I Killed an Aberration

I killed an aberration.

I'd been a coward my whole life.

I refused to do anything the least bit dangerous. I only crossed at crosswalks after the cars had come to a complete stop, and I wouldn't even touch rides like the zip line. Once, someone asked me how I even managed to breathe when I was that scared of dying.

Well, I always figured my kind of fear was different from that.

Simply not stepping forward into danger on purpose. That's the right way to live, isn't it?

"...What the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hell..."

Still, fear wasn't all I had.

You could call it a state of panic, maybe. When there was nowhere left to run—

I became, for lack of a better word, a madman.

When half my class trapped me in a swarm of hornets as a prank, when the delinquents cornered me in an alley—

I smashed through every last one of those situations.

A destructive instinct hiding behind the fear, I suppose.

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing all this up now is—

"Fuck."

At first I wondered if I was dreaming, but this was real—whatever it was, I was standing inside a building splattered with bloodstains.

Somehow, I'd already been trapped in this place for over an hour.

A giant mop lying on the floor in front of me, and a rule sheet someone had shredded to ribbons.

I had no idea what was going on, but I picked up the mop first.

What was this place?

The surroundings were wide open in every direction and pitch dark, so it wouldn't have surprised me if something came lunging out of anywhere at any moment.

The only things I had to rely on were one oversized mop and a torn-up rule sheet scattered in pieces all around me.

My head was starting to throb.

Normally, I lived my life calculating everything. I excluded danger from my life as much as possible and stuck to the safe road, always.

Situations that threatened that did come along once in a while.

But that was really once in a while.

In most situations, I was the one in control.

Maybe it was because I'd been in this place for a while now. Being somewhere with zero information, surrounded by danger on all sides, an enormous stress came crashing down over my head.

The kind of stress that made me want to smash everything to pieces right this second.

My hands were shaking.

They always did this when I was under a lot of stress. When fear closed in from every direction and I had no idea what to do, it kept piling up and piling up—

and in the end, it always turned into rage.

My breathing grew ragged.

My head began to ache like it was about to split open.

Not an endless fear, but a rage with no end in sight.

That was what began to wrap itself around my body.

"Which son of a bitch put this whole thing together."

In the end, the rage boiled over before I could hold it back.

Rage at whatever nameless thing had shoved me into this place. Rage at whoever had scrawled this godawful graffiti across the rule sheet—or whatever it was. More than anything, the panic of not being able to grasp the situation at all was making me angrier and angrier.

I pushed forward without hesitation.

The steps that fear had pinned in place at first had, by now, transformed into a single desire: to crush whatever nameless thing was out there.

My eyes swept the surroundings, sharp as a predator tracking prey.

The mop in my hand was ready to swing down at any moment.

Whether I'd been kidnapped or dragged here or whatever—the mistake was letting go of my hands in the first place.

I wasn't scared anymore.

I had a feeling this rage wouldn't settle until I broke the miserable bastard who'd made me this angry.

—Kehihihihi

That was when it happened.

A disgusting cackle drifted out from behind me.

I spun on my heel and swung the mop on pure instinct.

"Fuck."

There was nothing behind me.

A cheap trick.

I swept my eyes quickly around the area, but nothing showed itself.

I swallowed down the filthy feeling in my gut and kept walking. And then, in the distance, I saw a door that hadn't been visible before.

I knew it instinctively.

Something was up ahead.

I'd been feeling it for a while now—that this place held something beyond human comprehension.

The whole thing defied reality from the start. I'd been sleeping soundly in my own bed, and then I got dragged to a place like this.

Besides, this space was far too vast to be a building. A school auditorium wouldn't even come close. Something was here.

But none of that was reason enough to turn back.

My anger had already climbed to the top of my skull, past the point where coherent thought was possible.

The fact that I'd woken up here. The reason I was stranded in god-knows-where.

The rage that had almost been lulled back to sleep flared up all over again the moment I faced that door.

Come to think of it, that defaced rule sheet had been the most unforgivable part.

Dragging me to this shithole, and then tearing up the survival manual too?

An unreasonable, insane bitch like this deserves a beating.

My hands were trembling again.

Not from fear this time.

An unbearable rage was screaming at me to kick that door down right now and smash whatever was waiting behind it.

Yes—my hands shook because I was a hair's breadth away from swinging, because I couldn't hold the fury in another second.

I couldn't take it anymore.

I cracked my neck once, then kicked the door.

It opened easier than I expected.

And what stood behind it was—

—Kehihihihi

a disgustingly ugly doll.

"You need a beating."

My rage hit its breaking point.

The thing—whether doll or something else, human-sized—stumbled back a single step.

Then, apparently wounded in its pride, it drew out its long, sharp nails and lunged at me—

—CLANG!

With a crisp, satisfying sound, it went flying and slammed into the wall.

A jolt of pleasure so intense my whole body nearly seized—and no. Not yet.

Smiling, I ran toward where it had landed.

"Die, you bastard."

Facing it head-on, I finally understood.

This thing wasn't human.

God only knew how many people it had already killed.

I could feel it in my gut. Countless people had been sacrificed to this thing.

If this had been a person, I'd have smacked it around a few times and dragged it to the police station. But there was no mercy for something like this.

—THUD. THUD. THUD.

The sound of the mop slamming into it again and again rang through the room.

□□□

——

Once I'd torn the doll-shaped thing in front of me to scraps—ruining whatever it had been as a doll—the area around me finally came into clear focus.

Blood was spattered in every direction, and the space that had been so bone-chillingly cold now seemed to carry a faint trace of warmth.

You could say all the stress had drained right out of me.

I had no regrets, but with the anger gone, I was finally able to grasp just how insane what I'd done actually was.

My palms were completely shredded and throbbing, and I could barely focus on anything except forcing out one breath after another.

No matter how I looked at it, what I'd killed was an aberration.

Or a ghost—something like that, for sure.

Just in case, I pulled myself together and hacked off its limbs for a confirmation kill, but nothing changed.

What this place was. What situation I was in. I couldn't figure out a single thing.

So there I was, catching my breath and scanning my surroundings, when—

A message rang out.

An unreal blue window floating right in front of my eyes. If I'd seen this an hour ago, I might have collapsed backward on the spot—but everything was already so surreal that it barely registered.

"So there's a status window."

That aside—just like I'd guessed, what I'd killed really was an aberration.

Whether you can still call it an aberration after it's dead, I don't know, but a win is a win.

I poked and prodded at the status window floating in front of me with my fingers, wondering if there was anything else hidden on it.

It was a shot in the dark—

and luckily, it turned out to be the right call.

"...A gallery?"

One of those things people called online communities.

Somewhere I used to drop into whenever I got bored from time to time.

There was no reason to hold back on clicking around anymore.

I pressed the button labeled Gallery.

"What is this."

When I opened the thing labeled Gallery, it looked almost identical to the site I used to browse all the time.

You could tell me they'd ripped the whole interface off wholesale and I'd have believed it.

Having this show up in a moment when I had zero information about anything was honestly a good thing—but I still couldn't make heads or tails of it. Nothing told me what my situation was, or what this community even was.

And when in doubt, there's one thing you always do.

"Guess I'll start looking."

I clicked into one of the posts that caught my eye.

The posts I clicked through were absolutely dripping with humanity—a community full of living, breathing people.

But on its own, this told me nothing about my situation.

And what I desperately needed right now was information. Desperate to get it even a minute sooner, I hit the new post button.

Aberration? Rule sheet?

I stared at the comments piling up under my post—and on the off chance, posted again.

There'd been an attach-photo button, so I'd just snapped a picture of the doll I'd torn apart and uploaded it.

Countless question marks flooded the screen.