Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie

#183Reader Mode

#183

Lilies.

The scent reached him just after the voice. Thick, cloying, and so overpoweringly sweet it made his head pound.

Seojun’s knees gave out. Whether he dropped by instinct or obedience, he didn’t know. Ink-blue petals drifted past his face, soft and dreamlike, even as horror unfolded above him.

Johan struck first—his left elbow slamming into Samantha’s wrist. Bone met rotting flesh with a harsh crack. Her hand snapped backward at a sharp angle, fingers splayed like broken twigs. From her ruined throat came—

Nothing. Not a sound. Just the awful absence where a scream should have been.

Johan’s other hand was already in motion. He swung a monkey wrench, heavy steel whistling through the air—

CRACK!

Samantha’s head didn’t come off clean. It wrenched free, torn loose the way a child rips a flower from its stem, careless and absolute. The skull spun through the air then hit the floor with a wet thud. It bounced. Rolled. Disappeared somewhere into the dark. Seojun didn’t see where. He couldn’t look away from the neck.

The stump twitched. Once. Twice. Foam bubbled up from the jagged throat like something left too long on a stove—

Then it burst.

Blood geysered toward the ceiling. Seojun watched it rise in a graceful arc, almost beautiful in the dim light—until gravity kicked in.

Cold. That was his first clear thought. It’s cold. The blood splashed into his hair, ran down his temples, pooled in the dip of his collarbone. He tasted blood. Breathed it. The world went red and wet.

Samantha’s body stayed upright for another breathless second—headless, spasming, spraying fine arterial mist into the air. Then it dropped. Collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Whew. Scary.”

Seojun turned his head. Slowly. Like moving underwater.

Johan stood beside him, the monkey wrench dangling from one hand. He casually shook the blood from his fingers, as if flicking off rainwater. Just moments ago, Samantha had been about to kill him.

Now she was bleeding into the floor tiles.

Seojun couldn’t move. He just stared at the impossible.

It felt like a fever dream. Another hallucination conjured to torment him. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Only the thick, taste of blood and lilies coated his tongue. The corpse. Johan’s calm silhouette beside him. None of it felt real. Like the world had tilted sideways, slipped into something his mind refused to comprehend.

Then Johan laughed.

Strong arms wrapped around him, and Seojun forgot how to breathe.

The sound cut through everything: the copper stench, the ringing in his ears, the static haze where his thoughts should have been. It was bright, easy—like they’d just run into each other at a convenience store instead of standing in a corridor drenched in blood.

Warm. So warm. Seojun could feel Johan’s heartbeat through their chests. The lilies crushed between them released another wave of sweetness, battling the reek of blood for space in Seojun’s senses. His arms stayed limp. He couldn’t make them move.

He looked up.

Johan’s face was smeared with red, but his smile still shone through—bright and sincere. His blue eyes reflected Seojun’s stunned expression back at him, crinkling at the corners as he gazed down.

“Long time no see. You been doing okay? Good to see you, Jun.”

Despair, Seojun had learned, came in many forms.

A truck barrelling down the road. A niche horror movie. A sweet little girl left behind to die. It came in the writhing tentacles of a monster, the blank stare of a gas mask under fluorescent lights, a scarecrow moving through a cornfield. Hungry, parasitic insects born from a devil’s idle hands.

He’d stopped counting the shapes despair could take. Two hands weren’t nearly enough. The world was too creative in its cruelty.

But miracles—

Why did miracles always come in the form of people?

Just a few ordinary words. A single, quiet moment wrapped in horror.

Seojun’s eye burned.

“M-me too…”

His lips trembled. Pathetic. He sounded pathetic, and he didn’t care. People said the heavens would listen if you wanted something badly enough, if you screamed your need into the void until it had no choice but to answer. Seojun had never believed that. He hadn’t prayed. Hadn’t hoped. Hadn’t dared. He only thought about the man now and then, in quiet moments when he wasn’t bleeding.

And yet—

Johan was here anyway.

The tears came without asking. Hot streaks cutting through the blood drying on his cheek. Seojun let them fall. His mouth couldn’t decide what shape to hold—kept flickering between a smile and something that might shatter into sobs if he let it. He probably looked unhinged. Blood-soaked, hollow-eyed, crying in a dead woman’s blood.

He didn’t care.

“Me too. Good to see you, Johan.”

Johan’s smile didn’t waver. Didn’t flinch at the mess Seojun had become. Just stayed, warm and steady, like a porch light left on.

And so, they met again.

They stood there, arms wrapped around each other. Second floor. Abandoned hospital. A headless corpse leaking at their feet—the body of something that had forgotten how to stay dead. The stench of blood hung heavy in the air, thick as summer heat, soaking into their clothes, their hair, the silence between heartbeats.

“Jun, you look really happy to see me.”

Johan’s fingers brushed his cheek—soft, almost reverent. Seojun’s brain stuttered, struggling to reconcile the tenderness with the splatter across Johan’s face, the wrench still dripping onto the floor, the lilies drooping beneath a fresh coat of gore.

Seojun jerked back. Scrubbed at his face with a sleeve. Put space between them. Tried to make sense of the madness—of Johan—standing in front of him.

“Hang on. How are you even here?”

“What do you mean?”

Johan’s head cocked to one side like a curious dog. Genuine bewilderment. Like Seojun was the one being strange.

“Think I was stalking you? Nah. Total coincidence. I’m just as surprised.”

Seojun’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Words piled up somewhere between his brain and his tongue, refusing to form. Coincidence. A coincidence. In an abandoned haunted hospital. While a headless nurse bled at their feet.

Johan didn’t seem to notice Seojun’s brain had short-circuited. A flush crept up his cheeks—he was actually blushing—and he glanced down at the lilies like he’d only just remembered them. When he looked up again, his grin was boyish, expectant.

He held the bouquet out. The petals drooped, heavy with drying blood.

“Ah, right. These are for you. Jun, will you accept them?”

“Huh? Uh… uh. Thank… you?”

The words tumbled out on autopilot. Seojun’s hands moved before his brain could object, accepting the bouquet as if by muscle memory.

It was bizarre.

Johan stood there in jeans and a graphic tee—No Miracle, Yes Chance—looking for all the world like he’d just stopped by on his way to grab coffee. Tall. Handsome. Smiling. Offering flowers. If Seojun unfocused his eye, he could almost pretend this scene belonged somewhere else. A park. A doorstep. Anywhere but here.

Then the scent hit him again.

Lilies and blood, sweet and wrong, curling together in his nose.

Seojun looked down at the variety of flowers cradled in his arms.

Lilies—those he recognized. Baby’s breath too, maybe. Something small and purple he couldn’t name. And in the center, untouched by the blood soaking everything else, a single white rose. He’d never seen one in person before. He’d always imagined the occasion would be different. Less… damp.

The bouquet squelched softly against his shirt.

He couldn’t quite smile. His face wouldn’t cooperate, stunned as he was. Seojun just stood there, staring at Johan waiting for something, anything, to start making sense.

Johan wasn’t helping. His ears were pink. He kept fidgeting—shifting his weight, spinning the wrench in lazy circles, shyly avoiding Seojun’s eyes. Each rotation of the wrench left a thin red crescent on the floor.

Johan opened his mouth to speak.

He never got the chance.

His arm hooked around Seojun’s waist, yanking him sideways. The world blurred. A sharp whoosh split the air where his head had been a second earlier—close enough to tug at his hair.

Seojun turned his head. Slowly. Terrified. Already knowing.

Samantha.

Scrape. Scrape. Click.

The Nurse’s headless body uncurled from its lunge, joints cracking as it straightened. She reached for her head. It shouldn’t have been possible.

But the cold rolling off her said otherwise.

That same unnatural chill—sharper now—bit into Seojun’s exposed skin.

She’d been moving the whole time. While Johan blushed over flowers. While Seojun stood there like an idiot, cradling a blood-soaked bouquet. Apparently, she had no intention of letting them enjoy their reunion in peace.

His stomach turned as he watched her work.

She’d found her head.

Scalpel-fingers scraped across her scalp, clicking against bone. They groped lower, tapping along the torn edge of her neck—probing, aligning. Vertebrae grated together with blind, mechanical precision.

Seojun couldn’t look away.

Samantha’s hands paused. Adjusted. Then—with the casual brutality of snapping a lid onto a jar—she drove her head back into place. Flesh and skin tore under her claws, shearing away in chunks and slapping wetly onto the floor.

Seojun choked, his tongue tripping over itself.

“When—when did she get up? Johan. Johan. Did you just stand there and watch her do that?”

Johan had the nerve to look wounded. Those wide, guileless blue eyes didn’t even flick toward the reassembling corpse. Instead, he delivered a line straight out of a bad romance novel:

“But Jun… I only had eyes for you.”

“……”

Somewhere in the back of Seojun’s mind, there was gratitude. Probably. It had to be in there somewhere. This man had just saved his life. Had held him while he cried. Had shown up like some blood-drenched miracle in humanity’s shape.

He should say something kind. Something heartfelt. Something appropriate for a long-time acquaintance, friend, or—whatever Johan was to him now.

That gratitude would have to wait.

“That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Listen to me, Johan Gentil! Between the two of us, we have three working eyes, and you own two of them! Use your majority stake! Look! Forward!”

Johan pouted, eyes glistening with tears. Seojun groaned and smacked the bouquet against his chest, hard enough to scatter petals. White and blue drifted down between them.

So much for the heartfelt reunion. Blood, tears, flowers, mortal peril—and Johan was still Johan. Still the same strange, infuriatingly sincere man he’d always been.

Later. I can ask later. If there is a later.

Seojun squared up beside him. Planted his feet. Raised the bouquet like a lance and leveled it at Samantha’s chest.

Held the pose for exactly two seconds.

Then slowly lowered his arm.

What am I going to do, pollinate her to death?

Seojun forced himself to look at the Nurse again. Forced himself to really see her. She was facing them—shoulders squared, feet planted—but something was wrong. Something off. He was staring at the back of her head. That tight, severe bun.

Johan leaned in close, sounding amused.

“Pretty sure she put it on backwards.”

“…….”

Funny. Horrifying. Somehow both.

Not that it mattered. Samantha didn’t need to see. She never had. Her head could be upside down, inside out—it wouldn’t change a thing. Every twitch of her ears was a sonar ping. Every head tilt, a fine-tuned adjustment. She mapped the very air, searching for the sound of life.

Even with two fingers missing—Johan’s doing—she still had seventeen blades. The rest of her scalpel-fingers flexed and curled, gleaming. Her body shook like she was screaming from the inside out. Whatever was driving her hadn’t faded.

If anything, it had only gotten worse. The twitching was sharper now. More agitated. Furious.

Seojun edged closer to Johan without even realizing it. He couldn’t help it. Standing beside that solid, muscle-packed body made his own rabbit-fast heartbeat ease just a little. Johan stood loose, relaxed, exuding a kind of effortless calm that made Seojun feel like a small animal pressed up against something bigger. Something safer.

Seojun reached down. His fingers closed around one of the severed scalpel-fingers. The blade was razor-thin, wickedly sharp, but the end where a handle should’ve been was wet. Slick. Stringy.

Is this… a vein? A nerve?

Seojun gagged, then wiped the end against his shirt until it was dry enough to grip. Beside him, Johan rolled his shoulder, cracked his neck, and twirled the wrench in a slow, lazy arc—like he was just warming up.

“So why’s she so mad at you? Did you do something? Just tell me, Jun, and I’ll apologize for you.”

“I didn’t do anything. She’s been like this since we first met her. In the basement.”

Just saying it brought the memory crashing back. The scrape of metal on concrete, that swaying silhouette coming down the stairs, the way his lungs had simply… stopped. Seojun’s shoulders crept up toward his ears.

Samantha’s joints popped and crackled as she fixed her limbs.

“Johan, think we can get past her? Make it down to the first floor?”

The smart thing—the safe thing—would be to let Johan handle it. Out of the four of them—him, McCullan, Levi—Johan was clearly the best fighter. Strong, fast, armed with that heavy wrench. He’d already taken Samantha’s head off once.

But once didn’t mean anything.

She still had a dozen blades left. All it would take was one mistake, one lucky slash—and Johan would be bleeding out on this floor while Seojun stood there useless, watching it happen.

And for what? Because Seojun was too weak to do anything but hide?

He looked at Johan. At the faint flush still fading from his ears. At the way he stood just slightly in front, like shielding Seojun came naturally—like it wasn’t even a decision.

No.

He wasn’t going to crouch behind this weirdo and watch him die. Not here. Not for him. Johan had too many years ahead of him. Too many terrible romance lines left to deliver. The universe didn’t get to take that away.

Seojun’s thoughts were locked on one thing: getting away from her. He could feel it—the odds tipping further out of their favor with every creak and pop of Samantha’s joints. They just needed to break out of her sensory range. Find McCullan and Levi. Regroup. Improve their chances.

He turned to Johan, ready to press the point—and stopped.

Johan was watching him. Not Samantha. Him. Something flickered behind those blue eyes, too quick to pin down.

“You met that thing in the basement?”

“…Yeah. She came down the stairs. Why?”

Johan didn’t answer. His focus drifted, gaze going unfixed, distant—like he’d stepped out of the blood-slick corridor and into somewhere else entirely.

Then his mouth curved.

It started small, almost nothing. Then it spread, bright and eager, until his eyes snapped back to Seojun, gleaming.

“Jun. I just had a great idea.”

T/N: Finally! Let the slow-burn suffering end! Their reunion was so cute! Now Kiss! Wipe off the blood first though! (/≧▽≦)/