The dilapidated wooden door swung wide, letting out a long, agonizing creak that sounded like a dying man's final plea. I was immediately struck by a putrid, suffocating stench—an overwhelming miasma of ancient rust, damp rot, and centuries of clotted gore. It was the scent of death that had decomposed, only to be forced back into a wretched, unholy life.
I stepped out of the narrow corridor and into the arena. I froze, my eyes widening as I struggled to process the sheer scale of the hell I had just entered. I stood within a colossal circular amphitheater, reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum, but its towering walls were not forged from stone or brick. They were built entirely of bone. Giant femurs, skulls the size of carriages, and arched ribs were stacked with a terrifying, macabre precision, forming a wall that touched an invisible ceiling lost in the overhead void. The ground was not sand or dirt, but a viscous red mire, so saturated with blood that my feet sank to the ankles the moment I stepped forward. Squish. Squish. The sound of the thick, tepid mud was revolting.
There was no cheering crowd in those ossified stands. There was only a heavy, stagnant silence—the silence of a grave just before the resurrection. And in the center... they were waiting.
They were not wolves, nor ghouls, nor traditional demons. They were "Stitched Nightmares." Hundreds of humanoid abominations, their massive, distorted bodies devoid of skin. Their raw red muscles were exposed to the air, gleaming with a sickly moisture. Extra limbs, harvested from other corpses, had been sewn onto their shoulders; some dangled uselessly, while others clutched jagged weapons. Their spines were encrusted with rusted blades and iron spikes that seemed to have sprouted from the bone itself, forming a thorny armor. Their faces were tapestries of agony. The skin was pulled taut and sewn shut with coarse metal wire. No mouths. No noses. Only eyes. Wide, lidless white eyes, devoid of pupils, staring into the abyss with a vacant, mindless intensity.
The moment my foot hit the sludge, the atmosphere shifted. A psychic current seemed to surge through them. "Hssssssss..." A collective, chilling hiss rose from their sealed throats—the sound of air wheezing through rotted lungs. Hundreds of stitched heads snapped toward me in a single, synchronized motion, as if they were possessed by a singular, hive-mind consciousness.
I didn't wait. And neither did they. The earth trembled as the pack exploded toward me—a tidal wave of red flesh and rusted iron.
[The First Clash]
In that split second, I felt danger sting the back of my neck like a venomous scorpion. Something deep inside my psyche snapped—or perhaps, it was finally liberated. [Combat Mode Activated: The Crimson Eye.] My eyes flew open. The pupils split vertically, and the irises ignited into a radiant, glowing scarlet.
Suddenly, the world transformed. Everything was drenched in a deep, bloody hue. Time began to drag, slowing to a crawl. I no longer saw just their distorted forms; I saw the intricate details of their destruction. I saw the network of their muscles tensing under the raw meat. I saw the heat maps intensifying in their legs as they prepared to leap. I saw the neural pathways flickering with a faint blue light inside their wretched frames. I saw the first monster soaring toward me, jumping ten feet into the air, a serrated bone scythe aimed precisely at my throat.
My new mind analyzed the strike before it could land. (Threat: Bone Scythe. Speed: High. Trajectory: Descending arc from the right. Weakness: Exposed left axilla.) (Solution: Pivot left... Strike the throat.)
I sent the command to my body. "Move!" But I had forgotten one crucial thing: this body was still a stranger to me. It was heavy, alien, and possessed a power I had yet to calibrate. I lunged with too much force. The thigh muscles I had woven myself exploded with an underestimated energy. Instead of a smooth slide to the left, my foot dug too deep into the slick, bloody mud. I slipped. My balance faltered for a fatal microsecond.
I stumbled. My trajectory shifted. Instead of being outside the arc of the blade, I fell directly into its path. I looked up in horror. The scythe was descending. I threw up my left arm in a desperate, instinctive reflex.
"SHL-K!"
There was no pain at first. Only a sound—the sickening sound of a honed blade slicing through meat and bone as if they were warm butter. The bone scythe didn't just scratch me; it descended with a crushing, hydraulic force. I watched my left forearm detach from my elbow in a daze. It spun through the air, my fingers still twitching in a futile attempt to grab onto nothingness. A fountain of hot, arterial blood sprayed across my face, painting my vision a literal, visceral red.
The scream died in my throat. The monster slammed into me, its massive weight crushing me into the mud as it opened its chest to reveal more blades intended to skewer my torso.
I looked at my severed hand lying in the muck a few feet away. Then, I looked up at the abomination pinning me down. I didn't feel fear. I felt... insulted. A cold, dark, viscous rage flooded my being, deeper than any physical wound. "You took... my hand?" I growled, the sound coming from somewhere far deeper than my lungs.
As the creature raised its second arm to finish me, I didn't bother defending. I used my remaining right arm. I didn't punch. I grabbed its stitched face with my entire palm, digging my long claws into the white eye sockets and through the taut skin. (Die!) I squeezed. "CR-RACK!" The sound of its skull imploding was deafening in the silence of my mind. I crushed its head with raw, terrifying power until it burst between my fingers like a rotten melon, splattering gray matter across my chest.
[The Second Round]
I threw the carcass off me in disgust and stood up, swaying. I looked at my left arm; blood was pouring from the stump like a crimson waterfall. The pain began to register now—searing, fiery waves of agony shooting up to my shoulder and lashing at my brain. But... [Skill: Frenzied Regeneration – Maximum Output.] A thick, white steam began to hiss from the open wound. I watched the flesh boil. Muscle fibers began to emerge from the shattered bone like frantic worms, weaving themselves together, seeking their counterparts and fusing instantly. The bone began to elongate with an audible, grinding creak. The process was more agonizing than the amputation itself, but it was insanely fast.
The horde didn't wait for me to recover. Ten more leaped toward me, their chains and blades glinting in the gloom. This time, I didn't try to be a "fighter." I didn't take a stance. I realized the truth. I am not a swordsman. I am not some hero from a storybook. I am a monster whose body was forged in the bowels of hell. And monsters do not parry... monsters slaughter.
I charged into the center of them. A scythe bit into my right shoulder. A spear pierced my left thigh and came out the other side. I didn't care. I didn't stop. I could see their weak points glowing in a vibrant, pulsating red—an enlarged heart, a neural cluster in the spine, a fragile neck. Instead of dodging, I accepted their strikes just to close the distance to zero.
One of them drove a long sword through my stomach until the tip protruded from my back. I didn't flinch. I grabbed the blade with my bare hand—while it was still inside me—and yanked the monster toward me. "Come here!" I headbutted it with the full force of my reinforced skull. "THUD!" Its face was completely obliterated. I then bit into its throat, tearing away the primary artery with my teeth and spitting out a chunk of its rotted flesh.
The arena turned into a chaotic, gore-soaked slaughterhouse. I moved like a clumsy, devastating hurricane. I fell, I rose, I was struck, and I struck back. My left hand grew back entirely, though the skin was translucent and pink like a newborn's, the muscles visible beneath. I didn't wait for the skin to toughen. I used the new hand immediately to snap the spine of a mutant trying to stab me from behind.
The sheer physical strength was terrifying. A single touch was enough to tear their limbs apart. I grabbed one mutant by its leg and used its massive body as a sledgehammer to bludgeon the rest. I swung it left and right, smashing the heads of its comrades until its body was nothing more than a pulp of mashed meat and splintered bone in my grip, leaving only the leg I held.
My red eyes showed me every angle—360 degrees of combat awareness. Behind me, to my right, to my left. I danced amidst the blood, and while every mistake I made cost me a deep wound or a lost limb, it cost them their lives. The ground became a slick marsh of severed parts.
[The Master of the Arena]
After an hour... or perhaps an eternity... the noise died down. I stood in the center, perched atop a small mountain of corpses. My breath came in hot, wheezing plumes of steam from a chest riddled with wounds. The floor was no longer visible; it was covered in layers of minced meat. My body was a living map of scars, wounds opening and knitting shut in a constant cycle. I was drenched in blood—mine and theirs—from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, until my original skin tone was a distant memory.
I looked at my hands. They were shaking violently—not from fear, but from a surplus of energy and toxic adrenaline. "Is... is that all?" I spat out a broken tooth and a piece of gristle.
Suddenly... "BOOOM!" The earth heaved. A violent, deep tremor made the corpses jump and roll. The massive iron gate at the far end of the arena, bound in heavy chains, began to grind open. Iron links as thick as tree trunks were pulled back with a metallic shriek that set my teeth on edge.
"GRRRR-RRR...."
The darkness within the gate opened. And from it emerged something that made the previous mutants look like children's toys. The Master of the Arena. A giant, fifteen feet tall. A mass of dead, gray muscle. His body wasn't just flesh; it was a masterpiece of torture. Heavy metal plates had been bolted directly into his skin, secured with hooks and rivets until they became part of his anatomy. He carried a massive warhammer, its head alone as large as my entire body, caked in the dried brains and blood of countless predecessors. His face was hidden behind an iron mask welded to his skull, with narrow slits through which glowing, jaundiced eyes flickered with a malicious, cunning intelligence.
The giant exhaled, and a thick, toxic green smoke billowed from the vents of his mask, crawling across the ground and dissolving the corpses it touched. He took one step. The entire arena shook. He looked at me, then at the carnage I had wrought, as if evaluating the mess I had made. He raised his colossal hammer with a single hand and pointed its head toward me.
I felt my heart begin to hammer against my ribs like a war drum. This was no random abomination. This was a peer. I smiled, feeling the skin of my face pull tight over new scars, tearing slightly to accommodate the grin. My red eyes flared with a sharper intensity, leaving streaks of light in the air. I wiped the blood from my eyes to see my death—or my glory—with perfect clarity.
"Finally..." I whispered, tensing every fiber of my exhausted body for the final charge. "Something worth killing."