The night was silent, but someone was nervously chewing their nails.
After waking up, Alen finally brought the fur ball inside his room, glancing both ways down the hallway to make sure no one saw him. Only then did he quietly shut the door behind him.
He placed the fur ball on the bed and pulled up a chair, sitting down with all the seriousness of a soldier conducting an interrogation. His eyes narrowed.
"You're an Emo," Alen declared, nodding to himself with all the solemn certainty of a judge pronouncing a verdict. "But... you're not mine."
A quiet crack echoed through his chest. His heart had just broken—but none of it showed on his face. His expression remained unreadable, stoic.
"Well then," he sighed, lazily propping his chin on his palm while reaching out to poke the creature on its forehead, "I have no choice but to hand you over to the police station tomorrow. I'm sure your master must be worried sick about you."
Even as he said it, Alen's gaze didn't waver. He stared at the creature with unwavering focus. For a fleeting second, a thought tried to sneak into his mind—What if I kept him?—but he pushed it away. Possession of an unregistered Emo was a capital offense. No trial. No mercy.
"I wish... I had something cute like you," Alen murmured under his breath, his voice raw for just a second.
"But anyway, you should sleep now," he said, clearing his throat and gently pushing the creature to one side of the bed. He lay down next to it, facing toward the little thing. "Tomorrow, you'll meet your real master."
Suddenly—
"Momo!"
The creature leapt and landed squarely on Alen's face like a boulder disguised as a pillow.
"GRAH—!"
The pain bloomed instantly across his cheeks and forehead as he jolted upright, sending the creature tumbling into his lap. It stared up at him, still smiling, its tiny body wiggling with glee as if Alen's pain was the funniest thing it had seen all day.
Alen groaned.
He was already exhausted from endless missions, temporal disruptions, and bureaucratic nightmares. The last thing he needed was a living sugar rush bouncing around his room at dawn.
He picked the creature up with both hands and set it gently on the floor.
"You sleep here. And don't. Disturb. Me." He emphasized every word, yawning as he tucked himself back into the bed and turned his back toward it.
WHUMP.
"Momo!"
This time, the creature landed right on top of him again, with the force of a falling sack of potatoes.
Alen sat up, glaring at the hyperactive furball now resting in his arms like a satisfied cat.
"Why the hell are you so full of energy before sunrise?! We still have hours left to sleep, and I'm not spending them chasing around a damn puffball!"
In a burst of desperation, he grabbed a piece of string and tied the creature's leg, securing it to the chair like a teacher punishing a hyperactive student. He stared at it sternly, brows furrowed like a disappointed professor.
The creature's eyes instantly welled up into giant, glimmering puppy-dog pools, shimmering like stars.
But Alen had faced death, time fractures, and interrogation rooms filled with shadows. His immunity to cuteness was ironclad.
"Sleep. You're meeting your master tomorrow. Let me sleep too."
He threw a blanket over the creature like a tarp over a noisy machine and crawled back under his own covers. His body ached in ways he couldn't understand, every muscle humming with fatigue, as if something deeper than exhaustion was pulling at his limbs.
He didn't dwell on it. Sleep came fast.
Far from Alen's small, quiet room… hidden deep beneath the earth, beneath layers of stone and silence… was a secret research facility.
A monstrous lab, buried and forgotten by the world above.
Glass tubes lined the long, steel corridors—each one holding a floating Emo, suspended in liquid, their bodies connected to a mess of wires and tubes that pulsed faintly with light. The soft humming of machines was constant, broken only by the hiss of pressurized air and the occasional mechanical movement of robots rolling across the polished floor.
Men and women in pristine white coats moved through the space like ghosts, their faces hidden behind sterile masks. They worked silently, efficiently—each knowing that failure was not tolerated.
Farther inside, past reinforced doors and biometric scanners, was a room where no technician dared linger.
A dark chamber, cold and oppressive, where even the shadows seemed alive. The only illumination came from the faint orange glow of vintage ceiling lamps, casting long, flickering beams over the floor. Everything else was drowned in shade.
And in the center of that darkness sat a man.
He lounged in a luxurious chair, one leg crossed over the other, holding a half-full glass of crimson wine. The dim light revealed nothing of his face—only the glint of his polished shoes and the faint shimmer of a blade that gleamed like a crescent moon behind him.
His voice sliced through the silence.
"Did you find it?"
It was smooth, yet cold—calculated, like the edge of a surgeon's scalpel.
Before him stood a trembling man, head bowed, sweat dripping despite the freezing temperature of the room.
"We… we tried to catch him," the man stammered, "but he escaped into a different universe. We couldn't track him. I-I think he realized we were watching, and removed all the trackers—"
SCHLK.
The sound was wet and immediate.
Before the man could finish, a blade lashed out—not a traditional sword, but one affixed to a writhing, tentacle-like limb. In a flash, the speaker's head tumbled to the floor, rolling to the side with a hollow thud. Blood gushed like a broken dam, its sickening warmth filling the room with a metallic tang.
A few drops reached the polished shoes.
The others in the room froze, their bodies stiff as stone, breathing shallow. Terror clutched their spines like a cold hand.
The man in the shadows didn't move. He sipped his wine calmly.
"Find him," he said, his voice as indifferent as a passing breeze. "And contact 'Him.' Tell him I want a meeting."
Behind him, the darkness stirred.
Crescent-shaped blades extended from dozens of human-like tentacles—slithering, hissing, twitching. And then—
Swish.
A single, merciless motion.
Every other head in the room dropped to the floor like puppets whose strings had been cut. Their blood pooled beneath the man's chair, soaking into the seams between marble tiles. One droplet splashed against the tip of his shoe.
A groan echoed from behind him.
"Cleg… clehh…"
A monstrous creature slithered out from the shadows—something not quite alive, not quite dead. Its grotesque body crawled over the corpses, feasting on torn flesh and snapping bones with wet, crunching sounds that filled the room like a butcher's market.
The sole survivor stood shaking, hands clenched between his thighs, struggling not to breathe.
But then… it happened.
The wet sound of dripping hit the floor.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Urine leaked from the man's hands and trousers, trailing down toward the polished shoes.
The man in the shadows sighed.
He gently set his wine glass on the side table and rose to his feet.
"Useless."
Thud.
With that single word, the man's head joined the others on the marble floor. His body, still trembling, still urinating, collapsed in a pitiful heap.
Behind him, the feasting intensified—the slashing, the tearing, the splitting of flesh and bone filling the chamber with a grotesque rhythm of death.
"Why are you always so hungry?"
The man in the shadows didn't look back. He stepped over the blood and bodies like they were no more than spilled wine, and walked out.
Morning had arrived....
As always, Alen was dead to the world, sprawled across his bed like someone who hadn't slept in decades. One leg dangled off the edge like a limp vine, swaying slightly with each breath.
RING RING RING RING
The sharp shrill of the alarm filled the room like an air raid siren—but Alen didn't flinch. Not even a twitch. With robotic instinct, he reached out to swat at the sound, trying to silence it without even opening his eyes.
His hand missed.
Again.
And again.
RING RING RING RING
Alen frowned in his sleep, dragging himself upright while rubbing his face with a groggy hand.
"What the hell…?" he muttered, squinting blearily through half-lidded eyes.
But what greeted him next… defied comprehension.
"…What the actual hell."
His voice dropped, flat and stunned, as both his hands slid down his face in disbelief.
His room looked like it had hosted the Third World War, followed by a demolition derby, and ended with a riot led by demonic raccoons.
His chair—his favorite chair—was missing a leg and had bite marks etched deep into the wood. One arm was half-chewed like a dog's toy.
His beloved blanket? Shredded beyond recognition. The same blanket he had hugged like a sacred relic last night now looked like streamers used at a particularly wild frat party.
The dishes were shattered. Wall paint had been scraped off. Claw marks gouged deep into the plaster, some even trailing up to the ceiling like a horror movie scene.
Alen stood in the middle of it all, frozen, hair disheveled, jaw slightly unhinged, eyes wide with shock. His fists gripped his scalp as the full weight of the destruction settled in.
"Wait… wait, wait, WAIT! At this rate, I'm going to get kicked out!" he barked.
His gaze scanned the carnage, then snapped with fiery intensity as realization hit him.
"…But who," he hissed, teeth grinding together, "was the MOTHERF#CKER who did this?!"
His energy surged like an active volcano on the brink of eruption. Flames danced behind his eyes as fury rose like lava in his chest.
And then—movement.
A slight rustle came from the left curtain. A soft shiver of fabric.
Alen's glare sharpened like a blade.
Someone—or something—was hiding behind it. Holding its breath. Trying to shrink away from his burning gaze.
He didn't move. Not yet.
But his voice, when it came next, was low and deadly.
"…I see you."