For a second, Degritone's mind was empty as he reverted to his normal form. His lips pressed together and he actively frowned slightly as the duel arena cracked and his eyes began to water, despite his lack of tear ducts. "No. Not again. It's been 10 years, not again. Please, brain. Not again."
The entirely of the Patron of Duels's image shattered like glass and Degritone fell to his knees. The patron stumbled and reached for his head before opening his mouth to say something. Before he could, he died, multiple times, all overlaid atop each other. Earthen spikes came up and impaled one version of the patron through the head while a burning car came from Degritone's direction and turned another into a bloody mist.
The ground around them turned to blood-stained asphalt as another version of them was ripped in half by two cables that flew out of half-destroyed skyscrapers that weren't there milliseconds ago. Yet another version died to a phantom of Degritone beheading them, and another fell to a phantom of one of the skyscrapers falling on them. The ground around them erupted into molten asphalt and then silence.
The sky turned red as a ruined city spread out from Degritone. Broken, looted buildings surrounded him, lining the bloodied streets that stretched on for miles now. "Not again," he repeated. "I can't be here, not again. Please." His breath caught in his throat as he caught fire, feeling his body burn despite the System, his lack of real pain receptors, and the inflammability of his body.
Ignoring the intense pain, Degritone laid back on the ground and raised his right arm, staring at the closed fist. "Never again," he said as he activated his calming image, a golden rope appearing in his hand. He waited for a few seconds and the rest of his calming image failed to materialize.
His mouth fidgeted a bit for the few seconds he tried with all his might to fully activate the image. When he fully gave up, tears began fully falling down his face. "No," he said, "not here, not again. I have the System now. Surely I can fight it back."
An abomination crashed through the front of a store, aiming directly for Degritone. He bolted up and tried to dodge out of the way using movement Stavch, but it didn't cause him to move. The writhing mound of flesh slammed into Degritone, turning him into bloody paste on the ground. Degritone reappeared a few feet away, fully formed of flesh and blood once more.
The horrid mass of crushed, burned, bloody, stretched, ripped, and cut flesh absorbed the old body of Degritone into itself and began moving toward Degritone once more. He ran. Some cables reached out of the ground and cut the abomination in half, only for it to reform, before sinking back into the ground.
On the next street from Degritone, a giant hand grasped the corner of one of the skyscrapers before a giant humanoid with flayed flesh and bloody eye sockets instead of eyes came around the corner, holding a flaming car limply to its side, its fingers reaching fully around it as if it were a can of soda.
It turned to look at Degritone and smiled so hard its cheeks ripped in half to facilitate an cartoonishly large, ear to ear smile, filled with blood and broken teeth. It threw the car it held at him as Degritone ran into an alley between two buildings, the car turned to scrap as it hit the corner of the building furthest from the giant, some of which embedded itself in Degritone's back and legs, making his left leg completely useless.
"Please, no, please, not again, not again, not again," he repeated, desperately hopping away from the road. A cable reached out from each of the buildings and cut Degritone into two pieces, shattering his hips in the process. The giant reached the entrance to the alley way and reached in, picked up Degritone's top half and brought it in front of its face.
"I thought I was done with this when I finally found something to occupy your space in my mind!" He screamed while the giant held him upside down and peeled his skin off like peeling a cheese stick. The flesh abomination absorbed Degritone's lower half and sat, waiting, under Degritone's dangling upper half.
It was an agonizing 10 minutes of the giant slowly peeling off his skin and feeding it to the abomination, while the cables occasionally came out of the buildings and deeply cut the skin of the giant. It didn't seem to notice. Finally, Degritone died and reappeared inside one of the buildings.
The giant's hand crashed through one of the walls as he ran to the opposite side of the ruined building and flung himself into the street, leaving a lifeless corpse in a pool of blood as he died from the fall. In yet another body, he ran as fast as he could to be away from the two horrors.
The building he was in crumbled and fell as the two bust through it to get to him. As the giant was reaching for Degritone, both it and the abomination paused, the giant looking off to its right. The cables also ripped out of a nearby building towards the giant's neck, but paused before reaching it and bent like snakes to "look" toward the same direction the giant was.
After a few seconds of being still, they all disappeared, busting through whatever buildings they needed to get away as fast as they could. Degritone, yet again, fell to his knees. He knew what that meant. He looked behind him.
A man in a white top hat and tuxedo slowly walked toward Degritone.
Degritone slumped all the way to the ground. If he's here, there's no use even trying, he thought.
The man slowly walked up to Degritone and pulled out a scalpel-like cutting instrument with a saw instead of a normal razor blade. He slowly, slowly ran it down the front of Degritone's body, leaving a long, bloody, dirty cut in his torso. He just laid there, crying, as the man slowly cut his skin off before pulling out scissors. Cutting through his sensitive flesh, he pulled Degritone's tendons tight and cut them from his bones.
He then set the scissors aside and pulled out little metal balls with handles and slits in them. He shoved many of these throughout Degritone's exposed flesh and twisted their handles, extending serrated blades from the balls. Once the man released their hold on them, they began to spin.
After multiple hours of the sensation of his flesh being ripped to tiny pieces, he finally died. The man in white, still completely untouched by the blood, slowly walked over to Degritone and began the process anew.
Over the many torturous sessions Degritone endured, many small, humanoid creatures appeared in the buildings, barely peeking out of ruined windows, through cracks in the buildings, and over the roof toms, but leaving the alleyways completely empty.
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Their sewn-shut eyes and fused together bodies watched on as Degritone was brutally tortured over and over, always hiding again if the man in white looked in their direction.
After what felt like a few hundred days, the white man packed up his tools and walked away. Once he was out of sight, the sewn-together creatures began collecting the many, many, many strewn about pieces of Degritone and began crafting more of themselves.
Why do I put up with this? Degritone asked himself. How did I live with this for so many years? One of the creatures came over and pulled off one of Degritone's ears. Why am I back here? I have the System now, right? Can I do anything with it? Can it do anything here?
He pulled up his status, which worked perfectly fine. Another of the creatures snapped off his right foot's pinky toe. My calming image was my answer to this place before, why does it not work now? Why am I even here again? He raised up his right arm, startling the creatures away from his body. The golden rope appeared once more, and he gripped it increasingly tightly, eventually snapping his ring finger's tendon, ignoring as he got mobbed by many of the sewn creatures.
"Fine," he said, punching the ground and flinging the creatures off himself as he got up, "if I can't escape, let's become the monster," his arm split into tens of tentacles, "that this place wants me to be." Each tentacle reached out and split one of the creatures in half.
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"What is that?" Melena asked, watching the red ruins of a city spread out from where the Patron of Duels and Degritone engaged in their battle.
"The worst outcome possible. As the most recently split Degritone, I guess it's my job to stay and explain," he said as hundreds of Degritones appeared around the perimeter and activated their calming images. This slowed the advance of the city, but did now stop it. "Around 9 years ago, I guess it'd be 10 years ago for Deg prime, to around 4 years before that...starting around 5 years ago, absolute time, I guess, we were continuously tortured in our mind.
"Literally, only as figuratively as you can express when talking about somewhere that only exists in your mind. It's..." he shook his head and pressed his lips together before continuing, "not a good place. I don't know how much of it made it to reality, but I'll just say that that, right there, is why our calming image exists. If the whole thing escaped..." More head shaking, accompanied by fidgeting of his tightly closed lips.
"I honestly don't know if anything but a timeline hopper can stop it, outside of containing it once more. Best guess is that something happened and he's either questioning his loliconness, or it somehow got forcibly shut off, because the only thing that stopped it basically for good was us realizing we're a lolicon and thoughts of lolis taking over the parts of our brain that let this exist.
"From here, I can only really see 3 outcomes. We fail at figuring out how to contain this thing and it destroys everything, prime figures out whatever's wrong and fixes it, or he comes out of there as a complete, timeline hopping monster. Let's hope that middle one happens."
Melena hugged her Degritone and said, "Is there anything we can do to help?"
"He might come back around if he sees you, but that would mean finding him in what is already hundreds of miles of city, while avoiding the horrors of that place. If a man in a white top hat and white tuxedo finds the edge, it's game over. If Degritone becomes a similarly-powerful monster, it's game over. Some of the smaller horrors, we might be able to deal with out here, but not in there.
"Once you step in there, you'll die in every reasonably likely way possible, all at once. Catching fire from the intense heat, the horrors finding your location and killing you, a stray car from the giant, one of the buildings finally giving up and falling on you, simply having sudden organ failures. Anything that doesn't involve insane moon logic to kill you, will. Simultaneously. The only one immune from this is prime, maybe even us if we also went in, but I doubt it, since it's prime's... We never named it."
Another Degritone appeared just before that one finished and said, "The cables have reached the edge and have already made 8 Degs retreat. We need external help dealing with these things, we're not geared to fight or contain them whatsoever. Also, the Horrid sounds right."
A short look of understanding crossed his face and the original exposition Degritone said, "Yeah, that sounds exactly right. Melena, think we can get a Destruction or fifty here to see if they can do anything, or maybe there's a different Patron that could help destroy and/or contain the Horrid?"
"I'll see what I can do," she said while opening the messaging feature of the System.
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The black mist that invaded Degritone's head sprint-flew away from a tsunami of asphalt. The tsunami was much too fast for it, as it caught up to it, crushing and cutting it as the broken, sharp chunks of asphalt rolled over the surface of the city. After multiple agonizing minutes, it spit the mist out of its back, where the city looked as if the tsunami hadn't even existed.
"Oh, wow. Didn't know you were in here. So glad I didn't have to experience this twice for as long as I have," Degritone's voice said to the mist from nowhere. "I probably would have actually completely lost it if I'd had to. Have you experienced as much time as I have?"
"I was supposed to take you over! How does this make any sense!?" It screamed.
"Oooo, that was a mistake. Now the horrors know where you are. I expect the flesh hole to find you soon," Degritone responded. "Given you're still making that mistake, I'll assume you haven't been here as long as I have. Interesting. But yeah, this is what you get for coming into my mind and deactivating the only thing keeping me sane. How do I undo that, by the way? The sooner I fully get my body back, the sooner this ends."
"The what?" The building next to the black mist disappeared into the ground, where a lake of boiling flesh appeared, rapidly moving to and engulfing the black mist. It began screaming as its non-existent flesh began boiling alongside the rest of the flesh in the lake. "MAKE IT STOP!"
"Then reactivate the part of my brain you deactivated and get out of my mind," Degritone said.
"I CAN'T! I CAN ONLY MOVE INTO A BODY THAT I BELIEVE TO GIVE ME A BETTER CHANCE TO OBTAIN MY OBSESSION!"
"Which is?"
"THE PATRON OF LOYALTY! AAAA-" their scream cut off as they died and reappeared on top of a nearby skyscraper. Some of the eyes in the lake moved around to look for its victim, and when it found nothing, it went away, sinking the buildings in its path, only for them to reappear, half melted, where they were once they no longer overlapped with the lake's surface area.
"Ah, dang. So, the Patron of Duels isn't who sent us out of the multiverse, it was you. Melena's going to be sad when we tell her about the loss of her probably-still-friend. We may be able to fix him or save his soul, depending on how long has actually passed outside, but blah. Anyway, would killing you fix this?"
The black mist expanded and contracted like they were panting on the roof, but didn't respond.
"Don't make me descend down there and show you what 300 years in this place does to a man," Degritone threatened.
"Please, no! Fine, yes, killing me would probably end the Skill's effect, but I don't know if that would restore whatever part of your mind it took over. This shouldn't even be possible! The Skill is supposed to place the mind of its target into a dormant mode where I can still ask it what it would do in the current situation, but no one has even been aware during my possession before, let alone able to do all this!"
"Yeah, well, my mind has always been messed up. Now, how do I kill you?"
When the black mist remained silent, Degritone appeared in front of it. His right arm was tens of fleshy tentacles, his head was a dodecahedron of some metal, his lower half looked to be made of thousands of bone fragments, and his left arm unfolded itself to extend into the black mist and grab its nonexistent throat. "Do you want to be actively tortured by the worst thing in this whole city until you give up and reveal how I can kill you, or will you choose the painless route and tell me now so I can end you without any fanfare?"