Chapter Sixty-Three: The Evil Sacrifice

Toby’s sobbing slowly died away. He could feel the people around him staring with nothing but malice, and his resolve finally began to break. He turned to his father and begged.

“Father, please, save me. I’ll work hard from now on, I will, sob sob sob.”

He had intended to pour out a long string of pleas, but his father’s cold gaze cut him off.

At last, Toby heard someone speak to him.

“You should feel honored. Honored that you will become one with us. Honored that you will become a great offering to our lord.”

Toby looked toward the voice. The speaker stepped out of the crowd as if parting the waves, and came to stand before him. The other cultists all took a step back, their faces showing faint admiration and reverence.

“Who are you? Are you the one behind this cult? Please, let me go. I can join you too.” Seeing the others’ reaction, Toby quickly guessed the man’s identity and immediately began begging.

“Oh, my dear child.” The cult leader in the octopus mask leaned close, his fingers sliding over Toby’s body. The icy touch made Toby deeply uncomfortable.

“No need to rush. You’ll be joining us very soon.”

The octopus-masked leader patted Toby’s body, seemingly quite satisfied. But just as Toby managed to force out a faint smile, the leader drew a strangely shaped dagger and, in one swift motion, split open his chest.

Toby’s frozen smile was still on his face. At the same time, his head had already been severed by his father. His corpse was then butchered by the cultists piece by piece, until it was reduced to chunks of meat, which the cult members, long since prepared, placed upon plates.

Then the cultists arranged Toby’s body and the cut flesh into a grotesque posture. Under the octopus-masked leader’s guidance, they began chanting an evil, twisted hymn.

“In the sea we have Cthulhu, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done in R’lyeh, as it is in Y’ha-nthlei...”

“Oh, Cthulhu, the sacrifice of the twins shall build the stairway by which your servants may step into eternity...”

As the incantation continued, crimson light slowly drifted up from the two corpses. Toby’s smiling head rose into the air as well, drawn by the red force to James’s chest.

Toby’s lips suddenly parted. He began to tear and swallow James’s body in frenzied bites, gnawing straight into his chest and chewing relentlessly at James’s heart.

And the flesh he swallowed turned into strands of red energy, which began to rebuild a body from his head downward.

The cultists were even more excited by this bizarre sight. Delight bloomed across their faces, while the remaining red energy was drawn toward the flesh Toby had cut apart earlier, continually merging into those pieces.

At last the ritual ended, though Toby was still gnawing at James’s corpse. But no one paid any attention to the scene there; they simply stepped forward to claim the plates that belonged to them.

As the blood-red energy was consumed, it slowly seeped into their bodies. Some of the older cultists felt an incomparably comfortable force washing through them. Once they came to their senses, they swallowed their own portions in just a few bites, then looked hungrily at the plates of others. The rest of the cultists also quickened their pace, until only Toby’s head remained chewing away.

Seeing that Toby’s body had already formed arms, the octopus-masked leader no longer watched him and instead turned to preach to the others.

“Do you see it, my brothers? This is the power of the great Cthulhu! Under this power, we shall live forever!”

He raised his arm and cried out, and the other cultists all shouted Cthulhu’s holy name in response.

By then Toby had already devoured James completely, and his body was fully formed. What stood before them was a tall, powerful adult man. His arms were made of countless tentacles, and several more tentacles curled from his jaw, strikingly similar to the mask worn by the octopus-faced leader. Toby himself was now kneeling to the ground, continuously chanting Cthulhu’s true name.

The octopus-masked leader was extremely pleased with Toby’s new form and once again proclaimed Cthulhu’s righteousness before the crowd. The already spirit-poisoned listeners saw their sense of beauty slide further and further into madness. They did not find Toby’s new appearance eerie in the least, but instead thought it beautiful and powerful.

And so this gathering ended in the crowd’s satisfaction. The octopus-masked leader took Toby and left the secret base. Toby was now his personal divine servant, and he intended to return to headquarters and show him off to the other preachers. As for the wealthy men who left, they departed in high spirits as well. Most of them felt that their bodies had returned to the condition of their youth.

As for the two poor little fellows, who would care?

For a rich man, if youth could last forever and life could go on without end, then heirs were no longer necessary. If that was the case, what did it matter if a few sons died?

Of course, their minds had already been corrupted by the cult, and their thoughts had been guided step by step to this point. If James and the others had broken in from the beginning, their fathers, before falling to corruption, would certainly have rescued them. But there are no ifs.

This sort of thing was playing out in many places across the United States. The police suddenly noticed that the privileged second-generation troublemakers who once caused so much chaos had stopped going out. But for the police, wasn’t that a good thing?

Soon, among America’s upper class, an organization called the Dark Church began to swell rapidly. After one particular tycoon of great wealth and high standing had his terminal illness cured, even more magnates joined. As for the organization itself, they absolutely would not let newcomers feel the power of the god at first. Instead, they would keep deepening the newcomers’ indoctrination, and only after confirming that the other party had completely converted would they allow the participant to enjoy a gluttonous feast.

Naturally, every member who had attended the feast without exception became a die-hard loyalist of the Dark Church. The counterpart to that was the steady disappearance of sons and nephews from their homes.

This situation had, of course, already aroused some suspicion from Shield. But with the help of members hidden within its ranks, Nick Fury never managed to uncover the true scale of the incident. Since his main concern was still in Antarctica, he did not pay this sort of matter much attention.

As for Kamar-Taj, they were currently doing their best to resist the invasion from the Dark Dimension. Dormammu, ignoring his own safety, forcibly held off the Ancient One and even sent his minions into Midgard. Athanis and the others had also failed to notice the abnormalities within the United States. The Protoss Empire had not yet approved a full-scale surveillance of everyone on Midgard by Athanis’s group, and the Dark Church’s little tricks were far too crude, nowhere near the threshold for an alarm.