I. Unwelcoming
Decided to give this a facelift. Loooots of new content in addition to editing; heck, this first chapter is double the original length. Therefore I think it's worth the reread if you have in fact read it before. Depending on time (something I wish I had more of), motivation, and whether or not anyone is still interested in reading this thing, I may revamp and upload the other chapters as well as new content.
Gore, vore, cursing, violence, death, and my own special brand of morbid await you.
Losing portions of one's body to the darkness. A suitable punishment.
One that Yami Bakura mentally stored away for future penalty games. Not as painful as he would have liked, but he could integrate that into his own design.
He felt some level of begrudging admiration for the psychopath he fought if only because of his sadistic creativity, almost preferring Marik's childish dark side to the teenager lecturing him on his dueling skills. But there was an Item at stake. Sacrifices had to be made.
Hell, Bakura organized his strategy primarily around self-destructive cards; many, many things were sacrificed.
The final sacrifice he ended up making wasn't one he planned on: himself.
Actually, that was not entirely correct. His spirit remained scattered all about like broken bits of glass, some in the Ring, a little in the Puzzle, and a portion embedded in his host. Ryou Bakura's body was the one that the shadows slowly devoured, not the body of the spirit of the Ring—the mortal flesh he first occupied became rancid and disintegrated into little more than dust long, long ago.
Perhaps the initial loss of pieces of his limbs and torso to the attacks of Yami Marik's monsters and his own sacrifices did not cause as much pain as his sadomasochistic personality would have liked. But Ra's fire? That hurt a hell of a lot more. And so he exempted himself from shame for screaming with the same intensity as Marik at the initial flare that engulfed them.
Even his host, deep in pain-induced slumber as he was, jolted from within his soul room at the burning sting that coursed through both of their respective souls. Bakura smothered his consciousness to force Ryou back to sleep as he usually did upon possessing him. The last thing he needed was his landlord awakening and getting himself slaughtered.
Bakura thought of the body as his own, at least in those last few moments while his Life Points clocked out. Along with Marik he felt his host's soul being dragged into the darkness with him and remembered too late that in this particular trip to Hell he would have another companion.
The Shadow Realm.
Colder, danker, and murkier than anywhere one could find in the mortal world. Aptly named, too. Shadow creatures roved all about, lumbering, skulking, and, more often than not, crawling in and out of sight. Violet fog carried the scent of rot and death centuries old. Not that any of the shadow creatures would be able to smell it, but the new arrivals felt it tingle like frost in the back of their throats.
Would the monsters have cared if they could have detected the filthy air? Most likely not. Their senses had disappeared as soon as their spirits had finally succumbed and they were turned into the formless things that they had always seen in the other world but had never truly acknowledged: shadows. And it wasn't just their senses that melted away; whatever memory they had of the world before the darkness vanished.
Human minds descended into survival mode. Slaughtering one another and proceeding to devour their fellows happened on regular occurrence, adding more half-melted spirit gore gathered in gouts across the 'floor' until in some places one had to drag their feet through it like a swamp of putrid flesh.
Every once in a while a new spirit arrived in the Realm. Shadow creatures gathered around him or her as if welcoming a newborn child. Or assembling around the dinner table. One or the other.
On a fateful night (…or maybe day? Hard to tell, really) two spirits slipped into the dark world together and lay prone next to each other, unconscious and blissfully unaware of just where they were. For the moment, anyway. Each could barely be seen beneath the layer of shifting purple fog if not for the prominent white hair and pale skin they each possessed.
The misshapen monsters stared at the two figures that were the newest additions to the haze with half-formed eyes, some of them not even registering that there was anything there at all but continuing to drag themselves aimlessly around in the gloom.
Finally, after what could have been an eternity and what could have been a mere minute, one of them half-walked half-limped up to one of the human spirits and—he? She? It didn't matter—prodded at it with something that at one point might have been a limb but now resembled nothing short of a tentacle. The purple-black appendage dripped with the ectoplasm of its last meal, as did the tongue hanging halfway out of its mouth in anticipation of its next one.
The figure's face twitched and crumpled into the start of a scowl. Not that the annoyed expression meant anything to the shadow creature. It just felt intrigued that the spirit had moved at all.
Poke, poke went the oozing, deformed appendage at the pale face.
If the shadow creature expected a strong reaction, it got one.
Slender fingers clamped down on the tentacle of darkness and tore it off of the shadow creature's body as easily as it could rip paper. The grotesque thing screamed and stumbled back as the soul it made the mistake of provoking opened wine-red eyes and snarled in a carnal way that by and large only the shadow creatures that had completely lost their minds would make. It was not a suitable sound for a human spirit, much less one that had just arrived in the Shadow Realm.
But Yami Bakura was not exactly human, now was he?
The incorporeal form made his way to his feet with the dismembered piece of the shadow still clenched in one hand. A large number of the shadow creatures that had circled around the pair of spirits dispersed when Bakura so much as looked at them, but the one that had been robbed of its arm stood firm.
The red-eyed spirit noticed and sneered. He lifted up the dismembered shadow tentacle to his mouth and took a vast bite out of the side of it. There was a meaty crunch and a gray substance that smelled of old human blood oozed out of the sides of Bakura's mouth. Without bothering to chew he swallowed the hunk of slick meat with a gulp before flinging the remains of the appendage towards the shadow creature. It fell into the ground layer of fog, making a splat as if he'd just thrown a blob of gelatin.
"That tasted like absolute shit," Bakura said, wiping the slime from his chin with the back of his wrist, "but that's not going to stop me from eating you alive if you so much as look in my direction again. Understand?"
The shadow creature made a movement that may or may have not been a nod, and Bakura seemed to accept it. He turned away in favor of concentrating on the limp form of his host's spirit. Another beast roughly the size of a baseball, tiny by the Shadow Realm's standards, decided to crawl on top of Ryou's back and tugged at a lock of white hair with some interest. It nibbled on a piece.
Before the shadow creature could so much as blink the Spirit of the Ring gave it kick that sent it tumbling into the deeper darkness.
Bakura kneeled by Ryou and roughly flipped him over. The Millennium Ring did not hang from his host's neck, and after a glance at himself the spirit confirmed that he didn't have it either. To some extent this should cause him alarm. Survival and escape from the Pharaoh's penalty game after the Monster World RPG and later the Card Graveyard had depended in part on the false copy of the Ring that he had. For all he knew the fake could be buried somewhere beneath the goop at his feet.
"Landlord! Host! Wake up!" He snapped his fingers in front of Ryou's face, to no effect.
Bakura made an irritated noise in the back of his throat and grabbed his host's shoulders before shaking him with about as much care as one would give someone they wanted to strangle to death. "Host."
His host slept in his soul room all of the time. Why did he feel the need to now with ravenous shadow creatures all around them?
When Bakura reached his boiling point he smacked Ryou across the face. A red imprint of his hand and his host's head rolling to one side were the only rewards he got for his efforts.
He cursed and threw Ryou to the ground where his pale form sprawled, doll-like, amidst the darkness, half of his face landing with an abhorrent sound in the goop that was the remains of a shadow creature. Suddenly Bakura became aware of the hungry gazes on his back once more.
He turned partially to glower at the shadow creatures and snap, "What are you looking at?"
One of the few creatures graced with the gift of keeping one of its eyeballs rolled its gaze to Ryou and blinked rapidly.
"No," Bakura said flatly and shifted his body to crouch over his host much in the same way an animal protects its kill. "This one is mine."
The shadow creatures didn't pose any threat in that moment, but that didn't stop Bakura from baring his canines and snarling with beastly passion.
"He's mine, you hear me? Mine. If anyoneis going to make a meal out of this soul, it's going to be me."
Speaking of which…
He put a slender hand over his abdomen, massaging it idly. The overwhelming appetite that always assaulted him upon entering the Realm had begun anew, his stomach rumbling as the juices started flowing with more frenzy in expectance of more sustenance. The bite of tentacle, large as it was, did little to fill him up and was already completely assimilated in the pool of acid. Every bit of energy from the rancid thing had gone to his spirit, but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough. Bakura wanted—no, needed a bigger feed.
His gaze went to Ryou, saliva pooling across his tongue. The boy's spirit was frail, sure, but he would take the edge off of Bakura's hunger. He raked his gaze over the prone body, already planning how to properly enjoy consuming the richness of his pure soul.
Luckily for Ryou and unluckily for the closest shadow creature, Bakura thought better of it.
A few of the shadow creatures remained, either too blind or too stupid to realize they were in the midst of a predatory soul made from the darkness itself.
The closest happened to be rather small, only just barely able to fill up his hand. Truly sad, really, that a human would be reduced to something even more pathetic. It cried out as he snatched it up, twisting from side to side in an effort to break free. The cry grew even louder once it saw him opening his hungry maw.
He popped the soul headfirst into his mouth with all the care of a mortal child eating a cookie. The creature squealed in pain as he masticated it to a thick pulp, grinding up what remained of its spiritual innards and bones. It wriggled at first in an effort to escape his jaws, but all too quickly it had nothing left to move. The taste was foul, something akin to a mixture of dust and rotten flesh. A small price to pay in order to fill the void in his midsection.
Bakura forced the slimy remains to the back of his throat with his tongue and with a hard gulp it disappeared down into his esophagus. He wiped the leftover ectoplasm from his lips with a swipe of his fingertips as his snack arrived in his stomach, its mushy form twitching feebly. The hot walls, slick with acid, closed happily over the nourishment and began to digest the shadow creature in an instant.
His dark soul grew a little stronger, whatever humanity remained within him growing a great deal fainter as the energy was forcibly squeezed out of the shadow creature to add to his own. Bakura rubbed his belly in satisfaction, only to have it rumble hungrily beneath his touch, begging for more. Without a second thought he reached for another creature to further satisfy his appetite.
The ravenous spirit devoured four before Ryou began to awaken.