I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 21: Instinct

- Kyle Valtier’s POV -

"Damn it... this place is as dark as a blind grave," I muttered as I extended my left hand to feel along the cold, slimy rock wall.

One step... two... three. The darkness was swallowing the faint light coming from outside.

The air here was stagnant, reeking of ancient bird droppings and fungal rot.

And suddenly...

As I moved forward slowly, my right foot stepped down.

There was no ground.

There was emptiness!

"Damn it!"

Half of my body slipped into a hidden pit in the floor.

I felt my heart drop into my stomach, and my thoughts scattered.

I fell—but my instinct was faster.

I threw my body backward, my left hand clinging to the rough rock edge, while my left boot dug into solid ground.

I struggled to regain my balance and lifted my body, pulling my right leg out of that cursed hole whose depth I couldn’t even guess.

I sat on the edge of the pit, panting, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

"My God... I almost died because of a stupid hole. What a dramatic ending for the Black Joker."

I took a deep breath.

The place was quiet.

No sounds. No growls. Just water droplets falling slowly somewhere far away.

"Looks like this place is safe... for now," I said, trying to reassure myself.

I raised my head to look into the depths of the dark cave.

And in that moment... the cave lit up.

Not with sunlight, nor with magical glow.

But with small red dots.

Two... ten... fifty... hundreds.

Hundreds of glowing red eyes, filled with savage hunger, opened across the cave ceiling, staring directly at me.

"Damn..." I muttered, my hair standing on end.

Skrreeeeeeech!

A sharp, piercing shriek that tore through the eardrums and shredded nerves erupted from hundreds of throats at once.

Bats.

But they weren’t ordinary bats. They were Erebus bats.

The size of small dogs, their leathery wings ended in blade-like claws, and their fang-filled mouths dripped black acid.

They all lunged at me as one mass of darkness blazing with red eyes.

"No no no no!"

I turned and ran at full speed toward the cave exit, where I could see faint light.

I ran, the piercing sounds closing in behind me, the flapping of their leathery wings ringing in my ears.

And suddenly—

Bam!

My right foot tripped!

On what?

The same cursed hole I had almost fallen into a minute ago!

I fell hard on my face, my mask slamming into the rock.

"Damn my stupidity!" I shouted as I rolled across the ground.

A bat’s claw tore through my coat’s shoulder, and I felt an acidic burn touch my skin.

I kicked the air and struck another bat with the butt of my pistol—I heard the crack of its skull shattering.

I struggled to my feet, staggering, and literally threw myself out of the cave.

I rolled onto the dirt outside and quickly got up, taking cover behind a massive rock.

The bats poured out of the cave like black smoke, continuing their flight into the gray sky, searching for easier prey in the open valley.

I sat behind the rock, panting, clutching my shoulder that was slowly bleeding.

"What a delightful tourist trip..." I mocked myself bitterly.

I looked up at the sky. It was raining.

Not a light drizzle—but a torrential downpour. Drops the size of small pebbles struck the rocks violently.

And above all that—

Kraaaaaack! BOOOOM!

A terrifying purple lightning tore through the gray sky, followed by thunder that made the mountains tremble beneath my feet.

The lightning didn’t just strike and vanish—it stretched like glowing veins, illuminating the pitch-black darkness settling over Erebus. It was a majestic sight, as magnificent as the wrath of the Supremes.

"Great! Just great!" I shouted, trying to overpower the thunder.

"How am I supposed to take cover from the rain now? If I stay here, I’ll freeze to death—or get struck by magical lightning!"

I have to move.

I began walking very cautiously along the side of a massive mountain, its rocks black and smooth as if polished.

I searched for any safe hollow, any crevice that didn’t contain winged nightmares.

The rain blinded my vision, and the wind howled like tormented souls.

I slowly rounded the side of the massive mountain, gripping my pistol with a trembling hand as the rain lashed against my mask’s glass.

And as I passed the rocky corner... I looked ahead.

A massive flash of purple lightning, like a pulsing vein in a dead sky, illuminated the entire area for a single, harsh, cold moment.

And the universe froze.

Oh no... my God... no...

About fifty meters away... something was standing.

It wasn’t a ghoul. It wasn’t a gray hound. It didn’t belong to any biological nightmare the human mind could comprehend.

It was the embodiment of an error in the fabric of reality itself.

It was a gigantic entity, over twenty meters tall, yet grotesquely thin.

Thin as if its body were nothing but a skeletal cage stretched over with dark human skin, pulled so tightly that the sharp edges of its bones almost tore through from within.

It had no muscles. No logical anatomical structure.

It stood in an unnatural hunch, like a broken lamppost.

But its hands... my God, its hands!

They were impossibly long, extending far beyond any biological proportion, hanging at its sides until its fingers nearly touched the rocky ground.

They weren’t normal fingers—but a mass of twisted, deformed joints, as if they had been broken and reset dozens of times incorrectly.

And worst of all... when another flash of lightning struck, I saw its "head."

Its head was oval, covered in the same tight, dark skin.

It had no features! No eyes... no nose... no mouth. Not even holes to breathe.

Just a smooth, silent, dead mask of skin that looked as if it had been peeled from thousands of corpses and fused together.

And suddenly...

Amid the roar of the storm and the deafening rain, something happened that completely erased my mind.

The sound... vanished.

Not silence.

Absolute absence of sound.

The rain was still falling—I could see the droplets hitting the rocks—but I couldn’t hear anything anymore.

As if this creature had devoured the vibrations of the air itself.

A terrifying pressure dropped onto my chest, as if I had suddenly sunk to the bottom of a dark ocean.

Even though it had no eyes... I felt it.

I felt the weight of a dead, crushing gaze piercing through my mask, through my skull, searching the deepest and filthiest corners of my mind.

Its featureless head... turned slowly, mechanically.

Crack... crack... (the only sound that broke through the wall of absolute silence—the sound of its dry neck bones snapping).

It turned until its smooth face was pointed directly at me.

Absolute paralysis consumed me.

I couldn’t blink.

I couldn’t breathe.

This wasn’t fear of a monster that wanted to tear my flesh apart.

This was cosmic horror.

The terror of standing before an entity that tampered with the fundamentals of your existence.

I felt a cosmic nausea, a hysterical urge to vomit—not from my stomach, but from my soul.

"Don’t move..." a very small, dying part of my rational mind whispered.

"It’s blind... maybe it can’t see you. If you move, it will tear you apart."

But my instinct... that animal instinct forged in the orphanage... was screaming hysterically, deafeningly, pounding against the inside of my skull:

"Don’t look at it! Don’t let its shadow touch you! Run! Run now!"

Terror moved me like a puppet hanging by threads of panic. I turned completely.

I gave it my back. A fatal sin in the laws of hunting—but I was no longer a hunter. I was prey that had lost its mind.

And I exploded into a run.

I poured every drop of my weak G-rank Eitra into my leg muscles.

I ran back the way I came, along the smooth black mountain.

Rain lashed my face, mud splashing behind me.

I pushed against the ground with force that nearly broke the bones in my feet. I wasn’t running to save my body—I was running to save my mind.

I ran for twenty continuous seconds.

Twenty seconds of blind, insane sprinting.

I should have covered a very safe distance. I should have passed the mountain’s curve entirely and disappeared from its sight.

My chest heaved like a punctured bellows.

My vision blurred from sweat and tears I didn’t even realize had started falling.

I turned my head slightly to look at the rock wall beside me, to measure the distance.

The blood froze in my veins.

I... hadn’t passed the mountain.

I had barely moved a few meters.

"Hah?" I coughed, confusion flooding me, turning fear into maddened panic.

"What... why has the distance become longer? The wall... the wall looks like it’s stretching!"

I stopped for a moment, my feet sinking into the cold mud, the chill gnawing at my bones.

I couldn’t resist the sick urge.

I turned back to look.

The purple flash illuminated the scene again.

The entity... wasn’t moving.

Its long, grotesquely jointed arms still hung at its sides.

Its thin legs hadn’t taken a single step. It stood completely still like a cursed statue, its smooth face still directed at me.

But... it was closer.

It had been fifty meters away.

Now... it was only thirty meters away.

"W-what...?" I muttered, my voice coming out like the whimper of a dying child.

My mind began to tear apart, refusing to process what my eyes were seeing.

How did it get closer without moving a single muscle? Was the ground sliding me toward it like a cursed carpet?

Was the space shrinking? I looked at the rocks between us... they looked "compressed."

Geometrically distorted.

As if physical distance itself was being crushed under the weight of its existence.

Terror shattered every wall of my composure.

I almost lost control of my bladder.

Hot, burning tears streamed from my eyes, scorching my cold face beneath the mocking mask.

I turned my back on it again, and this time, I didn’t just run.

I leapt, pushing off the ground with all my strength, letting out a choked, strangled scream from sheer effort and terror.

The muscles in my legs were literally tearing from within—I felt the fibers ripping.

Blood pressure surged to my head until I felt warm, sticky drops flowing from my nostrils and dripping onto my lips.

"Get away! Get away from me!" I screamed in my mind, saliva spilling from my open mouth.

I ran until my lungs nearly exploded and flew out of my chest.

I ran like an animal fleeing a slaughterhouse, dragging its broken limbs.

I must have covered at least a hundred meters! I must have! I ran with everything I had!

I tripped over a sharp rock I hadn’t seen.

I fell brutally.

My masked face slammed into mud and stagnant water. The taste of dirt and blood filled my mouth.

I was crying.

Sobbing audibly and pitifully. I couldn’t control the trembling of my body.

My nails dug into the mud as I tried to drag myself forward like a worm cut in half.

I slowly... very slowly raised my head, my knees trembling.

I turned back for the third time, my eyes half-closed, praying I wouldn’t see it.

Lightning struck with a blinding force, turning the shadows black as spilled ink.

It was five meters away.

I wasn’t just seeing a silhouette anymore.

I could see the details now.

Details that made me wish I could gouge my eyes out rather than see them again.

I saw how the dark skin on its smooth face trembled slowly.

I saw that its extremely long fingers touching the ground were writhing, pulsing with a demonic life, the twisted joints contracting and expanding as if tasting the air.

It hadn’t moved. It hadn’t stepped. Yet the dead distance between us had been erased as if it were an illusion.

It doesn’t run after you.

It doesn’t chase you.

It brings the space you stand on to itself.

It folds reality like a cheap piece of paper—and you are nothing but an insect trapped within its creases.

And I... lying in the mud, bleeding, crying like a child, my mind collapsing... no longer had the strength for a single step more.