Unknown POV

I could still feel the sounds of the windows and floors being smashed in front of us and the crows circling the house ringing in my ears as I could do was stare at the horrifying figure looming above us, shifting around strangely calmly while it's body struggled to keep itself together, but still managing keep it's glowing blue eyes eerily focused on the three of us as we laid on the floor, as if it was deciding what it wanted to do with us. All I wanted to do was keep up and run, find any means of escaping this void, anything to get as much distance between me and this thing as I could, but no matter what I told my limbs to do, they wouldn't leave the ground, as if the shadow watching us was keeping us glued to the floor just by being there.

If that wasn't enough, in the corner of my eye, I caught sight of two of the crows diving away from the herd surrounding us and shooting straight towards where the shadow was, before they slowed and carefully landed on each of the figure's "shoulders". The crow too, began to glare at us without a sound, spinning their heads rapidly and extending their necks as far as they could towards to make sure each eye got a good look at us. Just then, they stopped, nothing, frozen, their bodies completely still as their heads fell downwards and I thought I saw them growing… taller? No, that can't be right, but looking again, my eyes weren't wrong. Those crows were growing, and they were growing fast, but just when I thought it couldn't get any weirder, I saw their beaks begin to shrink, and their arms and legs turn pale. Their feathers also began to vanish to reveal… s-skin?!

Oh god, they're not doing what I think they're doing, are they?!

But it just kept going. Soon human legs, feet, arms and hands replaced what was there before, and their heads were now those of young human children, complete with hair and facial expressions of both frustration and disappointment. The one on the left resembled a young girl clutching a plush doll in her right hand, while the one on the left looked like a young boy, and… wait a minute! These two were wearing the same clothing as the two on the roof. Could they be…?

The Neighbor gasping for horror confirmed my suspicions. Those were his children standing on the shoulders of the shadow, and they were clearly upset and angry with him. As I looked into their cold eyes, all I could see was rejection and hate towards the man who I'm sure they believed let them die. I could hear the neighbors trying to speak up behind me, but all that came from him were gasp and whimpers as I'm guessing he was struggling to comprehend what we were looking at in front of us, along with the sounds of squeaking coming from the floor underneath us, which I'm guessing what coming from the Neighbor slowly shifting backwards away, but I wasn't able to see for sure since my body was continuing to refuse my efforts to turn away from the shadow eyes.

Suddenly, I heard the Neighbor bring himself up from the ground and take off down the stairs, the suddenness of the action finally allowing me to pull my gaze away from the shadow to see him running down the steps, but before Yuri or I could follow after him, a loud, deep roar was bellows from the shadow, turning our attention back toward the figure. The eyes of the shadow turned from blue to red, very much like the mannequins we had barely escaped from before, but I could also see the children on its shoulders, from the head down, quickly started fading into black dust, being completely unfazed by this, and as they were fading, the particles of dust began to grow and morph into full grown crows, which flew up to join the swarm circling in the sky surrounding the house. The shadow then brought its arms up and suddenly smashed them into the floor, destroying the floor beneath us and sending us crashing down to the floor below.

We landed hard onto a light blue tiled floor and several large pieces of wood planks scattered around the ground. My ribs felt like they were split in half and my arm and legs might as well be broken with how sore they were and how much it hurt to move them, but I knew as soon as I able to open my eyes and see through the sawdust that plagued the air around us that I didn't have a choice, considering that we were lying right next to the far edge of the tile, which... I don't even want to think about what would happen if we fell. The shadow man, thankfully wasn't looking at where we landed, but rather was looking further down the edge of the house, but I knew exactly what he was looking for, and we had to go after him now. I felt myself straining to bring myself up to my knees, and upon seeing Yuri buried under some of the rubble, I powered through the amount of pain I was in and rushed over to her side.

"Yuri!" I shouted, falling to my knees and shaking her, desperate for a response to show she was still ok. Thankfully, it didn't take long before I heard a groan of pain coming from the lavender haired girl as she forced her eyes open and we worked together to bring ourselves up to our feet.

"Are you alright?" I worried, lightly grasping her shoulders as I stood by her side, glancing into her eyes.

"Yes. I'll be fine." She responded softly through her labored breathing. She then looked up towards the shadow, who was still frankly hunting for where the Neighbor went. She then turned to face me, and stated bluntly "But we can't waste anymore time."

I nodded in response. "Got it!" I told her with a pinch of newly formed confidence, and the two of us hurried forward towards where the shadow was searching. We headed to the right, through a large square opening in the wall, which said wall was covered by dark blue wallpaper and light gray swirls across it, and entered a long pitch black room, only being illuminated by the windows to our left, the sound of crows and thunder blaring in our ears as we raced down to the end of the room toward some stacks of seemingly random objects, which then the neighbor came running in from the right and in his rush, ended up tripping over himself and slamming onto the ground with a hard thud. We gasped, rushing to him, but before we reached him, we noticed the floor underneath us turning red and a familiar roar coming from behind us. The shadow had found us, and we spun around behind us just in time to see it smashing it's hand through most of the room. We braced ourselves, shielding our faces as the shadow started taking out the walls and the floor in front of us, barely giving us any room to stand as the shadow glanced deeper into the room. We involuntarily stepped back away from the figure as it looked on, completely ignoring us before moving on further down the house. As it left, we were able to loosen our tension and turn back towards where the neighbor was, only to discover that he had vanished, and upon realizing that, we looked at each other, silently understanding what we needed to do, and took off after the shadow once again.

Dashing through another opening, we were so focused on reaching the neighbor that we almost slipped and fell into the gap that separated us from a ladder that brought us up to the upper levels. Seeing that the ladder started from the basement directly under us, I carefully brought myself to my knees before spinning around and slowly lowering myself until I was hanging from the floorboards before letting myself drop to the tile below, the only source of light strangely enough being a random medieval torch with a green flame. Yuri nervously watched on as I did this, before repeating what I did to make it down herself. I held my hands up to catch her as she came down. However, I didn't realize that by doing this, I would get a surprisingly solid view of the underside of Yuri's skirt. I tried not to focus on it as I wrapped my hand around her as she dropped into my arms, and landed on the basement floor with me. Letting go, we turned and made our way towards the ladder, which seemed oddly thinner than most ladders normally are, but we climbed up it quickly regardless. Making it up, we frantically started spinning around the empty area to find the neighbor behind us in an empty room in the corner, pressing himself against the wall, breathing rapidly in fear, opposite of another set of windows that a pair of red lights were shining through. We gasped, wasting no time rushing over to him and standing in between him and the shadow, bracing ourselves once more before it smashed his hand through the window again. This time however, something definitely felt different, as when the shadow smashed through the ground, barely missing our feet, what was left of the room seemed much smaller than it was beforehand, but I chose not to question, as I was too focused on the fact the neighbor had vanished again, and the shadow took off in response. We hurried down the empty hall and down the steps in front of where the ladder was, and raced around through the dimly lit hallways, which was much harder to do than normal given the smaller size of the corridors, until we reached another room, this time the near right corner was filled with stack of random household objects, like chairs and boxes, the shadow continuing its searching through another pair of windows to our left. We turned to face him, and it simply looked down, but not at us, rather towards the sounds of the neighbors footsteps coming into the room from the far hallway past the stacks. The shadows' eyes turned red again as it readied it's next strike.

"I don't know what you want with him, but you're not going to lay another hand on him, you hear me!" I yelled furiously, facing the giant shadow .

"We won't let you hurt him anymore!" Yuri declared, standing by my side, her expression and stance brimming with determination. The shadow of course, ignored us and once again attempted to smash through the wall, breaking the windows and floors in front of us and sending glass and wood scattering across the room. We shielded our face from the debris, and once we were able to see again, the Neighbor and the shadow had both already taken off. However, looking at the stacks of things in the corner, they were definitely smaller than they were before, but at least from what I could tell, the stuff that was stacked didn't change..., so were they getting smaller, or were we...

I shook my head. Now was not the time to be thinking about this. Turning to Yuri, she also seemed to be noticing the same thing, but after a couple of seconds, she caught me staring at her and stepped back in surprise, clearly caught off guard, but quickly regained her composure, her expression returning to the confidence she had facing the shadow, and we both took off up of stacks to the empty hallway to the left of us. The hallway was pitch black, but as we hurried through, a single dim light illuminated the corridors end, with nothing but wooden walls and another left turn which into another tall, narrow empty room with only more window to our right, and a single empty doorway to our left, which was incredibly tiny for us given our newly larger size, only coming up to our ankles now, but tall enough for the neighbor to peek from, who quickly hid behind the wall upon seeing us.

"Hey, wait!" I called for him, but before I could bend down to reach him, the shadow appeared again, smacking it's hand against the window and focused its gaze at the two of us. Turning to face the windows, I clenched my fists and shot my gaze over to Yuri, who looked over at me, and nodded with an assuring smirk, before we both turned back to face the shadow, who roared louder than after, it's red glowing eyes burning with anger before reeling back and slamming its hands into the windows, but this time, after it crashed through the windows, it stumbled back in shock, it eyes vanishing and dropped it arms to its side, looking strangely... defeated. Without a second thought, Yuri and I leaped out of the house and towards the shadow. Crashing through the large chunks of flooring still falling from the shadows strike, I felt my feet leave the ground as I flew through the air, completely disregarding the seemingly lack of a floor and the army of crows surrounding us, but that didn't matter to us anymore. All that crossed my mind was finally bringing this shadow down, but as we grew closer to him, the world surrounding us suddenly shifted back to white, the crows instantly vanished, their cries suddenly growing silent, and the shadows covered his face like it was blinded before falling back and suddenly disappeared in a flash of golden light. We managed to land on the ground without much trouble, said ground seemed invisible compared to the white void surrounding us. As we circled around us, we saw the neighbor laying on the ground, with a strange floating purple and white swirling orb floating near where the house was before. Gasping as we laid eyes on him, we wasted no time hurrying over to where he was. Yellow flashes of energy pulsated from the orb as we ran towards where the neighbor was laying. It didn't take us very long to reach him, and I quickly fell to my knees, picking up the neighbor and shaking him. He didn't wake up, but Yuri quickly checked for a pulse.

Sighing in relief, she turned to me and explained, "Looks like he's just unconscious." Thank god.

We carefully set the neighbor back down, and brought ourselves back up to our feet, turning towards the floating orb that rested near us. We looked towards each other, unsure about what to do about this orb. Without any other options, I slowly reached out towards the orb, but Yuri quickly grabbed my arm before I could reach it. I suddenly felt my arm freeze up from how cold her hand was, my shocked expression greeting her as I brought my gaze around to her.

"Are you sure about this?" Yuri asked me softly, yet concerned.

"What else can we do?" I replied. Yuri's expression slowly fell, and she released her grip on my hand. Although hesitating at first, I found myself reaching for the orb once again. As I grabbed it, I was surprised to find that it was actually very warm. I rotated the orb around, but bizarrely enough, the swirling purple and white details on the orb didn't move regardless of how much I spun it around. Out of confusion, I ended up spinning it around so quickly that it slipped from my hand and smashed onto the ground, a gasp coming from both of us as we watched the orb fall. A large crash sound and a flash of light coming from the broken sphere, and we instinctively shut and covered our eyes to protect ourselves, but just then something strange happened. Even with my eyes being shut, I still saw something, a flash of something filled my sight, or someone. I could make out a human-like figure in a blood red cloak from behind. The figure slowly began to turn around to face me, but before I could see their face, they vanished into another white flash.

That figure... just what was it?