“What the actual god damn fuck was that?!” Vaile yelled as he heard (and felt) something that he swore up and down he had experienced before. That noise sounded a fair bit like the shrieking noise that those weird obelisks that the Desert/ Sand Elves had pulled around had made when they shattered, and also a fair bit like the whining, droning noise that constantly came from those weird glitchy things that he had faced back in the desert and even prior to that when with the Beastmen. Given how those two noises fused together sounded a fair bit like the scream that he had heard just a bit ago, he had a very bad feeling about what was about to happen.

“Lord Vaile, what was that?”

Vaile didn’t verbally answer and merely gestured that everyone should move away. If his prior experiences had taught him anything, it was that the sound, combined with the fact that a decent number of people nearby had just fallen over dead before going all Matrix-y and fading away into nothing, meant that something very wicked was coming this way. He may have slowly been picking up traits from his Tamed Beings, including the general lack of care that the majority of them seemed to have for any ‘lower people’ that followed them, but he still had his desire to at least ensure some degree of safety for them.

He wasn’t completely like his Tamed Beings. He was a true monster, at least not yet. He still had some of his humanity left, a great deal of it, actually, at least when the nearby Raid-level Tamed Being wasn’t somehow exerting a subtle influence on him. And whatever it was that just shrieked a bit ago was somehow able to cut that invisible tether just enough for him to actually give a damn a bit more than he had prior. His biggest concern now was not protecting the nameless spider’s ambitions but instead making sure that the survivors of this event would stay alive.

He could feel it; something hostile beyond all measure was coming towards him and would not stop until he was well and truly dead. But this feeling… it was… muddled? It was almost like a BGM was playing that he had heard before. No, there was music playing! He knew this tune, too. It had played several times during the lifecycle of Neon Genesis Fantasia, and it always played during the moments when a story-character who was an ally got mind controlled and forced to act against their better impulses.

In fact, the tune was so overused that it had become a meme in and of itself, but if such a song was playing then who would be the possessed former ally? Jacob? No, e wasn’t near powerful nor influential enough to be worth taking over, so it had to be Gareth. He had known that the High Confessor wasn’t exactly a fan of the direction that Vaile had forced the cult to go, but he had assumed that it was just the grumblings of an old man who knew that things were better but had a tsundere attitude about it.

But, as Gareth broke through the wall in front of him with a mad look in his eyes and his mutations exposed for all to see, Vaile could tell quite clearly that either Gareth had indeed been turned into a meat puppet or some other force had made him give in to his pent up emotions.

“VAILE!”

And, given that the High Confessor was screaming his name incoherently with a mouth frothing with spit, Vaile had to guess that it was probably the latter. As the madman rushed at him, Vaile felt his perception of reality shift.

“Fucking me…. Are we really doing this?” he grumbled as his body tensed up and Gareth plowed him through a few walls and out into the streets. It would appear that one of the least-liked aspects of that game that this world seemed to be at least somewhat based on had reared its ugly head. The person who had designed these ‘your ally is possessed, and now you have to either kill them or snap them back to reality’ events had obviously never learned about how to make good game design, because Vaile could feel his body stiffen every so often, which would allow Gareth to slam him around a bit.

On the plus side, he took no damage during these moments. On the downside, he was stuck in what seemed to be an endless loop of QuickTime Events that he couldn’t do anything about. And that wasn’t the worst part of this whole dumbfuckery that he had to deal with. He could see… something getting closer. It was huge, easily the same size as the nameless spider, if not slightly larger. The… thing… had no eyes, ears, mouth, nose, or anything that could easily be called any real discernible features of any kind. And yet, it moved on wavy, spindly ‘legs’ that wobbled around both with clear intent and a clear lack of it at the same time.

The whole creature, if you could call a glitchy thing such as itself a creature at all, just did not belong in the world that it was in, and every step it took seemed to rip up the reality around itself and… well… unmake it. What emerged from where it stepped was something that Vaile could not fully understand, almost like he was viewing a non-Euclidean anomaly that both existed and did not, a point in reality that was there, but, at the same time, just wasn’t. It was alarming, to be perfectly honest, and Vaile wanted it to cease.

He really had no way of dealing with that… thing on his own, and so he was forced to roll the dice in one of the few moments during this endless QuickTime Hell that he had some semblance of ability to do anything aside from simply be pushed around. He called on the one creature nearby that could possibly deal with the situation in any meaningful way.

The ground underneath the ruined capital shuddered, and the glitchy creature that had been wandering towards a larger cavern so that it could take a less-obstructed path towards its target stopped and, in a glitch of a move, turned 180 degrees in under a femtosecond. The nearly-erase capital city began to crumble into the labyrinthine cave network that flowed like a massive anthill under the former Republic, and a massive spider covered head to toe in chitin blacker than night emerged from the massive hole that it had created. Its eight massive compound eyes glowed a sinister crimson as it evaluated the threat before it, and before anyone could do anything, Vaile and the cultists all got a horrible feeling in their guts as the nameless Raid Boss of a spider unconsciously took a step backwards out of fear.

Vaile was the only one remotely able to voice any kind of response to this, and it was a simple two-word sentence.

“Well, fuck….”