The Unwilling Monster

A sound tore from Kaliyah’s throat that was utterly alien. It wasn't a scream of terror, not really. It was a raw, piercing shriek that was all animalistic reflex, a final, desperate signal from a body that knew it was about to be annihilated. It was the sound of pure, unadulterated synaptic overload.

Inside, her mind was a screaming prison. MOVE! GET UP! RUN! The commands fired through her neurons, a frantic, desperate litany against the tide of sheer, paralyzing fear. But her body was no longer hers to command. It was a statue of flesh and bone, kneeling on the cold, foreign earth, waiting for the impact. It was the same infuriating paralysis that had gripped her during panic attacks in boardrooms, when her mind would go blank and her tongue would feel like lead, but magnified a thousand times by the very real, galloping death bearing down on her. The ADD curse, it seemed, had successfully immigrated to this new hell with her.

The ash-dark monster, a creature of nightmare and shadow, closed the distance. Its ember eyes blazed, its talons tore the ground, and its intent to trample her into a crimson smear was a palpable force.

And then, something else became palpable.

It began as a pressure behind her eyes, a building, screaming tension that had no outlet. It was the terror, the shock, the utter, world-shattering disbelief—all of it compressed into a single, impossible point in her psyche. As the monster was mere feet away, the pressure found its release. It didn’t explode outward; it bloomed.

An invisible wave erupted from her, a silent, concussive sphere of pure, primal dread. It was not a magic she cast; it was a fundamental part of her new reality, an exhalation of her very being, triggered by a soul-deep instinct to survive. The botched summoning’s command—“bring terror to those who seek to harm me”—had misfired catastrophically. Its magic had woven itself into her DNA, and in its simplistic, literal interpretation, it had identified all living things in that clearing as potential threats. The monster. The humans. All of them. And it had given her the only tool a monster needs: the ability to inflict its own essence. Terror.

The effect was instantaneous and brutal.

The charging monster didn’t just stop. Its ember eyes widened in an expression of incomprehensible horror. The shadowy substance of its body seemed to vibrate, then unravel. The spark of life within it wasn't extinguished; it was frozen solid by a fear so absolute it was lethal. With a final, choked gurgle, the creature collapsed mid-stride, hitting the ground with a heavy thud. The darkness that composed its form began to dissipate like smoke, and the ashes lost their cohesion, revealing the decaying, long-dead carcass of a normal horse beneath the magical corruption. The spell was broken, and only the rot remained.

The adventurers fared no better. The warrior scrambling backward vomited, his eyes rolling back in his head as he fainted dead away. The one clutching his wounded arm screamed, a high-pitched, broken sound, and without a second glance at his comrades or the dead beast, he turned and fled blindly into the dark woods. The others followed suit, their flight fueled by a terror that overrode pain, loyalty, and reason. They didn’t see a woman. They saw a nexus of pure horror, a being whose mere presence had slain a shadow-steed by looking at it. They ran, and within seconds, the sounds of their panicked flight were swallowed by the forest.

Silence descended, broken only by Kaliyah’s ragged, choking gasps. She was still on her knees, her body trembling uncontrollably. The pressure was gone, leaving a hollow, aching void in its place. She stared, uncomprehending, at the rapidly decaying corpse of the monster that had been about to kill her. She saw the humans flee as if a demon were on their heels.

What… what just happened?

Her mind, reeling from the sensory assault, could find no logical anchor. The sequence of events made no sense. One second, death. The next… this. A quiet, smelly clearing with a dead thing in it.

Slowly, shakily, she pushed herself to her feet. Her legs felt like water. The world swayed. This had to be a dream. A stress-induced, hyper-realistic, incredibly detailed bad dream. That was the only explanation. She’d fallen asleep thinking about isekai and her brain, the magnificent traitor that it was, had cooked up this elaborate nightmare.

“A dream,” she whispered, her voice hoarse from the shriek. “This is just a really, really bad dream. Wake up. Wake up, Kaliyah. Samantha’s gonna laugh her ass off at this one.”

But the cold air biting her skin felt real. The gritty soil under her fingernails felt real. The coppery stench of blood and the foul odor of decay were overwhelmingly, nauseatingly real.

She started walking, her movements jerky and uncoordinated. There was no plan, no direction. The instinct was to move, to put distance between herself and the dead thing, between herself and the utter wrongness of this place. She stumbled through the undergrowth, branches scratching at her arms, her thin pajamas offering no protection.

“Just a dream,” she chanted under her breath, a desperate mantra. “Just wake up. Hit the alarm. Get the prescription. Go to the interview. Coffee with Ben. This isn’t real. This can’t be real.”

But with every step, the reality of it pressed in. The twin moons, the alien constellations, the strange, twisted trees that looked like they’d been grown from nightmares. Her mind, always so quick to jump to connections, began to piece it together against her will.

The chant. The Latin. The tearing sensation. The clearing. The monster. The adventurers in armor.

Her steps faltered. She leaned against a tree, her breath catching in her throat.

“No,” she breathed. “No, no, no, no.”

It wasn’t a dream.

It was a genre.

The absolute worst, most clichéd, trope-riddled genre imaginable. The one Samantha adored and she herself despised with a passion. Isekai. Whisked away to another world. The premise was always the same: some loser gets a second chance at life in a fantasy realm. But the tropes! The boring, repetitive tropes! The overpowered hero, the harems, the game-like systems, the oblivious protagonist…

A hysterical, broken laugh escaped her. It was all true. And she was living it. But her isekai was broken. There was no goddess, no cheats, no kingdom welcoming her as a hero. There was no explanation, no guiding quest. She’d been dead-dropped into the middle of a fight she had no part in, wearing nothing but her ratty old pajamas, and nearly splattered across the landscape.

The sun—or whatever passed for it in this sky—was dipping below the twisted horizon, plunging the forest into a deep, menacing twilight. The temperature plummeted. The mantra of “it’s a dream” was now completely gone, replaced by a colder, more urgent fear: the fear of exposure. Of the dark. Of whatever other things lived in these woods.

Survival instinct, sharper than it had ever been in her old life, kicked in. She needed shelter. Now. Pushing the existential crisis aside for later, she began scanning the environment, her eyes darting nervously at every rustle and snap in the undergrowth.

After what felt like an eternity of frantic searching, her eyes fell on it: a massive, ancient tree, its trunk split open by age or lightning, creating a dark, hollow cavity at its base. It wasn’t a five-star hotel. It was dank, probably full of bugs, and smelled of damp earth and rot. But it was a space she could crawl into, a barrier between her and the terrors of the night.

She scrambled inside, pulling her knees to her chest. The space was cramped and uncomfortable, but it was concealment. Exhaustion, emotional and physical, hit her like a ton of bricks. Curled in a ball in the dark, shivering from cold and aftershock, the tears finally came. Silent, hopeless sobs that wracked her frame. She cried for her lost job, for the prescription she’d never get to try, for the interview she’d miss, for the date with Ben that would never happen. She cried for Samantha, who would wake up to find her gone.

And a single, bitter thought echoed in the darkness, a perfect summary of her absurd, tragic situation: “Why was it me to get isekai’ed?”

Sam would have loved this. She’d always talked about wishing for it, for the adventure, the power fantasy. But this was no fantasy. This was a cold, terrifying, and deeply confusing nightmare. And what had happened back in the clearing? Why did everyone run? She’d just screamed. A useless, paralyzing scream, the kind her brain was so good at forcing out when action was needed. It made no sense.

Her mind, overwhelmed, could fight no longer. She slipped into a fitful, terrified sleep, haunted by images of burning eyes and the sound of her own inhuman shriek.