(POV – Protagonist)
“Did you guys... hear that too?” Rupert asked quietly, his expression stiff as he tilted his head slightly, as if trying to catch the sound again.
His eyes swept over the darkness surrounding us, scanning every corner with care, as though he expected sothing to erge from the shadows at any second. Not that he would actually be able to see anything in there, but I chose not to comnt.
I was focused on the sound, or rather, on whatever was producing it. With each passing second, the footsteps grew slower, more spaced out, and yet, terrifyingly closer to where we stood. The silence between one step and the next seed to stretch on. Even so, I still had no idea what exactly was coming toward us.
“Are you sure you’re not hearing things?” Victor asked, casting a suspicious glance around: “This place might be exerting so kind of ntal influence on us” he added, his skeptical tone clashing with the obvious tension in his shoulders.
I kept concentrating. Every ti the sound of footsteps appeared from a different direction, I turned my body toward it, my gelatinously flexible form following the motion, ready to react. But just as I prepared to act, the noise dissolved into the air, only to reappear seconds later from another distant corner.
There was no pattern, no recognizable logic. The footsteps appeared and vanished chaotically, as if whatever it was were deliberately provoking . The only thing I was certain of was that it was getting closer... and that with every repetition, the distance between us was shrinking.
“No...” Arthur murmured suddenly, drawing the attention of Victor and Rupert, who were closest to him. With a careful motion, he adjusted the monocle over his eye as if searching for sharper focus, then leaned forward slightly. In a low voice, almost a whisper heavy with unease, he added: “Rupert is right... there’s definitely sothing here besides us”
Arthur leaned in a bit more, directing his gaze in the sa direction as mine as he spoke, perhaps slightly above where I imagined the thing to be. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, he could see from there, but judging by the tension etched on his face, it clearly wasn’t the anomaly itself.
The footsteps echoed again, now closer than before, probably just a few ters beyond the reach of the faint light my eyes could project. I narrowed my gaze and forced my focus, trying to pull sothing out of the darkness ahead.
Despite having a very unique way of seeing, it had beco practically useless since we arrived here. If I shifted my focus too far from the central point where my body was, I couldn’t make out anything at all.
The darkness swallowed everything. After all, I could only see what my eyes directly reached, and without light reflecting ahead, the world around collapsed into an oppressive void.
At so point, the footsteps grew loud enough to be impossible to ignore. The reaction team mbers turned almost simultaneously toward the direction one of them had echoed from, a purely instinctive response, raising and aiming their weapons.
Then the footsteps stopped. The silence stretched on for several unbearable seconds, heavy enough to make every breath sound too loud. And then, suddenly, the footsteps echoed behind us.
One by one, we turned toward the sound. And, surprisingly... or perhaps not, there was sothing there. However, it was far from the terrifying, fire-breathing, three-headed monster dripping acid from its jaws that we had imagined.
“What the hell...?” Rupert muttered, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the supposed “Anomaly” the source of that strange sound in the darkness.
Arthur and Victor, along with the mbers of the anomaly response team, wore expressions very similar to Rupert’s: a mix of disbelief and silent caution.
No one said a word, which wasn’t surprising. Given the circumstances, any other reaction would have felt strange. The entire situation was far too absurd to prompt imdiate responses.
I didn’t know exactly what we expected to erge from the darkness, but it definitely wasn’t a human. And yet, that was exactly what appeared: a man with dark, slightly curly hair, falling carelessly over his forehead.
His eyes, just as dark, observed the surroundings with calculated attention. A pair of glasses rested on his face, giving him an almost intellectual air, one that felt oddly out of place, especially when contrasted with his strangely disheveled clothes, as if he’d been dragged out of another place... or another reality.
“I know this is going to sound insanely weird, but... why the hell is there a human here?” Victor asked, frowning, the confusion clearly audible in his voice.
“Maybe... he got lost?” Rupert ventured after a brief silence. The words ca out hesitant, almost a whisper, and he frowned imdiately afterward, as if realizing he didn’t truly believe that explanation himself.
I tried to find any plausible reason for a human to be in the middle of the ocean, especially inside an aquatic anomaly. The idea felt far too absurd to be real. Still, one doubt lingered for a few monts: was he really human? The uncertainty didn’t last long.
His body gave off a subtle glow that fractured into countless colors, rippling like light refracted through water, exactly the sa phenonon I had seen with Victor, Rupert, Arthur, and every other mber of the response team. There was no room left for doubt. This unmistakable effect caused by my eyes spoke for itself: he was, without a shadow of a doubt, human.
What struck as truly strange, however, was how familiar the man looked, unnervingly so. It felt as if I had seen him very recently, his image still fresh and vivid in my mind, impossible to ignore.
I tried to comb through my mories from every possible angle, searching for a detail, a context, anything that could explain why this human stirred such a strong sense of recognition.
I replayed recent encounters, forgotten faces, mundane monts... but before I could reach any conclusion, my thoughts were abruptly cut off.
“He’s ard!” one of the response team mbers shouted, urgency lacing his voice as it sliced through the background noise and instantly drew everyone’s attention. The others spun around on instinct, hands moving to their weapons.
He was right. The man was ard, specifically, he was holding a kitchen knife. Honestly, that wasn’t the kind of weapon that usually caused panic. Not when, on our side, we had futuristic firearms capable of firing laser beams and punching clean through steel.
That said, everything changed once you rembered one crucial detail: this was a “human” wielding a “knife” trapped inside a colossal aquatic monster, right in the middle of the ocean. From that perspective, the situation stopped being rely strange and beca genuinely terrifying.
Everyone was on edge, and understandably so. After all, when a supposed “human” appears in front of you holding nothing more than a kitchen knife, deep inside a massive aquatic monster in the middle of the ocean, it’s impossible not to feel at least a chill crawl down your spine.
I noticed so of the response team mbers exchanging uneasy, tension-filled glances before turning their attention back to Victor, clearly waiting for an order that never ca.
Victor, however, looked just as uncertain as they did. His weapon remained firmly trained on the “human” perfectly aligned, but his finger stayed off the trigger.
“So what do we do now? Shoot?” Rupert asked in a low voice, thick with impatience: “I vote we shoot” Unlike Victor, who kept his weapon steady but controlled, Rupert already had his finger dangerously close to the trigger.
“Are we really going to risk it? What if that actually is a human?” Victor asked, hesitation heavy in his voice. Even so, the slight tremor in his words and the way he avoided eye contact made it clear that he didn’t fully believe that possibility himself.
“You’re seriously considering that thing is human?” Rupert let out a short, mocking laugh: “What the hell would a human be doing here, in the middle of nowhere?” He spread his arms wide, gesturing around them: “I don’t know if you forgot, but we’re in the middle of the ocean, trapped inside a colossal aquatic anomaly. Unless humans suddenly learned how to breathe underwater and ignore common sense, that idea is ridiculous”
Victor couldn’t co up with any argunt against Rupert’s logic, it was airtight. And the mont the supposed “human” suddenly lunged toward us, brandishing that simple kitchen knife, any remaining doubt vanished instantly.
Strangely enough, watching him run stirred sothing deeply unsettling in . The scene felt familiar in a way I couldn’t explain. I didn’t know why or where that feeling ca from, it was just there, persistent, like a mory that refused to take shape.
My thoughts ca to a screeching halt when a gunshot rang out beside . Victor fired, but the shot slamd into the ground, missing the human by just a few inches.
The impact made him stop abruptly, shifting into a more cautious stance, almost instinctively. Honestly, the way he stared at us, eyes locked, face completely devoid of emotion, was deeply disturbing.
“He’s clearly hostile, Victor” Rupert said, his voice firm and tense, eyes tracking every movent ahead: “I’ll follow your orders like I always do, but I’m not standing around waiting while so lunatic with a knife turns into Swiss cheese”
I could tell Victor was still skeptical, still clinging to the idea that it might be human. The tension in his eyes betrayed the doubt he was trying to suppress. Rupert seed to notice it too and, after a brief, heavy silence, spoke again, his tone firm, almost impatient: “You still think that thing is human, man? I can say with absolute certainty that whatever that is... it’s anything but human”
Victor stayed silent for a few seconds, staring off as he weighed his thoughts. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, carrying the sa unease and doubt, as if sothing gnawed at him from the inside.
“That’s not it...” He hesitated, taking a deep breath before continuing: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I don’t think shooting... that thing is actually going to solve our problem”
“So what, then? We wait to get stabbed to death?” Rupert said, letting out a short, humorless laugh: “Honestly, I always figured I’d die to so bizarre anomaly, not to a psycho in the middle of the ocean, waving a knife around like that’s normal”
I wondered whether Rupert really thought a colossal, flying anomaly covered in tentacles, or a massive mouth in the middle of the ocean housing another dinsion, was more normal than a simple human holding a knife in the darkness, surrounded by all of this. I even considered asking him, but chose to stay silent. Honestly, even I knew it would sound incredibly stupid.
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