The air shrieked, thick with the stench of pulverized earth, ozone, and fresh blood. Henderson, an old man twisted by a malevolent curse, was a cataclysm unleashed. For two relentless days and two nights, the very ground had fractured beneath the constant, sprawling warzone—an ever-shifting landscape of pure terror. The sky, once a brilliant blue, was now perpetually choked with billowing smoke and the acrid stench of cordite, jet fuel, and incinerated flesh.
The military had thrown everything they had at him. A hundred thousand soldiers, a desperate, advancing tide of humanity, had been sent to halt his rampage. They had screamed, they had fought, they had died. Henderson moved like a living whirlwind of dismemberment. He'd torn men in half with casual swipes, their bodies parting with sickening wet tears that sprayed hot blood across his path. He'd slammed platoons of soldiers together, reducing them to single, mangled heaps of pulverized bone and meat. Limbs, heads, and torsos flew through the air as he carved a path through their formations with impossible speed, leaving behind a wake of grotesque, unrecognizable shapes contorted at impossible angles. Their bones didn't merely break; they shattered, splintering into dust-like particles upon impact from his blows, resonating with a terrifying, hollow crunch. The ground, now a vast, crimson slick of blood and viscera, was littered with pulverized bones and pulped flesh, reflecting the perpetual twilight of the smoke-filled sky.
Hundreds of tanks, their cannons roaring, had attempted to crush him. He'd vaulted over them with impossible grace, or simply ripped through their reinforced steel plating with effortless brutality. He'd casually lifted colossal battle tanks as if they were toys, hurling them with blinding speed into hovering attack helicopters, transforming both into explosive fireballs. The sky itself was a graveyard of twisted metal and burning wreckage. Artillery barrages, carpet bombings, concentrated bursts of destructive force designed to obliterate hardened targets—he endured them all. He stood through explosions that seared and tore at his flesh, leaving him with charred skin, angry red welts, glistening muscle, and even glimpses of bone. The pain was immense, visible in the tremors that wracked his body, but the curse only fed on it, intensifying his rage, honing him into an unstoppable blur of destruction, faster, stronger, and more devastating with every wound.
The military, battered, exhausted, and bleeding across every inch of the contested territory, had pushed him to the brink, but they hadn't broken him. His fury only mounted with each passing hour, with every soldier he slaughtered, with every weapon that failed to halt his advance. He was a force against which conventional warfare was utterly useless, his stamina limitless, his destructive capacity escalating with every wound.
Now, as the grim, smoke-choked dawn of the third day approached, Henderson, an old man transformed into a grotesque sculpture of pain and fury, stood amidst the latest layer of ruin. Chunks of seared flesh hung loosely from his frame, revealing glistening muscle and glimpses of raw bone beneath. His skin, charred black in patches, pulsed with angry red welts. He clutched at a visibly burned arm, the tremor violent, his jaw clenched, but still he stood, unbowed, utterly relentless.
Then, his head snapped up, eyes burning with inhuman rage, piercing through the smoke. "DOVAN! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU HIDING?! YOU BASTARDS! I KNOW YOU'RE SEEING THIS! HAND THAT BASTARD OF A PRESIDENT OVER OR I'LL ANNIHILATE ALL THESE SOLDIERS! SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND LEFT? I DON'T CARE! I'M GOING TO FUCKING MASSACRE THEM ALL!"
With a terrifying, almost mechanical precision born of pure malice, Henderson became a living, breathing instrument of annihilation. He snatched another battle tank, the steel groaning under his grip, and flung it like a pebble at a cluster of circling attack helicopters, triggering a chain reaction of fiery detonations that rained molten shrapnel across the ruined landscape. He didn't merely kill the soldiers; he dismantled them. A squad sprinting for cover found themselves crushed under a falling helicopter chassis, reduced to paste. Others were swept up in his wake, tossed like rag dolls into exploding vehicles or torn limb from limb with effortless, bone-shattering force. He moved too fast for the eye to follow, a blur of motion leaving a trail of screams and twisted metal, his every action an escalating testament to the curse's boundless, destructive power.
He was a walking, screaming abattoir. No longer content with merely breaking bones, Henderson's attacks became a grotesque symphony of mutilation. He'd grab a soldier, twist him into a screaming knot of flesh and bone before flinging him as a projectile into others. He'd punch through armored vests, his fist emerging from backs with sickening wet snaps. Faces were pulped with casual backhands, bodies cleaved in two by sweeps of his arm. The ground beneath him, already a quagmire of blood and viscera, churned with fresh layers of shattered forms and fragmented remains. Each death was quicker, more brutal, the sheer volume of his slaughter overwhelming any organized resistance. The screams of the dying were swallowed by the roar of the curse, replaced only by the wet thud of bodies hitting the ruined earth, a relentless, terrifying rhythm.
Miles away, in a hidden bunker buried deep beneath a nameless mountain, the President's face was a gaunt canvas of exhaustion, etched by years of carrying an impossible secret. He stared at the tactical display, its cold blue light starkly contrasting with the live intel of utter devastation.
"This is insane! He's not even slowing down!" the President roared, slamming a fist on the console. "The bleeding… it's doing nothing! How?!"
His eyes, wide with a terror barely contained, locked onto his Commander. "Deploy the last Anti-Curse! Now!"
A nervous aide flinched, voice thin with barely suppressed panic. "But sir… what if it fails? What if it doesn't kill him?"
The President's jaw clenched, his gaze hardening into a desperate, absolute fury. "DO IT! NOW!"
From the swirling haze of smoke and dust, a sleek, black projectile emerged. It was not a missile, not a conventional bomb, but something far more sinister. It moved with a silent, terrifying grace, cutting through the atmosphere at an impossible velocity—a specialized explosive, the first and only of its kind, meticulously designed for cursed users. It shimmered with unstable energy, already crackling as it accelerated, a searing hypersonic blur closing in on Henderson. The projectile was relentless, a silent, deadly hunter that matched his impossible acceleration stride for stride.
The gap narrowed. A hundred meters. Fifty. Twenty.
Henderson's roar, a sound of frustrated, agonizing fury, ripped through the air as the explosive was practically on top of him. He strained, pushing for that final, impossible burst of speed, but it was too late.
The activation signal was sent.
A blinding flash, a white-hot sun blooming in the heart of the ravaged battlefield, swallowed Henderson whole. The concussion arrived a split-second later, a physical hammer blow that flattened everything within a city block, ripping apart the very fabric of the landscape. The roar that followed was absolute, deafening, purging the world of all other sound. When the light finally receded, leaving behind a mushroom cloud of churning smoke and dust, there was nothing left of Henderson. Just a colossal, smoldering crater where he had been.
For a long, agonizing moment, the country held its breath. The distant military lines were silent, shattered. They had done it. They had finally killed him.
But then, from the epicenter of the smoldering crater, something began to stir. The smoke swirled, not dispersing, but coalescing, drawing inward. A grotesque silhouette began to form, rapidly growing, bulking, twisting. It was taller, broader, a horrific parody of human anatomy, pulsating with unnatural might. His skin seemed stretched taut, almost translucent in places, revealing the unnatural network of veins and fibers beneath. The creature moved with a fluid, unsettling grace, a predator at the peak of its power. A low, guttural growl, no longer human, vibrated through the ground.
Within that monstrous form, a flickering consciousness stirred.
"What... happened... how am I still standing...?"
Henderson saw his body move, a grotesque, hulking mass of flesh and muscle, and he couldn't stop himself. He watched, an agonizing, helpless spectator within his own mind, as the monster, with an instinctual, terrifying precision, went straight for its true targets. It hunted down the President and Vice President of that country, then the Commander of their military. They had been hidden in a very deep bunker none could smell or find it, but the monster did; it simply knew where they were. He saw his monstrous form kill them three instantly. No defense was fast enough, no security strong enough.
But then, his vision shifted. The monster's gaze swept over the populace, and it started going after children.
"WAIT! WAIT! NONO! NO-NO! WAIT! WAIT! STOP!"
He desperately tried to control himself, to scream, to seize back command of his limbs, but nothing worked. The primal, consuming hunger of the curse was absolute, deafening his internal pleas. He was a prisoner in his own flesh, forced to witness the annihilation. His mind screamed, a silent, futile echo within the monstrous shell.
"STOP IT! PLEASE! DON'T TOUCH THEM! NO! NO! NO! GET AWAY! PLEASE! I BEG YOU!"
The monster, deaf to his internal anguish, continued its merciless sweep. Each terrifying lunge, each horrific act of consumption, was a searing torment to Henderson's trapped consciousness. He felt the phantom impact of every blow, the tearing of every life, as if it were his own flesh doing the unspeakable. His desperate, voiceless shouts filled the silent confines of his mind, a perpetual scream against a tide of blood and despair. He thrashed against his mental bonds, a soul trapped within a living nightmare, as his monstrous form continued its rampage, unstoppable and insatiable.
It moved through the streets, a blur of flesh-rending violence. Men were crushed underfoot, women ripped apart, elders swatted aside like bothersome insects, their screams abruptly silenced. He saw it all. He felt it all. The force of impact, the wet spray of blood, the tearing of muscle and bone – it was a gruesome symphony performed by his own body, his own cursed power.
"NO! GOD, NO! LEAVE THEM ALONE! I BEG YOU! IT'S ME YOU WANT! TAKE ME! LEAVE THEM!"
His internal pleas grew frantic, a raw, guttural wail trapped behind unyielding mental walls. But the monster felt no mercy, only the cold, mechanical drive of its unleashed instincts. It didn't just kill; it consumed, leaving behind nothing but crimson stains and shattered earth. Each agonizing second was an eternity of forced complicity, a living hell where Henderson's humanity was tortured by the very power that was supposed to be his. He could only scream, and watch, as the country burned at his hands.
The Aftermath
For another full day, the monster continued its slaughter, a relentless tide of primal violence. It consumed everything: men, women, elders, children, even the animals, until nothing living remained in the ravaged landscape. The screams had long since faded, replaced by an eerie, profound silence over a nation turned into a graveyard.
Then, just as abruptly as it had appeared, the monstrous form began to dissolve. The muscles writhed, not with power, but with a sickening retraction. The translucent skin thickened, the unnatural network of veins fading, until the grotesque parody of human anatomy shrank, contorted, and then snapped back into the familiar, frail shape of Henderson, an old man. He stood amidst the devastation, naked, covered in gore and his own blood, yet physically unharmed.
The curse, a voice that resonated not in the air but in his very bones, simply laughed—a very wicked laugh, not a human laugh, but beyond that, a sound of pure evil that echoed in the silence.
The echoes faded, leaving Henderson utterly alone in the silence. He was the only man left alive. He crumpled to his knees, his face a mask of unimaginable horror, eyes wide and vacant, staring at the endless, self-inflicted nightmare surrounding him.
A raw, broken whisper tore from his throat. "What...have...I done?"