Hundreds of red irises open in the gray smoke and the soldiers pointing their weapons freeze for a few seconds, before some of them step back without realizing it, and others stare into the smoke as the look on their faces slowly changes.
In front of all of them, the smoke keeps clearing, and what's behind it...
Well, the blue-haired boy is still standing, though his clothes are shredded, and the wall behind him looks like swiss cheese from how many rounds hit it.
The boy has an open chest, where something that looks like a smiling mouth seems to peer out. A perforated stomach, from which the soldiers can see enormous eyes watching them. Destroyed shoulders, from which sharp teeth are visible.
The amount of blood splattered across the floor and the wall is a ridiculous amount, the kind that makes you think ten people were killed in there.
And yet the torn-open flesh on the boy is moving, from the edges of each hole in his body, the flesh is regenerating inward.
The RC rounds embedded in his body get pushed out and fall to the floor one after another with metallic sounds.
It's a surreal thing to watch, seeing them come out of the body of a boy who should have died several times over.
A second later there isn't a single wound left on his body.
—Bang! Bang!
A soldier from the second row gets overtaken by fear and fires another full burst. The flesh makes a wet sound as the rounds hit, but the red irises don't move with the impacts.
If anything, the wounds that open close immediately.
"The RC rounds aren't doing anything to him..."
Those words got no response. After all, what are you supposed to say when what stands in front of you is a monster capable of shrugging off all of your specialized anti-monster ammunition without any trouble?
"Hehe... hahaha! How is this possible..."
A man who hasn't taken his eyes off the red irises starts laughing. Tears are running down his face while he laughs without stopping and the rifle hangs from his hands with no strength behind it. Slowly his right hand pulls the pistol from his belt and raises it, pointing it at his own head.
"What are you doing?!"
The man closest to him shouts when he sees this, but by that point the man pulls the trigger and the bullet pierces his skull.
Across the room another man falls to his knees in the pool of blood on the floor and starts mumbling something while scratching his face and tearing out his own skin with his nails.
Another gouges out his own eyes with his fingers, runs at the window and jumps, shattering the glass.
Throwing from the seventh floor... the people standing outside will definitely be shaken up.
"What the hell is wrong with you all?! Everyone, stop!"
That loud shout from one of the men seems to be exactly what was needed, because the ones losing their minds manage to snap out of it.
The ones who suffered from looking at the red irises swallow hard.
"Don't look at the eyes... no matter how much you want to, ignore them."
That kind of phrase soon spreads between them.
Because those irises seem to be able to drive anyone who looks at them insane.
—Tap... Tap... Tap...
Arata approaches while the sound of his foot on the blood-soaked floor echoes, and several soldiers step back at the same time.
He walks slowly toward them with red irises glowing all around him, seeming to bloom from a bloody mist, accompanied by an erratic smile that keeps stretching further across his face.
"Fall back! Fall back to...!"
The order comes too late, or rather, it doesn't really matter anymore.
The soldier in the third row drops his rifle to the floor and runs toward the stairs while another follows two seconds later. A third soldier wants to run but accidentally meets one of the eyes, and his legs freeze in place. His eyes go dull, and he starts slamming his head into the wall over and over.
—Swooosh!
Arata vanishes from where he was standing, and a shaking soldier stops existing from the waist up. The lower half stays upright for a full second before falling backward with a wet thud.
The squad leader, the one who shouted the order, turns his head and finds a human arm pinned to the wall with the fingers opening and closing like they're searching for something to grab onto.
A nearby soldier standing in formation ready to act and fire disappears, and what's left in his place is his rifle dropping to the floor.
—Chomp! Chomp!
From somewhere on the ceiling comes the sound of chewing, and several soldiers feel their stomach turn at the sound.
"Above! It's on the ceiling!"
Three of them aim upward and fire, blowing apart the concrete and sending dust raining down. But there's nobody up there, just red stains.
—Crunch! Chomp!
"It's behind us...!"
The man's words are cut off the same way his body is cut in half.
The less trained among them, their heads full of fear, start firing in all directions without knowing what they're hitting, and one of them accidentally blows open his comrade's skull and they start screaming at each other in the middle of the chaos.
As they die, the lights in the rooms and hallways flicker three times and go out.
×××
What happens next is even more terrifying for those still on the seventh floor.
Because the walls start getting wet with blood, and not the soldiers' blood. It comes from the walls themselves, spreading across the concrete.
At the same time the elevators stop working. The strange part is that emergency power is still on according to the readouts, which means they should be operating, but to the despair of the ones who manage to reach them, the elevators don't move.
Meanwhile the security cameras flicker over at the CCG's command post set up outside. That's because the cameras were replaced with All-Seeing Eyes and Arata can see through them everyone trying to escape. At the same time he can make the feed that reaches the command post show whatever he wants them to see.
A group of four soldiers tries to get down through the east stairwell, they make it to the sixth floor and find the walls of the hallway covered in flesh.
"W-what is this..."
Red flesh replacing the concrete, and it moves and breathes. In that flesh, bleeding eyes of different sizes reveal themselves and open all at once when the soldiers enter the hallway.
A mouth opens in the floor beneath one of them.
"Run!"
The large mouth full of uneven teeth closes around his legs up to the waist with a crunching sound.
His companions try to grab him by the arms but the mouth grinds inward and pulls him down until he disappears into the floor.
The surface looks normal again after that, except for the blood stains.
The three left run.
One makes it to the stairwell. The other two don't.
If the walls are capable of swallowing people, then why did that monster let one of them live?
The truth is he isn't thinking about any of that in the moment, out of sheer desperation.
The one who got away runs down to the fourth floor where he runs into another group of soldiers coming up, and when they see him arrive covered in blood that isn't his, face white and saying things that don't make sense, several of them hesitate before continuing upward.
On the fifth floor, soldiers advancing through the central hallway hear voices coming from the empty offices. Human voices behind closed doors, saying fragments of sentences, laughing, and crying.
A soldier opens a door and there's nobody inside.
—Drip.
A drop of blood falls on his shoulder, and when he looks up he sees a ceiling of flesh with an enormous mouth that opens and closes, repeating the last thing a soldier said thirty seconds ago, in his exact voice.
The man closes the door and doesn't open another one.