As the pain continued and he bore the heat of his body, Andreas became aware that something fundamental had changed in the relationship between himself and his body.
He opened his eyes.
The sky was darker than he remembered, and missing stars.
His fingers, still pressed against his bloated stomach, began to lose their edges. The boundary between his skin and the air became a suggestion.
Light threaded out from the spaces between, pale and sourceless, drifting upward in slow ribbons.
He watched his body melt into reality, and he felt extremely bored, as if his death was not something to worry about.
Andreas sighed as the pain became much more bearable and death drew closer.
Ahhh. After years of being a coward, this is how it ends. Naxys and… Kihoko would be very disappointed to find out I died a few hours after… wait, did they also die? How did I not register the destruction of a city and that Aldric movie thing… damn. Heh heh. I must be some kind of monster. And now I die in this isekai before learning magic or doing anything noteworthy. But I guess it is fine. I do not think I am the kind of person to play out any kind of story.
...
His blood, skin, and even his clothes caught the light and then became it, each piece unraveling into faint luminous strands that rose, thinned, and vanished into the air like breath on a cold morning. His coat followed. The dust still caught in the folds of his sleeves.
He lay there in the dissolving dark, watching himself become mist.
His hands.
His arms.
The pressure in his abdomen, which had been so enormous and insistent, lifted like fog burning off in a midnight sky, except there were no stars, only a deepening dark, the soft grey desert, and the goat standing near his feet watching him with its golden eyes.
He wanted to say something.
He could not find words that were adequate.
He smiled instead.
***
Two girls ran across the thick forest, with trees so tall that their canopies disappeared into the darkness above. The darkness above was complete. No stars, no moon, only a blackness so absolute it had no texture.
Tall creatures moved through it without sound, following the girls.
That was the first wrong thing about them. Things that large should have made sound.
Their limbs were too long for their bodies, jointed in too many places, bending in directions that suggested the skeleton inside had been assembled by something that understood the concept of bones but had never seen them used. Pale skin pulled tight over shifting geometries.
Their faces were old and deeply, unnaturally old.
Beneath the skin, or perhaps instead of it in places, were smooth curves of bone that were not human. Orbital ridges too wide. Jaw structures too long. Teeth that had never belonged to anything that walked upright, visible through gaps where mouths stretched further than they should.
They ran towards the girls.
The forest floor made no sound beneath them.
The two girls ran for their lives as the monsters closed in, only a few feet away.
The one with straight black hair ran with her arms close to her body, holding an old large book marked with decay. Her breathing was irregular.
The one with wavy brown hair followed slightly behind, one hand gripping a glass box filled with sticks and flowers. As she cleared a root, her hair streamed behind her as though the air itself was trying to hold onto it.
The trees blurred past as the girls slowed.
Then one of them, the black haired girl, stopped completely. She looked back over her shoulder. Her feet halted almost reluctantly, as if they disagreed with the decision her eyes had made.
The brown haired girl stopped beside her, one hand braced against a tree trunk, chest heaving.
The monsters rushed past them, brushing against their bodies and knocking them into trees as they continued forward.
The girls stood again, breathing heavily, scanning the darkness between the trees, watching for movement that did not come.
The black haired girl exhaled slowly through her nose.
The brown haired girl pressed a hand to her chest, as if checking that her heart was still there.
They laughed hoarsely. The brown haired girl squeezed her hands in excitement.
Then the black haired girl turned, and her eyes and mouth widened in shock as she met the yellow eyes of a goat.
The brown haired girl turned as well.
Near them, at arm's length, a small black goat stood in the dark. It was very still. It looked at them with the flat, unhurried patience and indifference.
Beside it lay a broken and mangled man whose body was slowly transforming into light particles and disappearing.
The black haired girl took a step back, her face on the verge of tears as she realized that their small adventure to find treasures to enhance their powers had led them to meet a demigod, one that belonged to a species called faunus goats.
The brown haired girl stood next to her friend, dropped to her knees, and bowed as she cried out, "Lord, please have mercy on us! We..." she stoop and search the goat and her friend to see if she should continue.
The goat opened its mouth, about to speak, but as Andreas moved, it stopped and turned to look at him, then disappeared in a burst of blue flames that flowed into Andreas.
As the flames vanished, he raised his hand toward his face. His bones shifted beneath what remained of his flesh, as if his tissue could no longer hold them together, rotting away into light. He clenched his fist, and the remaining skin, muscle, and veins crumbled, leaving only bone.
He laughed hoarsely, then began to choke on his own blood.
Right. A monster. I always knew that, somewhere. I just never had a world strange enough to prove it.