Hero Regresses with Villain System-Chapter 23: Monster Within
’Set!’
Adam screamed internally as he felt the rushing beast rampage through the room. Wind slapped into him, sending his hair flying wildly and knocking him to the ground altogether.
’I can’t grow big, idiot! I’d just slam into the temple!’
Shit!
’Useless fucking football!’
Knowing that arguing with Set would be fruitless, Adam’s mind raced to find another solution. It didn’t help that even as the Kaiju approached him, he couldn’t sense it.
Closing his eyes, Adam followed the trails of wind left in its wake. Even if he couldn’t sense the Kaiju itself, he could sense the wreckage it caused.
Wind slapped into him, growing more and more furious. What had nearly knocked him over now felt like a mere gust compared to this rising tornado.
Adam gritted his teeth as he dug his heels into the ground and continued reaching through the darkness. Wind was not the answer, as it was everywhere. But even if he couldn’t sense the Kaiju, it wouldn’t be able to quiet the world’s cry.
Pat, pat.
That’s what he could focus on—the ground destroyed beneath its bounding stride. Unlike the wide area the wind affected, this was a singular and precise level of destruction that betrayed the Kaiju’s exact position.
’100 meters... 50...’ Adam thought as he tried to envision the length of its stride. The beast was far too wide to try to go around and far too tall to go over.
This left one more spot, the same that his first victim had left open: the underside.
However, going under did increase the chance of getting stepped on. Something Adam wasn’t keen on—
’Hey, puny human, you should get down!’ Set’s sneering voice called as instinct took over.
Throwing himself to the ground, Adam felt the harsh pressure of wind slamming him even deeper. More than that, though... he felt the beast’s talons just barely graze his back.
While doing all of those calculations, he had forgotten to consider such a basic thing. If he was following the beast’s footsteps, then he was already behind. A stupid mistake that nearly cost him his life.
’I can’t think about that. Self-reflection can wait until after this murder chicken is dead,’ Adam thought as he pushed himself back to his feet.
There was that silver lining to his failure: he learned this Kaiju had talons. Now it was just time to put that information to good use...
"The fuck?"
"Oh, we can talk now? Yippee! Thank you, Draken!" Set called as he flipped in the air.
The room was now filled with the light of the Temple because the Kaiju had run straight through its walls. For a second, Adam wondered why the hell the murder chicken would just ignore them and run away.
Then he heard a familiar scream.
...
Evan looked down at his hands, thoroughly confused. Weren’t they supposed to be peeling and bloody?
More than that, wasn’t he supposed to be...
"Dead."
Evan’s breath caught in his throat as he shivered, hugging himself vehemently with crossed arms. He had died. After a long, fruitless struggle, he had died. Both he and Natalie.
Why?
He knew it was to get to the stupid fucking tower, but that wasn’t his question.
Why was the world like this—a cruel, desolate wasteland of absolute hellish depravity? From the start, he knew it was dumb to think these new powers made him some kind of OP protagonist.
But this was insane. Apocalypse, suffering, rampant death. Was that all anything amounted to?
An insurmountable evil that squashed any good?
He wanted to say no. More than anything, he wanted to say no.
However, he was a horrible liar. Especially when the actual facts were so evident.
Thea died because she wanted to show him a flower. Not because she was some evil, malevolent being living only for selfish reasons. She died simply because she had a beautiful, if naive, heart.
He died because there was nothing else to do. The tower was their only beacon of hope left. It wasn’t that he had ever done anything wrong. The only reason Natalie and he died was that they were weak.
That was the real world, the real truth.
Innocence, love, laughter, kindness... none of that mattered. Not without the strength to stop those who would squash you where you stood.
Slowing his breath, Evan considered a simple fact. Power wouldn’t fall into his lap just because he was scared. Simply put, strength started with resolve.
So, instead of lamenting over his false death, Evan stood and took in his surroundings.
It looked like he was in some kind of ruins, a leftover aspect of some ancient civilization that simply wasn’t strong enough.
Loose cables hung from the ceiling, which rose at least 50 meters high. Faint lights flickered overhead, clearly losing their last leg in life.
The ground was mostly bare, except for these solid white cubes protruding from it. There were thousands laid out in perfectly measured rows, and he stood in the center of them.
Taking a deep breath as he approached the one closest to him, Evan noted how they seemed to dig deep into the ground. As if they wanted to cement this as their last place in the world.
’Like some kind of generator maybe? Hopefully...’ Evan thought, figuring that it would be good for your energy source to be unmoving. However, that answer didn’t seem entirely satisfactory.
Shaking the thought away, he continued trudging through the darkness. Somewhere, an answer had to exist.
An answer to his revival, where Adam and the other guy were, if Natalie survived...
And that answer wasn’t here, in this foreboding array of pillars. Therefore, it had to be somewhere else. Somewhere beyond this monotony of Endless White...
’What the...’ Evan’s breath caught in his throat as he looked ahead.
What he had thought were cables weren’t actually cables. At least not all of them...
They were tendrils, reaching from the darkness slowly but surely. After all, the dead couldn’t run.
Watching with horror, Evan saw a large, gaping maw reach down from the darkness of the ceiling and eat a corpse it had pulled from a pillar.
Blood flowed like a waterfall from the long-dead corpse, revealing this place for what it really was.
A tomb.
