"No... don't... mmph..."
Huddled in a corner, Solomon Grundy, the undead zombie who stood over two meters tall and had the strength to flip a car with ease, was crying as helplessly as a child.
Or rather, he was a child.
His intelligence had remained at the level of a seven- or eight-year-old, and as everyone knew, children that age loved to imagine things. They would unwittingly dream up strange creatures and turn them into the terrors that haunted their childhood.
Now he was surrounded by monsters born from his own imagination, experiencing a child's helplessness for the first time in his existence.
"No! You should be dead! You should be dead! Get lost! Get away from me!!!"
"Waylon, what nonsense are you spouting? Get over here and let me pull out those damned scales!"
Stumbling desperately as he fled, Killer Croc, who looked like some prehistoric monster, had lost all reason to fear. Yet the source of that overwhelming terror was nothing more than a frail woman.
His aunt, who deserved to die a thousand times over!
Because of an utterly bizarre congenital condition, Waylon had grown scales and claws from childhood, making him look just like a crocodile.
After his parents died, he had been placed in his aunt's care while still a young boy. That was where his nightmare began.
His alcoholic aunt had never cared about him. She had even tortured him regularly under the pretense of doing what was best for him.
Again and again, she had scrubbed off his scales with a wire brush, cut off his claws along with his fingers using steel shears, and ripped the sharp teeth from his mouth with iron pliers...
When he was sixteen, he had finally reached his breaking point and killed that damned woman himself. But