It was our third night in the Congo. Tree canopies hid a million screaming voices overhead as humidity and sweat soaked our fatigues. We cut our way through the jungle in hopes that it was not too late; That the villager we’d spoken to earlier was telling the truth. Unfortunately for us, he was.
We heard the thing before we saw it. The entire jungle went quiet, leaving only the ominous sound of something enormous dragging across dirt. My men and I had seen the worst of it in Afghanistan. We were chosen for this mission because of our fearless constitution. But the funny thing about fear is it never really goes away. It just waits, and then punishes you for all the time you spent ignoring it. We were told exactly what to expect, but I still remember the screaming when we saw it with our own eyes. What slithered into the clearing before us had once been known as Adrien Deschryver, but no longer. The man had let his balls become so large that they absorbed him, growing ever bigger in the process and gaining access to all of Adrien’s thoughts and memories. Pentagon intel suggested that this giant sentient ballsack understood the need for sustenance, and therefore had become the apex predator of the Congo. It was a truly impressive pair of balls, and we were given the impossible task of taking it down. Our tranq rounds bounced off its hairy, wrinkled skin as it roared from some unseen mouth. Sergeant Murphy was the first to fire his pistol, and for that received the trunk of a thirty foot limba tree to the torso, popping his limbs off like a ken doll. And then it was chaos. That man’s balls picked us off one by one, screaming its territorial warning. All of the fear and dread that I’d repressed over twenty years flooded back into my nervous system, freezing me. I saw into the eye of god himself as those balls towered over me. It used one stray pube to stroke my cheek, no longer perceiving me as a threat. Then it rolled off into the jungle, squishing between trees at a hundred clicks an hour. I collected my men's dog tags and trudged back alone. The next day, I made some peel a pound soup and shit my pants.