My gaze drifts toward the teacher’s desk; the imposing, fake-wood thing I hadn’t bothered to twist yet, to corrupt my power. It looks utterly out of place now, a relic from the world I came from. The authority I once feared. Too clean. Too untouched.
I place my hand on the desk. I begin to picture my next monster. I send mana into the object, to help me focus. Then it creaks.
The sound is sharp and wet, like bones settling in old glue, or stressed wood groaning under an impossible weight. I step back, instinct taking over, my hand flying up towards the crystal in my chest. A hairline crack snakes out from beneath the legs of the desk, a dark line appearing on the tiled floor, spiderwebbing outward across the familiar pattern. The entire floor seems to tense beneath my black boots, a palpable shift in my dungeon’s energy. I freeze. Every nerve screaming run, every cell in my new body vibrating with alarm, but I don't move.
No. This is mine. This space. This feeling.
This isn't like before. The Chalklings were soft, eerie, like sad, smudged ghosts drawn in the margins of a notebook. They were manifestations of neglect, silence and fading presence. But this? This is different. This is sharp. This is dangerous.
My Core pulses in my chest, a hot flicker of pressure, pleasure, and shadow, a sudden spike of raw power. I grit my teeth, bracing myself. Then the desk lurches. Once, a violent shudder rattles the floor, then twice, before something begins to jerk upward from beneath it, from the spreading crack in the floor.
Like puppets on invisible strings, they rise. Awkwardly at first, limbs jointed and stiff, then smoother, pulling themselves up and out of the darkness under the desk. One after another.
They come, not walking, but lumbering forward on all fours with the clumsy, top-heavy stride of something not meant to be on four limbs. Then they reared up with a jerky, sudden enthusiasm that was utterly sickening. To me, I created a twisted fusion of a black bear’s brute bulk and the hyperactive, unnerving energy of a sugar-rushed kindergartener left unsupervised in a locked room. Their limbs are too short for their swollen, disproportionate bodies, giving them a hunched, almost pathetic puppet-like movement. Until I watch that movement snap into a terrifying, ground-eating charge with impossible speed.
Their faces aren't just waxy; they're masks of pale, stretched skin pulled taut over something hard and wrong beneath like a child’s doll left too close to a fire. Their features melted and distorted into a permanent, expressionless smile. It’s the horror of a half-melted doll's face stretched over a bear’s skull. Smears of crayon-like colours; harsh reds, blues, and yellows, stain their fur in places. Then I noticed a smear on them like some grotesque finger painting session was violently interrupted by raw void tar. To me, it feels like I am looking at a disturbingly childish attempt to cover something awful, failed and now mingling with the dark, oily 'blood' that sometimes seeps through their tattered fur.
Their mouths don’t smile, not a real smile at least, a smile that doesn’t touch their faces. The smile just exists flat lines on waxy faces. But their eyes… oh god, their eyes. When they’re not simply blank, button-like voids, they giggle. I see it there, a horrifying mirth in the unsettling light reflected in those plastic-hard eyes.
When in groups, they don’t speak words you can understand. They just giggle. High-pitched, thin, unrelenting, multi-voiced tittering that feels less like laughter and more like tiny, sharp knives scraping directly on your sanity. And when they open those mouths that don't smile? You see teeth. Too many teeth, too sharp, too jagged, filling the void where a child’s grin should be.
They wear pathetic, stitched cloaks. My subconscious must have made them from frayed nap-time mats and classroom carpet squares, tied together with broken laces and stray bits of yarn. Remnants of forced rest and mundane confinement, twisted into the ceremonial robes of my little monsters. And in their little hands, they clutch plastic “knives.” Bright, cartoonish things like something ripped from a play kitchen set. But when they swing them, there’s a horrific, sickening shick sound, and the blades cut with real, system-approved lethality, slicing flesh and bone as if they were butter.
I had a feeling that they don’t just kill. That would be too clean. Too merciful. They play with their food. They bat at their victims and drag them across the floor like broken toys, their horrifying giggling filling the air as they do it. They find dark, unfathomable joy in the process, reflecting the deepest, most buried fears of childhood trauma given monstrous form.
Finally, it clicks. The face each one of them had. Those faces… oh god, their faces. I know that face. Not just one of them. All of them. Dozens of identical, unnervingly faces.
Him.
The boy with the knife.
Dozens of versions of him, crawling out from under the desk like a mutation of a teddy bear combined with a kindergartener. They were pulled from a nightmare toy box, endlessly.
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I take another step back, bumping into an unseen wall of my own making. My hands are trembling, shaking uncontrollably. It feels like my skin is made of static and glass, fragile and buzzing with terror. I can’t breathe, my lungs locked tight in my chest. And then I do breathe. A ragged, tearing gasp and something cracks loose inside me, something that had been held tight for years.
I laugh.
Just once. Sharp. Ugly. A little unhinged. It echoes strangely in the quiet room.
“You’re mine now,” I whisper, the words a promise and a threat rolled into one. My voice feels foreign in my throat, rough and raw, but I keep going, louder this time. “No more hiding in the dark. No more quiet.”
My Core flares in response, a sudden surge of power radiating outwards, feeding them, feeding me. Pain turned inside out, trauma given form and purpose. A seed finally bursts open, cracking the concrete to grow something terrible. A small shadow drifts into the edge of my vision. Bookbite. He walks closer like a nosy aunt arriving late to a funeral, silent until he’s right beside me, his large eyes taking in the scene. Then, with all the deadpan drama of a stage actor at intermission, he rasps: “Congratulations, Mama Monster. You’ve given birth to trauma with blades.”
I snort. It's ugly and wet and not really a laugh, but close enough. It’s a sound of grim acceptance, of dark amusement. I look at the five blank, familiar faces holding their toy knives. "Let's see what happens," I say, my voice low and steady now, the tremor gone, "when someone actually deserves what I felt."
The Kinderguards twitch at my words, a subtle, unified movement. Their plastic knives reflect the dim, flickering light from the core and the void. I swear I can hear the whisper of nap mats dragging behind them like shadows, rustling secrets.
They’re mine.
Born from the worst moments. Given form by my power.
And I’m done being quiet.
The air tastes different now. Heavy. Damp with memory, thick with the aftertaste of fear and chalk dust. Every breath I take feels like it’s being chewed before I can swallow it, rough and cloying in my throat.
And then—
System Notification[New Monster Manifested – Kinderguards: Fast light fighter– DPS Class with light tank elements] Silent Coordination – Group Aggression Triggered by Threat.
Monster Manifest: Kinderguards
Tier Rank: E
Point Value: 1 Dungeon Monster Point each
Adventurer Threat Level: Medium (Effective against Level 1–2 intruders)
Type: Constructed Horror – Traumaborn
Role: Fast Striker / Light Tank Hybrid
Rarity: Uncommon Spawn
Description: Twisted from the memory of the knife-wielding boy, the Kinderguards resemble warped children with a bear’s stubbornness and a child’s sadist laughter. They charge in together. Quick, shrieking, and relentless, but they can take just enough of a hit to delay their own deaths. That delay is all they need.
Stats:
- Health (HP): Low-Medium (2–3 hits to down)
- Speed: High (Erratic burst movement)
- Damage: Moderate-High
- Defense: Light Natural Armor (from nap-mat cloaks)
- Aggression Radius: Medium
- Spawn: 1 Monster point.
Abilities:
- Silent Coordination: All Kinderguards in the area aggro together if one is engaged.
- Plastic Precision: Sharp toy knives deal real damage. 25% chance to apply Bleed (Minor DoT for 5 seconds).
- Nap-Time Cloak (Passive): 15% chance to block or deflect the first incoming melee hit. Visual: nap-mat cloak ripples and absorbs part of the impact.
- Giggle Swarm (Aura): Emits unsettling, high-pitched laughter. -10% Perception and Focus on intruders within range.
- Bear-Like Bracing (New – Light Tank): When engaged with two or more adventurers, the Kinderguard can:
- Temporarily reduce all incoming damage by 25% for 3 seconds.
- Cooldown: 20 seconds
- Visual: A sudden snarl and puffed-up stance, cloak snapping like fur.
Drops:
- Tattered Nap-Time Cloak Fragment (Crafting Material – Uncommon)
- Miniature Plastic Knife (Weapon Component – Brittle but usable)
- Memory Scrap: “Hallway Whispers” (Emotional Echo – Coreborn use only)
Bookbite doesn’t speak right away. He walks in slowly from the teacher’s desk, quieter than usual, his large eyes fixed on the newly arrived monsters. The tension in the air must even press on him. When he finally speaks, it’s dry. Almost impressed. “You’ve got issues.”
“They’re mine,” I say. I don’t blink, just stare at the blank faces of the kindergarteners. “That boy,” I add, looking away from Bookbite, back at the waiting figures, “he taught me to be afraid. Taught me to stay quiet. He wasn’t the first one who made me feel truly powerless, but wasn’t the last.”
I look at the Kinderguards now—how they twitch, how they seem to breathe in terrifying unison. How they wait, their plastic knives glinting.
“Let’s see what happens,” I say, a slow, grim smile spreading across my face, “when someone talks back.”
“And I’m done being quiet,” I said.
The Bookbite smiles and eats a rat tail. Slurping it up like a pasta noodle. He then said, “Glass cannons? Hah! These little nightmares are more like bear-shelled badgers. Stupid fast, freakishly stabby, and somehow hardier than they look.”