"Even falling from the fourth floor, you shouldn't end up this... pulverized, should you?"
Standing before the bizarre manor on the black hill, Jenkins grumbled as sothing foul splattered onto his shoes. He waved a hand, conjuring a sheet of fla to incinerate the disgusting ss. Instantly, a choking stench assaulted him and the unicorn, forcing them to recoil. He quickly extinguished the fire.
"What in the world is this stuff?"
He couldn't help but look up again, only to see another indistinct figure standing in the exact sa spot on the roof.
Seeing Jenkins look its way, the figure leaped from the rooftop once more. But this ti, it didn't land in the previous spot. Instead, it struck the ground closer to the edge of the manor's grounds, right where Jenkins and the unicorn stood.
Over the next few minutes, even when Jenkins didn't look up, bodies continued to plumt from the roof, splattering before the manor's entrance.
Jenkins and the unicorn were forced to retreat again and again as a carpet of gore, a slurry of flesh and bone, spread out from the manor's door, knitting itself into a seamless, bloody tapestry.
At first, Jenkins couldn't comprehend the purpose of this macabre display. But as the flesh carpet beca more complete, the mingled remains of the different jumpers began to stir with a horrifying, biological vitality.
Skin-crawling buds of flesh sprouted from the surface of the bloody carpet, but they didn't morph into tentacles. Instead, they differentiated into a series of reddish-black, fleshy nodules.
At the sa ti, a murky, milky-white fluid began to seep from the crack beneath the manor's front door, staining the flesh carpet a pasty white.
The fluid dried quickly, leaving behind a thin, whitish-blue film that coated the gory tapestry and its grotesque nodules.
Jenkins was too disgusted to act. The unicorn, with the cat on its back, hid behind him, already regretting its decision to stay.
"This is..."
As the flesh carpet extending from the doorway finally beca whole, it began to writhe and ripple in the air. An absurd thought blood in Jenkins's mind:
"Is that a tongue?"
Whoosh!
The enormous, slowly swaying tongue suddenly shot toward Jenkins. He instinctively raised an arm to block it and was sent flying like a cannonball.
The force was so imnse that he soared clear to the bottom of the hill. When he tried to stand, his head swam. The impact had been severe, but there was another reason for his dizziness—once he left the hill, the dry, cracked plain below began to tug insistently at his very soul.
"What is this place?"
He staggered forward a couple of steps, then reached out and grabbed the left foreleg of the unicorn as it flew down to him. He was lifted into the air, carried back toward the front of the manor.
From this vantage point, he could see pale-faced figures standing in every window of the four-story building. So were dead, but a few were still alive. Among them were several acquaintances Jenkins recognized by the faint glow of their spirits. But alive or dead, they all stood motionless, their faces blank as they stared straight at him.
Their faces seed to have been painted with the sa ghoulish makeup, as if they had plunged their heads into a barrel of flour before soone drew exaggerated, curving lines around their eyelids with a black oil stick. Their cheeks were sared with an unnaturally bright rouge. The sight made not only Jenkins's skin crawl, but Chocolate's fur stand on end.
"Huh? That's really Captain Bincy in the second-floor window on the left," Jenkins thought with a grim sense of irony. "First ti I've ever seen him in such a hideous getup. I wonder what he'll think of this look when he finally wakes up."
He tightened his grip on the unicorn's neck as it banked sharply, dodging the lashing tongue.
The wind roared in his ears, and the foul stench of the flesh-tongue seed to perate the entire space.
Squinting, he focused on the base of the tongue—the manor's main entrance—and whispered a na in his mind: "Twin Demons." Instantly, a black figure wreathed in thick smoke materialized in mid-air.
It let out a maniacal laugh and shot downward, leaving a black afterimage as it swerved around the intercepting tongue. With a strange, rapid beeping, it triggered a massive explosion right at the manor's doorway.
This version of the Twin Demons was slightly different, and its effect was unique. The root of the tongue was severed. It fell to the black earth like a great dead serpent and was rapidly dissolved and absorbed by the soil.
At the sa mont, the hill began to tremble violently. Vines sloughed off the building's surface and plaster peeled away like flakes of dandruff. The entire house lurched upward by a foot.
"Hmm?"
Jenkins stared, stunned for a second before his expression shifted to one of horror. He urged the unicorn to fly higher, faster.
The unicorn spread its wings and climbed swiftly. From that altitude, they could clearly see the house tear itself from its foundations, revealing two thin, withered black legs beneath it.
Massive, pustule-covered arms burst through the walls on either side of the manor. The two windows on the second floor flickered, transforming into a pair of enormous eyes.
"ROAR!"
The main door, now a gaping mouth, let out a deafening bellow. A new, pasty tongue shot out from within, coiling toward the unicorn in the sky like that of a frog snatching a fly.
"Neeigh!"
A clear cry rang out from the small, pure-white creature. It pawed at the air and beat its wings, a shell of brilliant gold and immaculate white energy forming a protective sphere around it.
The tongue slamd head-on into the platinum-gold sphere. The unicorn was driven back several feet, but half of the grotesque appendage was burned to a blackened crisp.
"ROAR!"
An apocalyptic scene unfolded on the small hill. The manor completely uprooted itself, transforming into a monstrous, living head. From the windows containing the dead, tentacles tipped with writhing feelers shot toward the sky. From the windows holding the living, each person stared at Jenkins and let out a bloodcurdling wail.
The manor-head shrieked madly as its tentacles closed in on the unicorn from all sides.
Jenkins gently stroked the unicorn's mane, calming the anxious beast. Then, with a flick of his right wrist, a longsword with a skull-shaped crossguard appeared in his hand.
"Let's see what you really are!"
He roared and raised the sword, pouring his Spirit into it with frantic abandon. The blade blazed with light, sending a pillar of brilliance shooting into the heavens, a beam that seed to pierce through space itself.
The fleeting radiance vanished in an instant, and Jenkins brought the White Bone Holy Sword down. A colossal, curved blade of energy cleaved the howling wind and scythed through the roiling clouds. The sheer pressure of the attack forced the living manor on the hill to shrink back.
Finally, the blade of light, carrying with it an imnse and terrible power, struck the manor and carved a massive gash into its structure. Green blood gushed from the wound. The maniacally laughing black figure followed the blade's path, diving into the fresh injury and exploding once more in its deepest recess. Shards of architecture and pieces of the living walls were blasted in every direction as the conjoined powers of life, death, and machinery from the Twin Demons radiated outward with the explosion.
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