Breath of the Idle King

Chapter 2: One Breath, One

Stat Point The cold night air felt biting against his skin, but strangely, Garou didn’t feel a chill. His breath which now felt like the gust  of a high pressure industrial engine escaped in steady bursts, creating thin plumes of vapor in the stagnant air. Every time he inhaled oxygen, he could  feel a sensation of heat spreading behind his ribs, as if a furnace had just been lit right in the center of his chest.

He didn’t stop running until the dim neon lights of the city began to greet him.

His legs felt light, too light. Every footfall on  the asphalt left faint cracks he didn’t even notice. He just wanted to go home. 

He wanted to return to his ten-by-ten concrete box, lie down on the thin,  decaying mattress, and try to process what had just happened to his body.

His apartment was on the fourth floor of an old building where the ventilation always smelled of dampness. 

Garou climbed the stairs with wide strides. The rickety wooden door of his apartment creaked as he opened it. The atmosphere was silent, save for the irritating tick of the wall clock.

Garou stepped inside, letting his body collapse onto the worn-out sofa. However, his hand, still gripping the doorknob, felt stiff. 

He intended to turn the faucet at the small sink in the corner of the room to  wash his face. As his fingers gripped the neck of the rusted metal faucet, a sharp "crack" shattered the silence. It wasn’t the knob that turned. The entire neck of the  faucet crumpled like wet cardboard under his grip. Water sprayed out violently 

from the severed pipe, drenching the cracked ceramic floor.

"Shit," Garou cursed, his eyes widening as 

he stared at his fingers still clutching the bent piece of metal. "This  has to be a joke."

 He let go of the metal, dropping it to the floor. 

Clang. 

The sound was too loud, too heavy for a piece of metal that thin. He tried to calm his racing heart, but his breathing only grew heavier. With every breath in, his arm muscles tensed on their own, as if the muscle fibers were binding themselves into something denser. It was a bizarre cycle.

The more he panicked, the shallower his breathing became. The more he breathed, the "fuller" his body felt. He felt a pressure within his veins an unnatural density in his bone and muscle structure.

 "Calm down, Garou. Breathe in... breathe out," hemuttered, trying to follow the instructions he had once heard in  a meditation video tutorial he used to watch when he was bored.

However, as he tried to hold his breath to stop this unknown flow of energy, a transparent notification appeared before his eyes.

The text glowed with an electric blue that was painful to look at.

Status: Recalibration Phase. Oxygen intake restricted.

Density conversion forced to internal structure.

"Recalibration? What the hell is this?" Garou gripped the edge of the wooden dining table to support his body, which  suddenly felt incredibly heavy. The wood of the table groaned in loud protest.

Garou didn’t realize that his body weight seemed to have doubled as his muscle density was forced to adapt by the system. He pressed down harder on the table, trying to stand upright, but the wooden structure couldn't withstand the weight  of this new pressure. With the sound of an explosive snap, the table shattered into splinters beneath his hands.

Garou staggered back, losing his balance. His foot struck the floor with far too much force. A large crack spread from his heel,  splitting the cement tiles until it tore through the concrete floor of his apartment. The resulting thud sounded like a heavy object being dropped from  the floor above.

CRASH!

"Hey! Who’s that?! Shut the hell up!" a neighbor shouted from the next unit, followed by a loud banging on the wall.

"Still tearing furniture apart at this hour? You got a death wish?!"

Garou froze. Cold sweat trickled down his temples. He didn’t mean to cause a scene, but his body felt like a weapon without a safety lock. He tried to regulate his breathing again, but the system in his head  continued to provide contradictory input. He felt thirsty not for water, but for a greater physical capacity.

"I... I just want to rest," Garou whispered to the walls of his apartment, which were now cracked in various places.

He tried to take a slow breath, but his chest surged with an even stronger impulse, demanding room to expand. It felt as if an iron balloon was being inflated inside his lungs.

Suddenly, he felt a strange chill. It wasn't because the night temperature had dropped, but because a predatory instinct had  suddenly activated at the base of his brain. He turned slowly toward the slightly ajar apartment window, letting the thin curtains flutter in the wind.

Out there, atop the roof of the dark building across the street, a figure stood still.

The figure wore an expressionless white mask with a pattern of black lines across the eyes. He didn’t move; he didn’t even seem to  be breathing. He just stared intently at Garou’s apartment window.

Garou held his breath. This time, he truly held it. He tried to shut down the breathing rhythm that had turned his body into this  "monster," hoping the figure wouldn't realize he was there, falling apart inside.

However, the figure did something that made Garou’s blood run cold. He raised his hand, pointing directly at Garou’s chest, and  then slowly lowered his index finger toward the floor, as if signaling that Garou had been "detected" and was now being monitored.

Without a sound, the figure turned and vanished into the darkness of the night, leaving Garou gasping for air amidst the wreckage of  his own apartment.

 "Not a normal hunt," Garou muttered, his fingers crushing the remaining table fragments until they turned into wood dust. "They see me... as an object."

He realized that every second he spent here was a threat. The neighbor next door. continued to pound on the door, his voice now turning into coarse insults that drew the attention of others in the hallway.

Garou had to get out. Now. 

Not because he was afraid of the neighbor, but because he knew that whatever was behind that mask, it  wouldn’t come alone a second time. He stood up, and with one light push far too light for a normal human he leaped toward the window, letting the remaining glass shatter into pieces beneath his feet as he launched himself toward the  roof, leaving behind the "ordinary" life he could never touch again.

 In the middle of the city's darkness, Garou realized he was no longer a man who could sleep peacefully. He was an anomaly who had  just jump-started a war machine within his own body. And in the distance, police sirens began to wail closer, signaling that the disturbance in his  apartment had already become a coordinate for those on the hunt.