❦
Rin woke up swathed in a familiar, repulsive darkness. Her whole body ached fiercely and the air was heavy with the smell of human sweat.
Very faintly, she could make out some murmuring. Blood rushed in her ears so loudly, but she could fill in the blanks from experience. What they said was nothing worth repeating.
She clenched her teeth to keep herself from retching.
She's still here in this hell. There was no escape. There was no creature with soulless light-grey eyes.
It was all just a dream.
Her hands moved to her throat.
She wasn't bound.
Quickly, she searched for the mark of the oath that they made. A skin-coloured marking with a patterned "77" in the middle that the shapeshifter made at the side of her neck.
Her fingers brushed over the keloid scars that marked the oath under her skin and her heart calmed.
Her dilated eyes relaxed and reason returned to her.
She had escaped. The creature was real.
This was somewhere else. The surface she was lying on wasn't the ice-cold surface of an altar but a damp wooden floor.
And the murmuring she heard was the grumbling of children from above her head.
'They didn't give us food even though we trained so hard today.'
'Seki-sensei said too much food will make you lazy.'
'But I'm too weak to take another step forward.'
Childish giggles rang out along an echoey corridor.
'Then you can just sleep here in the hallway!'
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Rin surveyed her surroundings. She was alone inside this dark hole.
Rin felt around and figured that the place she had been thrown into was a deep pit that had been dug out of the dirt. From the thin sliver of light above, she guessed that the opening above her head was probably covered by a wooden lid.
'Tch!' Rin scowled to herself in the darkness as she remembered what happened before she ended up here. 'Useless shapeshifter!'
[Read the full story at novelconbini.com!]