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Tên truyện: Carved in Crimson
Tác giả: Lillie Acea (LillieAcea)
Đôi lời từ tác giả: Explicit content featuring violence for mature readers.
The heavy blade descended not to bring the sweet relief of nonexistence, but to plunge my shattered perception into a deeper abyss of physical torment. Rusted iron bit into the meat of my left shoulder with terrible momentum, splitting muscle and crushing bone into jagged splinters that drove deep into my chest cavity. Pain burst behind my eyelids like blinding white lightning, an agony so absolute that my throat tore itself raw on a soundless scream. I did not die. The blackness that enveloped my mind was brief and fragile, shattered almost immediately by the searing kiss of coarse salt and caustic chemical liquid slapped violently into the open, gaping wound.
When my eyes fluttered open again, the world was inverted and bathed in sickly yellow gloom. Warm fluid washed continuously across my forehead and into my lashes, obscuring my vision with a heavy crimson veil. I was hanging upside down from an overhead steel rail, a massive rusted meat hook driven beneath my left Achilles tendon. Gravity pulled the blood from my open wounds downward, painting my inverted torso in thick ropes of sticky dark life force that dripped onto the cracked concrete floor below with a steady metric rhythm.
The air in the deeper subterranean cavern was thick with the stench of ancient decay, scalded fat, and steam from boiling vats of grease. Dozens of shadowy forms hung around me in the gloom, suspended from iron chains like grotesque fruits in an orchard of death. Some were human torsos completely stripped of skin, their exposed musculature glistening pale pink beneath the flickering incandescent bulbs. Others were hollowed husks, opened from crotch to throat, their ribcages pried wide like empty crates to reveal dark hollows where vital organs had once rested.
The butcher stood beside a stained wooden carving table a few feet away, his back turned to me. The coarse iron wires holding his split torso together groaned under the strain as he leaned over a fresh mound of sloshing matter. The writhing black tendrils inside his hollow gut reached outward like blind serpents, probing and tasting the freshly harvested organs laid out on the wooden surface. Wet slurping noises filled the chamber as the tendrils dragged a pale spleen into the shadowy abyss of his open stomach, digesting the flesh with a hiss of dissolving acid.
"Ah, the little rat still draws breath," the monster rasped without turning around. His voice sounded like grinding stones buried in wet mud. "Your heart is remarkably stubborn. Most men surrender to the shock when the meat hook slices through the heel, but your blood continues to pump. Good. The meat tastes bitter when the beast dies in terror, but it grows sweet when the agony marinates the flesh over hours."
He turned slowly, dragging his deformed weight across the slimy floor. In his right hand, he held a long brass syringe filled with a thick, swirling purple fluid. The needle was as long as an iron spike, crusted with dark, dried residue from previous victims.
"You will not be granted a quick death," the creature whispered, stepping closer until I could see the yellow rot covering his teeth. "I have crafted something special for you. This tincture will prevent your vital organs from failing, even as I strip the meat from your bones. You will feel every incision, every scrape of the blade against your skeletal frame, perfectly conscious until the final scrape."
He plunged the thick needle directly into the exposed wound on my shoulder. A wave of liquid fire rushed through my veins, hot and volatile. My heart hammered violently against my ribs, pounding with such force that I felt my blood vessels straining to hold together. The cold numbness that had promised death was instantly burnt away, replaced by an agonizing heightening of every single sense. Every cut on my skin screamed with new, intolerable intensity. I thrashed wildly on the hanging hook, sending the iron chain rattling against the overhead beam. However, my movements only tore the muscle in my leg even further.
The butcher let out a guttural laugh that shook his chest. He grabbed a pair of iron bone shears from a nearby tray and tapped the cold metal against my knee.
"Let us begin with the joints," he said, his green eyes glowing with pure, unadulterated cruelty. "The marrow is where the sweetest spirit resides."
He placed the jaws of the heavy shears around my right kneecap. The cold steel bit into the tender flesh, pressing inward until it ground brutally against the hard bone. I bit my lower lip so hard that blood filled my mouth, mixing with the metallic slime that already coated my teeth. He applied pressure slowly, deliberately prolonging the friction. Bone began groaning under the immense force. The cracking sound was louder than a gunshot in the confined stone room, followed instantly by a sickening pop as the kneecap ruptured into jagged pieces beneath the blades.
White heat exploded in my brain. I opened my mouth to scream, but only a thick gush of dark blood erupted from my throat, splashing onto the monster's pale, wire-stitched stomach. The creature leaned into the spray, opening his mouth to catch the dark fluid upon his tongue, savoring the wet splatter like a ravenous beast at a trough.
"Yes," the monster hissed, his eyes widening in monstrous ecstasy. "Give me more of that sweet suffering. The flavor of pure broken hope."
While he reveled in the crimson deluge, my flailing left arm struck something hard suspended from an adjacent chain. A heavy iron meat cleaver swayed silently from a meat hook. My fingers, slick with grease and sweat, wrapped around the smooth wooden handle. Pain radiated through my shattered wrist, but the fire injected into my blood forced my broken nerves to respond through sheer adrenaline.
I did not pause to think. I used the momentum of my swinging body to pull myself upward against the hook in my heel, enduring a tear of agonizing white heat as muscle ripped free. I swung the stolen cleaver with every ounce of dwindling strength in my shoulder, driving the sharp, heavy edge mercilessly into the butcher's neck.
The blade hit with a dull, wet thud, burying itself four inches deep into his throat, and dark, curdled fluid sprayed from the gash, coating my face and chest in a lukewarm stench. The monster gasped, a wet choking sound issuing from his ruined windpipe as he stumbled backward, clutching at the iron handle protruding from his neck.
The sudden weight shift tore my leg free from the ceiling hook. I fell through the air and crashed hard onto the concrete floor, landing directly on my shattered knee. The agony was so immense that my vision turned completely red for a terrifying second. Yet the floor was slick with grease, allowing me to slide across the red tiles away from the reeling beast.
The butcher growled, a horrifying sound of fury and pain that echoed through the stone chamber. He grabbed the handle of the cleaver lodged in his neck and yanked it free with a wet tear of skin and muscle. Black tendrils erupted from the gaping neck wound, twisting and braiding themselves together to knit the torn flesh back into place. His wound sealed with a nauseating hiss of cauterizing meat.
"You dare touch me, vermin?" the creature roared, his voice distorting into something primal and demonic. "I will strip the flesh from your skull while you still watch!"
He lunged forward, dragging his rusted butcher knife through the air in a wide, lethal arc. I scrambled backward on my hands and good elbow, dragging my useless, bleeding legs behind me. My hand brushed against the base of an industrial rendering machine, a massive iron trough filled with revolving steel teeth designed to grind livestock skeletons into fine powder. The electric motor hummed softly nearby, vibrating the concrete floor beneath my palms.
The monster towered over me, raising his heavy knife high above his head to drive it straight through my chest. Cruelty lit up his pale face, a terrifying smile of triumph stretching his stitched mouth past human limits.
"Die in the dark, little rat," he snarled.
Instead of trying to dodge, I reached up with both hands and grabbed the iron wire that bound his open torso together. With a roar born of pure hatred and survival, I pulled myself upward, driving my weight toward his body and twisting the rusted wires with all my strength. The wire snapped with a loud metallic twang. The monster's chest swung open like a vault door, exposing the entire hollow cavity of writhing, squirming black parasites within his body. A wave of icy rot washed over my face as the tendrils lashed out in panic, biting into my jacket and tearing at my skin. Ignoring the agonizing bites, I kicked out with my one unbroken boot, striking him squarely in his exposed spine from within the hollow opening. The butcher lost his balance on the greasy floor. He tottered backward, his arms flailing wildly as he tried to catch himself on the edge of the grinding machine. I reached out and slammed my palm onto the heavy red toggle switch on the side of the industrial engine. The machine roared to life with a deafening screech of gearwork and revolving metal blades. The monster fell backward into the open steel hopper. The massive revolving iron teeth caught his shoulder and arm abruptly, dragging his heavy frame into the rotating blades. A sickening crunch filled the cavern as his arm was pulled through the mechanism, bones snapping like dry twigs under tons of hydraulic pressure. The creature screamed, a sound of unimaginable agony that surpassed human comprehension. The black tendrils inside his chest erupted outward, clawing frantically at the iron walls of the machine, trying to drag his crushed body out of the whirring steel teeth. But the machine was ruthless. It pulled his torso deeper into the churning gears, snapping his ribcage and tearing his wire-stitched flesh into ragged ribbons.
Blood did not merely flow. It erupted from the chute in a thick, continuous geyser, painting the stone walls, the suspended corpses, and my own broken form in a hot crimson slurry. The smell of crushed marrow and ruptured intestines in the air was so suffocating that I could taste the thick metallic pulp on my tongue. The monster raised his remaining hand toward me, his yellow eyes wide with disbelief and burning fury as the rotating teeth seized his jaw.
"Curse you..." he choked out before the blades crushed his skull with a final, wet crunch.
The grinding gears groaned under the immense weight of bone and iron, spewing thick paste and splintered bone fragments out of the lower discharge chute into a concrete basin below. Then the motor stalled, smoking heavily as the monster's remains jammed the steel teeth completely.
Silence returned to the subterranean chamber, broken only by the steady drip of blood from the ceiling and the heavy, ragged gasps escaping my own ruined lungs.
I lay on the cold floor, bathed in the remains of the beast that had sought to butcher me. The liquid fire kindled in my veins was fading, leaving a cold, hollow emptiness that threatened to put out my consciousness forever. My left shoulder was a mass of ruined flesh, my right knee was completely crushed, and my heel trailed a deep red mark across the stone. Yet, my heart was still beating. I dragged my broken frame across the floor, crawling over piles of bone and pooling plasma toward the dark stone staircase at the far end of the room. Every inch of movement was a fresh descent into hell, a slow grinding of broken bone against torn muscle that forced thick sobs from my throat. I pulled myself up the first cold stone step, leaving a trail of dark red life force behind me like a wounded snake.
Above me, a sliver of gray morning light crept through the cracked wooden doors leading to the alley above. It was not salvation nor peace. My body was ruined, my mind was forever scarred by the nightmare in the dark, and the cold air outside carried no promise of healing. But as I hauled my mutilated body into the light, dripping blood onto the alley cobblestones, I knew that I had survived the meat grinder. I was no longer the predator, nor was I the prey. I was merely a phantom made of scars and crimson, dragging myself through a world that would never be bright again.
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