Chapter 11: Chapter 11 — You Damn Son of a Bitch Part II
The domestic setting dissolved, reforming into what looked like a dark alchemy laboratory—a gloomy, damp, utterly foul basement that reeked of formaldehyde, rotted viscera, and stagnant bodily fluids. The air itself was thick, cloying, sticking to the throat like curdled oil.
Drip... drip... drip...
In the center of the chamber, a horribly emaciated female figure hung chained in a vertical position to a monstrous structure of black iron. Hundreds of rusted needles and glass tubes were connected directly to her veins, her temples, and her bloated belly.
It was the mother. She was still alive, but her gaze was completely shattered—reduced to a hollow shell of pure agony.
Her breath came in wet, rattling gasps, her cracked lips moving in a silent, endless prayer that no god could hear.
Directly in front of her, positioned so their eyes would be fixed on their mother’s torment, the two small twins sat gagged and bound to metal chairs, showing a severe state of malnutrition, their ribs jutting out starkly and their skin stretched paper-thin over brittle bones.
The heavy iron door groaned open and the Lich entered, floating with a spine-chilling tranquility.
He glided toward the chairs and stroked the children’s heads with his skeletal fingers, his touch leaving a trail of necrotic frost across their scalps. He addressed them in a sibilant, indifferent voice: "Subject 1" and "Subject 2."
Then, turning toward the confined woman, he tilted his head in a mock bow and called her, simply, his "queen."
"P-please... not them... kill me... let them go..." the woman emitted in an agonized whimper, dragging the words through her cracked, bleeding lips.
The Lich widened his grin, savoring every shred of that resistance. His goal wasn’t merely to experiment on their bodies—it was to shatter the very fabric of their souls through the most merciless psychological torture imaginable.
"Oh, my dear queen, creation demands family sacrifices," the monster hissed, basking in the suffering before him. "Watch closely what your weakness grants them."
Without wasting a second, the bastard activated the machinery with a burst of corrupt black magic. The tubes began to glow with a deathly violet hue, pumping industrial quantities of dark mana and alchemical fluids directly into the mother’s bloodstream in a single, violent surge.
Her body convulsed in brutal spasms, her spine arching grotesquely against the restraints as blackened veins bulged across her skin like writhing worms.
KRZZZT—SQUELCH!
But the true moral horror descended upon the children. The Lich extended his hands toward the twins and began invoking a forced transmutation process directly before the mother’s bulging, bloodshot eyes, all while wearing a grimace of absolute sadistic amusement.
The little ones whimpered in agony beneath their gags as their bones began to snap—loud, wet, visceral cracks that echoed off the stone walls. Their small skeletons shattered and reassembled themselves in grotesque configurations; the flesh along their ribs split open with a tearing sound like wet canvas, giving way to crablike limbs and chitinous shells that sprouted forth, fusing and melding with their infantile tissue in a writhing mass of shell, sinew, and screaming meat.
CRACK! CRACK! CRUNCH!
RIIIIIP... SQUELCH...
The mother shrieked with a despair so absolute it no longer sounded human—it was the raw, primal wail of a soul being flayed alive. Tears of pure blood streamed down her hollow cheeks as she was forced to witness her beloved children twisting, convulsing, their innocent faces contorting into abominations born of her own corrupted fluids.
Her scream tore through the laboratory, an animal sound of grief that only made the Lich’s grin stretch wider.
Under the final influx of the mystical injection, the woman’s body suffered one last aberrant metamorphosis: her skin stretched to its absolute limit, splitting open in long, weeping fissures to expose the glistening, living muscle beneath.
Her flesh swelled disproportionately, her ribcage snapping outward with a sickening series of pops, her organs shifting and writhing visibly beneath the taut membrane of her dermis—until, with a thunderous detonation, she burst apart in a rain of boiling black blood and viscera, collapsing into a uniform, pulsating mass of meat.
BOOOOM—SPLATTER!
From the remains of that latent amalgamation, an imposing creature—the Hybrid Queen of the hive—rose up, snapping the chains like twine and unleashing a deafening roar that shook the laboratory to its foundations.
SKREEEEEEEOOOONGH!
The Lich bastard contemplated his masterpiece and smiled once more with deep, unholy satisfaction, folding his skeletal hands before him like a painter admiring a finished canvas.
---
FLASH!
The grim memory of the laboratory shattered into a thousand shards of light. All at once, the darkness, the blood, and the monsters vanished, replaced by an infinite space—completely white, immaculate, and peaceful.
There were no walls, no ceiling, no pain.
There, in the middle of the luminous nothingness, I made out two small figures. They were the two brown-haired twins, completely stripped of the pincers, the carapaces, the crab mutations.
They were back in their original human forms, dressed in their simple field clothes, huddled tightly against each other, seeking the fraternal warmth that had been stolen from them.
I walked slowly toward them, feeling my own silhouette regaining solidity. Upon noticing my presence, the two little ones raised their faces in unison.
Their eyes were no longer shot through with panic or weeping black tears; their gazes were clear, though laden with a deep, mature plea.
"Mister... thank you for freeing us from that shell of pain," said the twin on the left, his soft voice reverberating through the white space.
"But our mother... she’s still trapped below, condemned to spawn those things in the deep darkness of the crypt," added the one on the right, squeezing his brother’s hand. Both stared at me intently, locking their eyes on mine. "Please, we beg you... save our mother. Grant her eternal rest. And not just her—save all the souls of the innocent people that wretch has been using and tearing apart for his macabre experiments. Destroy this place."
The two childlike figures began to blur little by little into the intense whiteness, losing definition as they offered me one last, subtle bow of their heads.
"I promise you... rest in peace," I managed to answer with a thread of a voice before the white space erupted into a blinding flash.
BOOM!
I snapped my eyes open, gasping and slamming my palms against the cold stone slabs of the dungeon. I was back on my knees, surrounded by the ash-gray fog and staring down at the inert, deformed remains of the crab-children I had just touched.
A torrent of burning rage—a fire far more destructive than any spell in my gacha system—began boiling up from the deepest pit of my guts, flooding my veins with pure, undiluted thirst for retribution.
I rose to my feet slowly, gripping the hilt of my weapon as an aura of rampaging mana made the stones tremble beneath my boots. Samira, Dorko, and Domack each took a step back, sensing the drastic shift in my energy.
I fixed my gaze straight ahead, directly toward the blurred silhouette of the Lich’s Throne at the end of the great hall.
"That damn son of a bitch is going to pay for this..." I hissed through clenched teeth, my voice so icy and lethal it froze the mist around us. "I swear I’m going to tear him apart with my own hands."
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