For a mass murderer, Echidna has a surprisingly youthful face.
It might not be hers, of course; even setting aside normal transformation, Echidna’s mastery over biological material ans she can make her face look however she wants—and reshape it at will, which has always made tracking her down a damnably difficult chore. The mont she’s out of sight from her pursuers, she can change her form and slip away with a fresh face. Her “real” face is just the one she shows most often.
It’s a soft face, pudgy-cheeked, with bright eyes and pale lips. A perpetually happy face. Her smile doesn’t fade even as half a dozen arrows sink into her body and explode in a nova of sunlight and moonlight. Dusk and Dawn keep shooting. Her cutesy, all-primary-colors outfit is torn to shreds, but she doesn’t seem to care about the effect on her modesty.
Sophia pulls away, shouting in my ear to fly, so I do, wobbling my way into the sky above the platform. I’m in a daze, still staring at Echidna and the horrors behind her… and wondering where Sophia got that sword that looks so much like Glamour’s.
Echidna pouts as I fly away from her, though the affectation never reaches her eyes. “Co back, Rachie!” she calls from below. “I’m here to help, promise!” She flashes double peace signs in the mont before a beam from Radiance lts both of her hands to slag.
The platform is a bloodbath in seconds. Echidna’s screaming victims clamber onto the stage in a roiling mass of flesh and bone. n and won with too many limbs, their bodies bulging and contorting where fresh appendages burst forth from ribs and spines, wet and glistening with a disgusting facsimile of amniotic fluid. Hungry mouths stretch wide and split apart—rows of shark teeth in one, great fangs in another, pale needles in a third. They are animals, hunched and growling and feral with only the ugliest remnants of humanity left in bloodshot eyes and scraps of clothing. Beasts.
The mahou fight back. Radiance, Dusk, and Dawn pepper the crowd with burning light from above. Kira Kira manipulates gravity to slam bodies against the ground where Sweet Tooth can petrify them into candy without fear of retaliation. Sonata sings desperately to keep the horde at bay. Mako—eyes glowing red with Maenad’s frenzy—leaps into the crowd to rend them limb from limb. nto shapes the platform itself, weaving steel and gold into chains that bind.
It isn’t enough. Burnt flesh is shed and reabsorbed. Bloated, lumbering corpses belch forth saltwater to free the petrified. Ears bubble away to shield their hosts from the singer. Strength is t with strength. The bound lt around their chains to reform on the other side, ceaselessly advancing. The beasts of Echidna are not individual monsters but a unified mass of biological material, reshaped at her whim to answer every challenge.
Their master laughs and laughs, crying with joy. The occasional arrow or bolt of magic sent her way doesn’t seem to faze her in the slightest.
In the air beside , Sophia is panicking. “Why is she here?” my beloved wife hisses. “How is she here? There was a barrier!”
My mind feels blank from terror. I’ve never been this close to a Catastrophe—I an, of course I haven’t, because I’m still alive. People don’t survive encounters with those monsters.
Echidna has killed thousands. Tens of thousands. She’s taken children from their hos and sent them back full of viruses and parasites and the curse of her attention. She attacks hospitals and schools and stadiums—anywhere she can find a high enough population density that a single point of infection becos hundreds of bodies to throw at her opponents. Anywhere she goes, human misery trails in her wake.
She’s going to kill us all, my brain whispers in quiet panic. Do sothing. Do sothing!
A weapon appears in my hands, summoned more by instinct than intent. It’s the bow I was given by Ferromancer, the one I used in my first proper fight as a witch. Isn’t that a silly weapon to use against a horror like this? But then, what would anything else really do to her? She’ll shrug off bullets and laugh at fire and ice, won’t she?
I fire an arrow anyway, shooting at random into the crowd. If the foam does anything to slow them down, I don’t notice. It’s hopeless.
Echidna finally stops laughing. The monster wipes a tear from her face and says, “That’s enough of a head start, don’t you think? Mm?” She rolls her eyes. “No, Dora, I won’t forget! I promised, didn’t I?”
Dora. Pandora? My chest hurts. My brain screams and seizes like soone’s gouged it with a railway spike. There’s sothing I’m forgetting. I need to rember. I need to wake up.
“Okay,” Echidna calls, projecting her voice so it covers the whole arena. “Ready or not, here I co!”
Then she splits apart.
In an instant, the form of a young woman is replaced by a seedbed of writhing, gory tentacles. Her face peels open, her chest, her back, all of her—every inch of skin tearing open as a hundred pinkish-red tendrils erge from her body and lash out. They stretch and extend, whipping around wildly. Each boneless, skinless limb seeks a different target, lurching around the battlefield with sick, unnatural movents—and a dozen of them co after us.
Sophia and I swerve sharply to avoid the tendrils chasing us. The bow is too slow and unwieldy, so I trade it for a gun and pop any tentacle that gets too close—not that it does anything; they regenerate too quickly for damage to have an effect. When Sophia severs one tendril with her blade, another simply catches the severed piece and adds it back to the greater mass of Echidna’s terrible form. It feels like there’s no limit to their range, no limit to their speed, no limit to anything she does.
Below, the Catastrophe makes mince of the mahou too slow to escape or too weak to keep her at bay. Fleshy tendrils wrap around Mako, curling in tight loops around her wrists and ankles, and they pull her apart as a second set of tentacles form sharp tips and gouge her joints to weaken them. Mako’s limbs are separated from her body with a sickening pop. She screams in pain and fear as the red frenzy leaves her eyes and she is buried beneath the hideous, mutated beasts that were once her human followers.
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A spray of bone shards cuts through Sonata’s throat, silencing her song. A tendril of flesh swats Radiance from the sky, sending her tumbling into the mass. The horde reaches nto and drags her down with barbed, frog-like tongues. The monsters beneath Dusk and Dawn grow disgusting pustules that burst and fill the air with heavy, rancid mist, distorting their shots and sending the two magical girls into coughing fits.
We can’t win. God, how could anyone?
A shadow falls over the platform. Sothing descends from above, and foolishly I turn to look at it, showing my back to the questing tendrils. I see great wings of rotting, sickly at, green and gray and wretched. Talons. Fangs. A toothy maw, a terrible tail, and milky eyes.
It’s a dragon. It’s a at dragon, a goddamned zombie dragon, and with a flap of its massive wings I’m sent careening down back toward the flesh mass below—right into the grasp of Echidna’s boneless limbs.
Tendrils tighten around and pull, more of them latching on no matter how quickly I cut and shoot and kick. Beside , the sa is happening to Sophia. Echidna drags us toward her, enveloping us in glistening flesh that spreads and grows and changes shape.
The horrid at of Echidna surrounds us. We are swaddled in her grasp. The outside world vanishes, hidden from view by a cocoon of flesh—a mbrane of skin stretched around us, held up by struts of bone, on a bed of churning fat and sinew. Her tendrils keep us bound and immobile in the red-lit dark. The air is thick with the stench of copper.
A shape presses itself to the mbrane of the false womb and pushes through, skin parting and resealing with a disgusting, wet squelch. Echidna dangles before us on puppet strings of torn tendon, a thousand tendrils erging from her spine. Her “human” form has been restored, but only partly; her face is intact, but the rest of her body is peeled and raw and squirming like worms crawling through carrion.
Still, she smiles at us like a child playing with her friends—or with her toys.
“Your stars are very interesting,” she says to lightly. “Were you born with them? I think you might have been, but I can’t tell.” I’m too frozen in fear to even begin thinking of a response to that insane question.
“You’ll pay for this,” Sophia hisses, her face contorted in hate as she struggles uselessly against her bonds. “Do you think you’ll get away with this? Release us now and Venus might show rcy, you worm in human clothing!”
Echidna giggles. “Well, we both know that’s not going to happen. Anyway, I’m bored of you, so no more talking for Glammy!”
A tendril of flesh whips out and wraps around Sophia’s head, gagging her mouth and obscuring most of her face. Her eyes go wide and panicked, her screams muffled.
“Let her go!” I scream at Echidna, a wave of rage washing away the terror that was drowning just a mont ago. This thing could kill easily, I’m sure of it, but I can’t stand seeing my beloved be treated like this. “Don’t touch her, don’t touch her, don’t touch her!”
Echidna tilts her head at like a dog, seeming genuinely confused by my reaction. She bites her lip and furrows her brow, and then, like a lightbulb’s gone off in her head, she laughs and snaps her fingers. “Ah, of course! Silly Chidna, she still thinks that’s her cutie!”
The tendrils slowly pull up Sophia’s shirt, exposing her midriff, and then in one smooth motion Echidna cuts her belly open.
I wail. Sophia’s guts flop out, spilling forth like slop from a can. Her insides splash against the red soup beneath us. And then—
And then she cracks like glass. She cracks like her skin—like her whole form—was a mosaic thinly coated with a layer of Sophia-colored film. The Sophia that I know and love peels away, falling to pieces around—
Glamour. It’s Glamour bound in those tendrils, Glamour struggling and writhing and screaming against the tentacle blocking her mouth as her innards pour out.
Glamour in my ho—not my ho, not my house, sowhere I’ve never been—smiling at with Sophia’s face—stolen, violated, a pretender to my angel—praising in her voice—lying to , nothing like Sophia—mocking her—not what she’s like, not what I want her to be, it’s a lie—deceiving —
Where am I? How did I get here? Why was Glamour—
—the orb on top of the Spire, the party, the revelry—
—two worlds overlapping, dancing and laughing and fucking and killing—
—the wafer of worship, godhood in my hands, in my chest, in my soul—
—the voice of Venus, the presence of the divine—
—the world going white—
I wake up and vomit.
That bitch, that monster, that—hate them, hate them, hate them all, those whores—need them to die, need them to pay—kill them all, kill them all, kill them all!
Venus trapped in this abomination of a dream and set Glamour to keep dazed. Glamour impersonated my Sophia, stole her face, stole her voice, stole her body and made think it was her, she—I almost throw up again. Everything about that was wrong. It was disgusting. Why did she show that? Why…
Why did I accept that? Why could I live with that vision even for a mont? With that… with that Sophia? That wasn’t my Sophia. She didn’t act like my Sophia. I—how could I have believed her? How could I have believed her for a mont?
What’s wrong with ? What’s wrong with that I took joy in that smile and admired that body and—and—
No. No, it was a trick. It was an illusion. Venus was influencing my thoughts. That wasn’t my dream. It couldn’t have been.
I spit out more bile and wipe my face—only realizing afterwards that I’ve been released from Echidna’s tendrils. I float gently in the air, my feet hovering just above the surface of the disgusting pool below.
Glamour is gone. I don’t know what Echidna did with her while I was insensate, and I don’t care. I hope she suffers. I hope it takes her hours to die in a pit of sothing caustic and putrid. I hate her more than I’ve ever hated anything.
Echidna makes a crooning noise and gently cradles my cheek. I flinch. “Shhh, shhh,” she says, voice soft and low, her red fingers trailing down to draw circles on my neck. “Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid. I promised Dora that I wouldn’t hurt you. I promised, okay?”
The city-slaughtering monster looms over and smiles, sympathy writ all across her face. It doesn’t even look insincere. That might be the worst part. Her eyes are bright and warm and loving. Yes, loving. She looks so innocent.
Dimly, the sounds distorted passing through the walls of our cocoon, I hear screams and wails and the horrible squelching of flesh. I hear the dying of the other won on this platform.
“Who did you promise?” I ask, voice quiet and dry. “Was it Pandora? Did—did the cat send you to ?”
The skinless horror hanging from its own cocoon by strings of sinew nods happily to my questions. “Yep yep! You made a promise with Dora, rember? You help us… and we help you. You give us Jupiter, we give you Venus. We all promised. And promises are really, really important. So they sent to wake you up when that an goddess played her silly little trick!”
She spreads her arms wide and sticks her tongue out. A bit of viscera drips from her finger where she vivisected the priestess that was wearing Sophia’s shape.
“Ta-dah!”
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