Cold. Shaking...
Dio abruptly surfaced from his groggy haze as though startled awake by a thunderclap. The hard surface beneath his head immediately told him he was no longer where he had been.
Keeping his breathing slow and steady, he quickly opened his eyes and surveyed his surroundings.
Stark white walls, an empty room, and the heavy air of death that came from years sealed away.
But... precisely because there was no sign of life, perhaps there was no danger here either?
Looking up, he saw the remnants of a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Its shade was exquisitely carved, but the candles had burned out, their wax congealed on the metal frame.
Those faint traces of wax made both the chandelier and the room it belonged to look even more dilapidated.
He glanced casually to either side. There were few furnishings around him.
In the opposite corner, however, something large had left its outline.
Judging by the rectangular shape on the wall, it had been roughly two meters tall.
There was less dust there, making the spot conspicuous-which meant the "move" had happened fairly recently.
"Tick-tock-tick-tock!"
The sound began without warning, growing steadily louder. Its source was right beside his pillow.
Dio was bold enough not to be terrified, but he could hardly help feeling suspicious.
In fact, he had already vaguely heard that faint clicking earlier.
The sound was jarringly out of place amid the pin-drop silence. He should have noticed it long ago.
He simply had an instinctive habit of examining his broader surroundings before attending to the details.
Careful not to make a sound, Dio turned his head.
There, on the small bedside table, stood an old-fashioned mechanical alarm clock that was still running.
The clock faced sideways to him, its glass face coated in dust, but he could still make out the hands: nine fourteen.
The second hand passed unhurriedly from mark to mark, though the finer markings remained indistinct.
"Whew..." Dio relaxed slightly and took a deep breath, only to feel a sudden wave of weakness.
He had focused his eyes for only a few seconds, yet his vision was already swimming and his head growing dizzy.
He blinked, but his vision remained somewhat blurred.
Something's wrong... it feels like my strength is draining away... this isn't just weakness from injuries!
Suddenly, his pupils contracted.
He could not tell whether it was a hallucination, but he thought he saw a gray-black tentacle extending from the shadows in that less dusty corner.
It twitched when his peripheral vision caught it, then abruptly vanished.
Adrenaline surged, his heartbeat quickened, and a jumble of information flooded his mind. Dio felt as though he was living through a ghost story.
And that black tentacle... I think I saw it before, in those endless dreams while I was unconscious! Damn it!
A spike of agony shot through his brain. He realized that some unknowable presence had imprisoned his deeper memories.
His knowledge of those black tentacles had been tightly sealed away by the same power.
Things did not look good, but at least he could now be certain that he really had crossed into another world.
Dio gritted his teeth and tried to sit up.
Only then did he truly feel how heavy and powerless his body was.
This body had clearly endured a brutal battle before losing consciousness. Old and fresh wounds covered it, with dried blood gluing clothing to skin.
He tried self-hypnosis, attempting to rally his vitality and restore his strength, but the dense negative energy around him suppressed his powerful natural regeneration.
It seemed this "heavy air of death" was the culprit behind his waking up utterly exhausted in body and mind.
But that was fine. They were only serious injuries.
Dio found the cold, hard metal bedframe with his hand, tightened his fingers around it, and pushed, slowly shifting his body toward the edge of the bed.
The instant his feet touched the floor, he seized the hollow metal support, as thick as the mouth of a bowl. His arm muscles bulged as he violently twisted and yanked.
The support snapped, leaving him holding it as a makeshift weapon.
Its jagged broken end gleamed coldly in the dim light.
He had been born different.
In elementary school, he could take on six boys his own age at once and beat their teeth out.
In secondary school, he had undergone wisdom tooth extraction under general anesthesia.
The doctor had administered enough muscle relaxants and sedatives to incapacitate any adult, yet he could still lift his fingers, his consciousness as clear as ever-something even more outrageous than anesthesia awareness. He had never been incapacitated at all.
In college, a new virus sweeping the world had ravaged his campus.
His classmates and friends suffered persistent high fevers, but he felt only mild discomfort for the first few hours before his temperature returned to normal. Like a meticulously organized army, his immune system completed the entire process of identification, elimination, and memory formation within hours.
When he visited the dental hospital a second time to have another wisdom tooth removed, the wound healed completely in just a few hours. He could speak and eat normally, as though it had been nothing more than a shallow scratch.
Even after he became obsessed with anime and turned into a shut-in who did nothing worthwhile in other people's eyes, Dio never lost that strength etched into his very bones.
It lay silently in the depths of his flesh, like a dormant volcano waiting for something to awaken it.
He knew perfectly well that beneath the ordinary world's facade of order, the same brutal laws of power and domination had always held sway-
The many oppressed the few, and the strong ruled the weak.
So-called fairness and justice were merely decorations the powerful offered when they felt generous, lingering flourishes in the histories written by victors.
Don't want to be exploited?
Then win. Dominate. Be the first to take the napkin!
And now he had arrived in another world where supernatural phenomena plainly existed-after all, that thing just now... was certainly no creature that belonged back home.
A thrill he had not felt in ages raced up his spine like an electric current.
"Body-move, damn you!"
Dio forced a low growl from his throat, as though issuing an override command to a machine on the verge of failure.
A succession of vivid, violent movements flashed through his mind-not thought, but sheer will driving this body on the brink of collapse.
The next instant, he actually swung the metal support in a powerful arc and hurled it as though it were a supple willow switch!
The movement was eerily fluid, and its force far exceeded anything he could have unleashed at his peak in his previous life!
The air screamed as it was violently forced aside.
Unable to withstand that inhuman force, the metal support shook violently, bent, and warped. Rusted flakes peeled from its surface until, the instant it struck the wall, it shattered completely!
The disintegrating metal fragments carried the remaining momentum onward, blasting out like buckshot.
The wall seemed to take a direct blow from an invisible sledgehammer.
The brickwork gave a muffled groan, then caved inward and collapsed amid a web of cracks.
Dust and rubble flew everywhere, mingling with metal shards.
The sight behind the wall lay fully exposed.
Gray-black, translucent tentacles writhed in tangled knots like rotting roots.
Their ends remained half-merged with the portions of wall still standing, wavering between substance and illusion, as though the creature itself were a tumor painfully grown from the building.
At the center of that writhing mass of shadows stood a stitched-together creation that defied all reason:
A deer's head, its expression vacant and its eye sockets black as the abyss, had been crudely grafted onto a torso combining the bulk of a bull with the grotesquely elongated body of a horse.
More indescribable tentacles of varying thickness stretched chaotically from gaps in the sutures, twitching and slapping the floor.
Each writhing movement came with a faint, sticky sound, like flesh being torn bodily from bone.
Merely looking at it was enough to sense every kind of malice harbored by sentient beings.
An intense surge of instinctive nausea and dizziness rushed straight into his cerebral cortex.
Yet faced with the monster's revealed form, Dio instead pulled his lips into a wild, savage grin.
"So... this is the kind of thing hiding here!"
Good.
This is exactly the world I wanted!
Before his words had faded, a thick tentacle came whipping toward him.
Dio neither dodged nor retreated. With a low shout, he stepped forward and lashed out with a kick, meeting it head-on!
The tremendous forces carried by his toe and the tentacle's tip collided.
A deafening, muffled boom exploded through the enclosed room, like a heavy hammer striking wet leather.
A visible shock wave spread abruptly from the point of impact, instantly blowing the accumulated dust on the floor into a gray-white ring that rolled violently outward.
The seemingly unstoppable tentacle bent at an unnatural angle and vibrated at high frequency the instant it met Dio's foot, then reversed direction even faster than it had come.
Like the tip of a whip swung with tremendous force, it slammed back into the monster's own stitched-together torso!
Nothing fancy-just a transfer of momentum.
The monster's huge, twisted body, crudely assembled from bull and horse, flew helplessly off the ground like a battered rag doll swatted away by a child swinging with all their might. It did not even have time to give a complete shriek.
It flew in a straight, unchecked trajectory and slammed solidly into the wall behind it.
Before that impact, the brick wall was as fragile as paper.
Large chunks of masonry collapsed inward with a crash amid clouds of dust. Broken bricks and billowing gray-white haze instantly swallowed half the monster's enormous silhouette.
Before you continue