The World Right Now (2)
Bang!
“Skreeeeaaagh!”
A skin-crawling shriek ripped through the air. My own eyes watched the mass of black shadows—what seemed to be the monster's head—cave inward under the impact, sending an electric jolt of certainty racing straight down my spine. A direct hit.
“Haa, haa... How do you like that, you freak?! That’s a custom-forged steel spike straight from my blood and sweat! Hurts like hell, doesn't it?! So just stay down and die already!”
I sucked in ragged breaths, praying with everything I had that the shock would drop it rolling across the floor, my knuckles turning white and veins bulging as I locked my grip around the trigger.
Yet not even a second later, my pitiful hopes were utterly shattered.
“Kikikikik, kyaaaak!”
The creature flinched for only an instant, but instead of bleeding, it unleashed a shrieking wail that sounded unnervingly like a burst of grinding, metallic laughter. Then it began thrashing with even greater fury.
“Crazy bastard... Why the hell isn't it working?! A thick steel nail drilled straight into your skull, so why are you getting more excited, you psycho?!”
I stumbled backward in a blind panic, screaming at the nightmare unfolding before me that defied every law of common sense. My desperate attack, forged through my awakened Mechanical Engineering, hadn't dealt a shred of real damage. If anything, it had only whetted the creature's sickening excitement and appetite.
Why did I think appetite?
“...Is that bastard drooling at me right now?”
Because it had literally started salivating while staring right at me.
Never mind the drool—the situation was catastrophic. Those absurdly thick, massive spikes had simply sunk into the monster's shadowy body like pebbles tossed into a swamp, swallowed whole without leaving a trace. To make matters worse, the old Porter truck I had parked as a sturdy barricade had long since been shoved aside by its sheer brute force, and the steel shutter was torn to shreds like wet tissue paper.
“No, please, get away! Stay the fuck back!”
My face went completely white as I scrambled backward, only for my feet to tangle in a pile of pipe wrenches scattered across the floor, sending me tumbling gracelessly onto my back.
Looking up from the cold concrete, I saw the creature's grotesque, towering silhouette poised to spill straight through the breach and into the hardware store. Paralyzing horror, far beyond anything I could overcome with my own strength, drained every drop of warmth from my blood as despair swallowed me whole.
Just then, as I floundered in that suffocating darkness, my eyes caught a dusty, faded family portrait hanging crooked on the wall.
Mom, Dad... I guess it’s my time to join you. Getting ripped to shreds by some nameless freak in the corner of this dingy hardware store...
Seeing my parents smiling brightly in that worn photograph, the realization washed over me that my end had come.
“...Except.”
From the deepest depths of my chest, a stubborn, desperate thirst to survive flared violently to life, jolting every frozen cell in my body awake.
The truth is, I want to live! I spent my whole damn life being pushed around, living in dirt-poor misery, buried in unfair bullshit—dying like this is just too infuriating! Before I kick the bucket, I want to blow through cash like water and live large just once!
The twenty-three years of grinding poverty and relentless struggle I had clawed my way through couldn't end in a joke like this. In that split second, as sheer unadulterated fury and an overwhelming will to survive struck my brain like a bolt of lightning—
Wuuuung!
“Huh?”
Suddenly, fragments of unknown knowledge began surging into my mind. A splitting headache struck, as if an ancient parchment record written thousands of years ago at the cost of someone's life was being forced open inside my skull, its words gouged into my brain matter with a razor-sharp quill.
Born from primordial darkness, the Cthulhu Kin—the vilest scions of the Abyss—are transcendent entities once revered as gods by ignorant mortals. We have realized that their grotesque flesh can never be severed or pierced by the crude physical strikes of the mortal realm.
“...Cthulhu?”
Yet, I propose the sole countermeasure to chastise this arrogant darkness. Only by converting human mana into the form of light and releasing it can one inflict fatal burns and agony upon their profane flesh.
However, the only metal in this world capable of housing and releasing light is orichalcum...
The sheer volume of vast, arcane knowledge tore through my neural pathways, completely overwhelming my fragile mortal comprehension. The agonizing pressure forced thick, crimson blood to gush from both nostrils, dripping steadily down my chin.
Drip, drip...
“Phew... Who gives a damn about a nosebleed... So what? Convert mana into light? What the hell does that even mean? I don't know what orichalcum or orichal-grandpa is, but it sure as hell isn't from this world... Something that emits light... light?”
I wiped the metallic blood from my lips with my work sleeve, my mind spinning furiously to find a way to survive. And right then, an idea flashed.
“A work light?”
I didn't know the first thing about internal mana whatever, but when it came to a medium for casting light, nothing beat an actual lamp. I instinctively knew I had only seconds left before that monster ripped through the floorboards at the entrance and tore out my throat.
“Just do it! Move, search right now! I need something that emits light and a conductor to link it—that's the only way I survive!”
Crawling across the floor like an insect, I frantically scavenged the searchlight head from an old flashlight I had dismantled earlier to illuminate the entrance, along with a bundle of stray copper wire and a roll of black electrical tape.
“Basically, I just have to act as the battery, right?! Keep it simple and move!”
Right at that moment, an unfamiliar, awe-inspiring sensation surged through me. A fierce, scorching heat roiled near my heart, coursing along my pulse and through my blood vessels before gathering at my fingertips as if ready to burst.
Sensing intuitively that this was the mana the ancient text spoke of, dormant deep within my body, I balanced the searchlight atop the blunt barrel of the Tacker Gun with trembling hands and wrapped electrical tape around it in thick, frantic layers.
“Please, just a little more, please!”
Ignoring the slick blood coating my fingers from sharp metal edges, I stripped the insulation off the thick copper wire with my teeth like a savage, rapidly bridging the tacker gun's trigger mechanism to the searchlight's switch. As if forging an artificial blood vessel to pump the searing heat from my heart into the cold weapon in my hands, I improvised a crude, miraculous imitation of a mana circuit.
Crash!
The very instant I twisted off the final knot of copper wire, the battered shutter gave out completely with an ear-splitting bang. A massive bulk of living shadows burst into the hardware store, unhinging its maw as it lunged straight at me.
“Kyaaa!”
“Eat shit, you disgusting, freakish piece of trash!”
I clamped down on the blood-smeared, wire-wrapped trigger hard enough to snap it, squeezing out every last drop of boiling heat from my heart toward my fingertips, and pulled both the light switch and trigger at once.
Fwaaaash!
Incomparable to the dull yellow glow of a regular incandescent bulb, a blinding storm of pure white radiance—charged with my very life force and mana—erupted through the searchlight lens.
Flash!
“Kraaaargh! Kyaaaak!”
Taking the concentrated blast of pure light dead in the face, the monster shrieked in true, unadulterated agony for the first time. Its body sizzled and hissed as if drenched in concentrated acid, flesh liquefying with a grotesque bubbling sound.
“...It's working! It actually fucking works!”
Pinning the dazzling beam relentlessly against what looked like its disintegrating, melting head, I hammered the tacker gun's trigger in rapid fire, squeezing until my finger felt ready to break.
“Eat this!”
Bang! Bang-bang-bang!
Softened by the light of mana, the beast's once-impenetrable defense unraveled completely. A merciless hail of thick, modified steel spikes rained into its melting skull.
Thwack-thwack-thwack! Thwack!
“Die! Just disappear from my face forever!”
With my desperate, venom-laced scream, the final spike drove deep into the creature's crown, piercing straight through.
Then, its massive body dissolved into black ash, scattering into the empty air like dust on the wind.
Where the creature had let out its final screech before being wiped from existence, only the nauseating stench of rot and a scattering of black, shard-like remnants remained on the floor—the sole proof of the gruesome struggle that had just taken place.
“Haa... haa... I-I lived. I actually survived.”
Still clutching the tacker gun that radiated scorching heat, the strength vanished from my legs, and I collapsed heavily onto the floor. The relief of barely escaping hellish death clashed with the violent backlash of squeezing my internal mana beyond its limits for the first time in my life. Every muscle in my body began to scream in agony.
“It's... finally over...”
As the sheer tension snapped, I slumped over the cold pile of scrap in the corner of the shop, sinking into the deep abyss of unconsciousness.
In the quiet stillness that followed, time lost all meaning until a single shaft of warm, brilliant morning sunlight filtered through the cracks of the shattered shutter, falling gently upon my pale, motionless face.
Ting.
A crisp chime rang out beside my ear as I lay like a corpse, and the blue glow of a system message flickered against my tightly shut eyelids.