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THE GROTESQUE
Raw torment.
There's nothing inside my head beyond lashing agony.
The infernati grasping me from behind glides his flaming hands from my torso up to my face, and the scent of my mask melting fills my nostrils. But even the stench of melted clay and paper is not enough to overpower my own natural smell as I burn, fire licking at my skin like a thousand tongues.
Heat blazes a trail through me, encasing me as my entire body fractures. Like a cracked watermelon, I can feel myself oozing, the pain seeping into visual form as fissures appear on my arms, showcasing jagged rivers of liquid rock, molten lava. My stomach melts all at once, and I emanate a glow. The dank walls of the office-lined hallway in Jennison's Meat Factory light up in an eerie orange and cast a hideous gleam across my enemy's face as she gloats.
Though several of her tentacles have been severed, Mishika stands in front of me as her fire-monster lackey attacks me. An ugly smile settles on her face as she awaits my final moment.
So do I.
As pain slashes hard and deep, so deep that I’m certain it rends my very soul from my body, I prepare to die.
I think of my reason for being here—the tiny, beautiful human who has captured me, heart, body, and soul—and I wish her face would be the last thing I see. I try to envision it even now, but pain steals the memory from me, tugging at it like a breeze blowing away dandelion fluff.
A blink.
A breath.
Another blink.
Though I should extinguish in a furl of smoke, though my body should char and then scatter to the wind...it doesn't.
I remain.
I remain…engulfed by sleek, slithering, burning trails of red-hot magma that stretch my battered soul to its limits, but just to its limits and not past them.
Because rock cannot be destroyed...only reformed.
I realize, with a start, that I'm not dying.
Which means I can't give up.
Aliana.
If this doesn't kill me, then I have to get to my precious mate, save my sweet human from the terrible nightmares my kind want to bestow upon her. Her face is finally able to penetrate the fog surrounding my mind and flashes like a picture from a View-Master in the before times. Plush lips, long dark hair streaked with white, those eyes that make me feel like I'm tripping over my own feet.
The fatalism weighing me down only moments ago morphs into vicious, trembling fury. I glide forward down the hallway on my viscous legs, ignoring the bastard clinging to my back as I surge right into Mishika with a bellow. The pink bitch gasps after I graze her side with a hand that's a dripping, seething molten mass. Vengeful pride swells inside my chest when I see her skin start to blister and bubble, one of her four tits melting into a charred black blob as the air fills with a scent like barbecued chicken.
I smile as I drag my tongue across my teeth. "You smell…delicious."
With a shriek, the female monster turns around, flees into one of the abandoned offices lining the hallway, and disappears from my sight. That's just fine by me because I'll enjoy this particular hunt. I'm going to take Mishika's intestines and spell out a warning with them, a gruesome message on the ground for the other Eights and Nines.
They think they can attack the four Terrors?
After they lay eyes on Mishika's mutilated form, no one will dare threaten us or our mate.
But first, I need to take care of the bastard on my back.
I raise the liquid mass that's now my arm and reach behind my head, letting my molten limb pour down onto the monster behind me. He may be a fire being...but let's see if he can burn hotter than an oven. Does his heat have limits? Because mybody clearly doesn’t. It has magnified the heat he poured into me ten times over.
Can he absorb the heat of the core of the earth? Can he deal with the volcanic force churning through me?
I slink my hand down over his shoulder and then sink into it. Somehow, even though I'm liquifying and my body is crackling with pain, I still have the ability to determine sensation. My gelatinous lava fingers send up impressions of skin, then muscle, then bone as they seep through the layers of the other monster's body.
