Noct's power was a tangible force here, an oppressive weight that bore down on us like the sky itself was trying to crush our souls. Oily shadows danced and cavorted at the edges of our vision, always darting away when we tried to focus on them. They chittered and giggled like demented children, their whispers a sibilant chorus that scraped at the inside of our skulls.

  “Jesus, this place puts even Infernum to fucking shame, and that’s saying something,” I choked out, the others barely even able to speak at this stage.

  The ground beneath our feet was a roiling sea of corruption, a heaving carpet of pulsating meat shot through with bulging veins and suppurating sores. It squelched obscenely with each step, disgorging jets of ichor and clouds of spores that drifted on the fetid breeze. Tortured faces, twisted in eternal agony, occasionally surfaced in the meat-tide like drowning victims before being sucked back down with moist slurps.

  From the seething morass sprouted a forest of thorny vines, each one pulsing with a diseased, lascivious life. They coiled and writhed like oily serpents, their bark glistening with a viscous sap that sizzled and hissed when it dripped to the floor. Wicked barbs and bony hooks tipped each vine, promising an agonizing embrace to any fool who strayed too close.

  A cancerous, fungal growth swelled from the far wall, climbing toward the distant ceiling in a mass of lumpy polyps and fibrous tendrils. At the center of the growth pulsated a massive, unblinking eye the size of a Volkswagen, its slitted pupil oozing milky ichor. Smaller eyes and pustule-like mouths studded the growth, forming throbbing clusters that followed our every movement with avid hunger.

  Delphy and Char took point, their monstrous forms almost comically out of place in this hellish wonderland. Delphy's shark-like silhouette prowled forward, her head swinging from side to side like a dowsing rod attuned to evil. Char scuttled along on spear-like limbs, her bristly carapace glistening with a mucal sheen.

  "Jesus fuck," I muttered. "Talk about a final boss arena."

  "Where's Noct?" Hannah hissed, hefting her carbine, patience having long wore thin like the rest of us. "I've got a few clips I'd like to introduce to its fucking face."

  As if summoned by her words, a chilling laugh rolled through the chamber like a fetid breeze. It was the sound of flies feasting on a carcass, of maggots writhing in rotting meat. A sound that bypassed the ears and burrowed straight into the primitive lizard-brain, triggering an atavistic urge to flee gibbering into the night.

  "Oh, my sweet dreamers," a voice purred from everywhere and nowhere, "you need but look upon the face of your god."

  The cancerous growth on the far wall shuddered and pulsed, then split apart like a rotting fruit. Amid the shower of pus and coiling entrails emerged a figure that made my bowels turn to ice water.

  Noct, I presumed.

  He towered over us, a seething mass of nightmares made flesh. His body was a constantly-shifting tapestry of fanged mouths, lidless eyes, and grasping pseudopods that bled into each other in a churning kaleidoscope of tortured anatomy. Ribbons of shimmering darkness wove through his semi-liquid form, pulsing like the diseased veins of a dead god.

  His face was a thing of unspeakable beauty and mind-shattering horror. It shifted between configurations, never settling on one for more than a second. Here a languid, androgynous visage of impossible loveliness, there a howling rictus of agonized terror, there a writhing mass of fang-studded tentacles. His eyes were swirling black holes, voids that drank in the light and sanity of all that beheld them.

  "Welcome," he purred in a voice like rotting honey, "to the end of all you know. To the final despair before oblivion's sweet embrace."

  "Fuck you, Shoggoth-for-brains!" I snapped, aiming down the barrel of my Sig. "Where's Artemis? Give him up before I redecorate this room with your fungal giblets!"

  Noct laughed, a sound like the death rattle of a trillion damned souls. "Artemis is here, of his own free will. He has seen the beautiful futility of your mewling existence and embraced his role as harbinger of my glory. All will be as he is, in time."

  Danika's face twisted in fury. "Bullshit! You've done something to him, you moldy fuck! Artemis would never join a freak like you!"

  "Oh, but he would, my dear. And he has." Noct's grin stretched wider than physically possible, a Cheshire slash of needle fangs and wriggling tongues. "Your kind is so delightfully predictable. You mewl and wail against the dying of the light, never realizing the ecstasy that awaits in the dark. Your brother has simply opened his eyes to this truth."

  "Enough, Cthulhu-cock!" Knight snarled, racking her AA-12. "Final warning—release Artemis or get ready to lick your own asshole in hell!"

  "Hell?" Noct's laughter was a physical thing, a blast of pure despair that scoured our souls. "Oh you blind, beautiful fools. I am the hell you fear! The monster in every shadow, every childhood terror aching to be realized! I am the cancer in the heart of your misbegotten species, the poison in your blood! Rejoice, for your nightmares have finally come for you!"

  With that, he unfurled his true form like a rotting flower, pseudopods and tentacles boiling out in a mass of clutching horror. Eyes like pustules throbbed and wept as fanged maws gibbered and shrieked, a thousand voices wailing in discordant union. The air shimmered around him, the fabric of reality blistering at his touch.

  We opened up, but it was like shooting a tsunami with a squirt gun. Bullets whined and ricocheted off squirming meat as viscous fluids sprayed. Noct just laughed, a sound like billions of spiders scuttling over broken glass.

  Rippling darkness lashed out faster than thought, barbed tendrils punching through Char's carapace to spear her against the wall. She shrieked, ichor gouting from her mandibles as her legs kicked and spasmed. Delphy lunged, jaws wide enough to swallow a horse whole, but Noct's hand shot out and clamped her maw shut with insulting ease. She thrashed and tore, but his flesh simply flowed around her teeth like rancid oil.

  "Filth!" I roared, blasting the monstrous fuck with the Beretta. "Let them go!"

  "As you wish," he laughed, and flung Delphy like a rag doll. Three hundred plus pounds of shark-monster slammed into me, bowling me over. The Beretta skittered away as we rolled to a groaning heap.

  I struggled to my feet just as a tide of foulness crashed over us, hurling us back. Knight screamed as a flailing whip studded with bony hooks shredded her fatigues, lashing bloody rents across her chest. Another caught Hannah in the gun arm, nearly severing it at the elbow. She fell to her knees in a spray of arterial blood, shock-white and stuttering.

  Danika lasted the longest, her augmented reflexes a blur of desperate motion. But even she couldn't dodge a tsunami. Grasping feelers coiled around her legs, yanking her off her feet. She hit the ground hard, rifle clattering from her grip.

  In seconds it was over, our feeble assault snuffed out like a match in a monsoon. We were down, broken and bleeding, while Noct towered triumphant. He shrank and solidified into a humanoid form, some Luciferian ideal of beauty wrapped in a cloak of liquid shadow. But his grin was a slash of white poison in the gloom, his eyes twin abysses of awful mirth.

  "And so it ends, not with a bang, but a whimper," he mused, strolling over to Danika's groaning form. "You've spirit, I'll grant you that. But spirit is just a condiment to be savored as I feast on your despair."

  He reached down and cupped her chin almost tenderly, tilting her face up to meet his terrible gaze. "Your brother is lost to you, child. Lost to the glorious madness that will soon smother your world like a black sun. Every torment you suffered to reach me, every horror and depravity, was simply an aperitif for the banquet of agonies to come. For I am Noct, lord of the final night, and I have come to collect my due."

  Danika spat a gob of bloody phlegm in his perfect, nightmare face. "Fuck...you,” she wheezed. "Artemis will...fight you."

  "Oh, he will, just as soon as he’s completed his work for me,” Noct purred, licking the blood from his lips with a tongue like an oil-slick centipede. "He will fight, and scream, and weep so beautifully as I peel his soul apart neuron by sweating neuron. And as the last tattered remnant of his being struggles in the abyss, just before that final guttering spark winks out, I will lean in close and whisper a single word, a word that will plunge him into the deepest pit of despair."

  He craned down until his lips brushed her ear, his voice a fetid caress.

  "'Sister.' "

  I groaned and tried to rise, to make one last doomed charge. My leg buckled, sending me sprawling. Through a red haze of pain, I saw Noct's form twist and flow into a boiling mass of horrors, a churning ocean of fangs and flame-shot eyes.

  "And now, little dreamers," he crooned, his voice distorted through a thousand fang-studded maws, "let the true nightmares begin."

  The tide of abomination crashed over us in a riptide of clutching limbs and gnashing teeth. I screamed, I fought, but the darkness swallowed me down, down, into a horror beyond imagining.

  The last thing I heard as I tumbled into that endless black was Noct's laughter, echoing into forever.

  Chapter

  Thirty-One

  The nightmare seemed endless, an eternity of sanity-rending horror that scoured my mind and flensed my soul. I was drowning in a sea of shrieking faces and grasping limbs, each one a distorted reflection of my own sins and fears. I could feel myself coming apart, the stitching of my identity unraveling thread by thread.

  Just as the last fraying tether of my self began to snap, the maelstrom of madness vanished like a popped soap bubble. I found myself on my hands and knees, retching and gasping. The shotgun was still in my hand, as if I'd never moved.

  Around me, the others were in similar straits. Knight was curled in a fetal ball, shaking like a junkie in detox. Hannah rocked back and forth, muttering a meaningless litany as blood ran from her cut arm. Danika appeared to be weeping, her head dipped to her chest. Even Delphy and Char seemed diminished, their monstrous forms hunched and quivering.

  "What...the fuck...was that?" I croaked, my voice a stranger's rasp.

  "A taste," Noct purred, his voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, "of the delights that await, should you persist in this foolishness."

  I staggered to my feet, Beretta trained on the shifting shadows. "You sadistic fuck!"

  Noct chuckled, his laughter a dry rasp of chitin on bone. "What you experienced was as real as this flesh you cling to so desperately. Your minds, your precious self-concept, are but playthings to me. I can unmake you with a thought, plunge you into hells beyond your feeble imagination.”

  He emerged from the darkness, not as the towering abomination of before, but in a simulacrum of human form. A gaunt figure in a robe of shimmering black, his face a pale mask of cruel amusement. His eyes though, his eyes were pits of swirling madness, windows into the howling abyss at the center of his being.

  "I've enjoyed watching you insects scurry and squirm," Noct purred, gliding toward us with a boneless grace that made my skin want to crawl off my fucking bones. "But playtime's over. Gather up your sniveling meat-sacks and crawl out of my domain. Snuffing you out now would spoil my fun. I want you out there, tainting the world with your delicious despair." He paused, inhaling deeply like a junkie savoring a fresh hit. "Mmm, the stink of corruption on you is just... chef's kiss."

  Danika, still shaky from the mindfuck horror-coaster Noct had dragged us through, clenched her fists. "I'm not going anywhere without my brother, you syphilitic shitstain. Where is he?"

  A sound like a backed-up septic tank bubbled out of Noct's nightmare maw. "Ugh, fine. Persistent little gnat. Feast your eyes."

  With a gesture of a hand that had more digits than a fucking calculator, Noct parted the thorny vines surrounding us like a pustulent Red Sea. The room beyond punched me right in the guts. It was a hellscape of wires and flickering screens, a deranged electrician's wet dream. And there, in the center of it all, was what was left of Artemis.

  Poor fucker was naked as the day he was born, with more cables and tubes violating his body than a weekend at the Marquis de Sade's sex dungeon. Wires burst out of his skull, arms, torso, pulsing with a sick, radioactive glow. His eyes were empty fucking parking lots, not a flicker of life to be seen.

  Artemis' hands tapped at a keyboard like a malfunctioning animatronic, jerky and unnatural. The screens around him vomited endless lines of code, the green text searing my retinas like a blowtorch.

  Jesus suffering fuck. When I'd decided to play hero, I hadn't signed up for this Cronenbergian shitshow.

  The stink of ozone and rotting meat clogged my nostrils, the buzz of eldritch electronics a sick counterpoint to Artemis' utter, corpse-like stillness. In that moment, staring at his violated, puppeted form, I tasted true despair, black and cold as the devil's asshole. We'd come to save him, but was there even anything left to rescue?

  Beside me, Danika made a noise like a dying animal, her hand clamping over her mouth. Seeing her brother reduced to this, a meat conduit for Noct's depravity, it was almost too much for her to process.

  "Artemis..." she choked out, his name a broken whisper.

  Noct hovered closer, his very presence an oppressive weight crushing down on our souls. "Gaze upon the sublime beauty of ultimate corruption," he—it—hissed, each word dripping with vicious glee. "Your brother has become an exquisite instrument of my will. Through his flesh and innate power with technology, I orchestrate the spread of my influence. He serves me in ways your pitiful minds cannot begin to comprehend."

  The sheer, sadistic pleasure in Noct's voice flayed us raw, leaving us exposed and bleeding in the face of Artemis' defilement. To see him so terribly diminished, hollowed out and puppeted, it was almost too much for our minds to bear.

  Danika lurched forward, white-knuckled fists shaking with impotent fury. "You malignant fuck! He's not your fucking Xbox!"

  "Oh, but he is, little primate," Noct crooned. "My very own next-gen flesh console, hardwired into the pulsing dark of the abyss itself. And now that I've indulged your mewling need to see him, you will all kindly leave now before I reconsider my leniency."

  I wanted nothing more than to empty my Sig into Noct's smug, nightmare face until my fingers bled. But as much as it chafed my ass to admit it, the abyssal asshole had our number. Another frontal assault would end with us smeared across the walls.

  Sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet and admit the other guy's holding all the fucking cards. Tactically speaking, it was time to haul ass and regroup before Noct decided to plunge us back into the hell he yanked us out of earlier.

  "Dani, we can't—" I started, but she was already moving, shoulders set with grim purpose.

  She marched right up to Noct, staring into the writhing chaos of his eyes without flinching. "You want corrupted humans to power your freakshow? Fine. Take me instead. Plug me into your fucked up ethernet and let my brother go."

  Knight went white as a sheet. "What? No! Dani, you can't⁠—"

  Danika cut her off with a sharp chop of her hand. "I'm packing the same tricks as Artemis, maybe even more. You want a human battery that'll make the fucking Energizer Bunny look like a dollar store knockoff, I'm your girl. Just cut Artemis loose and jack me in instead."

  Well, fuck me.

  Knight looked like she'd just watched her dog get run over, twice. "Danika, please..." she whispered, her voice cracking on the last word. But it was clear as a cock-punch that there'd be no talking Danika off this ledge.

  Hannah slipped a comforting arm around Knight's shoulders as we all waited to see how the Duke of Damnation would respond to Danika's crazy-brave offer.

  "Well, well..." Noct purred, his voice like grave dirt and broken glass. "What an unexpected delight. The sister, sacrificing herself for the brother. Such a delicious cliché."

  He paused, savoring our collective dread like fine fucking cognac. "You realize, of course, that once you're slotted into my divine array, there's no unplugging you. You will be mine, utterly, until I tire of you or your meat gives out. And I can assure you, your limited human imagination cannot even begin to conceive of the depths of degradation in store for you."

  Danika didn't flinch. Didn't even fucking blink. "I'm yours, you festering smegma-golem. Just cut Artemis loose. He's suffered enough."

  "Danika, Jesus, no," I tried again, desperate to stop this train to fuckedville before it left the station. "We'll find another way, we'll⁠—"

  But Noct was already moving, waving his gnarled freak-show hand in a gesture that had the vines and cables disconnecting from Artemis' abused flesh with a sickening series of squelches and meaty pops.

  Artemis slumped out of the throne of meat and circuitry that had held him, hitting the floor like a sack of rotten manure. He twitched and groaned, limbs moving in uncoordinated jerks as he tried to remember how to human again. It would've been funny if it hadn't been so fucking tragic.

  Danika rushed over, pulling his head into her lap as tears cut tracks through the grime on her face. "Arty? Can you hear me? It's Dani. I'm here."

  Artemis' eyes fluttered open, unfocused and glazed with confusion. It took a long, heartrending moment before a flicker of recognition sparked in their depths. "Dani...?" he croaked, his voice as thin and brittle as old parchment.

  She nodded, trying for a smile that came out as a trembling rictus. "Yeah, bro. It's me. You're safe now, okay? Drake and the others are gonna get you home, back to Pan. He’s waiting for you.”

  Behind her, the cables were already starting to slink toward her, pulsing with malevolent purpose. Knight choked on a sob, devastation writ large on her face as she watched Danika's awful bargain play out.

  I staggered over to Artemis, scooping the poor bastard up like he weighed less than a used condom. "I got you, pal. Let's blow this infernal pop stand before the walls start prolapsing or some shit."

  Artemis mumbled something unintelligible, but I was already moving, carrying him away from the nightmare machinery that had made a meat puppet out of him. Danika stayed put as the first cable slithered up her leg, the beginning of a very bad hentai flick.