Darkness pressed on me like a hand, heavy and suffocating, as though the whole world wanted to squeeze me into silence. It wasn't the soft night I remembered—streetlamps, rain on glass, the faint glow of a phone screen on the pillow. This was cellar-dark, wet-dark, a smother that filled my mouth and lungs that no longer worked. I tried to breathe and found nothing to inflate. No lungs. No ribs. No hands. Only a box of wood and iron wrapped around me. Only teeth.
Okay. Don't panic.
I died. (Probably—bus? fever? That blinding headache?) I woke up in an isekai.
And of all things…I am furniture.
The silence was broken by the tiny scrabble of claws across stone—a rat, oblivious. A squeak too soft to be afraid of coffins.
Instinct fired before thought. My lid snapped open with a violent crack.
My lid.
There was a squeal, a blur of fur, and then a swallow that wasn't a swallow—my whole inside was a downward pull, a cool void taking in a hot, struggling thing. Taste registered a split second later: wet hair, gutter-metal, rot. I would have gagged if I had a throat.
Heat slid through my timbers as if someone poured light into knots in the wood. The dark lifted a shade. A puddle on the floor mirrored me back to myself: a squat treasure chest bound in iron, banding scarred by age. Two rows of teeth where hinges should have been. A narrow gap under the lid glowed faintly red, like a coal from a remembered fire.
My laugh came out like a knife on glass. Of all the isekais—dragon? sword? no?
I get to be cursed Tupperware.
I tried to move, but I didn't. Panic belly-crawled toward my mind; I strangled it. Think. Inventory. I could open and shut the lid. I could roll my awareness across planks and iron. There—something slick and muscular coiled along the inside of my mouth. I flexed it.
My tongue flopped onto stone with a wet slap.
Absolutely vile, I thought. Again.
I planted the tongue like a climber setting a piton and hauled. My body scraped forward an inch. Another plant, another drag. Latch, drag, thunk. The sound echoed down the corridor like a lazy metronome.
I am a haunted Roomba. A beat later: No, I am a determined haunted Roomba. That is different.
The dungeon unfurled in centimeters. Torches burned far down walls; damp seeped like a rumor. My glow painted the floor in a bloody grin that made even me uneasy. Well, good. Let the world be uneasy.
---
Voices preceded the entry of two adventurers into the chamber. Not nobles—leather armor patched to rags, swords chipped, faces pale with hunger.
I tensed, hunger rising. Easy prey. I could snap them shut, fill myself.
But their voices stopped me.
Adventurer A (sighing): "If it's a mimic, at least it'll be faster than starving to death."
Adventurer B (voice dull, defeated): "A chest full of teeth sounds kinder than the mud waiting for us outside."
My void pulsed, thrumming like a second heartbeat. Their words weren't greedy. They weren't mocking. They were just… resigned, spoken with the hollow weight of people who had already lost the fight with life before they ever swung a blade.
And suddenly, I remembered.
My old body—thin, tired, brittle from too many skipped meals. Working shifts no one respected, dragging myself home with pockets too light and eyes too heavy. Watching others with power walk over people like me. Invisible. Weak. Disposable. I remembered clutching instant noodles because it was all I could afford, listening to bosses laugh in glass offices above me, knowing I was just background noise in their world. I remembered shivering in a coat that never kept the cold out, staring at the ceiling wondering if tomorrow I'd be worth less than today.
I was them once. Hungry. Powerless. Treated as less than human.
My lid quivered. I forced the hunger down, clawing against the pull that wanted me to swallow them whole. Instead, I spat.
Bread landed at their feet—stale, half-hard, but food. A small act of rebellion against the void inside me.
The adventurers froze. "What…?"
"Take it," the other whispered, snatching the loaf. They tore it in half, devouring with shaking hands, crumbs scattering like coins in the dirt.
I stayed still, lid cracked. Guarding. Watching. The hunger snarled, but I held my ground.
Eat. Live. I won't touch you. Not you. Never again.
My teeth clicked once, a warning to the hunger, an oath carved into the wood that now made me. The void inside hissed back, restless.
They are meat, it whispered, sultry and sharp. Everything is meat.
No. I pressed the thought like a brand against it. The weak are mine. They are not yours to gnaw on. They are not yours to measure in mouthfuls.
The hunger prowled, pacing the planks of me, pressing against my ribs of iron. I answered with silence, then with defiance. If you must chew, then chew those who think themselves kings. Feast on arrogance. Bite the cruel. That will be enough.
The void sulked. But it didn't strike. For now, I had the reins.
I was weak once. I know how it feels to be at the bottom, ignored and crushed. No one protected me. So I will protect them. The weak are mine. And anyone who hurts them—
I remember what it was like to cower in the shadow of those who saw themselves as predators, who took and took from people like me just because they could. Here, now, I have teeth. Now, I am the shadow in the dark, the thing they fear. I will not be like them, preying on the desperate. I will be their reckoning.
A sound echoed through the corridor—metal scraping stone, voices ringing with privilege and disdain. Laughter, sharp and brittle, bounced off the walls of the dungeon. Nobles and their lackeys, armored in arrogance, strolled closer with the careless swagger of those who believed nothing could touch them.
Noble Adventurer (echoing): "Easy pickings down here. Commoner corpses fetch coin too, you know!"
My smile stretched too wide, teeth gleaming in the torchlight. The hunger purred like a pleased beast.
Let them come. Tonight, the feast is for me. The world's cruelty will taste its own medicine.
Perfect. Dinner's walking toward me.