The green light of the portal was a nauseating, sickly colour, like bile illuminated from within. John stepped through it and into the humid, cloying air on the other side, then he stood his ground for a long moment, letting his senses adjust.

The first thing that hit him was the smell. It was a thick, coppery stench, a charnel house perfume of old blood and fresh viscera, the smell of a slaughterhouse left to fester under a heat lamp. He could almost taste it, the metallic tang that mingled with the smell of dust and decay.

A quick application of Biomancy dampened his sense of smell and suppressed his body's reflexive reactions to the stench. It was a scent he was becoming all too familiar with, but its sheer, concentrated potency here was on another level.

When his eyes finally adjusted, he understood why.

He was standing in a supermarket. Or rather, a place that wore the guise of a supermarket over a body of pure, unadulterated nightmare. The layout was instantly, hideously familiar: a wide entrance area leading to long, parallel aisles under the flat, even glare of fluorescent lights that hummed with a frantic, insectile buzz. To his left, a solid wall of what looked like chitinous, dried flesh marked the boundary of the building. On his right, however, the aisles, with their flickering overhead signs, stretched on into an oppressive, hazy darkness, seemingly forever. Just like the bus depot.

The entrance area itself was a grotesque parody of retail. Where towering pyramids of beer crates or promotional soft drinks should have been, there were instead neatly stacked columns of skulls, their empty sockets staring out. Some were bleached white, others were stained a dark, rusty brown. They were arranged with a merchandiser's precision, forming a grim welcome display.

There were no magazines or packets of crisps or sweets on the shelves. The products on offer aimed for a different theme.

Jars filled with cloudy, formaldehyde-like liquid in which eyeballs and severed fingers floated. Trays of glistening, freshly harvested organs laid out on beds of what looked suspiciously like human hair. Ropes of intestines coiled like sausages. And above it all, jaunty, brightly coloured signs proclaimed 'SPECTRAL OFFER!', 'DEATH! 95% OFF!', and 'DIE ONE GET ONE FREE!'.

In the centre of the wide linoleum floor, a massive, sprawling bloodstain, still wet and glistening under the harsh lights, spread out like a spilled sea of wine. Standing proudly in the middle of the viscous puddle was a bright yellow 'CAUTION WET FLOOR' sign, itself half-splattered with gore, the black silhouette of a slipping man almost obscured by a smear of crimson.

John's gaze lifted, tracing the long, numbered aisles. The signs hanging above them completed the parody. 'FRESH MEAT' had been replaced with 'HUMAN MEAT'. 'DAIRY & EGGS' now read 'BILE & EGGSACS'. 'HOUSEHOLD CLEANING' was twisted into 'BODY DISPOSAL'. 'FROZEN FOODS' had become 'FROZEN SOULS'. Blood was everywhere. It was caked and dry on the shelves, smeared across the floors, dripping in thick, slow drops from the ceiling panels, leaving little constellations of red on the cracked linoleum tiles.

A tannoy system crackled to life intermittently, playing a distorted, upbeat jingle that sounded like it had been composed with the raw material of human suffering—stretched screams formed the melody, ragged groans provided the bassline, and the percussion was a wet, rhythmic tearing of flesh. The signal was poor, cutting in and out, the horrific music blending with the constant, aggressive hum of the fluorescent lights and the faint, intermittent dings of a bunch of checkout tills somewhere in the unseen distance.

He stood there for what felt like a long time, just taking it all in. Another person, a person from before the world ended, would have screamed. They would have retched, their mind shattering under the sheer, calculated horror of it all. John, however, felt a different, far more insidious emotion creeping through him: a profound and soul-deep weariness.

He wasn't horrified. He wasn't even particularly disgusted, though he knew he should have been. He was just tired. So incredibly, bone-achingly tired of this kind of shit.

The endless parade of abominations and surreal, rule-bound pocket dimensions had all served to sand down the sharp edges of his shock, leaving behind a dull, smooth surface of utter desensitisation. What should have been a mind-breaking vista of terror had become just another Tuesday in the apocalypse. It was another elaborate, grotesque set piece designed by whatever sadistic intelligence was running this whole shitshow. The only thing it managed to inspire in him was a deep, bitter sigh.

The sheer, bloody-minded effort of it all was what got to him. The creativity. The commitment to the theme. Somebody—or something—somewhere, had actually sat down and designed this place. They'd thought about the parody signs, the product placement, the wet floor sign. They'd meticulously crafted this experience, and for what? To what end? It felt less like a genuine hellscape and more like a teenager's edgy art project given an infinite budget and a complete lack of taste.

His shoulders slumped. The weight of the last few days, of every fight, every near-death experience, every forced piece of cringeworthy bravado, settled on him like a physical cloak. The adrenaline from the last battle had long since faded, leaving behind the familiar ache of fatigue that went deeper than his muscles and couldn't be solved by a thirty-minute Rest.

A wet, retching sound from behind him signalled the arrival of the others.

He didn't need to turn to know who it was, but did anyway. Chester stumbled through the portal, his face pale as a sheet, and immediately doubled over, hands on his knees, his body wracked with dry heaves. The stench had hit him full force, and his stomach was rebelling violently.

Doug was next, and his reaction was a low, hollow chuckle that held no humour at all. He took a few steps forward, his gaze sweeping across the scene, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. "Well," he rumbled, his voice flat. "Not a subtle one, is it?"

Lily appeared a moment later, her breath catching the moment she emerged. Her hands flew to her mouth. She started breathing heavily with short, sharp pants that threatened to tip into hyperventilation. But then, she seemed to catch herself. Her shoulders squared. She took a long, shuddering breath, then another, slower one. She began whispering to herself, a quiet, repetitive mantra that was too low for John to make out, her own personal anchor in the storm of grotesquerie.

It was Jade who had it the worst.

She took a single steps, and then she froze. Her head was tilted slightly, her gaze locked not on the piles of skulls or the shelves of viscera, but on the massive bloodstain and the mocking yellow sign that stood within it.

John watched her in the reflection of a smeared glass refrigerator door. Her entire body had gone rigid. A faint, almost imperceptible tremor started in her hands and spread through her arms, up to her shoulders. Her breathing stopped. He could see the haunted look in her eyes, even from a distance. She didn't make a sound, her silence more profound and terrible than Chester's retching or Lily's harsh breaths.

"Right," Doug said, his voice pulling John's attention away from Jade's silent breakdown. The old man had recovered his composure, his expression settling into one of grim analysis. He gestured towards the aisles. "So, another game. Another set of stupid rules."

"Looks that way," John said, his voice rough. He cleared his throat. "This place… it feels like it's trying too hard."

"That's one way of putting it," Lily said, her voice shaky but controlled. She had her crossbow in hand, though it wasn't aimed at anything. It was a comfort object now, a piece of solid reality to hold onto. "So, what's the play here? We just walk down the aisles and kill whatever jumps out at us?"

Doug pointed at the ground, his finger steady. "Look there. The floor."

Stolen novel; please report.

John followed his gaze. He hadn't noticed it before, too distracted by the larger, more obvious horrors. A trail. Two parallel, smeared lines of dark, coagulated blood started near the entrance, leading directly into the first aisle on the far left. It looked for all the world like something heavy and bleeding had been dragged.

"It goes down the first aisle," Lily observed, her voice gaining a harder edge. She took a few cautious steps forward, her eyes tracing the path. "Then… yeah, look. It comes back up the second one. Then down the third."

"A path," John stated. "Showing us the way we're meant to go, I guess."

"Just like the buses," Chester managed to choke out, finally straightening up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his glove, his face still a sickly green. "Hopping from one to the next. They're forcing us down a set route."

"And if we try to just walk along the main part, past the ends of the aisles?" Lily asked rhetorically; she undoubtedly already knew the answer.

"It'll probably go on forever," John finished. "A loop. This place wants us to play its game."

He looked over at Jade. She hadn't moved. Her haunted gaze was still fixed on that wet floor sign, her body trembling. She was a million miles away, trapped in a memory this place had so cruelly resurrected.

"She's not going to be much help like this," Doug muttered, his voice low, laced with a gruff concern.

John knew he was right. But there was nothing they could do for her right now. All they could do was move forward, and hope she would eventually follow.

He turned his back on her, facing the first bloody aisle. The buzzing of the lights seemed to grow louder, more insistent.

"No choice, then," he said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.

A part of him knew he could defy the portal world's design, find a way to do whatever the fuck he wanted. He had Teleport. He had Flash Step. He had Draconic Wings and Geomancy and a dozen other abilities that probably could have let him bypass all this nonsense entirely and cut straight to the heart of the place.

But he didn't want to, right now.

"We go in."

He didn't wait for a reply. John took a deep breath, the foul air a strange sort of stimulant, and stepped over the threshold into the first aisle, his boots squelching softly on the blood-slicked linoleum. The weariness that had settled deep in his bones was still there, but something else was stirring on top of it now. A dark, ugly anticipation. A knot of coiled energy that tightened with every step.

He'd had a bad few days. A very, very bad few days. He'd been hunted, manipulated, beaten, and forced to perform for the amusement of a faceless system. He'd watched people die. He'd felt his own control slip, his own sanity fray at the edges. And as he walked deeper into this monument to theatrical sadism, he found a part of himself, a part he wasn't proud of, was actually starting to look forward to what came next. He needed an outlet. He needed something to hit, something to break, something to pour all his frustration and rage into without a hint of guilt or moral ambiguity. This place, in all its grotesque absurdity, seemed tailor-made to provide it.

He kept his pace steady, his eyes scanning ahead, ignoring the macabre displays on either side of him. Out of the corner of his eye, he registered shelves stacked with what looked like human heads, each one shrink-wrapped on a styrofoam tray like a piece of fruit. Another shelf was dedicated entirely to hands, arranged by size. He tuned it all out. It was just noise, set-dressing, a distraction from the real purpose of this place. His senses were peeled, every nerve ending tingling, waiting for the inevitable ambush. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides.

They followed the bloody trail down the length of the first aisle, the silence broken only by the squelching of their footsteps and the distant, maddening jingle from the tannoy. At the end, they rounded the corner into the second aisle, the trail continuing its obvious path. Then the third. The fourth. Nothing happened. The tension mounted with every empty corridor, every silent turn. It was a classic trick, drawing out the suspense until the prey was wound so tight they were ready to snap.

It was in the fifth aisle that they found something.

Halfway down, an ostensibly human figure stood side-on to them. It wore a stained crimson, once-orange uniform of an employee, complete with a little name badge that was too smeared with blood to read. Wiry, greasy black hair sat like a mop atop its pale head. Its skin looked like wax in the process of melting.

It was hunched over, its movements jerky and unnatural, like a poorly operated marionette. With a wet, sloppy squelch, it would reach into a large metal shopping basket on the floor, pull out a dripping chunk of gory meat, and slap it onto the shelf. Every movement was accompanied by the sound of popping joints and wet, tearing sinew.

John's eyes narrowed. He activated Soul Vision. The figure before him resolved into a shimmering, sickly green aura. A monster, if that hadn't been obvious already. It was contorted into a vaguely humanoid shape, its limbs bent at impossible angles to mimic a human form, but it was a sham. A puppet put here for the show. Just like the bus depot.

That was all he needed to see. The knot of energy that had been coiling finally snapped.

He didn't say a word. He didn't give a signal. A sound that was half-snarl, half-warcry ripped from his throat as he launched himself forward. Accelerate. The world blurred into a tunnel, the grotesque aisle becoming a smear of red and brown. In the fraction of a second it took him to cross the distance, he activated his Aurora Blade, a flash of green and red and purple briefly overwhelming the fluorescents.

The creature was turning, its parody of a human face registering a blank expression as John's Aurora Blade sliced through its shoulder and deep into its chest. The attack wasn't meant to kill, only to shatter the illusion and expose the real enemy.

There was a tearing sound, and the human disguise ripped apart like wet paper, practically flying off the monster from the force of John's attack. The bug unfolded, its limbs snapping and elongating, its torso swelling. What had looked like a man a second ago was now a giant cockroach, easily seven feet tall, its chitinous shell a slick, oily black. It let out a chittering screech, its multifaceted eyes locking onto John.

John didn't even look at his blade as he let it dissolve back into motes of light. He didn't need it. This wasn't about efficiency. This was personal.

The cockroach lunged, its serrated forelimbs scything through the air. John met it head-on. He ducked under the first clumsy swipe, his enhanced reflexes from Level 7 Agility and Accelerate making the monster seem pathetically sluggish, and drove his fist deep into its soft, pulsating underbelly. The impact was like punching a side of wet meat. Ichor and gore splattered across his arm and the floor.

And then John lost himself.

The world narrowed to the slick, black shell of the monster in front of him. The sounds of the supermarket, the buzzing lights, the screams in the tannoy, they all faded away, replaced by the thundering roar of blood in his ears. There was no strategy, no technique. There was only a red haze of pure, unadulterated rage. He was a storm of violence, a whirlwind of fists and fury.

He drove an uppercut into the monster's clicking mandibles, cracking them with a sharp, satisfying snap. He grabbed one of its flailing limbs, twisted it until the joint popped with a wet crunch, and used the leverage to slam the creature's body into the metal shelving. Jars of eyeballs and organs rained down around them, shattering on the floor in a shower of glass and gore. The cockroach thrashed, trying to bring its remaining limbs to bear, but John was too close, a relentless engine of destruction inside its guard.

His fists rose and fell in a brutal, constant rhythm. Each blow was fuelled by a different frustration as the foul creature became the living embodiment of everything that had gone wrong in his life in the last week. At a certain point, he was barely seeing the cockroach itself at all, imagining a nebulous being that represented the fuckers behind all this.

His fist shattered a section of its chitinous head.

His elbow drove into its multifaceted eye, rupturing it in a spray of black fluid.

He slammed its head into the linoleum floor, again and again, the impacts echoing in the suddenly silent aisle.

He didn't stop. He couldn't stop. He was barely aware of his own actions, his body moving on pure, primal instinct. He was hitting, and breaking, and destroying, and with every blow, a tiny bit of the pressure inside him was released, a minute turn of the valve. It was a desperate, ugly, but profoundly satisfying catharsis.

He only came back to himself when there was nothing left to hit. His fists were slick with the monster's black blood, his knuckles raw. He was breathing in deep, ragged gasps, his entire body trembling with adrenaline. Below him was nothing more than a smear on the linoleum. A grotesque ruin of shattered shell and pulped flesh, already beginning to shimmer and dissolve, the portal world cleaning up its mess.

Slowly, his head came up. The red haze receded, and the sounds of the supermarket came rushing back in. He saw the others. They were standing at the end of the aisle, watching him. Chester looked like he was about to be sick again, his face pale and eyes wide. Lily's expression was one of deep, undisguised concern. Doug's was harder to read, a grim, stony set to his jaw, but there was worry in his eyes.

And then there was Jade. She was no longer staring into the distance. Her focus was sharp, her haunted expression replaced with something cold and hard and focused. She had watched his entire savage outburst, and there was no fear in her eyes. Only a flicker of something that looked disturbingly like understanding.

It was she who broke the silence, her voice quiet but carrying a surprising weight in the echoing space.

"Leave the next one for me."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.