Wood Demon - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Unspeakable Act and the System’s Cold Comfort

The silence Muzan left behind was a vacuum, quickly filled by a roaring, all-consuming inferno in Jack’s belly. It wasn’t the familiar, almost comforting pang of skipped-lunch hunger he knew from his human life. This was a monstrous, alien craving, a gnawing abyss that clawed at his insides, demanding to be filled. It was a physical agony, twisting his guts into hot knots, sending waves of dizziness through his spinning head. His own saliva, thick and metallic, flooded his mouth.

“Okay, Jack, new diet plan,” he rasped, stumbling through the undergrowth, his legs moving with a jerky, desperate energy that wasn’t entirely his own. “The ‘Kibutsuji Cleanse.’ Step one: develop an unholy craving. Step two… Oh God, step two is people.” A choked, hysterical laugh escaped him. “This is fine. This is perfectly fine. Just a minor dietary adjustment. From Fritos to… folks.”

His heightened senses, a curious novelty moments ago, were now instruments of torture. Every scent in the forest was amplified, distorted, and reinterpreted through the lens of his demonic hunger. The rich, loamy smell of the earth was overlaid with the phantom scent of iron. The subtle musk of unseen animals became a maddening, almost-but-not-quite aroma of potential sustenance. He could hear the frantic thrum of tiny heartbeats in the undergrowth, the rustle of unseen wings, the distant gurgle of water – and each sound was a taunt, a reminder of the life force his body now screamed for.

He pressed his hands to his stomach, doubling over as another wave of agonizing hunger tore through him. “Come on, man,” he pleaded with his own rebellious biology, “can’t we just, like, find a really big, juicy deer? Or a particularly annoying flock of pigeons? I’m not picky! Well, I mean, I am picky, I don’t want to eat people, but you get the idea!” His voice was thin, reedy, already losing the battle against the rising tide of pure, animalistic need.

His human mind, the part of him that still recoiled in horror from Muzan’s edict, was rapidly losing ground. It was like trying to hold back a tsunami with a sieve. Thoughts fragmented, rationality dissolved. The vibrant, complex tapestry of his personality – his love for bad sci-fi, his crippling fear of public speaking, his tendency to make ill-timed jokes, his appreciation for a well-turned ankle or a witty remark – was being bleached, then shredded, by the singular, overwhelming imperative: FEED.

Then, a new scent cut through the cacophony of the forest. Warm. Salty. Impossibly, intoxicatingly rich. It was the smell of living, breathing human. It swamped his senses, eclipsing everything else, a siren song that promised an end to the torment in his belly. His head snapped up. His eyes, he dimly registered, felt different, pupils blown wide, a faint reddish glow reflecting the non-existent light.

Without conscious thought, his body moved. He wasn’t Jack anymore, not the wise-cracking, slightly awkward guy from Earth. He was a predator, sleek and silent, drawn by an irresistible scent, his human consciousness reduced to a tiny, horrified spectator trapped behind the eyes of a monster. He moved through the forest with an unnatural speed and grace he hadn’t possessed moments before, branches parting before him as if by magic, the forest floor barely registering his passage.

The scent led him to a small, isolated house nestled in a clearing. A faint, warm light spilled from a single window, a beacon of fragile domesticity in the vast, uncaring wilderness. Smoke curled lazily from its chimney. To the rapidly fading remnants of Jack’s humanity, it might have been a symbol of hope, of shelter. To the demon, it was a charnel house in waiting, a larder.

He didn’t knock. The flimsy wooden door splintered inwards with a single, contemptuous shove of his shoulder, the sound shockingly loud in the stillness of the night. The scene within was mundane, domestic. A family – a man, a woman, two small children – were gathered around a low table, a simple meal spread before them. They looked up, startled, their faces illuminated by the warm glow of an oil lamp, transitioning from surprise to confusion, then to dawning, abject terror as they saw him.

What they saw wasn’t Jack. It was a creature of nightmare. Tall, gaunt, eyes burning with a crimson light, fingernails elongated into wicked black talons, a low guttural snarl tearing from its throat. The air around him crackled with a palpable, menacing aura.

There was no thought, no hesitation, no remorse in the creature that was now in control. There was only the searing hunger and the overwhelming, biological imperative to sate it. The next few minutes were a blur of red-tinged savagery, a symphony of screams and tearing flesh, the coppery tang of blood thick in the air, on his tongue, hot and life-giving. He was a whirlwind of brutal efficiency, his newly acquired strength and speed used with devastating, instinctual precision. The man, attempting to defend his family with a flimsy wooden stool, was swatted aside like an insect, a sickening crunch marking his end. The woman’s pleas dissolved into a choked gurgle. The children…

The human part of Jack, the tiny, screaming spectator, tried to shut its eyes, to block out the sights, the sounds, the horrific, visceral sensations, but it couldn’t. It was trapped, forced to bear witness to its own body committing unspeakable atrocities. It was a unique, exquisite form of torture: to be aware, yet utterly powerless, as your hands become weapons, your mouth a maw, your very being a conduit for monstrous violence.

He drank. Deeply. Greedily. The warm, iron-rich liquid flooded his system, and the agonizing fire in his belly began to subside, replaced by a surge of raw, exhilarating power. Each mouthful, each life extinguished, sent a jolt of unnatural energy through him, mending the microscopic tears in his muscles, sharpening his already heightened senses further, thrumming through his veins like a potent drug. This was what Muzan had promised. This was the strength of a demon.

And then, as quickly as it had overwhelmed him, the demonic frenzy began to recede. The all-consuming hunger, now sated, loosened its iron grip on his psyche. The red haze tinging his vision slowly cleared. The guttural snarl died in his throat. The thrumming energy in his limbs settled into a less frantic, more contained hum.

He stood panting in the center of the small, devastated room. The oil lamp lay overturned, its flame extinguished, plunging the scene into a deeper gloom, illuminated only by the faint moonlight filtering through the shattered doorway. The coppery scent of blood was overpowering, cloying.

And Jack – the real Jack – began to surface.

He looked down at his hands. They were slick, glistening darkly in the dim light, coated in something viscous and crimson. His talons, still extended, were stained. He flexed them slowly, a wave of profound, bone-deep nausea washing over him. These weren’t his hands. Not anymore. These were the hands of a butcher. A monster.

His gaze drifted around the small room. The overturned table. The scattered remnants of a simple meal. The still, silent forms lying twisted on the wooden floorboards. A child’s wooden toy, a crudely carved bird, lay near one of the small bodies, splattered with the same dark liquid that coated his hands.

The full, crushing weight of his actions slammed into him like a physical blow. The memories, no longer filtered through the red haze of demonic hunger, but stark, clear, and horrifyingly detailed, played out in his mind’s eye. The screams. The terror in their eyes. The feeling of warm blood on his face, in his mouth.

“No,” he whispered, his voice a ragged, broken thing. “Oh, God, no. What… what have I done?”

Revulsion, so powerful it made him gag, rose in his throat. He stumbled back, away from the carnage, his legs shaking violently. He tripped over something – the man’s outstretched arm – and fell heavily to his knees. He didn’t get up. He couldn’t. He was paralyzed by a self-loathing so profound, so absolute, that it threatened to consume him entirely.

He had killed them. He had slaughtered an innocent family. He had drunk their blood. He, Jack, the guy who once rescued a baby bird that fell from its nest and cried when it didn’t make it, had become this. A monster. A butcher. Everything Muzan had said he was. Everything he had desperately, pathetically tried to deny.

Tears, hot and stinging, welled in his eyes, tracing clean paths through the grime and blood on his cheeks. They weren’t tears of demonic power, or hunger, or rage. They were human tears. Tears of grief, of remorse, of utter, soul-crushing despair. He retched, but nothing came up. His stomach, so recently sated, roiled with a purely psychological sickness.

“I’m a monster,” he choked out, the words tasting like ash and blood. “A goddamn monster.” He curled in on himself, his body wracked with violent shudders, the image of the small, blood-splattered wooden bird burning itself into his retinas. The jokes, the flippancy, the carefully constructed persona of easy-going charm – all of it was stripped away, revealing the raw, bleeding wound of his shattered humanity. There was no dark humor to be found here, no witty observation to deflect the horror. This was a bedrock of pure, unadulterated agony.

It was in this moment of profound, abject despair, as he knelt amidst the ruin of his own making, that a sound, alien and incongruous, chimed softly in his mind. It was a clear, almost musical tone, like a notification from a high-end smartphone, utterly out of place in the blood-soaked, fire-lit horror of his current reality.

Ding.

Jack flinched, his head snapping up, eyes darting wildly around the darkened room. Was he hallucinating now? Was this another layer to his personal hell?

Then, something shimmered into existence before his eyes. A translucent, rectangular screen, glowing with a soft, ethereal blue light, hovered in the air about three feet in front of him. It was filled with stark white text, arranged in neat, clinical lines.

His breath caught in his throat. It looked… it looked like a status screen. From a video game.

His mind, already reeling from trauma and self-loathing, struggled to process this new, bizarre intrusion. He stared at it, uncomprehending, for a long moment. Then, slowly, agonizingly, his eyes focused on the words.

—

Demon: Jack

Level: 6 (37%)

Status: Lowest Rank Demon

Ability: Accelerated Growth Rate, Biological Absorption, Enhanced Senses, Flesh Manipulation, Information Sharing, Strong, Unlimited Stamina, Unlimited Endurance, Menacing Aura, Regeneration, Immortality, Disease Immunity, Supernatural Blood.

Blood Demon Art: Plant

Sunlight Resistance: 0%

Wisteria Resistance: 0%

—

His gaze flickered over the list, his brain numbly registering words without truly absorbing their meaning. Accelerated Growth Rate… Biological Absorption… Flesh Manipulation… It sounded like the skill tree for some overpowered, edgy video game character. Then his eyes snagged on a few key lines, lines that resonated with the cold, hard dread that was already consuming him.

`Demon: Jack.` There it was. Clinical. Factual. His new, horrifying job title.

`Status: Lowest Rank Demon.` “Well, that’s… humbling,” a tiny, broken part of his brain whispered, a flicker of his old self trying to find humor in the abyss. “Can’t even be a good monster. Bottom of the demonic barrel. Great.” The thought died instantly, crushed by the sheer weight of his despair.

`Blood Demon Art: Plant.` Plant? What the hell did that even mean? Could he make killer daisies? Aggressive shrubbery? It was so absurd, so tonally dissonant with the carnage surrounding him, that it almost triggered another wave of hysterical laughter, or perhaps tears.

Then, his eyes fell upon the last two lines, and a fresh wave of cold dread washed over him, more potent than any guilt.

`Sunlight Resistance: 0%`

`Wisteria Resistance: 0%`

Zero percent. Absolutely no defense. These weren’t just game stats. These were vulnerabilities. These were the ways he, this new monstrous Jack, could be killed. The final, undeniable confirmation of his demonic nature, delivered with the cold, impersonal efficiency of a software program.

He stared at the glowing blue screen, at the neatly categorized list of his monstrous attributes and fatal weaknesses. He was too distraught, too shattered, to process it fully, to delve into the implications of each ability, each percentage. All he could truly register was the stark, undeniable confirmation: Demon. And the terrifying, absolute certainty of his vulnerability to things that had never mattered to him before.

The System. It offered no comfort, no explanation, no solace. Just a cold, detached summary of his damnation. It was, perhaps, the cruelest joke of all in this night of unending horrors. His new life, or unlife, came with a character sheet.