He Who Hunts Demons Chapter 6: 6-To The Dreamscape

Read chapter 6 of He Who Hunts Demons by A_Random_Turtle on NovelPedia.

6-To The Dreamscape [Welcome, Elmer Hills, to the Dreamscape] Those words echoed in my ears as I fell deeper into the blackness surrounding me. I could feel nothing and see nothing. I wasn’t even certain if my eyes were open. And what made it even worse were the words I heard. The Dreamscape? What was that? However, when I tried to put thoughts together, understand what was happening, a sharp pain coursed through my head, keeping me from coming to any assumption, and ensuring that all I did was sink deeper and deeper into the darkness. I fought against the resistance I faced, but I couldn’t win. It was unlike anything I’d felt before. It was grating, like stones were being grounded inside my skull and my brain was being stabbed by countless puncture needles. The pain was unbearable. Time passed, and I didn’t know for how long. Seconds? Minutes? Hours, maybe? My sense of time was completely skewed. Or perhaps I was dead and this Dreamscape was the afterlife. That was a possibility I couldn’t discard. My heart thumped hard, becoming my hope that I wasn’t dead. After all, a dead man had no need for flowing blood. At that moment, I realized I’d just had two different thoughts in quick succession. Baffled, I decided to circle back to what bothered me the most in this floating darkness I was stuck in, but when I did, the grating pain returned, and I realized what was going on here. I was restricted from trying to find answers pertaining to the message I’d received. Maybe it was as a result of my persistence, but then a sound like millions of birds were chirping rushed into my ears. The effect was a mind-numbing pain even more excruciating than the one I’d had prior, and I struggled to reach for my forehead as if rubbing at it would calm me down. But I couldn’t move. And then the pain stopped—all of a sudden. In the next instant a bright, golden light appeared before me, forcing me to wince. Slowly the light split apart and wriggled. Before I knew it, words were hovering before my eyes. [You have chosen to embark on the Journey to Transcendence] I gulped as I watched the words condense, shifting into new ones. [In the abyss dwells the shard of the Great Ancient One’s soul. Lead it to Paradise] I frowned, lost and confused; but before I could even completely process the words before me, a timer appeared and instantly I lost consciousness. ### I woke to a thick, humid heat spreading across my face, and something rough and wet dragging across my cheek. Then a putrid and nauseatingly organic stench hit me, like the kind that escaped from countless dead and decaying rats bundled in a sewer. My stomach rejected it, my body shivered, and before I could even register what was going on, I gagged, jumped up from wherever I was as I hurriedly began to wipe my face. My brows crossed as I was baffled by the slimy, foul-smelling wetness I found. “What is this?” A low-pitched growl snapped my attention to the thing standing across from me, and every hair on my body stood on end. It was like a dog, but as big as a lion with thicker and darker fur, had four red eyes distributed evenly on both sides of its face, and two protruding fangs. I jerked and reached for my side, hoping to pull out my revolver, but there was nothing there. Neither my holster, nor the piece. Even more strange was when my eyes shifted from my palm further down my body. My hands were…smaller? And the pants I had on were ragged and brittle. My muscles tensed. What is going on here? “Stop it, Wyg!” a gentle voice started from behind me, and I instinctively turned around. “Don’t threaten the kind man.” It was a girl. She was young. Very young. Probably about ten years old at most, dressed in thick clothes, had black, dazzling long hair that fell all the way down to her calves, and a round, pale face. Her blue eyes locked onto mine, and a sharp headache struck me. I leaned forward, groaning as I grabbed my head. The pain was intense and just as grating as the one I’d felt in the sink