TV (3)
What would four hundred kilos of flesh look like if it melted?
Its head and shoulders seemed to run together without any clear boundary, and the layered sheets of sagging skin made a nauseating, squelching sound as it moved.
Its forearms were buried so deep in the fat that they looked shorter than its elbows by half.
Its belly dragged along the floor as though it were wearing a dress.
The thing crawled forward like some kind of human slime, and it was so revolting that I couldn’t even look at it straight without feeling my skin crawl.
And draped over its shoulder was a man’s corpse.
Probably the guy from the next room.
He hung there like laundry, completely still, as if he were already dead.
Then the flesh lump tore off one of the man’s legs as if it were a snack and crammed it into its mouth, chewing with loud, wet crunches.
Damn it. Everything about it was disgusting, from the nasty little habits to the way it looked, like it had been made out of food waste and bad intentions.
“…Ah.”
I squinted, and for a split second my eyes drifted away from the grotesque lump and landed on the man’s corpse instead.
More precisely, on the left leg hanging beneath it.
Under the dirty, dried bloodstains, I could see a jagged cross-section where bone peeked out in places.
A clean cut that had gone crooked.
The rough, uneven end looked like badly butchered meat.
The tip was shredded, as if somebody had tried to rip it off by brute force.
He’d tried to cut his own foot off to get out of here.
He’d managed the cutting part, but not the escaping part.
Maybe that was only natural.
What kind of person chopped off their own ankle and ran on anyway?
Unless you were an absolute monster of physical conditioning, that was impossible.
“Kek-kek-kek-kek-kek-kek.”
The thing, somehow balancing on a thin railing, was climbing down the stairs with that eerie laugh.
Its huge body, maybe not even certain to have feet at all, shone slick and wet with the blood of previous victims.
Every time the flesh mass slithered down a step, something sticky and unpleasant stretched after it.
...It was slow.
If I wasn’t chained up, I could get away in time.
If I had a body trained by hammer work, maybe I could even cut my own ankle off before it reached me.
Maybe this was my last chance.
Cut? Cut? Cut? Cut?
The closer it got, the more my hand tightened around the hacksaw.
If I severed my ankle and bolted down the corridor, would I live?
Or should I run past it and take the side door on the second floor?
But climbing stairs on one foot would be hard.
Maybe I should cut it first, head for the corridor, and if something looked wrong, turn back and come out the other way?
The thing was slow, so if I just got rid of the shackles maybe it couldn’t catch me-
“Ghk.”
I jumped as the hacksaw bit into my ankle before I even realized I’d been holding it there.
When had I picked up the hacksaw...?
The sharp pain actually cleared my head a little.
Why was I thinking about running first?
Come to think of it, everything about this had been strange from the start.
There were this many people in the Backrooms?
And all this time, while I’d been making all that noise, they’d been quiet until now, when suddenly there were screams and that man in the next room.
Everything had been arranged like a script, cornering me exactly where it wanted me.
It said this was a role.
A thought crept in that maybe the man draped over the flesh monster’s shoulder wasn’t a real person at all.
What if it had been guiding me to cut off my own foot?
What if it had staged the whole desperate situation to make me mutilate myself?
No, I didn’t know.
But what changed if I didn’t self-harm?
That monster was right there, crawling toward me with all that mass, trying to eat me anyway.
I’ve taken down worse than this. Am I supposed to die to that thing?
Made me angry.
I’d already ripped the head off that mannequin bastard, and I’d cut the neck off that spider woman who used those grotesque webs.
And my ending was supposed to be getting eaten by some pig-shaped freak like this?
Die to something so useless it wouldn’t even work as material?
“Kek-kek-kek-kek-kek-”
“Shut up, you piece of shit.”
The instant the thing opened its mouth wide enough to swallow me, I slammed the hacksaw into the top of its skull.
“Keeeeeeek!”
“Time for pig disassembly, you foot-and-mouth disease shit mountain!”
When did I ever say I was running from a freak?
I came here to farm materials in the first place!
Remembering my original purpose, I yanked the hacksaw with all the rage I had straight through the top of the flesh monster’s head.
It reached out to pull the saw free, but all it managed was to flail in the air, trapped by its own fat.
Unbelievable.
I’d been so scared of this bastard I’d almost cut off my own ankle.
“Dieee!”
“Keet! Keeeek! Kket!”
I pushed. I pulled.
And the moment the hacksaw finally found its purpose, I went to work on the thing’s head like a madman.
The flesh lump’s skull split in two.
-Crack, crackle-
“…Huh?”
A strange crackling sound, completely out of place, rang out.
At the same time, the dark basement vanished, and the room returned to its original yellow color.
The second-floor railing was gone. The corridor behind me was gone. The shackles were gone.
And in front of me there wasn’t a half-split monster head, but an old CRT TV with a black moon embedded halfway into it.
...The bracelet’s still there, and the hammer too.
So that had been a hallucination the TV showed me?
As I recovered the black moon with the ugly aftertaste of a nightmare still clinging to me, my ankle stung.
...It had been cut.
My left ankle had a shallow cut from something sharp.
And there was a little blood on the black moon.
“The hacksaw was the black moon?”
I’d thought it had vanished, but apparently not.
It just hadn’t been visible, or had been visible differently.
I’d nearly been tricked by the illusion into cutting off my own foot with the black moon.
...Was that monster just part of the hallucination too?
I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t been able to kill it, and hadn’t been able to cut off my foot either.
Maybe it had been a real judgment until the moment I escaped.
“Damn TV bastard. You’re playing with people?”
The thought that I’d been beating a drum and playing the flute all by myself made me furious.
I summoned the hammer and smashed the already wrecked TV.
After turning the set into minced meat with the pork-cutlet hammer, I steadied my ragged breathing and lifted the lantern.
Current Area: TV Viewing Room
Explored Paths: Abandoned Warehouse, ■■
It was annoying as hell, but this place had been cleared too.
But was there any material?
I rummaged through the shattered TV wreckage, but there wasn’t anything worth taking.
I didn’t even know if the flesh monster had been real.
Was there really nothing at all I could salvage from this?
Even if it wasn’t a core of thought, there should’ve been some material in it.
Maybe it didn’t drop anything because it wasn’t a normal monster.
If I’d known, I wouldn’t have smashed the TV so hard.
I’d suffered like hell for this, and now I was coming away empty-handed, like this had all been a damn nightmare. That made me twice as pissed off.
This irritating tactile memory, this empty pocket.
“I’m not going back like this.”
I grabbed the lantern, ready to head straight for the next Backrooms level.
Anyone watching my stream would probably say I’d lost my mind, but I couldn’t leave it alone. If I walked away like this, I’d keep thinking about it forever.
I needed materials, sure, but I also needed to beat the hell out of a few monsters to cool off.
What did the next one do wrong, you ask?
Hell if I know. Call it monster collective punishment.
“Search.”
The lantern shone toward the drawer under the table where the TV sat.
Flash, flash, flash, flash-
Was that Morse code?
It seemed to be telling me how many times to open and close it, so I went ahead and opened the drawer.
The drawer slid open.
Empty.
I shut it and opened it again.
Shut it and opened it again.
“Hm?”
What had been an empty drawer a moment ago now held a single movie ticket.
What was this?
It felt like material, and there was nothing especially strange about it. Just an ordinary ticket.
Still, if it had popped out of nowhere, there was no way it was actually ordinary.
Besides, there was no title, no time, no theater number printed on it.
What kind of blank movie ticket was this?
One of those things where you could pick any movie you wanted?
Whatever it was, I couldn’t just throw it away.
It was a movie ticket, so I was a little uneasy about it, but...
Let’s keep it for now.
I didn’t know what it was for, but it would probably be useful somehow.
It hadn’t appeared normally, so maybe it had some kind of function.
But where was I supposed to put it?
I was still in my panties, because I didn’t have clothes that fit a shopping mall.
In the end, since there was nowhere else to put it, I rolled it up and stuffed it into the lantern’s eye socket.
“Sorry. I’m not treating you like a trash can, I’m just storing it for a bit.”
I gave the lantern’s head a pat and opened the drawer again.
It had said flash-flash-flash-flash, so maybe I just needed to open and close it twice quickly?
I pushed the half-open drawer back in and yanked it open again.
“…Here.”
No-clip into a brighter, wider place.
But the area was ridiculously loud, full of people talking all at once.
Murmur, murmur.
It was packed with students whose faces couldn’t be recognized because of all the noise.
Were all of these things monsters?
...No, wait.
No way, damn it.
Something about the scenery felt familiar enough that the swear word slipped out.
“No way, right? Damn it, is that bastard a prophet?”
Rows of desks and chairs.
A dark blue-black chalkboard.
And school uniforms.
Jack O'Lantern (B)
Current Area: School
Explore■■ ■ : ■V ■Viewing ■■, ■■■ ■■■
“For fuck’s sake.”
Why did it have to be the School?
Was this because that asshole from the boys’ high school had cursed me to transfer there?
I was losing my mind.
I’d come here to beat up monsters, not to study.
But was the boys’ high school guy in there?
Could it be that he couldn’t be recognized either?
As I looked around wildly, trying to figure out what was going on, something struck the back of my head with a horrified cry.
“Eek! It’s a flash-exposing pervert monster!”
“Ahh... what the hell, you-”
“Uh...? A person?”
...What the hell is this old guy?