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  Zayn’s throat made a sound no living thing was meant to produce.

  Ghhkk—khrrr—GRRRHHHKKK—

  His crushed larynx sprayed blood in violent, rhythmic jets with every desperate cough.

  Underneath his skin, something was swelling, pushing against the tattered boundaries of his human frame.

  His nails did not simply grow. The skin split around them as they hardened into something closer to obsidian than bone.

  With frantic, feral desperation, he dragged those lengthening talons across his chest.

  His fingers disappeared into the self-inflicted rent, and he pulled sideways, mimicking the ancient icon of Hanuman, but without the grace of devotion.

  It was a manual soul extraction.

  "WHAT THE FUCK!" an Asura screamed, stumbling backward.

  "He is peeling himself! He is harvesting his own meat!"

  "Back away!" another hissed, its crimson eyes wide with primal dread.

  "Observe! No creature chooses this level of agony...He is unraveling.”

  “Charge only if there’s an opening.”

  Flesh gave way with a wet, heavy peel. Meat met the biting air as Zayn tore through himself layer by layer.

  The human survivors watched the "Strongest Man" disintegrate into a nightmare.

  A soldier gagged from the sound of peeling flesh reaching their ears even over the roar of the tide.

  "JESUS! Don't look! Don't Watch!”

  Stolen story; please report.

  Zayn kept clawing, continuing his horrific work, raking through his own flesh, tearing out the guts and skin.

  He was no longer fighting demons.

  He was fighting the cage of his own biology.

  He tore at his skull, his arms, his face, trying to rip away the last tattered veil of the man he used to be.

  Veins bulged across his temples like thick ropes seeking an escape the world refused to grant.

  His eyes rolled back into his head, whites bulging as if they too were trying to flee his skull. Blood seeped from the corners of the sockets.

  He dug at his skull, his face , as if trying to shed the very concept of a man.

  “Gods save my child..." his mother wailed, her voice a thin reed in the storm.

  "Zayn, please...Come back to me!”

  Bhumi scurried back on her knees, her pride finally shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. "Stop, Zayn!"

  "Please...I understand you’re angry! I know what I did wrong! Just stop!”

  The irony was suffocating.

  She begged him to stop being the monster her betrayal had helped create, while simultaneously needing that monster to keep the tide at bay.

  A soldier tightened his grip on his blade, blood slick across his hands.

  “He’s not dying…Something is trying to claw its way out of him.”

  Then, Skin half-peeled and standing, Zayn raised one hand toward the sky.

  A sound tore from him like stones grinding between anvils.

  The roar became a bloody geyser, crimson rain blown forward by the sheer force of pain and rage forcing dominion over his body and making space for something to come out of him.

  The ground groaned as if the Earth itself recognized something ancient surfacing.

  The Asuras fell silent. Even the trillions beyond froze, war cries strangled in their throats by the gurgling thunder shaking the sky.

  Aditi stood hollow, shaking.

  “That isn’t him,” she whispered.

  “And he’s leaving us… with every second.”

  “He’s moving somewhere we can't follow."

  "BABE?" she screamed, a frantic, useless plea.

  "ARE YOU REALLY LEAVING US?”

  “Don’t look at him!” Bhumi screamed, still crawling backward.

  “He’s not human! You’ll die from this rage, you psycho!”

  The clawed finger remained pointed skyward, trembling, daring the heavens to answer.

  Then his knees hit the ground.

  His head lowered, it looked like the final exhaustion of a dying man.

  Seeing the opening, the demons surged.

  This was their moment. The time to collect the debt of nearly a million dead brothers butchered in a single afternoon.

  They surged, circling him like vultures closing on a carcass pushing each other.

  They roared and circled him, blades raised howling with eagerness to kill this man.

  Steel plunged. Tusks drove down.

  Only choking sounds escaped him as his body vanished beneath the mass.

  Bhumi screamed, hysterical:

  “Stop! Stop! Leave him!”

  “Zayn, come back! Who will save us if you leave?”

  Aditi’s hands shook uncontrollably.

  “He’s gone… they crushed him inside the tide.”

  “He fought like we never could,” a soldier whispered as the enemies engulfed him.

  He offered a shaking, final salute.

  "I believe you were the strongest.”

  "Sir!" another shouted to the General.

  "Do we shoot? Help him! We might still save him!”

  “He fought so hard for us all, we must help him.”

  The General stood frozen, the response was a hollow whisper:

  "If we shoot, we die.

  If we don't, we still die.”

  But far above the atmosphere, within a kingdom of blackened void, the Devourer leaned forward on his throne.

  His grin, which had lasted an eternity, finally faltered, the swirling galaxy in his chest stalling for a fraction of a second.

  "He is not dead," the Devourer hissed to his generals in the hall.

  On the battlefield, a new shape erupted from the center of the demon horde where Zayn had been buried.

  A massive, blood-slicked limb with a finger shaped like a blade longer than any spear, it was a talon.

  Long and thick like the bark of a dead tree rose through the mass of enemies.

  It towered over the tallest Asura, a monument of red rising from the black tide.

  The hand didn't strike. It simply pointed at the sky.

  The Devourer whispered to himself, his voice vibrating the stars:

  "He is pointing at me.”