Nikita struck the creature with such force that the air exploded in a thunderous boom.
Bakunin was hurled violently across the entire structure. Its body was slammed against the wreckage and debris like nothing more than a sack of meat. Meat that, along with crooked bones, rotted teeth, and putrid entrails, was flung in every direction, staining everything within reach in blood and mucus.
And Nikita was already on top of it. Already lunging at the beast. His agility had become something imperceptible. With every small movement he seemed to split the air itself, carving brief vacuums into it and producing sharp, concussive booms whose only purpose was to intimidate and threaten.
And they worked.
But Bakunin had no time to defend itself. What little remained of its body was already being rapidly shredded and torn apart by the soldier, who kept hurling his prey left and right, torturing it in the most abject ways imaginable.
Nikita landed on top of the creature and began squeezing its throat as hard as he could. Bone, along with tonsils and vocal cords, soaked in red, didn't take long to come loose. The beast was pinned to the floor, every limb broken and pulped in a sea of blood, unable to move or react. Unable even to scream.
Nikita didn't stop. Not even then. What followed were beatings, punches, clawing, quartering. Each one more violent than the last. Each one drawing more blood, digging deeper into the flesh, carving dark and yielding cavities whose pulsing walls warmed the iron of the soldier's hands. Bakunin, however, managed to retaliate. Without warning, its tail drove violently through Nikita's torso. Bakunin was entering something close to a transitional state. Its skin no longer simply seemed impossible, in its impossibility, it had become artificial, rubbery. It moved in ways it was never meant to move.
It had no form. It was not remotely describable. Meanwhile, the soldier found himself practically paralyzed, his body once again run through by those seemingly metallic spines, dripping, stained red, while the rest of him was already being destroyed from within by tentacles that sliced through everything like razors.
Nikita screamed in pain.
He kept screaming as he fought back against his tormentor, crushing the parasitic entities inside him and obliterating every last trace of the Ijo's flesh, which never stopped attacking.
And so the two monsters destroyed each other. When Bakunin attacked, Nikita counter-attacked twice as hard. Then four times as hard. Then eight. And the flesh had already been giving way long before.
I am not a person. I am the war.
This was the price to be paid. A sin for which only the blood of saints had to be shed to cancel them all out. An act of sick love, to make it happy. To make it feel special.
But I didn't feel happy. Much less special. Instead, I was sick.
In there, I abandon everything. I never know if I'll get it back, but I have to atone for my guilt, for myself, so that I can do it again and forever, and never feel sick again.
In there, I pray. Nothing is heard. Not even I can hear myself.
May the Lord hear my pitiful cries and give me the strength and the will to keep dying in this nonexistent hell.
Because I don't want to live anymore. I think it all the time. But they force me to. The first one is me. The problem is that I am not Me, but me. me wants Me to live, and Me has to stop itself from falling apart, so that me can keep being Me and me at the same time.
But neither of them ever asks what I want to be. I'll say it again: I don't want to be. They force me. They torture me. They've drained every drop of blood I had, then filled me back up and emptied me again. And this has been going on for a long time.
I don't know if this is fine. I never ask. I don't have time for it. I have so many answers to questions I don't even understand. But I answer well, and that terrifies me. It disgusts me. Even if I can't feel it. Maybe that's not even what they want.
They don't want me to do anything but fight and kill. I don't know who I'm fighting. But they impose it on me. They even gamble on the outcome of both our lives. I know that's how it is. But I can't resist.
I can't look. I can only do. Do what I always do.
Whatever that is.
Nikita seized what was now nothing more than a distant memory of Bakunin's jaw.
He tore it from the body like paper.
Immediately after, his head began to shake.
…10 SECONDS…
The soldier's jaws split open like a strongbox thrown wide. His teeth began emerging in a grotesque eruption, tearing through both flesh and iron beneath a chorus of bone-deep, sickening sounds, as thick black smoke began pouring from his throat.
As the man roared like a madman, the creature slowly came apart. The head was the first thing to go. Its brain matter was immediately ground apart by the soldier's teeth in a horrible, relentless chewing, the structure crumbling like butter, but with a soft, rubbery give, mixed in with eyes and muscle, cut through by the crunch of skull fragments and bone chips. Next came the chest. The soldier's fingers pried the torso open with obscene ease. The ribcage shattered immediately, and the lungs were ripped free and devoured, along with whatever else Nikita chose to desecrate.
And then it all seemed to begin again. The creature was opened and split at every point still intact. Its attempts to defend itself were useless. The soldier didn't appear to be affected in the slightest by the blows, weak and barely landing.
Bakunin struggled to break free, but Nikita was so utterly dominant that the outcome was never in doubt.
It was only a matter of seconds. Eight, to be precise.
By that point, Bakunin had already stopped breathing.
Only faint spasms remained, likely nerve stimulation rather than any genuine suffering. The muscles, the few the soldier could still make out, contracted and then immediately relaxed, forming small, scattered clumps. Something still moved, a finger, perhaps, plucking at the air, the sharpened phalanx twitching quickly at first, then slowing to a halt over a few last moments. Beyond that, it was almost a miracle anything remained of that monster at all.
Because even so, Nikita kept massacring what was left, flesh and bone, each blow more brutal than the last.
Of Bakunin's carcass, what remained was already pulp. The soldier was now close to striking the floor itself, driving punches so fast and so powerful they gouged deep craters into it, the surface damp and smeared with offal, most of it reduced to a wet, soft paste.
…5 SECONDS…
Hansen threw himself onto Nikita with a frenzy so total that the soldier lost control of the situation almost instantly, finding himself pinned beneath the man's grip. Hansen's serrated jaws dripped with blood, and as he screamed into Nikita's face he regurgitated chunks of flesh and freshly torn viscera. While he did this, he had pinned Nikita's limbs to the ground and was driving his fingers into the soldier's forearm, boring through it in a way that turned the stomach, cracking the iron first, then punching through skin and bone as though neither existed.
Hansen's demonic screams rang through Nikita like a bell. His time was almost up.
…3 SECONDS…
Hansen began to massacre his comrade. He opened with heavy punches to the abdomen and stomach. Each time he raised his arms and loaded the blow, he left craters that sprayed blood and viscera in every direction. The heart was the first to burst. Then the lungs. Then the ribcage. Then the spine. Even so, Nikita kept resisting, straining every last fiber of flesh that desperately tried to knit itself back together, to keep pumping blood, keep drawing air, keep standing against the raw brutality of yet another monster.
…2 SECONDS…
Seizing the moment as Hansen wound up for what promised to be the most devastating blow yet, Nikita managed to throw himself at the man.
He seized him by the throat, roaring with a fury packed full of hatred and frustration, of irritation so intense and so deep it seemed like it had been held back for a long, long time. That hatred was what made the grip so crushing, so relentless. His fingers had already broken the skin, the thumb going in first. In that instant, feeling what he thought was his neck snapping, Hansen stopped roaring. He let out only a low, rattling breath.
Nikita hadn't snapped his neck. But his fingers had reached the bone beneath.
…1 SECOND…
The force he drove into slamming Hansen's head into the floor with tremendous power shattered not only the cerebellum, obliterating the entire back of the skull, which exploded into a pool of blood the moment it made contact with the ground, but also the pelvis, which fractured with a sharp snap from the grotesque backward bend of the torso. The floor itself gave way beneath them, cracking open into a massive void and sending enormous clouds of dust and debris into the air.
…0 SECONDS…
Before everything went dark, Nikita was already standing in triumph, releasing his final, enormous roar into the sky, reverberating through the air like a high, piercing note in a sealed and empty room.
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