Sin Eater (Demon Slayer SI)

I took my first breath, and it sent wet dirt and clumps of soil up my throat. I’d never woken up so fast in my life.

Shoving myself off the floor, I tried to snort out the mixture of wet soil and regain my ability to breathe. By the time I had cleared my blocked nostrils, I was very much aware that, one, I was not in my comfy bed, and two, more importantly, I was on a battlefield, or what was left of one.

Looking down at the lumps of dirt I’d breathed in and snorted out, I saw the brown earth was tinged with something red. It wasn’t just wet dirt; the ground and everything around me were blood-soaked.

I forced myself to ignore the pale hands and fingers I could see connected to my torso. Instead, I allowed my eyes to survey my surroundings.

The first thing I noticed was the blanket of white that covered nearly everything. That was when I realized the clothes I wore were also covered in the same substance. Those same pale hands I refused to spare more than a thought about drifted to my shoulders and pulled off a handful of what I was coming to realize was snow.

Yet, even though I could feel it in my hand, the sensation of cold refused to register. I had been left underneath the snow long enough that hypothermia must’ve been setting in. Probably frostbite too, yet I lacked the distinctive dark-colored extremities that should’ve indicated such.

A shift of the breeze brought a sickly sweet smell to my nose. The scent was the most intoxicating thing I had ever perceived. I could already feel my lips parting as my tongue slipped out as if to taste the air.

Then the most revolting smell came, one that I was more familiar with: the thick stench of shit. My suddenly increased sense of smell was indiscriminate and was forced to snap my mouth shut with a limb over the lower part of my face. The voluminous robes I seemed to have on helped to at least reduce the smell.

I allowed my eyes to roam again, picking up the red that the slow yet continuous downpour of snow seemed to try its best to hide—the scattered arms and armor partially hidden beneath the snow, and most importantly, the bodies.

I’d woken up on a battlefield, I confirmed with a dampened sense of fear. Why was I not shaking in my boots? I found myself wondering. I already knew I was made of sterner stuff than most. I’d survived a kidnapping and a car accident without ever falling into despair.

Yet I felt this should’ve been different. I’d woken up on a battlefield, my partners the disemboweled and ripped apart forms of the dead. Yes, I knew they were ripped apart; barely a meter from me was the sight of a man torn in half, his legs missing, and his internal organs spilled from the tear.

The scene was horrific, revolting in a way that should’ve sent me to my knees, trying my hardest to throw up everything I’d eaten in the last week. Yet I only felt a muted sense of fear and the fast-rising feeling of hunger.

Why exactly was I complaining again? I didn’t know, so I instead tried to make out something from the surroundings. I was in the centermost part of the battlefield. A banner stood not far from me, with a sigh that identified it as a noble's banner.

I was still deep in my thoughts when that particular sweet smell wafted into my nose once more with another shift in the wind, and it suddenly felt like my insides were empty. The last thing I remember was curling into myself with a strangled scream as the ravenous hunger took me.

...

I blinked blurry eyes that were rapidly clearing and watched my bloodstained hands tenderly pick up a kidney from the gaping hole that was a man’s chest. Before slipping it past my lips, my rapidly building horror was discarded immediately as the bulbous organ landed on my tongue.

The exhilaration that followed as my jaws automatically chewed, trying their best to draw out every ounce of juice from the organ, almost sent me over the edge. The sensation of finally swallowing and feeling it slide down my gullet was the breaking point, and I was lost in another mind-breaking euphoria.

Until my unfocused eyes landed on the clouded-over eyes of the man whose chest I had been digging into. Like a veil had been ripped from my eyes, I found myself struggling and staggering to my feet, trying my best to get away from the corpse. “What have I done?” The question left my lips, burdened by the weight of sin.

As if to validate my act, a sudden calmness came over me. One that pushed aside my rapidly rising hysteria and madness. Instead, I stood up gently from the mess and started to rapidly make my way back to the body, back to the man.

No, no, no, no.

I repeated the words like a mantra, begging and trying to wrest control over my body as it moved on autopilot or instinct. But it was not to be. I was still ravenous, and the logical part of my brain had been kicked out of the driver’s seat.

I could feel my body shift to my knees and gently cradle the head in my hands. Before sinking two fingers into the eye sockets and plucking out the man’s black eyes, with only the dangling optical nerves as proof of where they had come from.

As my head tilted back and my fingers dropped the observatory organ into my throat, the only thing that came to mind was a hysterical thought:

Venom was right; human eyeballs tasted nice.

...

The third time I came to, I was above a different body. Another corpse that had been left on this desolate snow-covered battlefield, splattered, stained, and given color by all the blood I’d spilled while digging deep into the caverns of their midsection. For some macabre reason, it seemed like I preferred organs to the extremities, in defiance of natural predation, just one more clear-cut sign of the unnatural monster I woke up as in this life.

The body beneath me twitched, and I experienced a clarity of senses and thought like never before. I had experienced intense adrenaline surges before, ones formed from fear and ones formed from anger. What I felt was nothing like an adrenaline surge. It felt like what an adrenaline surge tried to be at its peak. I went from standing confused and looking at my blood-soaked arms and kimono to a low stance as my body primed itself for violence.

My senses shifted and were suddenly heightened in a second. I could smell what my instinct identified as a nearby predator. The sound of wings beating against the sky, as they struggled to stay aloft while circling, hinted at scavenger birds that had finally discovered the abandoned battlefield.

However, my eyes were the most focused. They stayed on the woman, watching still muscles and looking into her ripped-open chest for any signs of her missing heart, expecting it to beat any second now. When nothing happened after a few minutes, I could feel the way my body slowly readjusted. I could still hear the birds struggling against the heavy snow, while the soft patter of padded feet against snow rang out from farther away, but it was muted, needing me to actually focus on them for some measure of accuracy.

When it happened again, I was waiting for it. I had already banished thoughts of zombies and the like and had come to a simple conclusion, one that was rare but not so rare that I had not heard of it: cadaveric spasm.

The moment it passed, confirming my thoughts, I allowed myself to ease out of my stance. For some reason, it had never been fight or flight; my body had skipped that decision and simply decided on fight. I tried my best to ignore the woman on the floor. Ignore the way her head had been cracked open and the empty hole that had been left where her brain should have been. Ignore my hands that were still dripping with blood and the sudden feeling of fullness I could feel in my stomach. Instead, I assessed myself. Truly assessed myself for the first time.

It was a better alternative to contemplating what I had done. Luckily, once again, my feelings and emotions were dampened heavily, and that was what helped me hold on to whatever shred of sanity I had found. My arms were pale things. Not as moderately muscled as my actual arms had been; these were leaner.

Yet they had been strong enough to rip open cavities and break apart ribs while searching for those sweet bloody...

Shaking off that wild tangent and the pit it no doubt led to, I focused on my face instead. I could not see my face, and I resisted the urge to feel for it with my bloodstained arm. Instead, I extrapolated from the bodies surrounding me and my one change in skin color, and I knew I was Asian. Was that it then? Had I suddenly gone back to the past and stolen the body of some ancient Japanese demon?

No, I looked at my clothes, and while it was definitely traditional and had spun, the kimono was well cared for and well worn, the same as the bodies I had passed. certainly medical Japan but not so far as to be ancient.

That was when I noticed the blade at my hip. A katana? No, a wakizashi. Now how had I known that? Sharp memories came of wielding the two different blades at two different points in time, while an older man sometimes stood and watched me or was in front of me teaching me.

The influx of new memories tore through my head, and it took all I had to stem the tide. So what was I, some samurai? I didn’t think so. Unlike a lot of the bodies I had ripped open to feast on, I wore not even the slightest shred of armor. So, a noble then? Or some sort of attendant? The flapping of wings close by drew me from my contemplation as a bird alighted on a partially snow-covered caravan.

What I initially assumed to be a vulture turned out to be another type of scavenger bird. I had no name for it, and even though I could feel the name at the tip of my tongue, I knew I would have to let the tide of memories flood back to recall it. The thought didn’t last more than seconds before it was dismissed.

No freaking bird was worth enduring that, not now. My eyes trailed over everything, and as more birds continued to land, uncaring of the rapidly building snowstorm, I began to see vague shapes in the distance, details lost in the swirling snow. Something in me urged to call out to them, to go over and request help. But I strangled that feeling and gave it a quick death.

Whatever these new instincts wanted, I was going to do the opposite, considering they saw fit to rip open the dead and eat them. Coupled with the fact that any return to civilization, as bloodied as I was, would not bode well. The sound of predators coming for the buffet that had been left behind made me turn to the forest a few meters ahead. Whatever was coming to feast on the dead would find their meals suddenly lacking because I was certain at least half of the corpses had been ripped apart and opened by me already.

I doubted the new scavengers would be happy about that, so I began to walk towards the forest. Despite the inches-deep snow, I found it easy to move. Whatever drag I was supposed to feel from the packed snow was lost as I bulldozed my way through it. Vague fears of leaving tracks for something or someone to follow were thrown aside as the increased snowfall did an accurate job of covering them. I just needed somewhere to stop and think. Somewhere that was preferable to a massive gravesite.

I finally left the battlefield behind and stepped into the forest. The snow here was lesser, allowing easier maneuverability. Not that I needed it much, considering how well I already coasted through the thicker snow. Instead, it was a nice change of environment as the trees and leaves reduced the amount of snowfall. Barely meters in, my leg hit a raised root, one that tried its hardest to trip me, but my hand automatically reached out to a tree for balance, and my fingers clamped around it, stopping my fall.

Barely minutes in, and the forest had exposed me for a fraud. An outdoor woodsman I was not. I had lived all my life in the rigid structures of concrete walls and bright lights, with paved roads that were the hallmarks of civilization.

My eyes glanced at the palm imprint I had left behind on the tree, and not for the first time, even as I turned away and trudged deeper into the forest, I asked myself a soul-searching question: What was I?

...

I had lived for twenty-four years without ever giving two fucks about the sun. In fact, that was a lie. I actively hated and despised the fiery ball of hydrogen and helium held together by its own gravity and suspended in the sky.

Its iridescent glare on my skin had made me grow a deep loathing for its annoying rays. It darkened my skin and had me sweating like an over-bloated office worker surviving on a diet of greasy fast foods, but I couldn’t have been farther from that.

Which was why staring at it rise from the shadows of the dilapidated and abandoned house I’d found for myself left me with mixed feelings.

I was truly trapped and screwed, as I was rapidly coming to realize. I stretched out a hand once more, out of the protective shade of what had most likely been a hunting cabin at one point in time.

I watched the way my skin seemed to redden the closer it got to the light. Those instincts reared up again—the same ones that had me shoving a man’s innards by the handful into my mouth for hours, forcing my brain to shut down in an attempt to protect what was left of my fraying sanity. The same instincts that had me ready to fight at the movement of what it had identified as prey.

Unfortunately for them, I was prepared, knowing their effects. It felt like I was at war with my own hand, but I was determined to see this particular deed through, to acknowledge what I was, and to defy the baser instincts this body was cursed with. Despite my body fighting me every single inch of the way, my hand steadily drew closer to the sunlight. The already red skin began to blister and pop as the ultraviolet rays wreaked havoc on the limb.

I have always had a ridiculously high tolerance for pain. It was not quite congenital insensitivity to pain, but it was not far from it. This tolerance had been fostered even further by my rough childhood. By the time I turned twenty-four, it took something special to elicit anything more than a grunt out of me—something like the mental attack that was a whole lifetime of memories trying to scramble its way into my head. Which was why the scream that left my throat surprised me the moment my hand felt the full brunt of the sun’s glare.

I could feel those instincts rattling the cage that was my brain, forcing to be put in control and take us out of danger. But against all odds, I refused, for the first second, literally watching my hand spontaneously combust before my body’s sense of preservation won. I was flung back into the shade of the building, cradling my charred hand and strangling what was left of my screams in my throat as I watched my hand heal.

Muscle grew grotesquely and slowly over blackened bones. Nerves and tendons connected, bringing back sensation. What should have taken months to years, if not outright impossible to heal was returned to full functionality over the course of minutes.

“Fuck.”

That was the only word that left my lips. A profound summary of the mess I had gotten myself into as I realized what I was and where I was.

*So I’ve somewhat put my shit in order. As best as I can at least, a simple bandage over a rotting and festering wound. But making lemonades out of fried bananas and all that.

Anyway, yes this is a new story. No, it’s not taking precedence over cursed eyes. Yes, it’s only a snippet and it’s the longest chapter 1 I’ve ever written. Yes, I've tried my best at being vague but I’m certain the ending exposed the particular verse. I’ve said I wanted to write a fanfic in this particular verse for a while.

The original plan was an OC and as one of the good guys instead, but I finally started this today to get my mind off things and my hands kept moving till I had this out, with me inserting myself in it instead of my original vague draft. Shocking, but my brain already has a plot outline, which is flat-out weird.

It’s unnamed cause I’m shit at names. So if anyone is interested in naming it, give it a go.

Started editing the next chapter of Cursed Eyes, so expect it in a couple of hours. Ciao.