it could be said to be a funeral of some sort but honestly, I don't think you deserve one so let's recontextualise thing. Let's say that instead, your screams are the funeral symphony of all those you killed."
I held up my forged chain, the metal links gleaming with silent menace. With a subtle thought, I called upon the radiance in my mind once more, shaping the chain through Adaptive Material Synthesis. The links elongated, bending like living metal serpents, coiling around the Cyclops's massive arms. Its flesh bulged between the metal loops as I tightened them into place, ensuring it would not break free. Also, did I mention the pain-strengthening glyph would make sure that the subject would not perish until the caster decided when enough was enough?
From my hip, I drew my plasma knife. With a flick of my thumb, it ignited into a blade of shimmering light and heat. The aura of it cast flickering patterns across the Cyclops's twisted face. The creature's single eye widened, seemingly understanding what was to come.
I leaned in, speaking softly, "It's not going to be quick at all."
Until Dusk, the roles of prey and predator were reversed between man and monster.