Canta and Alleluia stand beneath an overhang. It started raining a day into their journey and it hasn’t stopped once since then. They return eastward, traveling along a different route. There’s something off about the rain though. It’s oddly warm and the water feels oddly… thick and almost slimy.

The really odd thing about it though is that there isn’t a single cloud in the sky. Water simply falls from above, as if coming from absolutely nowhere and Canta can’t make heads or tails of it as he stares out from the overhang, at the brightly shining sun and cloudless blue-sky above them.

He sighs, heading back to Alleluia to fiddle around with her gears and to wind her up. Walking through the forest isn’t really great for her, he’s already had to pull out a few twigs and at least one caterpillar out from her workings.

“It should be about another hour,” says Canta, fairly sure of himself.

“How do you know that?” asks Alleluia, turning her head around to look at him.

He shrugs. “It’s been like this every day now. Couple hours of rain, couple hours of sunlight, couple hours of rain,” he explains. “It’s not normal. Real rain isn’t… rhythmic like this.”

“Oh,” says Alleluia, facing back forward. The two of them stay there silently, listening to the odd rain drizzle outside and the tinkling of metal as Canta makes some adjustments here and there. “Can you tighten up my fingers?” she asks. “I think they’re a little wobbly.”

“You’ve been reading too many books,” says Canta, rolling his eyes.

“I don’t know if that makes sense,” she replies, looking at her fingers, which are indeed a little wobbly.

“It makes perfect sense,” says Canta, grabbing her hand and turning it around to look into the exposed mechanicals above the synthetic skin of her palm. It takes another half an hour, but the oddly musty rain stops eventually and the two of them keep walking.

The ‘odd-forest’ comes to an end eventually and the two of them find themselves back in the nigh-tropical place from before, but Canta has a feeling that they’re further north than they were during their initial passing through here.

Being an adventurer used to be a lot less walking, didn’t it? Though he supposes that he technically isn’t an adventurer anymore. That era seems to have ended a long time ago. He wonders if he can bring it back? He wonders that if he gets rid of the demon-king, if he removes the rot from the world, if there is even enough healthy substrate for it left to regrow? Can the world ever return to what it was before, or to at least anything close to it?

Maybe not.

But whatever it becomes after this, it has to be better. It can’t be worse than what it is right now, right? His free hand rubs over his stomach as the other one holds Alleluia’s.

As they walk, the landscape changes. The tropical, lush jungle starts to become… crumbly. The leaves of the many tall trees are dry and crumbly. The dead grass and foliage beneath their feet is gray and ashy and crumbly. The rocks, the bark, everything is just kind of… dried out and powdery and crumbly.

“Everything looks dead,” says Alleluia, touching a branch that basically dissolves a second later, falling apart in some kind of chain reaction. Unlike the flush, tropical jungle all around them, this place is like a desert. “It’s like every bit of moisture was just… sucked out,” says Alleluia.

Canta nods, noticing how odd the air feels to breathe. Even it is entirely dry and he can feel himself becoming dryer as well just by being here and breathing it in. “At least it’s not gonna rain here,” he says.

As if the universe were punishing his hubris, water begins to fall around them. Canta grabs Alleluia’s hand and starts running to find shelter. But then he stops, noticing something.

He isn’t wet.

Canta looks back over his shoulder, towards the jungle behind them. Water falls down from the sky there, plainly visible to him from here where he stands. It’s like he’s on the edge of a raincloud. “What the hell?”

“Is it supposed to do that?” asks Alleluia. Canta shakes his head.

“It’s probably something evil,” says Canta, sniffing the air. There’s definitely a whiff of something here… somewhere. But it’s hard to say. The jungle is constantly washed over with water and the air here is so dry and arid that if there is a scent here to be carried, it’s hardly noticeable.

But there is something.

For another hour, they walk through the gray, lifeless ‘desert’, hidden in the far-north-west of the world. Canta can feel his throat and eyes becoming dryer and dryer the further they go. Whatever is draining the world of its moisture here seems to be affecting him as well. He crushes some old human remains, walking over them inadvertently. The skulls crumble beneath his boots, having only needed a very slight touch to fall apart into a heap of dry powder immediately. It reminds him of the skeleton he had found down in Alleluia’s dungeon. The man. Uh…

Maschif? Yeah, Canta thinks that was his name.

Another hour passes.

The air is getting worse. He didn’t think it was possible, but it’s getting even dryer than before. Or maybe he’s just starting to dry out himself? The only thing keeping him going and his eyes locked forward is the smell. The smell in the air is intensifying the further they go, not even the dryness can hide it anymore.

His stomach growls.

There is undoubtedly a sin here. A real sin. Something big. His boot shuffles forward as he takes another step towards it.

Another hour passes.

Some kind of tube-like disruption to the landscape seems to be forming ahead of them. It’s large, like the dead tree of the cathedral-city. Or maybe even some kind of odd rock formation? Canta isn’t sure. But the smell is coming from there.

Another hour passes.

It isn’t a dead tree. It isn’t any kind of rock-formation.

The two of them stand there, staring ahead of themselves. Canta’s eyes, next to entirely dried out, hardly function anymore. But even through his blurry sight, he can see that the cylindrical, towering thing is something that doesn’t belong.

Out of the landscape, in the center of a long-since ruined city, juts out a behemoth made entirely out of meat. Out of what looks like thousands of bodies, of faces, stitched together into a long, vertical, worm-like tube that sways around left and right, sticking out of the arid ground.

All around the distorted, the thing, are human faces with open, gaping, toothless mouths, their eyes long since gone. All of them are inhaling, breathing in as much air as they can, drawing it into the body of the giant. Then, a moment later, after some critical apex has been reached, they all close their mouths.

Canta and Alleluia exchange a look, before staring back towards the distorted.

Its body bulges, contorting as all of the moisture that it has drawn into itself rises up from its base, spewing out of the large opening at the top of it. Water spurts out of the ‘mouth’ at the top of the creature, up like a plume from a fountain, as it shoots towards the sky.

The area around them isn’t being rained on, realizes Canta.

It’s all spit. It’s all mucus, created by thousands and thousands of faces. They’re not just stitched together on the outside of the creature, they’re stitched together on the inside of it as well.