I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 12: The Orphanage (4)

The descent was slow.

The corridor was very long, stretching like the intestines of a gigantic earthworm.

The lighting was dim, consisting of pale light strips fixed to the ceiling every few meters.

Each step made the air colder, as if they were descending into the belly of ice.

Before the end of the long corridor, on the right side, there was a door.

It was not an ordinary door. It was a wide metal door, with a thick rectangular glass window in its upper half.

From that window... a deep crimson light was emanating. A faint, pulsing glow that resembled the color of coagulated blood.

They slowly approached the door.

Strange sounds seeped from behind the glass.

The humming of medical machines, liquid bubbles bursting, and the faint murmuring voice of a woman.

They reached the door.

The glass window was almost at the level of their eyes.

With hearts beating like the wings of terrified birds, Kyle and Victor raised their heads and looked through the clear glass into the room illuminated in red.

And what they saw in that moment... tore apart their childhood, crushed their innocence, and carved into their minds a nightmare that would never fade, even if they lived a thousand years.

The room was not a storage room.

It was a slaughterhouse.

A nightmarish laboratory covered in black and red blood splattered across white walls.

In the middle of the room stood a metal surgical table tilted at a sharp angle to drain fluids into a channel in the floor.

And on that table... lay Edgar.

Their friend Edgar. The quiet child with the wide brown eyes who loved dismantling toys.

The child who had left a few days ago smiling, believing he was going to "heaven" with a new family.

But Edgar was no longer a child.

He was no longer even human.

He was a pile of mutilated, twisted flesh screaming with ugliness and madness.

Kyle’s crimson eyes and Victor’s blue eyes widened until they nearly tore apart.

Dear God...

Edgar’s small body had undergone a horrifying demonic biological transformation experiment.

His rib cage had been split open completely like a grotesque bloody flower.

The small white ribs were broken and bent outward, piercing the burned flesh like twisted nails.

Between those opened ribs, there were no normal human organs.

Instead there was a mass of pulsing black tissue intertwined with rusty metal tubes pumping a yellow phosphorescent liquid that leaked out, burning the surrounding flesh and releasing thin smoke that smelled like roasted meat.

His skin... was no longer skin.

It had melted across large areas of his body as if a corrosive acid had been slowly poured over him, revealing layers of rotting red muscle and swollen black veins that looked like dying worms writhing beneath the surface.

His left arm was stretched out and nailed to the table with steel spikes.

But it was not the arm of a child anymore.

It had grown and swollen grotesquely, and sharp, deformed bone blades had torn through the skin like the forced growth of a beast’s claws.

But the most horrifying sight—the sight that made Kyle’s mind stop functioning entirely—was Edgar’s face.

Edgar’s lower jaw was broken and hanging unnaturally.

His small tongue was swollen, dark blue in color, dangling from the side of his mouth filled with coagulated blood.

And his right eye...

Edgar’s right eye was not in its socket.

It had been forced outward by enormous pressure from inside his skull.

The innocent brown eye dangled outside his face, hanging only by a thick white optic nerve covered with threads of blood and pus.

The eyeball was swollen, congested with bursting blood vessels, staring directly toward the glass door... toward Kyle and Victor.

As if it were looking at them with a terrifying eternal reproach.

Drops of thick black fluid dripped from the empty eye socket, running down his melted cheek to gather in a pool of blood beneath his tilted head.

This was not an ordinary death.

This was pure torment—pain frozen in the final moment of a child’s life.

"Ed... Edg..." Victor tried to whisper, but his throat closed completely.

The two children stood frozen before the glass, unable to breathe, unable to scream, unable even to close their eyes.

Shock devoured their souls and paralyzed every nerve in their bodies.

Then... something moved inside the red room.

A tall woman wearing a white medical coat stained with dark blood and yellow fluids appeared in their view.

She stood beside the table.

She turned, and her face appeared beneath the nightmare-red light.

It was the orphanage director. Mrs. Grace.

But her plastic smile was gone.

Her face was completely expressionless, cold like the face of a corpse.

She held an electronic tablet, writing notes while looking at the mutilated pile of flesh that had once been called Edgar.

Her sharp, lifeless voice filtered through the small speakers hanging above the glass door and reached the ears of the frozen children:

"The blood type is incompatible with the concentrated Ghoul Eitra. Cellular rejection occurred in the third minute. Internal rupture in the cerebral blood vessels."

She sighed with disgusting indifference, then added:

"Another failed experiment. The DNA of these children is too weak to withstand the conversion. Clean this garbage."

A failed experiment? Garbage?

Mrs. Grace turned her back on the table and walked toward the other side of the laboratory.

And there, Kyle’s eyes fell upon another nightmare added to the hell inside his mind.

In the corner of the room stood a giant glass cylinder filled with a faint glowing green liquid.

Inside that cylinder... a girl was floating.

Her soft silver hair moved slowly in the liquid.

Her small limbs were restrained with metal cuffs connected to wires.

Plastic breathing tubes had been violently forced into her mouth and nose, pumping air mixed with unknown chemical gases.

It was Serin.

Serin, who had left today convinced that a loving family was waiting for her.

She was still alive.

Her light blue eyes were wide open, filled with hysterical terror, and her tears mixed with the surrounding liquid.

She stared at Edgar’s torn corpse from inside the cylinder, her small body twitching in silent convulsions as she waited for her turn to become the next "failed experiment."

Horror was no longer just a feeling.

Horror had become a physical entity choking Kyle and Victor.

Their world—the orphanage, the promises of heaven—everything shattered into blood-soaked fragments.

This was the real world.

A slaughterhouse run by monsters wearing human faces.

Kyle’s small body began trembling violently and uncontrollably.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to break the glass. He wanted to cry.

But his lungs refused to work.

They stood like two statues of ice before the gates of hell.

Then suddenly...

Directly behind them, in that dark, cold corridor...

Click... click...

The sound of quiet, slow, measured footsteps.

Footsteps not from rubber shoes—but from soft shoes.

Someone was approaching them from behind.

The sound grew closer. And closer.

But Kyle and Victor were too shocked to move.

They could not even turn around.

Their eyes were still fixed on Edgar’s dangling eye and on Serin floating inside the cylinder.

The footsteps stopped right behind them.

Warm air carrying a faint scent of vanilla and cold sweat touched the backs of their necks.

In the next moment, two hands extended from the deep darkness behind them.

Cold hands, trembling violently.

Their mouths were covered with force and violence, silencing any scream that might escape their dead throats before it could be born.

Their small bodies were seized and pulled backward away from the glass window, into the thick shadows of the corridor.

Kyle’s blood froze in his veins.

Had they been caught? Were they going to be turned into a pile of flesh like Edgar?

But the voice that whispered in their ears was not Mrs. Grace’s voice, nor the voice of a rough guard.

It was a familiar voice—broken, dripping with pure terror and unstoppable tears.

"Kyle... Victor..."

The woman holding them whispered, covering their mouths tightly so they could barely breathe.

"What are you doing here? For heaven’s sake... what are you doing here?"

Kyle’s crimson eyes widened in the darkness as he looked up.

Through the tears covering her face and the shadows distorting her features... he saw her face.

It was Kayla.

The kind caretaker.

The girl who used to sing them to sleep.

The girl who had warned them.

She was wearing a dark coat dripping with rainwater.

She was the shadow they had seen entering the storage building.

She was the one who had entered this hell of her own will.

But why? Was she part of them? Or was she trying to stop them?

Kayla’s eyes held a terror greater than the children’s themselves.

The terror of someone who knew that the end had already come.

The children had seen her... and the children who see what lies behind the red-lit door never return to the dormitory again.