Still, it was a futile attempt. The instant his void-filled eyes angled toward the direction of the Sand Globe, his mind began to churn violently, as if so unseen hand had reached into his skull and stirred his thoughts into sludge.
The pressure ca without warning, and it was unlike anything he had ever felt. An indescribable, suffocating sense of danger pressed in from all directions, heavy and alive, as though the very concept of "threat" had materialized and wrapped itself around his being.
His consciousness teetered on the edge of collapse, fragnts of thought threatening to shatter completely.
It felt as if his very existence would unravel.
Bound to be destroyed—not by the storm of sand itself, but by whatever hid inside it.
Yes.
Now he was sure.
It wasn’t the Sand Globe that devoured his mind and gnawed at his sanity. That storm, massive and incomprehensible as it was, was only the curtain. Sothing else waited behind it. Sothing that preceded even the horror of the storm, sothing older, deeper, and infinitely worse.
Sothing truly incomprehensible.
Sothing truly indescribable.
He didn’t hesitate. He yanked himself out of the Astral Plane, severing his connection with a sharp snap of will before he could fall any further into the abyss.
His body lurched, his breath caught in his throat, and then he was back—back in his own flesh, back in the sky above the desert, clutching at the pounding in his chest as though trying to force his heart to rember its rhythm.
He drew in a ragged breath. Then another.
Only when the air finally burned in his lungs did he dare look back toward the churning wall of sand.
And his eyes were filled with terror.
"Just... what the hell is inside that?" His voice was little more than a whisper, a mutter pressed out between clenched teeth.
His thoughts swirled like a maelstrom, questions forming only to be devoured by others, none of them complete. Nothing fit. Nothing made sense. The feeling that slithered across his skin was alien, unnatural, like his body already knew truths his mind could never survive.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t just dangerous.
It was threatening on a level beyond instinct.
Really, truly threatening.
"Is Leon even alive in there? Can anyone... can anyone survive against sothing like that? Against whatever is inside that Sand Glo—"
His voice broke, and so did his thoughts.
Because he saw it.
Not clearly. Not fully. Only a fleeting glimpse, a crack in the veil. But even that was too much.
Sothing writhed within the storm, half-hidden by swirling grains of sand. Not a creature, not even a shape. A squirming, spasming, pulsing mass, crawling and shifting in ways that mocked the idea of form.
Flesh lded with nerves. Nerves twisted into organs. Organs fused with tissues that folded in on themselves endlessly, like a body built without rules, without sense, without rcy.
It was no thing. It was nothing.
At least nothing the mind could na.
He tried to fit it into words, into the narrow prison of imagination, but even his puny attempts collapsed under their own absurdity. His reason faltered. His grasp on what was real wavered.
The more he tried to give it a shape, the more it pressed against him, reminding him with sick amusent that it had none.
That realization crawled into his chest like a parasite, gnawing and chewing and spreading cold dread through his veins.
"What... what... w-why... h-how?" His words tumbled out, broken and stuttering. His voice cracked, his tongue refused to form coherence, his very mind refusing to define the thing he had glimpsed.
He didn’t even try to understand it anymore. So primal, buried instinct scread at him not to. Because what if understanding it was the sa as calling it closer? What if acknowledging its shape was what gave it power over him?
On a deeper, subconscious level, he knew. To cross that boundary would be suicide. Or... Worse than suicide.
Art was confident, yes. Arrogant, even. But he was not a fool. Confidence and stubbornness had their limits, and he was rational enough to recognize them.
And whoever claid they would stand and defy the monstrosity hiding inside that storm? Whoever claid they could fight it?
That person was the biggest liar in the world.
"I need to run." His lips trembled as he whispered it. Then he repeated, louder, more frantic. "I need to run. I need to run."
Saving Leon?
Yeah. That had been the plan. That had been the thought. But now, staring into the storm, feeling the echo of that glimpse still gnawing at his brain, Art wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
He wasn’t even sure if he could truly save himself.
As such, he ran.
He ran as far as his legs could carry him, as fast as his lungs could burn, as wildly as his instincts demanded. Yet... he went nowhere.
No matter how hard he pushed forward, no matter how recklessly he hurled himself into the swirling sands, it was as though the space itself had shackled him.
The world folded around him like a cage, hemming him in. An invisible do pressed down on him, illusionary yet unbreakable, and every frantic step led only deeper into the sa suffocating place. His muscles scread. His veins pulsed fire. But nothing changed.
It was futile.
Yet still—he did not surrender.
Because Art was many things: a fool, a scher, a lunatic at tis... but above all, he was a creature rabidly unwilling to die.
His survival instinct burned hotter than any prison of space, his will to live snapping and snarling at the walls of that phantom cage.
If this had been another monster—if this had been a Rank ★★★★★★★★★★, no matter how absurd, no matter how grotesque—he would have found so way.
He would have wrenched apart the chains, shattered the bars, clawed his way free with nothing but sheer insanity and a grin.
But this?
This was different.
The monster before him was not sothing he could surpass. Not with wit. Not with strength. Not with madness. It wasn’t even a matter of fight or flight. It was sothing beyond both—sothing that devoured the very concept of choice.
And the more he ran, the deeper he sank.
The sands did not yield. They swallowed. They dragged. They pulled him further and further into their storming maw, until the air itself seed to peel his skin away. His flesh ca apart in thin, curling strips that fluttered off his fra.
But no blood spilled.
What seeped from the wounds instead was far worse. Crawling things. Pale and writhing. Maggots—or sothing his mind, in desperation, called maggots. They had no true shape.
They had no true form. They were not things of flesh, nor things of nightmare, but his thoughts clutched at them anyway, shaping the unshapable into horrors his instincts could understand.
Because the mind fears the unknown more than the grotesque. And what writhed from his body was the deepest unknown.
Art, however powerful he thought himself to be... was still human at the end of the day.
"Aaaaaaahhhhh!"
His scream ripped out, raw, unfiltered, torn from the gut. Yet even that was stolen from him. No sound ca. No vibrations tore the air.
Instead, what burst from his throat were not words, not cries, not the voice of a desperate man... they were fleshy tendrils unfurled, coiling wetly from his mouth.
Their texture was slick and veined, soaked in the darkness of blood that had no business existing. They writhed with a will of their own, choking him as they spilled past his lips.
He gagged. He sputtered. His eyes bulged, watering, vision collapsing into a blur. His throat convulsed against the invasion, but nothing stopped them. His own scream strangled him, becoming the instrunt of his suffocation.
Still... still, he clung.
Even as his vision dimd. Even as his skin sloughed. Even as maggots replaced blood and tendrils replaced voice. He bit down on the terror clawing at his sanity and forced himself to stay awake, to stay conscious, to stay alive.
Because beneath the terror, beneath the madness, beneath the pain that threatened to consu him whole—one thing remained.
The drive to survive.
And even here, in the maw of sothing no man should ever glimpse, he refused to let go.
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