I'm lying on my bed, bent forward, clutching my stomach with both hands.
It hurts! It hurts so much!
As a zombie, I don't normally feel physical pain unless something extraordinary happens. Like that time when I ate part of the ghoul and my regeneration suddenly increased.
Then I could feel a warm heat emanating from my stomach. And it was more comforting than anything else.
The time I ate the two parasitic worms was much worse. Those bastards caused me so much pain that I writhed for minutes.
But now, why does my stomach hurt so much again? It's different from the other times. I feel like my insides are being torn apart from within.
Ugh... on the one hand, I want to laugh because I can feel pain, which makes me feel alive, but on the other hand, I can't do anything about the pain. Damn it!
If I start to remember when it exactly started, it was when I was walking back home after saying goodbye to Saya and Rei.
I'm a person who has spent ten years being a zombie in this world with only two friends while everyone else rejects me and treats me like a monster. That has led me to become quite paranoid over time. I often obsessively think that Saya and Rei will eventually discover me as the monster I really am. As my train of thought was going in that dark and depressing direction, walking down the street, I was suddenly attacked with a rock by a child.
The rock hit me in the head.
At that moment, I suddenly felt a completely irrational anger escaping from me, and I can even say it was a burning rage. I turned my head and stared at those children.
The children immediately got scared and ran away screaming in terror.
In fact, I felt that something strange had happened to my eyes at that very moment. Because the entire scene in front of me had transformed into a world completely in black and white.
Only humans were visible in that monochromatic world in the form of bright red silhouettes. If I had to be specific, then they are like walking bloodstains. And seeing them transformed into that form, I felt a need to jump on them, tear their flesh from their bones, and eat them while they were still warm.
That's when the unbearable pain in my stomach began.
I had frightened myself with those horrible thoughts and strange vision. I walked back home with my eyes tightly closed.
In fact, I even consciously shut down my senses of smell and hearing, because they had suddenly multiplied exponentially in potency. I could smell every drop of blood within miles, I could hear every heartbeat, and I just felt this uncontrollable urge to jump in any direction where I smelled or heard living humans.
Still, the pain just grew and grew the more I tried to resist those urges.
'So it's because I'm hungry? Is that what's going on?'
After ten minutes lying in bed trying to wait for the pain to subside on its own, I finally realize that it's not going to happen. I struggle to get out of bed, staggering a little from the pain shooting through my abdomen, and walk over to the closet with the broken, cracked mirror on the door.
I look at myself in the distorted reflection.
"This is... my eye?"
My left eye has a completely black sclera, and the iris is a bright red color like blood. It looks exactly like the eyes of a ghoul.
But my right eye is still completely normal.
"What the hell...?"
If I focus specifically on using only my left eye, the entire world instantly turns black and white. I look at the concrete wall in front of me.
And I can see through it.
I see through all walls. In that colorless, monochromatic world, I see two bright red silhouettes of girls running together about a hundred meters away from my location.
Those silhouettes seem strangely familiar to me for some reason, but due to the intense pain coursing through my body, I can't form a coherent thought about who they might be.
I look in another different direction. Inside a house a few blocks away, I see a group of red silhouettes. That family is happily preparing for dinner.
—Grumble!
My stomach growls loudly.
I try with all my might to resist the irresistible temptation to run over there and devour them all.
"Ah, yes! The fish!"
Suddenly I remember that I had caught some fish from the river when I went swimming today. I quickly stagger over to my bed. I lift up the dirty mattress and throw it aside. I tear open the plastic bag where I kept them and take out the three dead fish I have there.
Then I start eating them like someone who hasn't eaten in days.
Normally, I can eat raw fish without any problems, and I even find it quite tasty. But now I feel horribly nauseous as I chew the flesh because it tastes awful. I feel like I'm eating expired fish that has been rotting for several days.
But I force myself to swallow it anyway.
I eat the three fish in quick succession, but I don't feel the pain subside even a little; if anything, it seems to be getting worse.
It's unbearable pain!
Staggering, I approach the broken window. I clumsily climb onto the wooden frame and jump.
—Crack!
The frame breaks under the force of my momentum and I fly high into the sky.
I feel much stronger now than before. Perhaps it's because my half-ghoul state was unintentionally activated, which would also explain my transformed eyes. At least three times stronger than my zombie parasite strength.
My senses are also amplified in this transformation, and I can hear conversations several miles away. The problem is that I can't properly differentiate all the different noises. And actually, it's quite annoying and disorienting to hear many different voices and random noises simultaneously at the same time.
The same goes for my sense of smell, but the only thing I can really smell clearly is the scent of human flesh and fresh blood. Some humans smell noticeably better than others.
—Crash!
I fall heavily onto the flat roof of a nearby abandoned building because I can't properly control my new strength.
Without thinking about destroying things, I jump again.
—Boom!
The roof crumbles and falls apart. When I hit the ground after flying about thirty meters through the air, my feet sink deep into the pavement, and the ground where I landed is indented in the shape of my feet.
I feel like I'm going completely insane. All I can think about is fresh human flesh.
Eat. Eat! I want to eat!
I run at full speed toward the strongest and most delicious smell of flesh. My legs move so fast that the landscape around me becomes blurry. That smell leads me to a dark and narrow alley in a less traveled part of the city.
I focus on using my left eye specifically, and my world instantly turns black and white again. Through all the walls of the surrounding buildings, I see the red silhouettes of two people.
One is the silhouette of a large, burly adult man. He has the second silhouette cornered against the wall, which appears to be a small girl trembling with fear.
With my heightened senses of hearing focused on that spot, I listen to the conversation between the two.
The man sounds like a disgusting degenerate pervert as he is saying horrible things about what he wants to do to the girl.
But then the girl suddenly stops trembling and her voice changes to a cold tone.
"I've heard that a predator of girls is lurking around here. I came specifically to eliminate him. Killing human trash like you is definitely better than killing innocent humans. That way I won't feel so guilty when I devour you."
"Huh? What the hell are you talking about, girl?"
The curious thing about the girl's silhouette is that it looks completely different from the man's.
Because in her bright red silhouette, specifically located in the area of her back, I can see a dark purple thing pulsing, and it's like an extra organ.
But my brain is very cloudy, and I can't think and process clearly what I hear and see.
I stop using my left eye, returning my vision to normal, and quickly turn the corner, appearing in the same dark alley where the two of them are.
The perverted man sees me appear and yells aggressively.
"Hey, brat! Get out of here right now or I'll have to kill you!"
He says this as he pulls a long knife from his jacket to look intimidating.
But the man is frightened when he sees my eye glowing in the dark.
Although I can deactivate my monochromatic vision whenever I want, my eyes are still transformed. I don't have enough control over my current state to know how to deactivate this transformation.
"M-Monster!"
Perverted man screams as his eyes widen so much that they almost pop out of their sockets.
The girl also notices me and looks at me with a strange expression. She has dark blue hair cut in a bob. Her large eyes are also a striking dark blue. She appears to be about ten years old or so.
Seeing my transformed eyes, she says to me in a cold voice.
"Don't get involved in this, whatever you are. This human is my food. I claimed him first..."
But before she can finish her sentence, I disappear from my original position.
I reappear instantly right next to the man who is trying to run away.
I grab his head with one hand.
—Cruaaaassshhh!
I violently rip it from his neck in one swift motion.
Blood gushes from his neck.
Then I sink my other hand deep into his chest. My fingers pierce his ribs and I pull out his heart, still beating weakly, dripping with warm blood.
"Fufufu..."
I bring the heart to my mouth and eat it.
×××
20 advanced chapters on Pá treon.
pá treon.com/OlwinMoriarty