I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 19: The Cursed Waterfall

- Kyle Valtier’s POV -

I began the fight—and it was no fair battle, but a savage, brutal bloodbath that made the skin crawl.

I twisted my waist to evade the attack of a rock ghoul that lunged at my neck, and drove my tactical knife into the weak fleshy gap beneath its armpit.

I channeled the Eitra into the blade and yanked it upward with force, tearing through its entrails and ribs.

Black and yellow, foul-smelling intestines scattered, covering my coat, and sticky blood splattered over my mask like sludge.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

I fired with my right hand with surgical precision, each bullet claiming a life, while I cut and tore with my left.

When the Glock ran out of ammo, I didn’t have time to reload.

I used the gun as a tool to crush skulls.

With all my strength, I smashed the face of an ash hound that lunged at me. I felt the bones of its nose and jaw shatter beneath the Eitra-infused metal. Its teeth pierced the flesh of my hand, but I ignored the pain and snapped its neck with a savage kick.

Blood covered everything.

The rocky ground turned into a slick pool of limbs, digestive fluids, and rotten blood.

I stood in the middle, panting like a feral beast, severing an arm here, crushing a head there.

Hot blood sprayed and evaporated in the cold air, creating a crimson mist around me.

When the last rock ghoul fell before me, and its movement ceased after I crushed its skull beneath my boot... I stopped to catch my breath.

My lungs were burning.

The muscles in my arms screamed from lactic acid buildup.

My body was completely covered in minced flesh and pus.

"Are... are they finished?" I asked myself in a broken voice.

But the mountains answered with a terrifying echo. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

From between the towering rocks ahead of me, and from behind the fog... more appeared.

Not hundreds this time... but thousands.

A new wave, snarling and drooling, their eyes gleaming with insatiable hunger.

"Damn it!" I shouted in desperate fury.

I reloaded my gun at incredible speed and charged toward them. The massacre continued.

An hour, two... I don’t know how much time passed. I lost all sense of time.

All I did was kill. Kill and kill and kill. My coat was torn, and I was wounded in my thigh and shoulder.

Their filthy claws left deep, bleeding scars across my body.

I used the Black Eitra skill to temporarily cover my wounds, but my energy was draining at a terrifying rate.

"Do they ever end?!" I screamed as I ripped the jaw off one of the ghouls with my bare hands after my knife broke.

"How can there be such an enormous number of weak monsters in one place? This makes no biological sense! They should starve to death or devour each other!"

When I realized that direct combat would mean my death from exhaustion even if I was stronger than them, I decided to flee.

I ran. I ran as fast as my exhausted legs could carry me.

I changed direction toward a narrow side passage between two massive black mountains, trying to circle around this cursed valley.

I leapt over jagged rocks, slipped, fell, and rose again.

The monsters chased me, but I was faster thanks to the G-rank Eitra concentrated in my legs.

I ran until I felt my heart would burst from my chest.

The fog began to thin slightly in this passage.

I could no longer hear their snarls behind me as intensely.

"I escaped..." I gasped, leaning against a large rock to rest.

But... the moment I raised my head, the blood in my veins froze.

I hadn’t escaped. I hadn’t left hell. I had crawled, hand and foot, into its deepest point.

I looked around.

The rocks here were not black.

They were dark red, pulsing with a sickly heat.

The ground beneath my boots wasn’t dirt or stone—it was slick, wet, and coated in a thick layer of gelatinous matter resembling a rotting placenta.

There was a sound... a tremendous roar, like that of a massive waterfall—but it was not the sound of pure water striking rock.

It was heavier, thicker, more horrifying; like the sound of millions of throats gargling their own blood and choking at the same time.

I took a few steps toward the inner cliff edge of the passage and looked down, then slowly and fearfully lifted my gaze upward toward the source of the sound.

And what I saw there... was a sight that shattered my mind and destroyed every biological and physical law I had ever learned.

It made me drop to my knees in the viscous sludge, trembling like a child witnessing a distorted sky being torn apart.

It was a surreal painting of pure horror—a masterpiece of brutality and eternal madness.

"Oh God of the heavens..." I muttered, my jaw trembling, as my Glock slipped from my limp hand.

From the peak of the mountain piercing the gray clouds, it was not water that fell.

There was a colossal waterfall of blood.

Yes. A massive, immense river of thick, crimson blood flowing from the belly of the sky itself, as if the mountain were merely a dagger used to slit the vein of the universe.

The blood boiled, releasing toxic crimson vapors that embraced the clouds, and surged down the black rocky slopes with terrifying force and ferocity.

The waterfall plunged from thousands of meters, crashing against the rocks and sending up a bloody spray that burned the face like acid, gathering below into a vast abyss... a gigantic, endless lake of coagulated blood.

The sight was a nightmarish majesty. The waterfall roared deafeningly, and the deep crimson of the blood clashed horrifically with the black mountains and gray sky.

It was beautiful in the way nightmares are, and terrifying in the way of the end of the world.

The air reeked of a suffocating mixture of rusted iron, rotting flesh, and sulfur—the stench of an unholy "womb" birthing death without end.

But the true horror—the kind that makes you wish to claw your own eyes out—was not the waterfall itself.

It was what was happening in the blood lake below.

The monsters were not multiplying.

They were not coming from magical gates.

They were being made here.

Right before my eyes.

I stared at the thick, boiling blood lake, my mind refusing to comprehend the grotesque reality.

Its surface churned, forming massive bubbles the size of small houses.

When a bubble burst, it made a disgusting sound like tearing flesh, releasing yellow and black gases.

From within the boiling blood and red sludge, the nightmarish process of creation began.

I saw pieces of filthy white bone thrust upward from beneath the blood, colliding violently with one another, producing cracking and snapping sounds as they fused into deformed skeletons.

The bones were alive, growing like the branches of demonic trees.

Then, as if woven by invisible threads of black magic, red, bleeding tissues and pulsing muscles began to crawl over those bones.

The muscles twisted and intertwined like giant tapeworms, stitching flesh to bone in a visceral scene that churned the stomach.

Excess blood coagulated in the cold air, forming rocky crusts and hardened skins that covered the exposed muscles.

I saw empty eye sockets form, within which gelatinous eyeballs took shape, spinning wildly before settling and glowing with primal hunger.

In less than a minute, the creature was complete.

A rock ghoul or ash hound emerged from the pool of blood, covered in a membrane of viscous fluids.

It opened its deformed mouth, filled with teeth not yet fully set, and let out a roar that tore its newly formed throat, spewing amounts of rotten blood from its lungs, before dragging itself from the red mire to join the thousands of monsters lining the shores of the lake.

Ash hounds, rock ghouls, multi-limbed abominations, and other blind creatures crawling like spiders... all were born from this cursed waterfall.

An endless army—an army that required no food to multiply, because it was created directly from the mountain’s blood.

"This... this is why they don’t end..." my voice trembled as cold tears mixed with the bloody mist on my face.

"They don’t end because this place is the womb of death itself. The waterfall births an infinite army... every second."

I stood on the cliff, nothing more than a microscopic insect watching a divine factory of nightmares.

I looked up at the massive waterfall stretching into the clouds.

If this was merely a "path" or an "entrance" leading to the cursed forest... then what was the thing bleeding all this blood from above? What cosmic entity had been slaughtered—or was being tortured at that summit to create this eternal waterfall?