Chapter 81 - #81: Slapping a Scourge Beast

Chapter 81: Chapter #81: Slapping a Scourge Beast

[Don’t you worry. Whatever happens, you may think it all a mere bad dream...]

The old Blood Minister’s raspy voice echoed in the darkness, offering one final, unsettling reassurance.

The game had opened from a deeply weird, mysterious angle, plunging the player headfirst into the cursed city of Yharnam without any real explanation.

The blood transfusion began.

The screen slowly faded to black, perfectly simulating the protagonist slipping into a heavy, anesthetic sleep.

Silver had been sitting peacefully, waiting for the cutscene to end, but as the screen darkened, the old man suddenly let out a low, sinister chuckle.

The clinic looked grimy and abandoned. Aside from the messy, bandaged old man, there didn’t seem to be another living soul in the building.

When Silver finally opened his eyes again, the IV drip was still hooked up next to the gurney. But the old man had completely vanished.

Looking around, the clinic looked exactly the same as it had before he passed out.

But when the camera automatically panned to the far left, Silver’s blood ran cold.

A massive pool of blood was slowly expanding across the floorboards. It wasn’t just a flat, pre-rendered texture; the engine’s real-time fluid dynamics made the thick gore ripple, pool, and reflect the dim ambient light with terrifying realism.

Rising from the center of the gore was a horrific, skinless monstrosity. It crouched in the center of the dilapidated clinic hall, greedily lapping up the blood.

The camera’s focus was intentionally blurry, utilizing a flawless depth-of-field effect to perfectly capture the hazy, disorienting sensation of waking up from a coma.

The beast slowly rose from the pool, its eyes glowing with a sickly, feral red light. As it locked onto the protagonist, it began to slowly and deliberately crawl toward the surgical bed.

The deep, piercing growl of the beast was terrifying, but the wet, sickening sound of its claws dragging through the dynamic blood pool was even worse.

The flayed werewolf was entirely stripped of its skin. Its raw, glistening muscles were heavily corrupted, pulsing with a dark, unnatural sickness.

The subsurface scattering applied to the beast’s exposed tissue made the meat look viscerally wet, warm, and horrifyingly alive.

"What the fuck!" Silver recoiled, physically kicking his chair away from his desk.

The beast dragged its mangled, incomplete body forward, extending a massive, blood-soaked claw toward the screen, desperately trying to grab him.

Its razor-sharp talons grazed through the air, inches from the camera. Just as the beast was about to make contact with the protagonist, it suddenly erupted into flames.

A roaring fire, seemingly igniting from absolutely nowhere, completely consumed the flayed werewolf. The volumetric lighting from the blaze cast aggressive, dancing shadows across the clinic walls.

In seconds, the beast was reduced to nothing, leaving only the pool of blood on the floorboards. There were no bones, no ash—it was as if the terrifying encounter had never even happened.

Just as Silver let out a shaky breath, dozens of small, pale, skeletal creatures began crawling out of the floorboards beside the bed.

The ghastly little messengers clambered over each other, reaching out with their horrific, hollow faces to grab onto the protagonist. They swarmed the screen, their gaping mouths opening wide as if to devour him whole.

"Bro... are we absolutely sure this isn’t a horror game?!" Silver shuddered, wrapping his arms around himself.

He quickly glanced over at his stream chat, desperately needing the comforting tether of reality.

[

Maelstrom443: Nova’s atmospheric direction is actually terrifying... I genuinely just jumped.

BlueFrostGhost: I am actively losing my sanity. I wouldn’t dare play this in the dark.

Wanderingsock: CHAT PROTECT ME! THE SANITY DRAIN IS REAL!

calvin: I literally pre-ordered this and now I’m too scared to boot it up...

SpectralEdge: Nah that werewolf thing was actually foul.

jacksepticeye: Imagine if this were made into a movie... the potential.

]

Just as Silver was caught in a terrified daze, a soft, melancholic woman’s voice echoed gently in his ears.

[Ah, you’ve found yourself a hunter...]

When the protagonist’s eyes opened for the third time, the swarm of ugly, pale creatures had completely vanished. The UI faded in, indicating that the player finally had full control of their character.

"Phew... okay, I can finally move," Silver said, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead.

It had been a very long time since a video game had managed to put him on edge this quickly. He panned the camera around, taking a moment to catch his breath, but as he actually focused on the environment, his jaw slightly dropped.

"Dude, the ray tracing in this room is fucking insane," Silver muttered, leaning closer to his monitor.

He slowly walked his character past a surgical tray. "Look at the way the moonlight bounces off the rusted steel. The textures are so incredibly crisp. You can literally see the individual strands of my character’s hair reacting to the draft in here!"

He was completely stunned. Sprout Studio hadn’t just created an atmospheric masterpiece; they had pushed Terra’s graphical capabilities to their absolute bleeding edge, achieving a caliber of photorealism that rivaled massive, billion-dollar tech demos.

He was currently standing in Iosefka’s Clinic. The room was completely empty.

Silver’s very first instinct was to snap his camera to the left, checking the spot where the beast had emerged.

The pool of blood was completely gone. There wasn’t a single trace of contamination on the floorboards.

It was exactly as the old man had promised—whatever happened, he could just write it off as a bad dream.

The clinic was filthy and dilapidated.

The white plaster walls were stained with gray grime, peeling away to reveal ancient, decaying red brick underneath.

The high-poly rendering made every cracked brick and layer of peeling paint look tangible.

Navigating by the faint, ambient light piercing through the dirty windows, it was obvious this clinic had been abandoned long ago.

The wooden floorboards were rotting, and the surgical tables were rusted shut.

Dusty glass vials littered the floor. Looking at the horrific, unsanitary medical equipment, the idea that the protagonist had just received a blood transfusion here was physically nauseating.

Silver immediately opened his inventory to check his loadout. His character had absolutely nothing equipped besides a basic, tattered outfit.

Whether it was the oppressive environmental storytelling or the item descriptions in the menu, the game was constantly reinforcing the fact that this world was incredibly hostile.

[Foreign Garb: Clothing worn upon awakening to the nightmare of blood and beasts. Perhaps its wearer had to stay out of sight, and travel by cover of darkness. Without memory, who will ever know?]

The exotic, drab clothing was distinctly different from the standard Victorian attire of Yharnam.

It was a constant, visual reminder to the player: You do not belong here. You are a stranger.

On a wooden desk not far from the surgical bed, Silver found a crumpled note. He leaned in to read the hastily scribbled text:

[Handwritten scrawl: Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt.]

He pushed through the heavy wooden doors of the clinic, discovering a long, descending staircase.

He walked down carefully, step by step. The tattered carpets were heavily stained with dark, dried blood.

At the bottom of the stairs, the dim clinic opened up into a slightly brighter, expansive hospital ward.

Abandoned medical beds lined the walls, completely soaked in blood. Smashed, filthy vials were scattered across the tiles.

In the center of the illuminated room, a massive, fresh trail of blood was smeared across the floor.

The gore wasn’t just a flat decal; it had actual physical volume, the specular highlights catching the dim hospital lighting perfectly.

A massive Scourge Beast—identical to the one from his nightmare—was hunched over, viciously tearing into a human corpse.

"...?" A massive question mark practically floated above Silver’s head.

He immediately noticed the glowing red health bar hovering above the beast.

Was the game seriously expecting him to fight this werewolf right now?

He noticed that the werewolf’s health bar was only sitting at about fifty percent.

Did that mean it was heavily injured and easy to kill?

A prompt at the bottom of the screen had just given him a basic combat tutorial for light and heavy attacks.

Silver confidently marched his character right up to the werewolf.

He squared up and threw two massive, bare-handed right hooks directly into the beast’s face.

Smack. Smack.

The damage numbers were practically non-existent.

He hadn’t even scraped a millimeter off the beast’s health bar, but his actions had absolutely infuriated the monster.

The stream chat burst into hysterics watching his galaxy-brain play.

[

paladar_blade: I thought bro was going to pull out a weapon, but he just walked up and gave the werewolf a booty slap LMAO

Hippster: There’s no way you’re supposed to fight this unarmed! The cover art literally shows him holding a giant saw!

ApexPredator_00: Silver is way too brave for his own good.

d_souza: Werewolf: "Did this guy really just slap me?"

kurikara: The traumatic memories are flooding back. It’s a Nova game. Your death count is either zero or infinite.

]

Seeing that his two bare-handed slaps had done absolutely nothing to the towering beast, Silver fell dead silent. He let out an awkward, nervous chuckle.

The werewolf retaliated instantly.

With three blindingly fast, brutal swipes of its claws, Silver’s health bar was completely eradicated. His character collapsed into a pool of his own blood.

The screen faded to black. When the character slowly woke up again, they were surrounded by an ethereal, foggy graveyard.

Staring at the hauntingly beautiful Hunter’s Dream, Silver finally realized what had just happened. "I was literally just sitting here wondering why the sadist would put an impossible enemy in the first five minutes of the game!"

"I can’t believe I fell for it. So it was a scripted plot kill."

I just finished the Carrie TV series by Mike Flanagan. What do you all think about it? I wanna hear your thoughts(for anyone who watched it).

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