Thomel stared up slackly at the expansive wall of meat, kept afloat in the air by thousands of beating wings, each one easily the size of a plane wing.
Its multitude of enormous eyes were black as night, with swirls of what he would assume was pus drifting around inside them. It made him feel like he was looking at different galaxies.
Slowly and with inexplicable formality, the mass of rotten and regenerating meat began to descend towards them.
He knew it was massive but the closer it, got the more he grasped the scale of the creature, it might even be as large as the mountain.
“DISC!” Screamed out the lieutenant, darting towards the hunter and hastily grabbing it from their outstretched hand.
And then they both vanished before Thomel’s very eyes.
One second they were standing there, the next the duo were simply gone, it was like they never even existed.
Their suits were gone, their beamers were gone, they were gone. Erased from reality like someone reapplying paint to a scratch on their car.
Even the surrounding rocks were gone, there was just a perfect crater where the last two members of his cohort had been.
Looking back up at the carrion creature, he didn’t know how to feel.
He didn’t feel scared or frightened, wrathful or desperate, he just felt numb.
A sense of deja vu was overcoming him and everything felt unreal, what he was seeing just didn’t make sense.
Stagnant blood dropped out of it in the gallons, spilling down onto the world below like perverted rain.
“Something like this simply can’t exist.” He murmured to himself.
“You know that’s what I thought about you, funny that isn’t it?” Millions of voices spoke out from all around him.
He could really do with that Hunted Hunter boon right about now. Yet it still didn’t activate.
Was he so far below its notice that it didn't even consider him prey?
“Our apostolate, you seem so frail.” The singing chorus called out again, voices drilling into his ears.
“Wha-what are you talking about?!” Thomel forced himself to say, staring up at the impending, sentient calamity, as he pointed his beamer up at it in an act of defiance.
“You’re weak, a being worthy of pity and no doubt gifted with disappointment. We will make you anew for you are ours.” The chorus sang out, the Eldrich being’s lazy eyes all focusing on him at once
“I belong to no one.” He yelled out.
“I suppose you’re right, you belong to a council of your high-born peers rather than an individual. Still, why choose to serve them rather than a God?”
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Just before he spoke Thomel had a moment of clarity and he knew very well what he was about to say was self-destructive but he said it anyway. “You’re no God of mine.”
“Not yet but we will be.” Was the unbothered answer the horde of voices gave him.
It was beginning to close in on him now, even with the respirator on he could still somehow smell its rotten stench.
It smelled of sickening decay and life, like maggots being conceived and wiggling around inside an old corpse.
Now the fear was beginning to come back to him, everything slowed down as the enormous cloud of rippling muscle and pulsating fat drew closer.
His gaze was attracted toward its bloody appendages. For the most part, they were tendrils made out of interlocked spinal columns, with streaks of dark red ligaments supporting them and patches of saggy muscles directing them warmly towards Thomel.
The other limbs consisted of dissolving giant feet and arms, they were what supplied the majority of the rotten rain and were where most of the chunks of flesh fell from.
Somehow there was a sense of grace about its movements that eluded his understanding of the world, it was like there were two creatures juxtaposed over each other, one disgusting and despicable and the other pure and righteous.
He wasn’t an ant compared to this thing, he was something infinitely smaller and weaker
It didn’t even have to use its physical body to deal with the last two people in his team, it just smote them out of existence.
What was he meant to do? He didn’t want to see what this ‘God’ wanted to do with him.
Mind racing, he thought of dozens of plans and discarded each one, until finally, he came to a realisation.
Looking uneasily at the beamer grasped firmly in his hands, he pointed the barrel at his face and tried to pull the trigger.
A shard of vicious bone sliced cleanly into the gun, penetrating it and cutting through Thomel’s suit and into his stomach.
Gasping out, he collapsed to the ground, pulling the gun away from himself and dislodging the bone shard in the process.
His blood felt like the only true colour in this world, everything else was grey or rotten, his blood was a source of bright red.
His strength was leaving him, he didn’t think he would be able to stand up even if he tried.
It felt poetic to die like this, if he was lucky he would bleed out just before the eldrich horror reached him but he couldn’t rely on luck.
Straining with the effort he pulled himself towards the beamer and grabbed ahold of it. He tried tugging the bone shard out for a few seconds before choosing to simply use it while it was attached to the beamer.
But he didn’t have the strength to even lift it up, focusing on the tip, he saw a transparent dot of liquid swelling and dribbling down it.
Worse still, he felt his wound clotting, he’d been simultaneously poisoned and also healed.
Laying immobilised on the ground, Thomel quietly and quickly tried to come to terms with everything.
It didn’t take him long, his life before the tournament had been wrapped up, he had no family members or close friends, not even a pet to look after.
He just had some vegetable fields and other crops, nothing more and nothing less.
The group of friends he’d met here didn’t need him, he didn’t need to help anyone complete anything, they could move on from him.
He didn’t actually have anything he had to do, he’d already been living like he was dead in terms of actually having an impact on people's lives.
What would he have even done if he’d managed to buy his freedom?
There was no point worrying about that now, clearing his mind, he breathed in the stagnant smell of stagnant flesh and spoiled blood and prepared to meet his end.
He earnestly believed he’d done the best with the cards he’d been dealt, there was nothing more he could do.
“Finally we’re here, we can touch you, we can mould you.” The voices cried out in glee and he felt something coil around his ankle.
Now he had regrets, mainly that he was still alive.