Hundreds of Deaths for Resurrection
The hospital would occasionally buzz with rumors of strange things people had seen.
Stories of glimpsing a ghost, or of a blood-soaked vengeful spirit standing right before one's eyes only to vanish without warning.
In the latter cases, a critically wounded soldier would sometimes claw his way back from the brink, but the former were usually dismissed by the staff as hallucinations—or, some muttered, the weight of too much accumulated resentment.
Today was different.
"Heh, uh-heh-heh, the eyes, the eyes... they're still watching me... in the sky, on the ground, on the walls! Uh, heh-heh-heh..."
One patient dragged his injured foot down the corridor, turning his head this way and that, chuckling as he went, saliva trailing with every breath.
It was the hour when the nurses usually slipped away to read the books they hid while the patients slept—right at the scene where the hero was about to confess his love—when a muttering voice shattered the quiet. A nurse, driven out by the irritable demands of a patient who hadn't even hurt his leg that badly and kept going on about elves, stepped into the hallway.
"Patient, it's lights-out. Please maintain silence..."
She never finished the sentence.
"You—you see them too? Right? Those eyes watching all of us? The yellow eyes—you can see them, can't you?"
"Ah—ah—aah—aah..."
The corridor was filled with darkness. It was easy to tell this was no ordinary absence of light. Countless blades—blades not forged of iron—packed every surface. They clung to the walls. They covered the windows. Every single one had an eye. Eyes where none should be, and none where eyes belonged. It defied all sense.
And then there was that thin, continuous screaming that had been rising for some time. Rooms began to stir.
"Hey, nurse! Can't you shut that bastard up? It's bedtime!!"
"...What the hell is that? What is it?!"
Patients who had been asleep woke one by one. And they saw it too: the creature lurching into the corridor, arms bristling with blades and studded with countless eyes.
"Wh-what in the world..."
A wet shunk split the belly of the patient still standing outside. Then the flesh was crushed. The eyes closed the distance in an instant. The fallen body was dragged away as if sucked into the dark, leaving only a red smear on the floor.
A soft slice, and the nurse's heel was severed.
"Ah—uhh—uhhhh..."
Her scream never rose very loud. Beyond those yellow, staring eyes she saw it: a single form scrawled in wild, countless curves. Too grotesque to call human, yet too defined to call mere monster. It writhed too much to name, yet stood too clear to dismiss as illusion. Eyes, tentacles, flesh, muscle, bone, darkness, light—filling her entire vision, swelling and collapsing, joining and tearing, twisting, growing, pressing forward. That nauseating spectacle, the song and scream of living meat no sane mind could bear, finally broke her.
"Heh—heh-heh—kh—khuh—uh... uhhh..."
She walked, step by dragging step, just like the patient before her. Behind her came the wet crack and grind of bones snapping. She could not stop. She could only roll her tongue to the song that now filled her skull.
"Do you see...? All of you? Do you see these countless eyes?"
And the next person to understand the meaning, and the next after that, would keep speaking the exact same words she had.
The slaughter was quiet.
Thanks to Chaos's kindness, offered to spare us the trouble. Countless lives filled the rooms with blood, yet not a single sound rose. I simply lowered my eyes to the floor, unwilling to know what was happening within.
The corpses that had sprouted blades went about their "work" with ease, each wielding its own twisted weapon. Could one even call it work?
The giant beside me—moving with that strange gait that was neither crawl nor walk, tentacles sweeping through the rooms—spoke those words as it advanced down the corridor.
"Evan... for... for Evan. Because it's to save Evan..."
Tears fell. I had come face to face with a corpse laid out on the floor: a wounded man who had stabbed out his own eyes with his own hands, his throat cut. The lines of his gaping mouth and contorted face spelled pure terror. Only the one piloting the flesh beside me would know what they had endured.
Once more it sent tentacles into a room, the air itself vibrating as it spoke to me.
"Enough... it's enough. I only need Evan... just Evan."
I moved forward almost leaning on my staff. Too many were dying. I was realizing just how lightly I had always spoken the word death. It was not noble. It was not quiet. Every single one met a twisted, ruined, clamorous end. In every ward I passed, every corridor I walked, bloodstains were everywhere, the traces unmistakable. Quiet, yet deafening.
That all of this was for Evan— the thought flashed through me that it might be an insult to him. If he never returned after what I had done. If I had been deceived from the start. If this entire thing was nothing but one vast scheme to snatch lives away—
It had already pierced the doubts in my heart and offered its answer with ease. But I could not look straight at that body. The grotesque way it rummaged through the insides of the already dead, the wet squelching sounds—every noise that reached me was a gift of pure horror. Could I keep believing in a being that committed such cruelty as if it were nothing?
A sharp splash of liquid being shaken free reached me. With a long arm it swept the blood-soaked floor clean, then vigorously shook its skin until every stain was gone.
"You might not keep it, though. Right?"
I was afraid. Terrified. Perhaps I had always carried the thought that Evan returning to my side was something that simply could not happen. I could not allow myself to shake this badly—or perhaps being seized by such terror was only natural. To expect life from a being that filled every room with blood and snuffed out lives as casually as breathing—was that not the true contradiction?
As if smiling, it twisted its three-pronged tentacles into a bizarre shape and gave a little shudder, then settled quietly before me—exactly the way a dog chooses a spot and lies down—and looked up.
It spoke in an oddly bright voice, as if it found me impossible to understand. I did not think I was the strange one. Killing so many people was never a normal act. Yet I understood the meaning of those words—why it said them to me. It was advising me not to attach emotion to the act of killing.
Was I running away? Or had I grown too exhausted even for flight? I was accepting that voice. Acknowledging it. Even though it was wrong, I closed my eyes in the end.
Yes. This is only... work. Just as I had once treated the patients who hit on me so relentlessly. Just as I had wrapped bandages without a change of expression even when filthy eyes raked over me. This, too, was something I simply had to endure and finish.
When all of it was over—
—Evan would be waiting.
Dawn arrived.
With the hospital at my back, I quietly watched the twisted lives slip away into what darkness still remained. There were no survivors. The hospital director who had once seized me had no hole left that had not spouted blood. Those who had once mocked me—once my own kin—died with smiles still plastered across their faces... yet their eyes were drowned in terror. The patients and soldiers who had thrown me lewd looks had all met equally horrific ends. Just looking at their faces, at their wounds, at the corpses laid out at regular intervals along every corridor and the indescribable smiles left on those faces—everything was the worst imaginable.
So the giant said. Through the same crack it had opened in the air with those unknowable characters when we first arrived, I had no choice but to turn my feet at last. I could no longer even tell whether I was still myself. I had been the one who called this god. Hundreds had died because of my wish. I was far too fragile to accept that with a clear mind.
Even if they had thrown me lewd looks, even if they had insulted and cursed me for loving him—did that give them reason to die like that? Yet when I looked back, a faint sense of relief still lingered. They had mocked Evan. Cursed him. Ignored him. Because I loved him, they had envied his life and ruined it as well. ...Evan had never once shown it, for my sake. Rather, as if nothing else would matter so long as I loved him, he had come to me every day and comforted me. Yes. He had done that for me. Somewhere along the way I had forgotten. But the reason I could remember it again now was—
—because his body lay right before my eyes.
"...Really. With this... can I get him back?"
A heart pierced through. A face covered in bruises. A body cracked even further from the aftermath of possession. Perhaps from being left too long, his face now looked emaciated as well. All I could do was weep. How many times I had worn that same expression—I could no longer even remember.
A wet squelch, and tentacles began to unfurl from its hand. With the massive three-pronged mass of flesh upon its head it peeled away his bandages, then writhed the tentacles into his wounds and began to push them inside.
With those words, Evan's body began to thrash. All I could do was watch. ...There was nothing I could do. I could only hope, desperately, that none of this was empty belief. That Evan would return to my side. I was far too exhausted to think of anything else.