His body was stiff, cold, still damp with sweat. But it wasn't the forest that lingered in his mind—it was the beeping of a heart monitor. The fluorescent lights. The weight of helplessness pressing against his ribs.
"Move the world." The words echoed again. Not a wish. Not a hope. A command.
Loid sat up slowly, his limbs sluggish, the ache still settled deep in his bones. Yet something was different. The world felt... thinner. Closer. As if, for the first time, it was listening.
I was supposed to die there. Alone. Forgotten. But I didn't.
Yet the world didn't care whether Loid survived or not—so it tore him from his delusions with teeth bared.
A scream cracked through the forest like a rib shattering in the chest of God—high-pitched, agonizing, impossibly human, yet warped beyond comprehension. It was the kind of sound that didn't just pierce the ears, it dug inside, curled up behind the eyes, and screamed again.
It was grief and fury and bone-deep despair, all tangled in a raw, fleshly howl. Like a soul being dragged backward through every regret it ever had.
Pain—that was Loid's first thought as he jolted forward, running without grace, tripping over rotten logs and gnarled roots that curled like ancient fingers. His lungs fought him. His legs buckled. But terror gave him momentum.
The scream came again.
It didn't echo.
It collapsed the air.
There was no direction to it. It was everywhere. A tidal wave of sound that rippled through the marrow of trees and the flesh of beasts. Birds fell silent. And once more the forest forgot how to breathe.
Loid no longer feared death.
Only pain.
And that scream promised a death that would remember him—in every shattered nerve and torn flesh.
It sounded like something that had forgotten how to be human—and was punished for ever trying.
Like a body trying to vomit up a soul.
The closer it came, the more reality seemed to thin, as if the scream itself were unraveling the world thread by thread, until only that sound remained—pure, cruel, eternal.
Loid's legs moved on instinct. His heartbeat wasn't his own anymore—it was the drumbeat of prey.
In that scream there was desire.
He could feel it in every atom of his being. It wanted him.
Fear devoured his mind. All Loid wanted in that moment was to crawl into some shadowed corner of the earth and die—unseen, untouched, and to never awakened again.
And still, he ran—not because he thought he could escape. But because dying , curled like prey, was worse.
The trees leaned in, twisted and gnarled like old voyeurs, mocking his feeble attempts to run. Their branches whispered with the wind, but it wasn't comfort he heard, it was laughter. The leaves rustled with cruel glee. Every step on the dead foliage beneath his bare, blistered feet was a reminder that power is a dream for the weak.
Then he fell.
His ankle caught, snagged in a mess of ancient roots, gnarled and hungry, like the hands of the long-forgotten dead reaching up to drag him into the earth's cold embrace. Wanting him to stay. To rest. To rot.
Loid writhed, panic clawing up his throat as he desperately tried to rise.
Then the woods exploded.
A sickly white figure burst forth, rupturing trees like matchsticks under its monstrous velocity. It didn't move like something born of flesh. It didn't move like anything. It shouldn't move. Its limbs were too long, bending at impossible angles, snapping trees in half just by existing.
It was not a beast.
It was not a man.
It was rage given form.
Its face—a void of misery and fury—locked onto him. A grotesque, toothless maw peeled open, stretching wider than its skull, reality recoiled from its sheer wrongness.
And then... the scream.
That same soul-ripping wail. Like grief set ablaze. Like every cry of agony across time, condensed into a single moment meant for him alone.
The air shrieked as it tore forward, trying in vain to hold the creature back. Reality seemed to buckle, peeling away from the speed, the intent, the malice that surged with it.
It closed the gap in a heartbeat.
Loid stared into the mouth of oblivion, his body frozen as if his soul had already been swallowed.
Mouth wide open. Inches away.
Something shifted.
Not in the air.
But inside him.
A silent pulse, deep in Loid's soul, surged upward. His will to live roared louder than his fear. And in that moment the world listened.
The air twisted.
The earth snapped.
The elongated hands, once so certain of their prey, missed.
The thing flew past, a shriek trailing behind it like a comet's tail. It crashed through trees like a hurricane given flesh and hatred, its wail echoing as trunks shattered like glass.
Loid lay there, panting, alive.
But not safe.
Not strong.
Just… changed.
No longer hopeless.
Finally free to breathe.
But then—
It screamed
Not a cry, not a roar, but a violation of sound itself.
The air itself tore open, as if sound had become a weapon. Trees buckled, the very ground flinching at its fury. Loid's bones trembled under the weight of that scream. His teeth felt like they might explode from the pressure. Blood leaked from his ears, hot and slick.
It surged forward—A sonic boom echoed as the air collapsed in on itself, struggling to fill the void left in the thing's path. The ground split where its claws dug in, each step an earthquake, each lunge a scream of death.
A sickly white death.
Lithe.
Elongated.
Wrong.
Its claws reached for his face—Jagged. Bone-white. Inches from flesh. They didn't just aim to kill. They meant to erase. To shred him from existence like he had never mattered, never existed.
Time fractured.
The scream stretched into silence. The forest dissolved into nothing.
Only that face.
That scream.
Loid.
And then—something else.
A presence entered. The world held its breath. Reality stilled, as if nature itself dared not whisper in the presence of what had arrived. The creature—seconds from ripping Loid apart—was suddenly... gone. No, slain.
Its body stood where he first diverted it—sliced into impossibly neat segments, as though carved by a force that transcended comprehension. It hadn't moved. It never moved. And yet, it was dead.
Meters away, Loid sat frozen on the ground.
Everything stopped. Even time seemed afraid to move. And there, amidst the stillness, he stood. A man, if he could still be called that. Hair like the void. Skin pale as untouched snow. And eyes… eyes that didn't look at the world, but through it— with a gaze older than air, older than silence, older than fear. He didn't stand in the world. The world stood around him shaped by his presence, as though reality itself bent to make room.
Then he spoke—His words flowed like ancient wind—measured, level, carrying a calm that felt like the end of all things. A calm that didn't ask, but decided. And the world dared not interrupt. His voice was not loud, but it silenced everything.
"What is your name?"