The heavy steel door was perfectly intact. Forget being smashed open—there wasn't even a scratch on it. Yes, there really was a pack of shrieking cultists outside trying to force their way in, but that slab of metal clearly wasn't something their random junk weapons could shake.
And the so-called "witchfire" was pure fiction. The room was dry. Aside from the burnt-gunpowder stench left by discharging weapons and the steadily thickening smell of blood, there wasn't even a single spark to be seen.
They were like a troupe of incompetent mime actors, putting on a farce called Hell Descends.
Except the pain on their faces was real. The fear was real. The blood was real. The wounds they were inflicting were real.
Another soldier died.
Not to some invisible daemon—but because a fellow trooper, already lost to hysteria, shot him straight through the chest. The shooter didn't even spare him a glance. He kept screaming at empty air.
"Die! You Chaos filth!"
My stomach rolled. My head swam. I could only curl tighter into the corner, trying not to get caught in the blast radius of these men who'd gone completely feral.
That was when I noticed the brute of a captain had stopped.
His magazine was empty. Yet he didn't reload. He held his rifle in the same firing posture and stood there, frozen.
Then, suddenly, he reached up and flipped his helmet's faceplate open. He stared at me.
Really stared.
For the first time, his smoke-blackened lower face showed an expression that wasn't shooting or screaming—an expression mixed from pure terror and a kind of baffled emptiness.
His gaze wasn't focused. It looked like he was seeing me… and also looking through me, toward something behind.
I followed his line of sight.
Behind me was only a wall riddled with bullet holes.
"How… is that possible…" he whispered, so softly it sounded like sleep-talk.
What did he see?
I didn't know what he saw. But from my side of reality, he looked like a madman who'd been paused mid-performance, standing absurdly still among a room full of thrashing lunatics.
Then he moved. Slowly, he looked down at a cut on his arm.
It was long, but shallow—something he'd scraped himself on earlier when he slammed into exposed rebar while dodging an "enemy." Now, though, he studied it with a strange… suspicion. As if the wound wasn't supposed to be that light. As if it should have hurt more than it did.
He reached out with a trembling finger and touched the edge of the cut, where it had nearly stopped bleeding.
Then he looked up again, locking onto me.
This time his eyes weren't hollow. They were searching. Doubtful. And beneath it… a thread of something that looked dangerously like hope.
The way he stared made my skin crawl.
He wasn't going to decide I was a daemon too, was he?
"They… go around you," he rasped, half speaking to me, half speaking to himself. "No… they can't see you. They pass through you… like you're not there…"
What?
I was completely lost. All I saw was him having a conversation with a bullet-riddled wall. What "they" was he talking about?
He seemed to read the blank confusion on my face. His facial muscles twitched violently. The look of a worldview collapsing was somehow even more horrifying than his earlier madness.
But he still didn't give up.
Maybe it was a soldier's training. Maybe some stubborn sense of duty. He suddenly lunged at me, grabbed my wrist, and hauled hard.
His hand was rough, crushingly strong—like an iron clamp.
"Move! Now!" he roared. "This place is too dangerous!"
He tried to drag me out of what he clearly believed was an active battlefield.
And then—at the instant his hand closed around my wrist—his entire body went rigid.
The iron grip vanished. His hand slackened, resting loosely against my skin. In the space of a single second, his expression shifted from urgent determination… to total blankness… and then to a shock so immense it almost didn't look human.
He snapped his head around, staring at the room as if seeing it for the first time.
His lips parted. A wet, choking rattle came from his throat.
He saw it.
I think he finally saw what I had been seeing all along.
No burning flames.
No shattered door.
No horned, clawing daemons.
Just an ordinary room full of bullet holes.
And a group of men—
Men with twisted faces, screaming at nothing, wrestling empty air, smashing themselves into walls, stabbing themselves, and even shooting one another.
A living hell, crafted by their own hands.
One trooper was slamming his helmet into a concrete pillar again and again. Each impact made a dull, brutal thud. Blood ran down his forehead and smeared his visor until he couldn't see. Another knelt on the floor with a cleaver, hacking into his own left arm over and over as if it were some alien parasite. A third held a dagger in his left hand, the tip hovering less than two inches from his eye, trying desperately to plunge it in—while his right hand braced the left wrist and shoved outward with all its strength. He was literally fighting himself, teeth bared, trembling.
The man who had supposedly been "consumed by fire" was lying on the floor, tearing at his own throat in agony. His nails dug into his neck until he drew blood. He was strangling himself, face purple-red, on the edge of suffocation.
The captain's body began to shake, uncontrollably.
He stared at his men—those he had trained with, fought beside—watching them destroy themselves in the most grotesque, absurd ways imaginable. The impact of that sight was likely ten thousand times worse than being killed by any "daemon."
"Th-this… this is…" His voice fell apart, forced out through clenched teeth. "What is this? What the hell is happening?"
He whipped his head toward me, eyes bloodshot and veined with red, filled with pain he couldn't process.
"The daemons? The sorcery?!" He seized my shoulders and shook me hard, as if he could shake me awake—or shake himself awake out of a nightmare. "Where did they go?!"
He was so strong my vision swam.
Fear flooded up together with an emotion I couldn't even name, and finally I snapped.
"There are no daemons! There's no sorcery!" I wrenched free and screamed back at him. "What the hell is wrong with you people?! Look at what you're doing!"
My voice came out sharp, high, cracking, on the edge of tears. In the chaos of that room, it sounded bizarrely clear.
I was terrified.
Truly terrified.
I was afraid that next they'd swing the gun toward me, the only "normal" person in the room, and decide I was a disguised daemon. I was afraid they'd try to "purify" me the way they were purifying their own limbs and their own brothers.
Under that crushing weight of fear and absurdity, I don't know where the courage came from, but I turned toward the soldiers who were still mutilating themselves and one another, and I bellowed with every ounce of air in my lungs:
"Calm the hell down!!"
That shout drained me so completely it felt like my chest collapsed afterward.
"There are no daemons! There's no sorcery! You're fighting the damn air!"
The room went silent, as if someone had hit a mute button.
They turned toward me.
The helmet smashing stopped.
The self-mutilation stopped.
The men attacking one another froze in place.
One by one, hands slackened. Weapons lowered. Movements halted.
Time congealed.
The soldiers slowly turned their heads, staring at me with blank, stunned expressions, then looking around the room again. The madness and terror on their faces hadn't fully faded yet—but it was draining away fast, replaced by something deeper and heavier: shock and confusion so profound it felt like it could drown a man.
A trooper who had just been trying to stab himself in the gut looked down at the knife handle wedged into the seam of his abdominal armor, then at his blood-slick hands, as if he was meeting his own body for the first time.
The one who'd been smashing his head against the pillar touched his mangled forehead and stared vacantly at the warm liquid coating his fingertips.
They… seemed to be listening.
(End of Chapter)
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