I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 49: Nightmare

The giant butcher leaned over me.

His red eye stared directly into mine.

His breath reeked of rotting entrails, making me vomit bile into my mouth—but I couldn’t spit it out due to the paralysis.

He raised his massive hand, grabbed my cotton shirt, and tore it in a single motion as if it were tissue paper, exposing my chest marked with Vargas’s claw scar.

"Let’s begin... with the opening," the butcher growled.

One of the mechanical arms descended from the ceiling, holding a laser scalpel that emitted a terrifying buzz.

There was no anesthesia.

There was no mercy.

The burning laser scalpel touched my skin at the center of my sternum.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!"

I screamed silently inside my mind, my body convulsing violently, but the metal restraints didn’t allow me to move even a fraction.

Flesh was being burned and cut at the same time.

I felt layers of skin separating—then fat—then muscle.

The smell of my own roasted flesh filled my nose.

The pain was unbearable—it was like millions of fire ants devouring my nerve endings.

The scalpel moved down slowly—from the base of my neck to my navel—splitting my chest and abdomen entirely open.

Hot blood poured like a river down both sides of my body, dripping onto the metal floor and sinking into the drainage grates.

"Excellent... tender flesh," the butcher snarled.

He grabbed two rusted hooks from the chain he held.

With brutal force, he drove the first hook into the right side of my ribcage, and the second into the left.

Then... he pulled.

Craaaaaack... tick... CRASH!

The sound of my ribs breaking and my cartilage tearing away from my sternum was louder than anything I had ever heard.

The butcher was opening my ribcage like cabinet doors.

The pain reached a level that turned my vision completely white.

My lungs were exposed to the cold, contaminated air.

I gasped, choking on my own blood—every breath a desperate struggle for survival. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

My beating heart was fully exposed, contracting and expanding hysterically within my open chest cavity like a bloody flower.

"And now... the bait," Madam Grace’s voice echoed through the speakers.

A large glass container was pushed toward the butcher by a mechanical arm.

Inside it was a thick black liquid... and something swimming within.

A parasitic creature the size of a human arm.

It resembled a massive centipede—pitch black and glossy—with hundreds of needle-like legs. It had no head, only a circular mouth filled with grinding teeth pulsing with corrupted red Eitra.

"This is the Voiders’ parasite," the butcher said, plunging his massive hand into the black liquid and grabbing the writhing creature.

"We will merge it with your heart, boy. If you survive, you’ll become a magnificent abomination. If you die... you’ll become fertilizer."

He lifted the writhing parasite... and placed it directly on my exposed heart.

The cold of the parasite met the heat of my beating heart.

At that moment, it opened its circular mouth and sank its grinding teeth directly into my heart muscle, burrowing inward.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"

If there had been even a single Supreme in this universe, I would have begged them to kill me.

The parasite was chewing through my heart valves, while hundreds of needle-like legs pierced my lungs and veins, injecting burning black Eitra like acid into my bloodstream.

I could feel it moving inside me—eating me alive—consuming my identity, my soul, replacing it with absolute darkness.

The pain surpassed madness.

I began to hallucinate. My mind started slipping away from reality.

And as I convulsed in the throes of this endless torment, I forced my head—barely—to the left, tears and blood blurring my vision.

In the darkness, beyond the surgical light, there was a massive glass cylinder filled with glowing green viscous liquid.

And inside...

It wasn’t just a random subject.

My eyes widened.

My torn heart stopped for a second, ignoring the parasite devouring it.

There was a girl.

A small girl... terribly familiar.

She had soft silver hair floating gently in the liquid, and innocent childlike features destroyed by terror.

"Se... Serene..." I whispered in my mind, her name tearing through what remained of my soul and shattered humanity.

My childhood friend.

Serene.

The shy girl they took to the so-called paradise that fateful day at the orphanage.

The one Victor and I watched drown behind the glass.

She floated in the cursed liquid, thick plastic tubes piercing her small mouth, her eyes, her stomach.

Her frail body was deformed with rusted metal wires, corrupted Eitra flowing through her to prevent her merciful death.

Serene slowly opened her dead blue eyes in the liquid.

She looked at me.

A lifeless gaze... filled with eternal reproach and silent hatred.

Suddenly, her lips moved around the thick tube, and I heard her voice echo in my mind—clear and sharp like a cold executioner’s blade:

"Why didn’t you save me, Kyle?" her voice dripped with pain.

"Why did you leave me to drown and die slowly? You’re not a Joker. You’re not a hero or a rebel. You’re just a coward... a coward who watches us burn and be digested just to save his own skin."

"No! Serene! No!" I screamed, tears of blood streaming down my face.

"I’m sorry! I swear I’m sorry! I was a child! I was weak!"

Beside her cylinder, from the dense shadows... another shape emerged.

Or rather, two shapes.

A massive, completely charred body, emitting the stench of burned human flesh, its spine protruding broken from its back.

It dragged a smaller corpse, also charred, with a single strand of blonde hair stained with blue ash.

"Morphind... Victor..."

The burned Morphind raised his head—his features melted away, exposing a grotesque skull—and pointed a charred skeletal finger at me in accusation and disgust.

"You failed us, son... you let the blue flames consume us while you hid in your mind. And now... the parasite will consume you. This is the fate of weak cowards."

"Nooooo! Father! Victor! Stay away! Please! Don’t look at me like that!"

The parasite dug deeper into my heart.

Black Eitra began flooding my eyes, blinding me, turning the world into a corrupted crimson.

The giant butcher raised a rotating bone saw, its teeth dripping with pus and old chunks of flesh.

"And now, let us separate the skull and extract the brain to connect it to the main network," the butcher said with delight, bringing the spinning saw toward my forehead.

The buzzing sound was deafening, swallowing even my screams.

The sharp metal teeth touched my skin, tore through it, pierced the hard bone, and began grinding my skull slowly—deliberately.

White bone dust scattered, mixing with the hot blood across my face.

"Serene... Morphind... Victor... forgive me... I deserve this..."

The pain reached the absolute point.

The point where consciousness bursts like a fragile soap bubble.

The saw burrowing into my brain.

The parasite devouring my heart.

My twisted family staring at me in eternal disgust.

The thread snapped.

The universe exploded into bottomless, absolute darkness.

Gaaaaaasp!

I jerked violently—so hard it nearly shattered my spine.

I sat upright like a released arrow, gasping hot, violent air like a drowning man dragged from the depths of a dark ocean.

"AAAAAAAH!"

I screamed at the top of my lungs, slamming both hands against my chest in frantic panic—searching for the open wound! Searching for broken ribs! Searching for the black parasite devouring my heart!

My trembling fingers tore through my cotton shirt, scraping across my skin soaked in cold, sticky sweat.

Nothing.

No fresh wound. No broken ribs.

No blood.

Just my intact chest rising and falling... and Vargas’s old claw scar, healed days ago.

I panted, my crimson eyes darting wildly around the room, pupils expanding and contracting in madness as if searching for the butcher.

I looked around.

I wasn’t in an underground slaughterhouse.

There was no red lighting.

No butcher.

No parasites.

No glass cylinders.

I was sitting on a simple medical bed in my small room inside the Alpha Squad wing at the FBI headquarters in the Golden Sector.

The room was completely quiet, illuminated by the pale light of early morning filtering through the glass window.

The air smelled faintly of coffee from the machine in the corner—not rotting flesh, sulfur, and blood.

My body trembled like an autumn leaf in a storm.

Sweat poured from me like a waterfall, soaking the white sheets I had been sleeping on.

My heart pounded against my chest at nearly two hundred beats per minute, threatening to break through my ribs from sheer terror.

I placed my trembling hands over my pale face.

I was crying.

Real tears—hot, uncontrollable—streaming between my fingers.

"It was... it was..." I muttered in a hoarse, broken voice that didn’t sound like mine at all.

I focused my Eitra and summoned the system interface in my mind with frantic urgency.

I looked at the skill [Future Sight SSS].

[Skill Status: Ready for use. Cooldown complete.]

It wasn’t on cooldown. It hadn’t been used.

My hands fell onto my lap.

My head dropped forward as I struggled to breathe.

"It wasn’t a vision..." I whispered, a hysterical, broken, sick laugh slipping from my trembling lips.

"It wasn’t the skill... I didn’t see the future..."

It was a dream.

Just a dream.

A nightmare woven by my shattered subconscious.

A nightmare fed by my deepest fears, by the horrors of the orphanage, by the guilt gnawing at my soul for failing to save my childhood friend Serene, my father Morphind, or my brother Victor.

A nightmare created by my twisted imagination of what "Saint Ilarius Hospital" might truly hide in its hellish depths.

My mind—damaged by endless trauma, by monster Eitra, by relentless pressure—decided to punish me with a blood-soaked horror play beyond all limits.

I wiped my drenched face violently and clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white.

The terror I felt in that dream... was real.

The pain of the saw, the sensation of the parasite devouring my heart, Serene’s accusing gaze...

All of it was etched into my nerves as an absolute truth that nearly stopped my actual heart.

I looked toward the window, at the gray sky of Elysium preparing for a new day.

If my limited human mind was capable of imagining such horror... then what true terror do the Six Voiders and Saint Ilarius hide within that cursed hospital?

Is reality worse than that nightmare?

Of course it is.

I swallowed hard, realizing one terrifying truth, clear as day:

I am afraid.

Terrified to my core of approaching that hospital.

The Black Joker—the cunning killer who pretends to be insane—was trembling like a lost child in the dark.