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The Avatar of the Skin God laughed with her multiple voices, the sound echoing across the broken battlefield like the chorus of a mad choir. She held Ren's severed head up high, displaying her trophy with twisted satisfaction.
"You almost killed me, little human," she mocked, her various mouths all speaking in unison. "Your illusion was clever, I'll admit. You even made me afraid for a moment. But your mana was too pathetic to finish the job. So now you have to die instead."
Her smile twisted impossibly wide, stretching across faces that shouldn't have been able to smile at all. The fusion with the Obsidian God's divine essence had made her stronger than she had ever been before. She felt invincible, immortal, unstoppable.
Then she felt a tingle of pain in her left arm.
She looked down in confusion. Her left arm, the one that had been holding Ren's severed head, was suddenly gone. Cleanly severed at the shoulder, as if it had never existed. Black ichor dripped from the stump, pooling on the glass below.
"What?" The word came out as a whisper from all her mouths simultaneously.
Then she felt a pressure unlike anything she had experienced in millions of years of existence. The horrifying weight of something that transcended even divine authority. It was as if some cosmic force had taken the very concept of fear itself, condensed it, shaped it, and made it into something that existed beyond even her considerable imagination.
The air itself seemed to freeze. The black sky above darkened further, turning into something that wasn't merely absence of light but a negation of existence itself. The temperature dropped so rapidly that the glass beneath her feet began to crack from thermal shock.
Then she finally saw it.
The being that emerged from the darkness behind her defied every law of nature and divinity she knew. It stood impossibly tall, its form draped in flowing robes that seemed woven from shadows themselves. The fabric moved without wind, rippling and shifting as if alive with its own malevolent consciousness.
Two pale masks adorned what might have been its head. Two of them were already present smooth, featureless faces that stared with eyeless intensity. They were beautiful in the way that death is beautiful, serene and terrible and absolute. Between these two masks was an empty space, waiting to be filled.
The being's body was wrong in ways that made her divine senses scream in protest. Multiple arms extended from its torso, she counted six in total each one ending in hands with too many fingers that moved with impossible grace. The arms were too long, too thin, wrapped in what looked like bone and sinew covered by that same shadow fabric that made up its robes.
Behind it, extending from where shoulder blades might be, were structures that resembled wings but were not. They were like the ribs of some cosmic cathedral, curved and elegant and utterly alien. They didn't move but seemed to exist in multiple places at once, creating an afterimage that hurt to perceive directly.
In one of those six hands, the being held Ren's severed head. The head's eyes were still open, frozen in an expression of pure hatred and unwillingness to accept death. The face was twisted with emotions so raw they seemed to burn the air around them.
The being moved with deliberate slowness, bringing Ren's head toward the empty space between the two existing masks. As it did so, Ren's face began to change. The flesh started to harden, losing its organic quality and taking on the smooth, porcelain appearance of the other masks. The expression of hatred and defiance became frozen permanently, captured in death but somehow still alive with malice.
The transformation completed, and now the being wore three masks arranged in a triangular formation, Ren's face forever preserved in that final moment of absolute rage.
Now the being was in complete form.
The Avatar of the Skin God found herself unable to move a finger. Terror, true and absolute, flooded through her divine consciousness for the first time in eons.
What is this thing? her thoughts screamed internally.
This pressure, this presence... it's like Plague. No, it's different. The Plague represented death through disease, corruption, decay. But this... this is something else entirely.
Fear made manifest. Not the fear of dying, but the fear of something worse than death. The fear of being unmade, of having your existence questioned and found wanting. The fear that even gods feel when they realize there are things in the cosmos that they cannot comprehend.
How did this come from that pathetic human? He was nothing! A fake S rank hunter with borrowed power and a clever tongue! He shouldn't have been able to create... this. This thing that makes my divine essence recoil in terror.
Those masks. Those three pale faces staring with empty eyes that see everything. The center one that's him. That's the human. But he's changed. He's become something that shouldn't exist. A bridge between mortality and something beyond even divinity.
And the way it moves. So slow, so deliberate, like it has all the time in the universe. Like time itself bends around its will. Every movement is precise, calculated, inevitable.
I've seen cosmic horrors that would drive mortals mad with a glance. I've witnessed the death of stars and the birth of black holes. I've stood before the Plague God himself and traded insults. But this... this is different. This is wrong on a fundamental level that transcends my understanding of wrong.
The aura it emits isn't just fear. It's the promise of something worse than any torture I could inflict. It's the guarantee that even my divine existence is nothing more than a temporary aberration in the face of what it represents.
I can't move. My body won't respond. Every instinct I possess is screaming at me to run, to hide, to burrow into the earth and pray it forgets I exist. But I'm frozen. Paralyzed by a terror so pure it transcends the physical.
What have I done? What did that human unleash in his final moments?
The being reached down toward Ren's headless corpse with one of its many hands. The movement was smooth, almost gentle, as if handling something precious. It plunged its fingers into the severed neck, the hand disappearing up to the wrist into the body cavity.
Then it yanked.
The spine came out in one smooth motion, pulled from the corpse like drawing a sword from its sheath. But this was no ordinary spine. It was completely intact every vertebra perfectly aligned, every rib still attached, even the arm bones connected by ligaments that shouldn't have existed after death.
The skeletal structure hung in the air for a moment, suspended by the being's hand. Then it began to transform.
The bones whitened, becoming pure as fresh snow. The ribs stretched and flattened, forming a blade edge that gleamed with impossible sharpness. The vertebrae compressed and reshaped, becoming a handle wrapped in what looked like preserved sinew. The arm bones twisted and merged, forming a guard that swept upward in elegant curves.
The transformation completed, and the being now held a sword forged from Ren's own skeleton. The blade was long and curved, elegant in the way that perfect predators are elegant. It caught the strange light of this realm and reflected it back as something darker, something that seemed to absorb illumination rather than reflect it.
The sword pulsed with an inner light or perhaps it was an inner darkness that seemed to draw the eye and repel it simultaneously. Runes appeared along its length, writing themselves in a language that predated human civilization by eons.
The Swords of Pure Horror
The Avatar of the Skin God finally found her voice, but when she tried to speak, only a whimper emerged from her multiple throats.
The being moved one of its other hands, bringing something up toward its central mask. The Avatar's eyes widened as she recognized what it held, her missing left arm, the one that had been severed so cleanly she hadn't even felt it happen.
The being brought the arm to where its mouth should be beneath the center mask. The mask didn't open, didn't move, but somehow the arm began to disappear. Not eaten in any conventional sense, but consumed on a level that transcended physical consumption. The divine flesh dissolved into nothing, absorbed into whatever existence the being represented.
As the last piece of her arm vanished, the Avatar of the Skin God finally managed to move. But instead of attacking or fleeing, Her multiple eyes stared up at the being with absolute terror, and from all her mouths came a sound that no cosmic entity should ever make.
A sob of pure, undiluted fear.