Children thought about many things, possessing truths that no adult would agree with. At most, they’d feign understanding, nod, and tell them exactly what they wanted to hear and indulge in whatever fantasies they had. No, they weren’t fantasies! They were very real things because in the eyes of children, all things were true and bright and warm, and that was perfect. And no adult could understand that.

But Mom was different.

Sometimes on Ordoian nights when the sun was pulled down by Mister Giant, they sat there on the floating balcony of their little castle overlooking the sugary East Asian Sea where dolphins danced, and counted tumbleweeds on the wild wild shores where sand was snow and tasted like blueberries when you eat it (don’t actually eat it!), and stars dripped, because inside them was melted candy and each tip was leaking sweetness and you could taste it on your lips: the tartness of greens and sour pinks and ripe blues and black was velvety, which rolled off your lips like a roly poly, but the greatest thing about stars, and Mom said this, was the fact that they twinkle and every time they twinkle it meant the Cosmos was winking, sort of like a nice cashier-man sneaking you a candy bar and putting a finger on his lips.

Mom was the good adult who told him that not only Santa Claus was real but you could be anything, even Saint Nick (he wanted to be Saint Nick). While nobody could be a saint as good as Saint Nick—other than the man himself—it was not a reason to not be nice (if that made sense) so it was always good to say “Thank you, sir!” and “No, ma’am!” and “Have a great day!”. Kindness was the best present in the world, and if he knew one thing about money-science, it’d be this: everyone wanted kindness because it was scarce.

Mom was the best adult. She understood him as far as he wanted to be understood, loved him as much as he wanted to be loved, and hugged him as tightly as he wanted to be held. And if children and adults had to agree on one thing, it’d be that hugs were the greatest warmth since the Sun. More than hot baths or chicken noodle soup, because they touch you in the heart and almost nothing touches you there.

But there were bad things too. Bad nights when the Cosmos didn’t wink, and some people held fingers to their lips and he didn’t know what the big secret was. Jokes on them, he was a brave boy. When everyone was running away, screaming and sobbing, he didn’t cry. He was nervous though. Some pranksters dressed up as cool monsters with shiny swords and real bows, spilling red paint out of people, and the people sounded real too. In real pain. They were running like it was a haunted house chased by a scary man with a chainsaw.

Even Mom. She was really scared. She picked him up and ran towards the soldiers with loud, loud guns. No matter how much he plugged his ears, he felt each boom in his heart. A mister took an arrow to the neck and fell down, and Mom passed him. He squirmed on the ground like a wriggly worm in the rain.

Another mister’s head fell off. His eyes blinked.

A lady tripped on something, and a big green mister reached her before anyone else could, and he brought down a heavy ax—like for cutting thick trees—onto that small, small lady.

He had never seen so much red paint in a person before.

And a small group of three, two scared sirs and one ma’am, they had caught on fire and cried out so heavily that not even the rifle booms matched. It was a trick. He saw stuntmen do that before: catching on fire. They’ll be just alright, and if they weren’t, he’d give them lots of cold water (you do that for burns).

When Mom ran past the soldiers, she told him they’d be safe. She rubbed his hair and kissed his cheek and hugged him tightly, and she was warm.

Mom cried. She told him she was sorry. About a lot of things. About working too much and not having a good father for him. About not getting the toy he wanted last Christmas. About yelling at him last week for not doing his homework (he hated homework).

He couldn’t understand. What was there to be sorry for? She was his mom, and she was warm and touched his heart. Moms shouldn’t apologize for that.

But then something happened, and she took him away. He didn’t know what was going on. Everyone was running and shouting again. It was getting awfully scary, and he wasn’t sure if he could be brave forever.

Mom tucked him under one of those big military cars and asked him to be brave one last time.

“I’ll be brave forever,” he said.

“Good. Whenever you’re sad, find me winking in the stars,” she told him with a happy smile.

Mom ran away, and people continued to scream and booms rang out. He held his hands over his ears, shut his eyes, and thought about how he should’ve done his homework that day.

Eventually the sounds stopped, and he heard weird noises instead: snarling that didn’t belong to dogs, words that grumbled, and a horn. Suddenly something grabbed his ankle and he was pulled out.

It was that big green mister with the heavy ax. He helped him up, patted his shoulder, covered his shirt in warm red paint. Everything was like that, he saw. Everything was warm red paint and icky bits.

He trembled. How could a man be so tall and small so bad? “Mister… Have you seen my mom?”

“Nah,” replied the mister in a weird, weird accent. “Prolly killed ‘er.”

“Huh?”

“She’s gone.“

“No… Mom isn’t gone. She isn’t!” He shook her head. The green mister was a scary mister, but he wouldn’t say something like that. Mom was here, she was here somewhere! He just saw her earlier, she couldn’t be gone!

But the green mister shrugged, dug something out of his ear with his pinky. How could he act like that after saying something so cruel? “Yeah.”

He stammered, “N-No…”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No—!” He beat at the mister’s chest; it was mean, but he deserved it for being mean. “No—!” He was a mean mister. “No—!” So, so mean. “No—!”

“Yes—!” And the mister lifted him up with one arm and they spun around and he cried, looking for Mom but Mom wasn’t here. “Yes—! Yes—! Yes—!” And the green mister laughed like it was funny. It wasn’t funny.

He was dropped onto his butt and cried. He wanted to see Mom again; he had to apologize for not being brave anymore. The great green mister was too terrifying and he stank too bad.

“Hah—ah—ha—“ he breathed. “Ah—!”

“Easy now.” The mister kneeled, took out a small knife. It was covered in red too—why was everything covered in red?—and the mister made sure he saw it, took in every little detail like it was show and tell. “Just fer you, I’ll let ya off easy. Go n’see your mom.”

The mister shoved the knife into him and everything hurt. Warm stuff came from his body. He laid on his back, on a pond of warm paint, looking at the weird, weird night with oddly twinkling stars. But for some reason, none of them seemed to wink. Not for him.

He thought back to what Mom said and her promise, and he didn’t see her.

Mom was a liar.

If the Cosmos winked every time a star twinkled, then where was Mom? Why did she keep her eyes shut?

So he called for her until forever ended.

When he opened his eyes, he was a red carcass. Rough, burnt, having the texture of sandpaper put through gravel, and two gaping holes were placed where his eyes would’ve been, and he could not see, and hot steam lurched through them, but it did not burn. Blunt things patted the ground like worn, soft baseball bats, and he found himself incapable of walking, merely swaying about like motiveless grass. In the distance, he faintly heard the sugars of the Pacific and the heaven-chime of stars, and he did not mistake it for the emptiness inside his skull but rather the emptiness in the chest cavity where his heart was supposed to be. They had taken it. He felt nothing in his heart, so nothing touched him. It was maddening.

“—Ah—!”

“It must be you,” said a voice, one that wished to be heard. “It is you who arose from this massacre, you whose will is greatest of all. Wondrous.”

“—Ah, ah—!”

“You will do nicely. Go on then, go on and create a miracle for us servants of Kreutz, servant of Sirius Aethfell. Cry, scream, destroy all who have taken your insignificant life.”

“—Ahhh—!”

“Destroy the very humanity you have lost. As I, Wonder, declare it. You, the spirit of all who had wrongfully passed.”

A wonderful thing happened.

Him and Mom and the sirs and ladies and all the kids his age and older brothers and sisters and cute little babies and dogs and everyone and everyone could be together again, and Mom would be safe and they could count microscopic goblins in the sand.

And no one could hurt them now.

He gained legs. He gained arms. He gained mouths. He gained a new body, a superior body to the one he had, and a mind shared across thousands and he, the union of flesh, could get revenge. Him and every other tormented soul.

Yet…

~~~

The verdict was decided. While the zombies creeped towards the Tormented Flesh, they were much too slow and weak to provide adequate aid; while the Tormented Flesh had its siphons, they were disabled as soon as they dropped; and while it had legs, trying to walk towards some unknown place, they were cut down one-by-one, deforested. By that flaming man mostly, heaving his ax and inexplicably turning himself into a ring of fiery demise.

“—Ah—!”

The pain was too much. It shared the same nerves as all of the assimilated many, accounting for thousands of little lives that screamed and cried and whined and it hurt, it hurt. No matter the stomping or the lashing or the eating, nothing worked. Nothing. The Slayers overcame each and every obstacle, adapting. Every minute they passed, they improved more and more.

So the Heart of the Tormented Flesh screamed again, desperately rising what snailing dead was left; all it did was terrorize the living outside of this battlefield. Here though, it did naught but tear at their ears. Its siphons renounced their previous objective, to feed and grow, and began targeting the Slayers altogether, yet all it did was made it predictable. They dodged, trapped the siphons, tore them apart. No matter how many legs there were, how they stomped and threatened, none of them killed a single Slayer. They were taken down by the likes of Team Luster.

Even its defenses were falling; the walls were thinner, unable to keep up with the attacks. Some even pierced its small, frail body.

One leg was gone. One wall was torn. Another leg, another wall. It tilted to the side, its bloated mass weighing too heavily on the dwindling number. Again, again, and again, until it lost one leg too many. From that, the tilt became a turn, and that turn gave way to shouting.

“Timber!”

“It’s coming down!”

“Get away!”

The legs desperately tried to upright themselves, stretching out as far as they could to better maintain the balance but it was too late. The mound-head crashed first into a building, the force plowing through the roofs and the floors, breaking each level as though it was pulp, crashing, smashing until it was firmly stuck in the defacement it molded.

“—Ah—!” it screamed, trying terribly to free itself. Arms sprouted from the mound’s sides, tearing pieces of concrete and rebar off to lift itself up. Oddly enough, Team Luster did not engage. Not the man with the ax, nor the swordwoman and her clones, or the invisible one, or the mage (they disappeared a while ago).

In this solace, through the use of at least a dozen hands, its head was risen an inch—

[Death Chance: 100%]

And a black, thick javelin struck from above. The same javelin that destroyed its shell, the womb, and it was the killing blow. As soon as the javelin pierced through the mound-head, it seemingly exploded the throng into a fine red mist. Rain came. Of flesh and blood. The final scream, the end.

The legs crumpled, fell, looking like spider legs without the spider body, and the siphons were detached and shriveling like raisins, and the excited howls from the Slayers filled the combative air with victory. The zombies went as expected, no longer being puppets to the monstrous thing, and returned to their rightful rest.

As for the Heart of the Tormented Flesh, somehow after the second powerful bolt, it survived. It laid on the ground looking up at the twinkling stars once more without any arms or legs, possessing only a teethless mouth and eyes that emitted steam, and it cried. It was useless again. Useless.

Slayers heard the Heart and gathered around, men and women of odd aesthetics pulled from several inspirations, and Team Luster who looked worse for wear. Out them all, the ones who looked slightly normal were a group of five, Slayer Team Alba. Every Slayer saw the child, and no one cheered for its death anymore.

“Ah—hah—ah—” it gasped.

Perhaps the Slayers there were reminded that they did not live in a game, not in a fantasy, nor a Fallen World where all semblance of society and logic collapsed. That this was the real world—their world—and what laid was once a child, a child that they once were, who believed in silly things like the Easter Bunny or Jack Frost.

Seeing the icon of the Tormented Flesh, perhaps they were reminded again of what had truly happened. How many people witnessed their lost loved ones come to life? In Ordo University, how many of their friends woke up? Maybe it was a blessing that they were here and not there, living through the heartbreak once more.

Jury approached the dying boy, looking down at him. She kneeled and gently rubbed his head like how Mom used to do. “It’s time for you to go. Whichever Comet performed this twisted miracle, we will end them.”

“Ah…” replied the boy, staring at the stars. Although he had no eyes, he felt a star twinkle.

“Be at peace.”

Finally, the Tormented Flesh passed.

~~~

[QUEST NOTIFICATION - COMPLETION]

Subjugation: Tormented Flesh is completed.

You have brought him rest.

Rewards:

500,000 standards

Bestiary - Comets