Candlelight flickered. The suit jacket slipped to the floor with a soft rustle.
“…” Cavendish’s face turned ever so slightly, and he took a step toward the outside of the bathroom, holding the candlestick. “I appreciate the sentiment, but I have no interest in that sort of th—mmph.”
Ode stepped forward and pinned him against the doorframe. Ode’s right hand plunged into the silver strands of Cavendish’s hair, then pressed the back of his head, forcing his face to tilt sideways. Their lips crashed together abruptly.
“…” Cavendish froze for a full two seconds before his right hand, gripping Ode’s arm, finally twitched.
At first, he tried to pull Ode away, but the effort was so feeble it was negligible. After clutching for a few more seconds, his hand slowly released its hold. It trailed down Ode’s lean back, sliding toward the taut, elegantly arched curve that was always held so straight.
This was no tender kiss—not by a long shot.
They were more like two beasts poised to strike, low growls rumbling in their chests, their bared white fangs concealed behind soft lips that feigned harmlessness.
“I thought… you’d give this more careful thought,” Cavendish said, his voice losing its usual crisp clarity and turning a bit muffled. Yet he wasn’t panting; his breathing remained steady—unnaturally so for a human. “What are you testing? Whether I’m a monster like the Deep Ones?”
Of course you are, Ode thought, though he kept it to himself. What if Cavendish was two-faced like the Undercover Agent and flipped on him the moment he called it out? Ode was quite satisfied with Cavendish’s current demeanor. “Can’t it be love at first sight? Or maybe I just got in the mood today and wanted to chat with you about The Little Prince?”
He was talking nonsense. Ode had zero interest in discussing The Little Prince—that peony of a book—with this bovine brute. The man’s reading habits were practically an insult to it.
But Cavendish clearly wanted to. One hand gripped Ode’s waist, pulling him closer with half-coercive force. ” ‘I felt something extraordinary had happened. I hugged him close like a child, but I felt him slipping straight into a bottomless abyss. I tried to hold him back, but it was no use…’ “
The candle in Cavendish’s other hand was callously discarded, rolling across the floor. It ignited the glossy fur rug and devoured the elaborate, expensive gold jewelry and gems in tongues of flame.
Cavendish’s arm tightened around him. His nose, colder than a human’s, brushed against Ode’s forehead and lips. His breath washed over Ode’s rapidly rising and falling chest, where beneath that thin layer of flesh beat Ode’s heart:
“Are you sad for the pilot?” Cavendish’s voice was low and hoarse. “Sad that he had to watch the Little Prince die from the snakebite—bit by bit, all to return to his rose?”
“It’s a terrible story,” Cavendish concluded with finality. “The Little Prince’s impractical romanticism, the pilot’s impotent helplessness—if I were in that story, it wouldn’t end like that.”
Ode wanted to roll his eyes, but Cavendish leaned in again and captured his lips.
This time, he used his teeth, nipping Ode’s lower lip and drawing a small bead of blood. As it welled up, Cavendish kissed it meticulously, as if that spot were the source and end of all desire.
The firelight danced erratically as scorching heat gradually filled the frigid stone chamber. Ode’s breathing quickened. When their lips parted, he heard Cavendish’s breath finally grow unsteady as well.
They stumbled into the bathroom, entangled. Water droplets splashed onto their still-clothed bodies, and Cavendish lifted Ode by the waist, seating him on the windowsill. Ode’s back slammed against the stained-glass window with a crash.
“There’s noise outside,” Ode said, his eyes half-opening. A seductive shimmer flickered in their depths like darting fish. “The Deep Ones are fighting among themselves.”
“Wasn’t that part of your plan?” Cavendish braced his hands on either side of Ode’s shoulders. “Didn’t you deliberately flirt around after entering the outpost?”
—He had.
So Ode closed his eyes without a care, threading his fingers through Cavendish’s cool locks and tugging lightly in encouragement. He ignored the chaos erupting beyond the thin pane of glass as the Deep One outpost descended into turmoil.
“You’re all insane!! That filthy spawn—he killed our kin! He’s our enemy!! And yet you want to offer him as a bridegroom to Princess Khirra?!”
“He’s the most perfect one! The most perfect must be offered to Khirra! They will unite… Khirra will bear children… And the great Cthulhu will fully awaken from His daughter’s womb!”
“No… no… beauty… you won’t belong to Cthulhu, or to Khirra… You’re mine, mine!!”
Mad laughter, hateful curses, endless chants to the great Cthulhu, the rending of flesh by claws, the snapping of spines—all blended into a symphony of bloody revelry. It surged toward the room at the outpost’s deepest point, where the dispute raged. No one spared a thought for the hostage still unconscious in the Third-Layer Prison.
Inside, Ode arched his back against the windowsill, his gaze tilted upward. His long, pale neck tensed, the fading firelight accentuating its fragile line.
The room held no calm breaths anymore—only gasps shallow and deep, echoing off the walls.
At one point, Ode’s eyes cracked open slightly. A dense, eerie green leaked from beneath his lashes. “The woods… where did you go?”
Cavendish’s voice carried a sigh. “To handle some minor trouble… or maybe not so minor. I’ve wanted to leave for a while, but I figured you’d suspect I’d broken our deal and get angry, so I rushed back before finishing. But I couldn’t find you.”
Cavendish buried his face in the hollow of Ode’s shoulder and inhaled deeply, as if committing to memory the scent of Ode’s skin and the blood beneath it. It was probably futile, so he did it again. “I couldn’t find you. So I waited outside the outpost for the interview. I knew you’d come—you could find this place…”
And you did.
Cavendish left the rest unsaid, his lips curving in evident delight.
Ode’s eyes shifted subtly beneath his lashes. “Is that so? Sounds like our deal from the woods still holds.”
“Of course. I won’t leave you—at least not this time.” Cavendish smiled, taking Ode’s right hand and interlacing their fingers slowly. “Just like I said: ‘If I strike you down, I’ll stay by your side until the last breath leaves your body.'”
“…” Ode’s lashes lifted sharply.
Lust was truly the world’s best crowbar. Before this, Cavendish would never have uttered words so bluntly face-tearing.
“Did you pull some trick? When? What trick?” Ode shoved Cavendish away and leaped from the windowsill, his legs wobbling slightly but holding. “I knew you always wanted me by the sea, but the interviewer said the Children of the Dust in the prison cage were withered but untwisted because Quachil Uttaus had possessed them—”
That detail seemed useless, but it answered a crucial question for Ode.
Why, with a motionless photographer right there, had the man-eating monster in the woods chased only the elusive prey and ignored the easy target?
“That monster only hunts sufficiently powerful quarry. The first Child of the Dust it caught was already withered in the photo—he’d been possessed by Quachil Uttaus. The monster was after the mighty Quachil Uttaus.”
“The second victim was the Lady in Black Fur Coat’s husband—that guy was assigned alone to deal with the Colour Out of Space in the woods, so he was plenty strong among the Deep Ones.”
By that logic, why didn’t the monster come to the Deep One outpost for an easy meal but lurked in the woods instead?
—It was waiting for the Colour Out of Space to fully hatch! In other words, the monster’s choice revealed which was stronger: the outpost or the Colour Out of Space.
But if the Colour Out of Space outmatched the outpost, why did Cavendish still think coming to the sea was fatal for him after he’d wiped it out?
Just then, a fragmented voice pierced Ode’s ears: “Beware… this human is not…”
The voice was strangely ethereal, genderless yet carrying a faint, sacred resonance: “…someone is blocking… our conversation. Get out of here! The Deep Ones are summoning Dagon! They meant to sacrifice humans, but with so many Deep Ones dead now, their blood flows into the altar. Dagon will descend even sooner than—”
The voice cut off, as if violently severed mid-call.
“?!” Ode’s pupils contracted. No time for second-guessing the mysterious voice or what new horror Dagon was. He snatched up the suit jacket from the floor and strode toward the door while shrugging it on.
The fire in the stone chamber had long died out for lack of fuel. Ode tested the door but couldn’t force it with his current strength. He paused only a moment before pivoting back to the bathroom.
He shoved aside Cavendish, whose expression was less than pleased, and readied his elbow to smash the apparently glass window—
“…”
All the clamor outside fell silent in that instant.
“…” Ode’s motion slowed.
Through the stained glass, he saw a hazy sea mist rising. Within it, something phosphorescent ascended slowly—from level with his view until he could no longer make out its full shape from inside. It blotted out all moonlight, looming like an upright blue whale planted before him.
Ode: “…”
Ode’s mouth opened slowly: “Fuck.”
How the hell do you fight that?? Unable to hold back, Ode—who’d sworn only once before in his twenty-one years—nearly had his hair stand on end. He couldn’t fathom that such a monstrosity existed in the world he’d lived in, and that people—like his former self—had been utterly oblivious!
A string of F-bombs nearly escaped, but he clenched his teeth and swallowed them. He watched the surviving Deep Ones gather reverently around the colossal thing, murmuring prayers to the Father God. One squad broke off, scrambling toward the cage in the third layer.
“No,” Ode muttered instinctively. “Like hell you will.”
He barely gave it a thought before raising the arm he had let drop in shock and smashing it toward the window with all his might—
“Don’t you want to reconsider?”
Cavendish’s arm blocked the window, stopping him. Now the man was putting on airs, whispering earnest advice in his ear. “You can’t possibly stand against Dagon. The Deep Ones and Dagon are like humans compared to gods. You came out covered in wounds just from fighting the Deep Ones and the Colour Out of Space—how do you expect to take on Dagon?”
Cavendish enunciated each word carefully. “You will die.”
Ode’s breath caught for a moment. He hesitated. But in the next instant, he shoved Cavendish’s arm away with force.
He kicked up the vest from the floor, wrapped it around his elbow, and smashed it against the glass without a second thought. Without turning his head, he sneered, “Then what would you have me do? Pick up right where we left off?”
Crash…
The window shattered.
This was far from normal. The interviewer had deliberately confined them to this room, which meant it should have been impervious—at least to anything a human could throw at it.
For the glass to break so easily proved that the very person who had just earnestly tried to dissuade him from rushing into danger had secretly altered the window’s material, clearing a path straight to his death.
Ode wasn’t entirely surprised. Even he had kept one hand near the shotgun at the height of his emotions. They were wild beasts circling each other in standoff; intimacy was merely one weapon in their arsenal.
“Ode.” Cavendish’s voice came from behind him, but Ode didn’t look back as he vaulted over the windowsill.
He tilted his head upward, peering through the thick sea mist, and spotted the isolated squad. They had already climbed from the base to the seventh level.
“…”
Ode let out a breath into the night air.
A plume of white mist formed before him.
His hands felt like ice, and his feet were nearly numb from the cold. Cold sweat seeped from his limbs in instinctive terror; the feverish heat from moments ago had long since fled.
—Maybe I should just run while I can.
This is way beyond me.
Charging in blindly would only get me killed. It’s reckless.
I should escape… while none of the monsters have noticed me… I can get out, alert the local police—
The squad had reached the third level.
The human sacrifices, who had passed out from hunger and thirst, now stirred amid the dragging. Under the threat of death and fear, they summoned their last burst of strength—but it was all futile struggling and cries.
Lola, the only woman among them, was carried separately in the arms of a Deep One at the front. It appeared to be the leader of the guard unit. With a bend of its knee, it leaped from the third level straight to the one level with Dagon’s gaze. “Great Father God, for You—”
“The best sacrifices?”
Suddenly, Ode heard his own voice echo calmly through the pit.
Just like that, the shaking stopped. His limbs gradually warmed as a rush of heat surged from his chest—mingled with rage, defiance, and the madness of staring death in the face. In the blink of an eye, it spread from his chest to his fingertips, turning his body scorching hot.
He couldn’t run.
—No. He wouldn’t.
His mind had never felt so clear and calm. Escaping from here and then tangling with the police—what chance did Lola or the others have? Even if the police arrived in time, could they truly stand against these Deep Ones? He’d already heard those two Dagon Cult followers back in the rice paddy: human “firesticks” couldn’t kill them.
He had to save Lola. He had to save them all.
They might be the only ones left he could fight to rescue in the face of death… Death had already stolen everyone he loved, everyone who loved him. Now, by some stroke of luck, he had the chance—the gun in his hands—to face death head-on. Was he going to set it aside?
No.
Why would he?
He no longer had any reason to fear death. To him, it was merely a long-awaited reunion. What was there to fear? What did he have left to lose?
Ode’s heart pounded with unprecedented force, like war drums, but his expression remained utterly calm.
He took a step forward. The outpost’s circular hollow design amplified sound perfectly. His earlier words had not only interrupted the Deep One captain but had also caused the colossal figure in the sea mist to shift slightly.
Amid the thunderous rhythm of his heartbeat, Ode felt a few seconds of dizziness that threatened to make him faint. But he didn’t falter, and even his voice held steady without a tremor.
“Come on… I thought I was the prime human sacrifice in this batch?”
Rumble…
The massive form turned ponderously in the mist, barnacles and tube worms on its body glowing with the eerie light unique to deep-sea creatures. “Ahf’ ah fahf…”
