I rushed him.
Two and a half ters of hatred and at. A goliath that could swat like a fly and not even pause to laugh about it.
But it didn’t matter.
The bones in my body—how many were broken now? Six? Ten? More?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t care.
Pain had long since stopped aning anything.
Pain was normal now. Like breathing. Like bleeding.
It was just another thing I carried.
I sprinted toward him, reckless, stupid, mad.
Before the madness swallowed whole, before the blood finished feasting on whatever was left of my soul, I needed to do one last thing:
Make the bastard feel it.
He saw coming.
Raised one massive fist, thick and heavy like a battering ram wrapped in skin.
He swung.
A blur of muscle and death.
But I ducked.
Just in ti.
The air from his punch blasted over my head, a hot gust strong enough to ruffle my hair like a gale. Strong enough to feel like a physical thing, even without touching.
I dropped low, slamd my feet into the ground, and sprang upward—hands grabbing his bicep like a rope in a burning house.
I hoisted myself up.
Climbing him.
Scaling the mountain of rage and muscle that had tornted this ship.
He snarled.
A deep, guttural sound that vibrated in my bones more than my ears.
And then he grabbed .
His free hand snatched my torso like it was nothing—his fingers wrapping around , squeezing.
Hard.
Bone shifted.
Bone cracked.
Pelvis buckling under pressure.
I heard it.
Crunch.
Like brittle wood snapping underfoot.
Pain shot through , white-hot, pure, and it should’ve paralyzed .
Should’ve ended it.
But I didn’t stop.
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t even slow down.
Because at that mont, there was no pain.
No agony.
No tomorrow.
Just him.
I jamd the pistol up against his face—right against his eye.
The demon saw it.
Saw the gun inches away from his eye socket.
And he panicked.
His grip tightened. Crushing, desperate. I could feel my ribs bending inward. Could feel blood filling my lungs.
But it was too late.
He reached up, his other hand clawing toward the pistol to knock it away.
Too late.
Way too late.
I pulled the trigger.
Point blank.
The gunshot tore through the rotten silence of the ship.
A blossom of fire.
A scream of tal.
A roar of gunpowder and hate.
The bullet punched straight into his eye—through the socket, into the at of his skull. Buried deep.
He jerked back violently, howling.
A noise so loud it rattled the boards beneath us. A howl that cracked the air, a sound that wasn’t human, wasn’t animal—sothing worse.
Pain.
Real pain.
Not just irritation.
Not just amusent lost.
Agony.
The hand that had been crushing spasd, then hurled .
He threw like a broken toy.
I hit the ground hard, skidding, skipping across the blood-slick boards, smashing through shards of bone and old splinters. I tasted iron. I tasted rot. I tasted victory.
I gasped for breath—wet, ragged, wheezing through broken ribs and crushed organs.
And I smiled.
Because when I looked up, when I wiped the blood and sweat from my one good eye—
I saw him.
The demon staggering.
One hand clawing at his ruined eye, blood pouring in thick, black ropes down his face.
The hole where his eye had been gushed and pulsed, veins throbbing, skin bubbling.
He wasn’t dead.
Not yet.
But he was wounded.
Bad.
And he wished—oh, he wished—that he was dead.
But his laugh didn’t die.
His giggles still sounded.
Like it was broken but still there.
A gurgling, choking roar of pure, unfiltered rage and pain.
The cabin shook with the force of his howl.
Fucker is crazier than .
Dust fell from the beams.
Chains rattled.
Even the girl behind the rman flinched deeper into the shadows.
But not .
I didn’t flinch.
I didn’t look away.
I just grinned.
Broken teeth, blood-slicked grin.
Because for the first ti since stepping onto this cursed ship—
The demon knew what it was like to hurt.
He knew what it was like to bleed.
And he knew it was who had done it.
Fucking alone.
Fucking broken.
Fucking mad.
I watched him writhe.
The great beast—two and a half ters of brute arrogance—reduced to a staggering, bleeding ss.
Every step he took splashed the floor with his blood. Thick. Dark. Viscous. It poured from his ruined eye, from the ragged hole my bullet had carved into him.
What a sight it was.
What a fucking sight.
The demon who had laughed, who had played god with broken bodies and shattered lives—he was suffering. And I drank it in like a dying man drinks rain.
The blood inside stirred at the sight.
It pulsed and twisted under my skin, eager, hungry, almost purring.
It got to work imdiately.
I could feel it moving—threading through the shattered bones of my pelvis, knitting marrow to marrow, fusing what had been crushed. Hot, invasive, wrong—but necessary.
The sentient blood didn’t ask permission.
It saved whether I wanted it to or not.
My ribs cracked back into place one by one, the pain sharp but fleeting. Flesh sealed. Nerves rewired. Skin stretched taut where it had torn.
I gritted my teeth and moved—slow, shaking off splinters from the body pile like a corpse rising from its grave.
I pulled a shard of bone from my thigh, tossed it aside. A jagged splinter of wood from my ribs—gone. Each ti, the blood closed the wound behind it, sealing up tighter, faster, more wrong.
And then—
Sothing colder.
Sothing harder.
Lodged near my heart.
I reached in with trembling fingers and pulled it free.
It wasn’t bone.
It wasn’t wood.
It was a necklace.
Thin chain. Tarnished silver. The links sticky with blood and rot.
And at the end of it—a locket.
I wiped it clean on my already ruined sleeve.
It clicked open with a soft snap.
Frozen in a mont before everything went to hell.
Soone he had killed.
Soone he had eaten.
Soone who had once laughed, once dread—and then beca just another part of the monster staggering in front of .
My grip tightened around the locket until the tal bit into my palm.
It didn’t matter.
It wouldn’t bring her back.
Nothing would.
But it stoked the fire already raging in my gut.
It gave it teeth.
I slipped the locket into my pocket.
A weight. A reminder. A promise.
I straightened slowly, my legs trembling but holding.
I was healed enough.
Healed enough to stand.
Healed enough to fight.
Healed enough to finish this.
The demon had stopped stumbling.
Stopped roaring.
Now he just stood there.
Breathing heavy through cracked, bloodied lips.
His good eye locked onto .
No more gas.
No more performances.
Just two things left in this room.
Hate.
And blood.
The ruined socket where his other eye used to be pulsed with every heartbeat, leaking black ichor down his ruined cheek. His chest heaved, muscles twitching under his ruined skin. His claws flexed at his sides—still dangerous, still monstrous.
But not invincible.
Not anymore.
I t his gaze.
Didn’t flinch.
Didn’t blink.
We stared at each other across the broken wreckage of this prison, across the stink of death and failure and lost things.
Two monsters.
One born of cruelty.
One born of spite.
I smiled.
A slow, feral thing.
"We’re gonna have ourselves a fucking massacre, baby," I muttered under my breath.
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