The Shocker's Heart
The Shocker staggered back onto its feet.
From the shattered left shoulder, threads of lightning bled out like veins of pure current. Those filaments writhed across the ruptured flesh, tasting the air like a serpent’s forked tongue.
Crackle.
The electricity seared its own hide, cooked its own meat, and flung a nauseating stench of burnt flesh into the corridor. In an instant the air turned bone-dry; the surrounding currents warped under static, as if flayed skin were twisting beneath a merciless sun.
And then—
The shoulder that had clearly been ruined began to reclaim its shape in a manner that defied reason.
First, fine static rose along the edges of torn meat. The lightning stitched flesh to flesh, reweaving severed tissue strand by strand, forcing an unnatural vitality into the ruined muscle. Blood droplets did not fall; they rewound. Fractured bone was replaced by some alien, fibrous texture that knitted itself whole. Flesh crawled. Bone locked together without a sound.
In the space of a single second, the shoulder looked as if nothing had ever happened to it.
Minel watched in silence, then allowed his lips a faint twist of distaste.
“……Regeneration?”
No.
This was neither regeneration nor healing. It was closer to a reversal—as though the natural laws themselves refused to acknowledge the damage, nullifying it, winding time backward over the wound.
Minel recalled the Merchant’s words about the laws of the Backrooms.
Firearms for humans. Cold weapons for monsters.
In the end, only a cold weapon could kill a monster. A firearm could only shock the Shocker into discharging its lightning; it could never inflict lasting harm.
Minel sprinted toward the beast, drawing Silence. An otherworldly chill rode the floor, freezing even the corridor air. Metal walls contracted without a sound; the very atmosphere seemed to shrink.
Then the sword painted a crescent of pale blue—a line drawn through empty space, smooth and lethal as a crack fallen from the sky itself.
The Shocker reacted with a beast’s pure reflex, lashing out savagely with a foreleg. It never doubted the outcome. No blade, no weapon, had ever pierced its electromagnetic field. Lightning had always flung every assault aside—especially metal cold weapons.
But the Shocker’s lightning was currently spent.
Shhhk.
A short, thin sound. The wave of it shuddered through the entire corridor.
“Grrraaaah!”
The Shocker felt part of itself vanish. It turned its head and saw what had fallen: a grotesque toe the size of a human skull, spinning through the air before striking the floor.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Frost settled slowly over the severed remnant. The static that had poured from the cut surface sparked like torn circuitry, then guttered out.
The Shocker recoiled in raw shock. Disgust and confusion flooded every nerve. Its speed was unmatched. Its lightning burned everything that lived. Its body rejected every metal edge. Every premise it had taken for absolute truth was crumbling, one by one, before Minel.
Minel stood quietly, sword in hand. He did not press the attack for a simple reason: blue radiance was already flaring again across the Shocker’s entire body.
Crackle-snap-snap—!
Crackle-snap-snap—!
The creature’s breath came ragged; its eyes clouded with Wildness. Pain was plain, yet its pupils sharpened once more with the pure instinct to kill Minel. Minel had already dropped into a low stance. The blue frost wreathing Silence’s tip shimmered like cold moonlight, drawing an invisible line across the floor.
Do not cross this line.
“Grrraaaah!”
The Shocker ignored the warning and charged. Lightning restored, there was no reason left to hesitate. Trails of static raked the ground, throwing sparks; the trails tangled like living vines, seeking to coil around Minel. Dozens of lightning whips carved the air, thrashing like serpents, sealing the space itself into a perfect cage. Sky, floor, left, right—every gap closed by a net of electricity.
Minel did not flee. He stepped forward instead—deliberately offering his throat. Then, in a single instant, his body folded. Waist and knees collapsed together; he slid low across the floor as if a painting had been torn in half. His silhouette simply evaporated between the bolts of lightning.
In the gap he left behind, the enormous muzzle of a 30 mm anti-materiel sniper rifle appeared.
Hina did not even sweat. With a calm breath she stilled the last tremor of excitement and squeezed the trigger.
Walls, floor, even the air itself seemed to cave inward as the muzzle erupted like a storm.
THOOOM—!!
Inside a roar of crimson the massive round flew on a perfect straight line. It skimmed past Minel’s waist by a hair’s breadth and punched cleanly through the Shocker’s brow. Precision impossible for an anti-materiel rifle—miraculous accuracy only a perfect Digital Vein scorer could achieve.
“KRAAAAAH!”
A sound the Shocker had never made in its life tore from its throat. With that cry its entire body ignited. Unrefined lightning burst outward in a radial explosion, drowning every direction in a blinding blue fog. Fragments of electricity scorched ceiling, walls, and floor at once. Sparks crawled through the air; the whole corridor drowned in blue until the edges of reality itself vanished. It felt like a dream that would never end—everything blurred, everything drowned—except for one sharp silhouette: a small shadow advancing on the Shocker’s vast bulk, and the pale-blue blade in its hand.
Shhhk—!
A single blue line carved the dark. It swept across the Shocker’s abdomen in a wide, merciless arc, and something neither solid nor liquid spilled out in thick clots.
“KRAAAAAH!”
Whether scream or thunder, the cry shook the corridor again. The Shocker lashed out in desperation. Lightning condensed into a sphere above its foreleg, then shot forward like a living projectile—an instinctive technique born at the edge of death, a pure explosion of terror racing along its electric nerves.
Yet the sphere’s path drifted, ever so slightly, away from Minel. It did not correct course. As if it possessed a will of its own, it veered and flew straight toward another target.
Minel turned his head.
The white sphere of lightning tore through empty air and arrived exactly where Hina stood.
CRACKLE-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP!!
A white explosion of lightning flooded the space around her. Every fluorescent light died; the metal walls turned pure white, as if about to evaporate. The light swallowed Hina completely. Vision became nothing but white; only after-images and static howled in the void.
The Shocker’s torn mouth released a faint breath of relief. At last, it believed, the meddler who kept draining its lightning was gone.
What the Shocker did not know was this: the white radiance suddenly began to funnel in one direction, sucked away as if down a drain. At the center of that vanishing light sat the rare rubber bracelet on Hina’s wrist.
Minel spoke in his flat, rough voice.
“So you do have a brain after all.”
The Shocker felt cheated. How could it have guessed that two people, not one, would be immune to its lightning?
Minel, of course, cared nothing for the monster’s sense of injustice. He simply closed the distance—quietly, swiftly. The Shocker had already emptied every last volt; only bulk and animal instinct remained. It clenched its jaws and swelled every muscle. Sparks still leapt from its hide; each heartbeat leaked residual current. Not enough to hurl lightning outward, but enough to throw its entire body into spasms.
“KRAAAAAH!”
The Shocker began to thrash. This was no longer resistance. It was pure desperation. Every power it had trusted had crumbled; all that remained was a beast’s carcass.
Boom—! Boom—! Boom—!
Boom—! Boom—! Boom—!
Simple movements stripped of lightning—yet the Shocker’s enormous mass was still lethal. A single swing of arm or leg carried crushing weight. Any blow would shatter bone and burst muscle.
Minel flowed aside as if skating on ice, his body skimming the ground. The Shocker’s thrashing was pure chaos; even the beast itself no longer knew how it moved. No pattern. No prediction. Unconscious command, destructive instinct following. In the end Minel was forced to take a hit.
Boom—!
A heavy shock resonated through his chest. Balance collapsed; cold air flooded deep into his lungs. Fortunately the leather jacket Balan had given him absorbed most of the damage. Momentum, however, transferred fully—his body was hurled roughly into the air.
Another enormous foot followed. This time the target was Minel’s head—a vital point even a Level 10 leather jacket could not protect. Even dying, the creature still possessed this final gambit.
Minel gritted his teeth and wrapped both arms around his skull.
Boom—!
He had expected the impact. He had steeled himself to keep consciousness even if every bone broke. What he had not expected was to feel almost nothing at all.
He did not understand it, yet he reacted instantly. Both hands seized Silence. He twisted his falling body, found his center, and aimed the blade at the Shocker’s ankle.
Shhhk—!
A burst of freezing aura exploded from Silence. A single ribbon of frost coiled around the Shocker’s ankle. For the first time the thrashing bulk faltered. One foot locked in place, the chaos of its movement shrank dramatically.
Minel did not waste the opening. He moved like a dancer on black ice—jump, drop, spin—and Silence fell upon the Shocker’s skull.
Shhhk—!
Silence arrived.
No sound at all.
Minel landed softly. In that same instant the Shocker’s massive head was sheared along a diagonal line; the upper half slid free and toppled sideways.
Ssssshhhk.
Thud.
Minel steadied his breath and looked back. Hina stood there with both hands still extended toward him.
“Nice shield.”
Hina’s smile could not have been brighter. Then, in a flash, her face filled with alarm.
“Minel!”
Balance gone, Minel sank to the floor where he stood. His breathing was ragged; the tips of his fingers trembled minutely. He tried to close a fist, yet the fingers moved each on their own. His body no longer obeyed properly.
Hina stuffed the anti-materiel rifle into her inventory without a second’s hesitation and ran to support him. Minel managed to lift one arm and pointed.
“……That first…….”
Where he indicated lay the countless Blood Crystals left behind by the vanishing Shocker—and something else. A massive lump. The Shocker’s heart. Pale-blue lightning still crawled across its surface; the organ convulsed as though still alive, radiating a presence that tore at the air itself.
Hina gathered every Blood Crystal first, then lifted the heart without flinching. It filled her entire palm—neither metal nor meat, but something caught between. The moment she touched it, a violent electric shock leapt out.
Crackle-snap!
Hina did not so much as twitch. The current seemed to drive into her bones, yet her hand never trembled. The rubber bracelet on her wrist nullified every shock. Only a faint tingling remained in her fingertips; the heart nestled quietly in her grasp, twitching like a living thing.
As if entranced, Hina studied it. The shape was warped; the tissue sat somewhere between metal and flesh. A faint pulse still beat inside.
“……It’s still…… beating…….”
She murmured, half under a spell.
Then—
Grrraaah.
Grrraaah.
A hoarse growl crawled out of the darkness at the far end of the corridor. Slow, yet relentlessly gathering killing intent. In the lightless passage a single yellow eye blinked open. Then another. Then another. One by one, yellow sparks of eyes bloomed in every gap of the shattered corridor.
A cold shiver raced up Hina’s spine.
Those damned Hounds.
Every fluorescent light was broken. The only light still barely illuminating the area was the heart in her hand.
“Grrraaah.”
“Grrraaah.”
At this rate they would be surrounded by Hounds rushing from every direction. Hina clenched her teeth and gripped Minel tighter.
“Minel!”
“……Don’t worry.”
The instant Minel finished speaking, one wall of the corridor quietly opened into the shape of a door. A thin line of light spilled through the crack, and Chori’s small head poked out.
“This way! Hurry!”
Hina immediately half-carried Minel toward the opening, careful not to let him fall, careful not to lose their center of gravity. One step. Another step.
Then—
Thud!
The moment they crossed the threshold the door sealed shut.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang…….
The razor claws of the Hounds that had sprinted after them raked the place savagely. But by then the door had already become wall once more.