Transmigration in Mordor

He stood at the entrance of the cathedral of bones, a solitary figure swallowed by shadow, his soul twisted with anticipation. The air was a thick tar, a suffocating mix of the dust of decay and the nauseating musk of evil creatures. Far above him, in the veils of gray silk hanging from the invisible ceiling, a mass of living shadow moved, a mountain of legs and empty eyes, the skeletal spider. Hunting.

Zac backed away, a predator calculating its prey. A frontal assault was suicide, a waste of the new, raw strength he had forged. No. He turned back, entering the labyrinthine tunnels, his mind a cold and ruthless map, tracing the deadliest path.

The exploration was a prolonged agony, a test of endurance. He climbed vertical walls, his muscles screaming, and squeezed through cracks so narrow they threatened to crush his bones, using the `Forge of Brutality` to hoist himself where only a demon would dare. Patience, that new virtue forged in despair, became his secret weapon. Finally, he found it: a high breach, a gaping maw in the rock face that looked directly down upon the throne of terror, the beast's nest.

With bestial agility, he climbed. His hands found holds that the darkness concealed, his feet planting themselves with deadly certainty. He positioned himself on a ledge directly overlooking the colossal form. Thirty meters of empty space between him and the monster. He had not been noticed.

From there, he could savor the horror. Every detail of the hideous body, a nightmarish assembly. Plates of black chitin, smooth as obsidian polished by hell, lay alongside sections of bleached bone and shreds of putrid flesh, all held together by tendons of black, glistening silk, like the strings of a torture instrument. Its multiple legs, thin as sharp lances, ended in hooks that tore at the webs and the ground. Its eyes, hundreds of empty sockets, had no pupils but seemed to reflect an infinite void, a primordial hunger. The stench of the charnel house rose, a reek of death that brought a visceral bile to his throat.

Then, without a cry, without a warning, he let himself fall.

His fall was a shroud of shadow, a silent flight toward annihilation. The spider did not react. It sensed nothing.

Until the impact.

His cursed blade, held in both hands, pointed downward like a bolt of death, plunged deep into the creature's thorax. An apocalyptic sound, an obscene crack of shattering ceramic, of tearing chitin, of putrid flesh splitting open. Then, the scream. A shrill howl, not a single sound, but a hundred voices, a cacophony of unspeakable suffering that tore through the cavern's gut, echoing in the tunnels, shaking the bones and the webs.

In an instant, it was absolute chaos. The entire environment was rocked by the convulsions of a beast wounded to the core. The spider's horrid legs, each as long as a tree, began a macabre and frantic dance, a desperate fury, seeking to crush the gnat that had just defiled it.

An infernal battle began. Zac, clinging to his blade like a deadly parasite, became a whirlwind of violence. He moved on the monster's back, dodging the deadly leg strikes, his senses sharpened by the `Forge of Brutality`. He drove his blade in again and again, turning each blow into a deep laceration, tearing away strips of flesh, opening fissures in the carapace. Each impact of the weapon seemed to make the creature scream louder, an unnatural pain, an agony that simple injury could not explain, for the blade was gnawing at its very essence.

But he was killed. Again and again. A cycle of death and resurrection, each return a torture that brought him back to the consciousness of horror.

The first time, a massive leg swiped him and threw him against a wall, his body crushing with a wet sound of broken flesh. 

**Resurrection.**

The second, he slipped on a stream of poison spat by the beast, his lungs burning to asphyxiation. 

**Resurrection.**

Other deaths followed, a tide of small mutant spiders overwhelming him, fangs tearing his flesh before the mother beast crushed him in her fury. Each resurrection was an icy slap of reality, a wrench from the void that left a bitter taste in his mouth, but he suppressed it, turning the pain into fuel, using the momentum to return to the fight before the psychological shock could break him.

But even a human machine, programmed for survival and revenge, has its limits. After what felt like an eternity of deaths and rebirths, he could take no more. His body and mind were at their breaking point, flayed raw. Taking advantage of a convulsive spasm from the creature, he ripped his blade free, the beast's black sap dripping down the hilt, and leaped to a high ledge. He collapsed, his body trembling, the air tearing at his lungs with every breath. Exhaustion gnawed at him to the bone, but he kept his eyes fixed on the scene below.

The cavern was a picture of hell, chaos incarnate. In its blind rage, the skeletal spider was destroying itself. Jets of corrosive acid and sickening poison mixed with torn webs and putrid flesh, creating a toxic, steaming sludge that covered the ground. The beast, in its indiscriminate fury, slaughtered its own offspring, its colossal legs crushing the small spiders swarming around it without distinction, turning them into splinters of chitin.

The monster was slow, now. Weakened. Deep black gashes, abysses of suffering, streaked its body, and from these wounds flowed not blood, but a dark, oily liquid, a nauseating sap that produced an unnatural smoke, a blackish vapor that seemed to absorb the light, carving deeper shadows around it.

Zac watched the creature's slow agony, a death that was itself a form of torture. After a long moment, in a final, foul scream that seemed to empty the air of all substance, a final gurgle of suffering and hatred, the mass collapsed. Its legs twisted in a final spasm before locking into a macabre rigidity.

It was dead. Abominably.

The silence that followed was heavier than any scream, a pall of darkness that fell over the cavern. Zac looked at Morngul. He made the connection. The black smoke escaping from the beast's wounds, the supernatural agony the creature had suffered, it was all the work of his blade. He was terrified and fascinated by the power he held in his hands. This weapon had not just killed. It had tortured. It had corrupted.

In his nascent madness, in the exhaustion that blurred the lines of reality, he felt as if his weapon were exulting, a cold, satisfied vibration running through the hilt. Then, a hallucination. A whisper in his ear, a sound made of metal and shadow, of cruelty and triumph.

A single word, whispered with an icy pride and a terrifying intimacy.

'Morngul.'