51

Hunter had seen glimpses of the entity’s true form before, back when he’d shot Mother with Fawkes’s pistol to break her spell, and had wished he hadn’t. Even that, however, hadn’t been enough to prepare him for what now stood before him.

The enormous coiled body of It That Whispers was akin to that of a gigantic centipede, each of its segments a cavernous humanoid torso, each of its dozens of legs a long, skeletal-looking arm. Four great, many-jointed limbs that could have belonged to the world’s most monstrous praying mantis grew symmetrically from its body at perfect right angles. Fused to the biggest of its torsos was Mother’s upper body, bony and malformed like a vestigial twin. Hovering above all else, the entity’s head was a thing that defied description; a chaotic, elongated mass of spongy flesh, clusters of alien organs, and hundreds of trypophobic orifices.

Simply looking at it was enough to eat away at Hunter’s sanity, bombarding his senses with impossible shapes and colors and notions he couldn’t put in words even if he tried. He fell to his knees and emptied his stomach. His dagger clattered on the floor. Somewhere a million worlds away someone (Fawkes?) cried something, but the whispered hymns and chants that emanated from the entity were too loud for him to pay attention.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tried not to burst into laughter at his own folly. Had he really expected to defeat this… this god? To try and match the sheer authority it had over this flimsy reality?

Preposterous.

He became dimly aware of heavy, lumbering footsteps approaching him – one of the spear-wielding low-ogres, most likely, coming to punish his hubris. He could simply not bring himself to care. The razor-sharp tips of its praying mantis limbs were tracing luminous ophidian sigils in the air, carving cuneiforms on the face of reality itself. Beams of cosmic light tore through the air, burning holes in the world itself. Someone screamed in pain. Small voices chittered and chattered in the back of his mind, desperately trying to grab his attention.

Hunter didn’t care.

Hunter couldn’t care.

Then, suddenly, a change; two tiny silhouettes flew to the light, little more than specks of dust against the radiant corona of a thousand suns. A tiny pause, the world holding its breath.

Then surprise, agony, pain.

Sheathed in the lime-colored energies of their hexes, the two raven familiars crashed in the amorphous face of the entity like two avian-shaped missiles of pure, irreverent spite. They lodged themselves deep in those gaping orifices, piercing spongy flesh and drawing rivulets of thin, light-blue ichor, and then kept going. The pecked and clawed and tore and burrowed, all the while cawing obscenities that would make a dock worker blush.

It was pitiful.

It was glorious.

It was fucking amazing.

It was just enough to ease the noose the entity had tied around Hunter’s will, just enough to let him shake free.

Beams of scalding light tore deep gashes along the walls and the floors of the Inner Sanctum as the entity struggled to free itself from the irritant that were the ravens. Hunter fell flat on the floor, barely managing to get out of the way of a wayward disintegrating ray. The low-ogre just a few feet away wasn’t so lucky; the ray of light slice him in half so perfectly, Hunter saw the top half of his body slide to the floor as if in slow motion.

There was no time for Hunter to think. If there was, he’d probably freeze and be killed where he stood. Acting on pure instinct, he rose to his feet and started dashing towards the entity on the other side of the hall. When all you have is a hammer, it’s tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. Who had said that? Hunter couldn’t remember, but it was goddamn accurate. He’d tried to punch Cthulhu in the face before, as the expression went, and it had worked. Well, kind of.

Maybe it would work again.

The plan was still on.

It just needed a bit of improvised finetuning.

Hunter pulled out his Wasting Ancient Bone Charm of Warped Flesh and pushed some of his mana into the eerily smooth and warm carved bone, activating is effects. He felt his skin and flesh start to warp and harden, turning blotchy and tough like beef jerky. He poured more of his mana into the charm, activating it again, and then did it a few times more for good measure. He felt his whole body stiffen, and his skin hardened to the point he barely had any sense of touch left.

He hadn’t forgotten about the negative part of the charm’s effect, of course. Armored skin and increased durability came at the price of pangs of wracking pain and necrotic damage every half a minute or so. He’d stacked the charm’s effects enough times for that to kill him in just under a minute, if not less.

It didn’t matter.

Just under a minute was all the time he needed.

Pushing himself to the limit, he sprinted towards the entity, slowing down only to do a forward roll through a large puddle of Phage that had pooled on the floor, smearing himself with globs of the deadly crimson ooze. It clung to his hardened skin immediately, eager to consume his flesh. Hunter tried not to think about it, and definitely not to look.

The entity was apparently still preoccupied with the two magnificent feathery bastards, who, judging from the furious chattering he still heard in the back of his mind, were still very much alive and kicking. Good. That made Hunter’s job much easier.

The two remaining low-ogres saw him run straight at them and moved to stop him, but they were slow and predictable, and this wasn’t Hunter’s first rodeo. He feinted a right turn, then went left and ran around the first low-ogre, then tumbled under the wide arc of the second’s sweeping spear attack, then got right back on his feet and continued his crazy banzai charge.

He was no more than twenty feet away when It That Whispers finally turned its attention to him. The crushing pressure of its sightless gaze was so intense it almost felt physical. For a fraction of a second, Hunter was the worlds tiniest mouse caught smack dab in the middle of the world’s brightest spotlight. Ironically, it was the Phage that helped him pull through. It had eaten through the numb and hardened layers of his charm-infused skin and was started to tear at his flesh. The agony was exquisite. The pain of the Phage consuming him tissue by tissue, cell by cell, neuron by neuron was excruciating – so much, in fact, that it was enough to flood his brain and numb him to the effects of the entity’s domineering gaze.

One huge, insect-like limb tried to swat him away, but Hunter rolled under that, too, and went on to barrel through the final few feet that separated him from the entity’s monstrous coils.

And then he was finally there, up close and personal.

A couple of leg-arms wrapped around him, grappling him and pinning him in place.

“You fucking moron”, Hunter spat and started to squirm around, spreading the crimson ooze that had been rapidly consuming his body, propagating. The entity felt it too, but it was too late; the Phage had already infected it, was already greedily spreading through the luxury all-you-can-eat buffet of alien flesh that was the entity’s monstrous body. It didn’t matter how long it would take for it to eat its way all the way up to the entity’s creepy cauliflower of a head. All that mattered was that it would, and then all the goddamn whispered hymns and cosmic laser shows in the world wouldn’t be worth a damn.

“You fucking, fucking moron.”

The entity recoiled and tried to shake him off, but Hunter held fast. At that point, he was running on nothing but fumes and pure, unadulterated rancor. The whispered hymns where frantic now, blasting him from every directions with enough volume to match a jet’s takeoff. Hunter laughed He felt the consuming sting of the Phage spread to his face and lips and eyes. He laughed harder.

The entity’s huge alien centipede of a body thrashed around, and traces of new notions entered its chanting: confusion, doubt, fear. Hunter just laughed, held on, and spread the ooze around even more.

Then, in a last-ditch attempt to rid itself of this dangerous aggressor and the deadly infection he had carried with him, the entity turned one of its scalding beams on itself. It sliced through its own body in half, separating the Phage-ridden parts from its head and upper segments and collapsing on the floor. For a moment, Hunter thought that was that. He didn’t have it in him to push any further. The mere fact that he was still conscious was a miracle by itself. Then, however, he saw Mother’s face – Sister Finch’s face, his companion’s mother’s face – contort in agony, and a new wave of spite spread through his half-eaten limbs.

Screaming at the top of his lungs, he pushed himself to half-dash, half-stumble to the entity’s head. It was as large as a small car. Its skin – if it was skin – was the non-color of dust. Rivulets of bioluminescent blue ichor ran from the orifices Biggs and Wedge had buried themselves in. Hunter raised his disintegrating fist and punched the spongy flesh again and again and again, leaving crimson Phage prints. He rubbed what remained of his body on the writhing creature, making sure to spread as much of the ooze was possible. He was little more than a torso, four stumpy limbs, and a rictus grin now. He didn’t have long before the ooze claimed his life – but again, neither did the fucking thing, and that was all that mattered at this point.

As he felt the darkness closing in, Hunter had just enough time to think about two things:

He wondered whether Fawkes and the rest of his companions would be alright, and he wished he still had fingers to flip the entity the bird one final time.