Meal Time
High above the ground, on an upper floor of a building still under construction.
Concrete walls and building materials lay strewn about without ceremony, and the emptiness of it all — the barrenness, the bareness — sent a chill drifting through the air.
True to its unfinished state, the exposed outer wall let in the deep darkness of night along with a shaft of moonlight that poured down, illuminating two women inside the deserted building.
One of them, a high school girl still in her uniform, had been backing away unsteadily from a young woman until she bumped into a pillar, and now she spoke to the woman in a voice thick with terror.
"W-who… who are you? Wh-where… where is this…?"
Click… swish.
The woman took a single step forward, shrugging off the shadow that draped over her and letting the moonlight reveal her in full.
Her ash-brown hair had grown out to midway down her back, swaying in soft, unbroken waves — the only flaw a slight natural curl.
A small, fine-boned face with sharply defined features, layered under heavy eyeliner and bold lipstick, gave her the look of a woman you would not want to cross.
She was the image of a Gangnam beauty without the surgery — a face no man could look at and reasonably dispute her being beautiful.
Aloof, sexy, imperious — the very image of a queen who looked down on men by the dozen and managed them like a collection.
And on top of that, a voluptuous figure that had been everywhere and seen everything, dressed head to toe in luxury brands that only sharpened the impression.
A slick black tank top and jacket that left her abs and shoulder line bare.
A leather mini skirt cut so short it showed most of her sculpted thighs, paired with high heels.
A black choker at her throat, earrings and rings that looked expensive at a glance.
Every article of clothing and every ornament carried a designer mark somewhere on it, adding value to the woman as if she herself were merchandise.
Her all-black styling and haughty aura brought to mind the fierce persona of a girl group on stage, fused with the image of a rich Gangnam woman — a composite of both.
"My, my, what a hurtful thing to say. You make it sound like I dragged you here against your will — even though you came holding my hand, all on your own…"
The woman spoke to the girl in a voice of wounded disappointment, wearing a sorrowful smile that felt rehearsed.
Matching her image, the voice was crisp and clear, yet it carried the sly impression of a fox playing innocent.
"…I-I don't know… I don't remember. Just… c-couldn't you let me go?"
The girl was pleading — but she was lying.
Just as the woman said, she did remember coming here of her own will, hand in hand with her.
The problem was that the memory was foggy, blurred as if seen through mist — as though she were a third party watching herself from the outside, stripped of any sense of reality.
For a fact, the woman before her was someone she had never seen before, and there was no reason she would follow such a stranger to a remote, dangerous place like this.
Apart from being prettier than her peers, she was just an ordinary high school girl, living the same everyday life as anyone else — heading home after evening study sessions, night after night, like clockwork.
"You're hilarious, you know that? Am I restraining you right now? What exactly should I let go of?"
The sneering woman was right — nothing was holding the girl in place, and there was no one else around but the two of them.
"Then, I'll…"
At that perfectly reasonable statement, the girl spoke cautiously and was just slipping away from the pillar —
Flick.
"Ugh!"
In the blink of an eye, something shot out from the woman's throat and struck her between the brows, bringing with it a sharp sting of pain.
"…Huh?"
Only belatedly did she realize it was a red tentacle with a slick, glistening surface — but knowing that changed nothing.
Nothing explained why a tentacle had burst from the woman's neck, or why it had buried itself in the girl's forehead.
"So… what, you're just going to leave?"
Grin.
The woman's lips split into a wide smile, mocking the girl's complacent attempt to gloss over the whole situation.
"I don't think so?"
"…Wuh—!? Eeeeeeek!?"
Thud!
The girl dropped hard onto her rear, eyes rolling upward toward the tentacle rooted in her forehead, and began flailing her hands and feet at the air, making a sound no human throat should make.
Her clothes came askew, her uniform skirt rode up, and everything underneath was casually exposed — but the girl didn't have the presence of mind to care about any of it.
Convulsing as if in the grip of a seizure, she suddenly broke into a slack-jawed grin, and then tears and drool running down her face, she let loose an ugly, unbroken torrent of laughter.
"Woohee!? Wooheeeheee!? Ehehehehe~!?"
"PWAHAHAHA! You look like a total lunatic~! God, this never gets old… haa… kekeke! Fuck… kekeke!! Look at you grinning like a monkey on drugs — one little poke to the brain and off goes the dopamine!"
The woman, the clear architect of this incomprehensible behavior, roared with laughter as she looked down at the girl's pitiful display and jeered.
"You humans — you don't have any of those things you love to prattle on about. Souls, hearts — none of it exists. They're just pretty little words you wrap yourselves in to feel noble. You're nothing but organic matter. Blood, flesh, muscle, and bone. All that lofty talk about souls and hearts — disgusting. Look at you! I gave your brain one little knead and now you're flashing what's under your skirt, laughing like you've lost your mind… oh my, and now you're wetting yourself too? PWAHAHA! Ah, this is just too good. Pathetic."
A heart?
A soul?
Nothing more than the output of a brain processing external stimuli taken in through sight, sound, and touch.
The thought and consciousness that every living creature naturally possessed — humans had packaged it up in some invisible, ethereal form, and the sheer audacity of it never failed to send this woman into fits of laughter.
"Ahh… fufu… I've had my fun, so now it's time to eat. Nom nom~ dinnertime!"
Glrrk.
From around the woman's shoulders burst four tentacles, each as thick as a grown man's forearm.
[Kiiiiieeeee…]
Sharp-tipped at first, they bloomed open all at once like flowers flashing into full blossom, spreading in every direction to reveal a long tunnel of unspeakable darkness lined with rows of horrifying teeth.
Moving like creatures separate from the woman herself, they writhed and squirmed, then each stretched out toward one of the high school girl's four helpless limbs.
CHOMP.
Teeth specialized for tearing prey apart gaped wide, and each maw clamped down on one of the girl's arms and legs.
Crunch!
Like swallowing soft tofu, they punched through flesh, chewed through the muscle beneath, and drove straight on to sever bone in a single bite — then began slowly, savoringly, devouring the girl's limbs piece by piece.
The blood that should have sprayed from the fresh wounds was swallowed whole by the mouths that had taken the limbs in their entirety.
Thanks to that, not a single drop of blood touched the floor — a clean meal, leaving no trace behind, exactly to the woman's liking.
Crunch! Crunch!… Gulp, drip… drip, drip… squelch…!
The grotesque sound of a human being eaten alive echoed through the empty building.
"Heeheeheet!? Hee! Hehehe!! Hehehehehe!?"
The girl whose limbs were being devoured paid it no mind, laughing her unhinged laugh on and on like someone drunk on something.
Rolling eyes, drool and snot running in ropes, the stream of urine soaking her skirt and panties and leaking without pause from between her legs — everything on the surface announced that her mind had come entirely undone.
The reason was the tentacle lodged in her forehead, churning her brain into mush, rewriting every sensation of her body being devoured into raw pleasure.
An artificial malfunction, deliberately induced, had warped even the survival instinct and sense of danger that every living thing was owed.
Gloop… gloop…
The tentacles climbed higher as they chewed through her limbs, bulging rhythmically like a throat swallowing, sending what they'd eaten onward into the woman's connected body.
"Human women really are the best. Soft and tender, so much cleaner than the men, and absolutely appetizing. The young ones especially."
Wearing a smile of deep satisfaction, the woman crouched down before the girl — her body no longer able to support itself, propped against the pillar with arms and legs gone.
Her predatory eyes glistened as she stared at the girl's panties — or precisely, at the lower abdomen beneath them — and licked her lips, smacking wetly.
"Then let's have a taste of the inside too, shall we~?"
Glrrk.
Yet another tentacle emerged from somewhere on her body — slender, only about as thick as the woman's wrist, a different tool from the ones devouring her limbs.
Slurp…
The tentacle pushed the panties aside and slipped into the woman's… into the girl's sex, spreading its teeth inside and beginning, slowly, to excavate the organs within.
Having entered through the vagina, the proper order of the meal was to start at the cervix and work its way upward.
"The cervix really is the best part — so delightfully chewy… oh my, how sad. A virgin who's never even had a child, and big sis just went and broke her hymen before any man could, defiling her womb. I'm sorry… in return, I'll savor every bite."
The woman said it in a gentle, cooing tone, softly caressing the cheek of the girl who was still lost in her mad laughter.
Beneath the skin of the girl's lower abdomen, the outline of the buried tentacle could be seen shifting this way and that, and with each movement the organs inside convulsed, the sound of something being eaten echoing out from within.
Having bored through the vagina and devoured the cervix entirely, the tentacle soon set about the small and large intestines just above in earnest, and began its climb toward the final delicacy — the brain.
"Hk… hit…! Hup! Kkghk, kkghk!"
Then the girl, who had not stopped laughing, suddenly swallowed hard and began vomiting up blood, again and again.
Being eaten from the inside, the blood welling up within had nowhere to go but back — it surged up and burst out of her whether she willed it or not.
"Ghhkk! Ghhhkk!!?"
No matter how thoroughly her brain was being manipulated, once the pain exceeded its limit she could bear it no longer — the girl's eyes rolled back white and she thrashed in agony.
Her face a ghastly shade of blue, trembling like a dying person, blood still trickled ceaselessly from the corners of her mouth.
"You fucking bitch! This was my favorite outfit!"
The woman, for her part, couldn't have cared less — but when the blood the girl suddenly vomited splattered onto her clothes, she scowled furiously and began wiping at it with her hand.
"Kkghk, kkghk!!… Grrrghk!… Kk, ghk…! Ghh…… kkghk…… kk…"
With a wet, rattling wheeze, the girl's mouth gaped wide open in hyperventilation — and then, all at once, her strength gave out and her head lolled limply to the side.
Drip.
The blood sliding down from her mouth fell in a thick, sticky splatter to the floor.
Eyes fallen shut without focus, a body that had lost every last will to live as a living creature — she hung slack and utterly still.
"If you were going to die anyway, you worthless piece of shit, you could've died prettily… ugh, annoying, fuck… totally killed the mood. Tch!"
Glaring irritably at the girl's final moments, the woman clicked her tongue and then, in a fit of pique, devoured what remained of her.
It was such a thorough cleanup that it was hard to believe a young woman had stood there, alive and breathing, mere moments ago.
Her clothes had been eaten too, leaving behind nothing but the urine-stained concrete from her incontinence and a faint trace of blood visible only to a careful eye.
A girl born from a mother's belly, raised in the warm embrace of a family.
A girl who carried a future of going to university, meeting a wonderful man, falling in love, marrying, building a home of her own — she met a monster like a walking disaster, and vanished from the face of the earth in an instant, without a sound, without a whisper.
Her parents, never knowing she'd been devoured and digested, would surely search for their daughter's body for the rest of their lives, crying themselves to sleep every night until the day they died.
"BUUUUURP!!… I'm full.… hm?"
Despite her elegant looks, the woman belched like a savage and was basking in her satisfaction when a sudden unease pricked at her, and she turned to stare intently out through the exposed outer wall.
"What is that… one of our own? And yet… the scent's awfully faint?"
In the not-so-far distance, a young man could be seen walking down the street, alone.
Even disguised as humans, their kind gave off a subtle scent that only their own kind could detect — enough to tell, more or less, whether a presence was one of them or not.
But the scent coming off the man walking the street right now was remarkably faint.
Frankly, it was faint enough to be almost embarrassing to call him kin — if anything, he smelled closer to a human.
And so.
Curiosity welled up.
"What are you, what are you… god, I have to know."
Lightly forgetting the human she had devoured mere minutes ago, the woman began to cautiously close the distance toward the man.