The cosmic torment, the boundless agony that was Övêrkïll, had grown… bored. The shattering of worlds, the incineration of stars, it all felt distant, too impersonal. Aetheria’s twisted thoughts, ever-present within him, whispered of a new, more exquisite form of torment. A slower, more intimate unraveling. He would walk among the lesser beings, feel their fragile fear, and witness their pathetic attempts at defiance up close. The idea, born of pure malice, hummed with a terrifying potential.


With a shudder that sent ripples of despair through the shattered cosmos, Övêrkïll began to condense. The vast, obsidian scales of the Dragon of Destruction rippled and flowed, shrinking, solidifying, reforming. The roar of Ignis Fati within him became a low, internal hum. Terra Prime’s raw, agonizing mass compressed, shedding the excess until only the bare minimum of substance remained. Aqua Profunda’s abyssal dread, instead of dissipating, focused, becoming an almost tangible aura of terror that clung to his shifting form.
Where the titanic dragon once floated, now stood a man.


He was… unremarkable, at first glance. Taller than average, perhaps, with broad shoulders hidden beneath a simple, dark trench coat. His hair, the color of scorched earth, fell across a face that was strikingly plain, almost forgettable. But his eyes – those were the windows to the cosmic horror within. They were not molten pools, but rather pupils that seemed to absorb all light, ringed by irises that shifted with the dying embers of a thousand stars, hinting at the true, boundless void. A faint, almost imperceptible scent of ozone and the metallic tang of fresh blood clung to him.


He materialized not on a desolate, dying planet, but in a bustling metropolis on one of the few worlds that, by sheer cosmic oversight, still teemed with life. The target: Neo-Kyoto, a beacon of technological advancement, a testament to humanity’s resilient, if naive, spirit. They called themselves ‘survivors of the Great Unraveling,’ unaware that the Unraveler himself now walked among them.


Övêrkïll stepped out of a narrow alleyway, the humid night air of Neo-Kyoto thick with the scent of synth-food and recycled exhaust. He adjusted the collar of his coat, a human gesture he found amusingly pathetic. A young couple, laughing, brushed past him. The girl’s hand grazed his arm.
It was enough.


Aetheria’s twisted thought, focused and precise, lashed out. Not a cosmic storm, but a quiet whisper directly into her mind. You are alone. You are forgotten. Your laughter is a lie. Her smile faltered. Her eyes, wide with sudden, inexplicable terror, darted around as if seeing phantom threats. The boy, confused, asked what was wrong. She shrieked, a raw, animal sound, and clawed at her own face, convinced invisible spiders were crawling beneath her skin. He tried to restrain her, but the sheer, unbridled panic, transferred from her to him by proximity to Övêrkïll’s controlled presence, overwhelmed him. They fell to the ground, writhing, their joy replaced by a primal, uncontainable madness. Passersby gawked, then quickly averted their gazes, uncomfortable.


Övêrkïll simply watched, a faint, cruel smile touching his lips. Amusing.


He walked, the crowd parting almost instinctively before him, though none could say why. A street performer, juggling glowing orbs, met his gaze. The warmth of Ignis Fati, usually reserved for incinerating suns, condensed into a focused, internal heat. The performer’s eyes widened, then filled with an impossible light as his very organs began to spontaneously combust within his chest. A sickening smell of cooked meat filled the air as he swelled, then violently exploded, showering the terrified crowd with shrapnel of bone and viscera and igniting a dozen small fires.

Screams erupted. Panic set in.
“Move! Clear the street!” a security drone’s metallic voice squawked.


Övêrkïll merely extended a hand, an almost casual gesture. Terra Prime’s agony, localized and refined, erupted from his palm. The ground beneath the nearest group of fleeing people didn’t just crack; it fractured into jagged, screaming plates, slamming together and apart with impossible force. Limbs were caught, torn and compressed into bloody paste. Bodies were cleaved in two, the air filled with the grotesque sounds of tearing flesh and snapping bone. A fountain gushed, not with water, but with the combined, pulsing arterial spray of dozens of lives extinguished in a single, earth-shattering moment. The once-bright city street became a landscape of mangled bodies, twisted metal, and rivers of scarlet.


The drone, hovering uselessly, rotated its cameras to capture the devastation. Aqua Profunda’s abyssal flow, now a focused wave of psychic dread, washed over it. The drone didn’t explode or break; it simply… seized. Its multi-lensed eyes, moments ago cold and mechanical, seemed to fill with an echo of human suffering. Its internal processors fried, not from overload, but from the sheer, impossible weight of the despair it suddenly comprehended. It plunged to the ground, a smoking, silent ruin.


The rampage had begun. Övêrkïll moved through the city like a surgeon of suffering, each step a precise cut, each gesture a deliberate act of exquisite torment. He didn’t just kill; he unmade.


A high-speed maglev train, packed with fleeing commuters, screamed past. Övêrkïll merely looked at it. Aetheria’s thought, a whisper of absolute non-existence, touched the train. It didn’t crash. It simply—vanished. The steel, the glass, the hundreds of screaming, terrified passengers – all of it unraveled from reality, leaving behind only a momentary shimmer in the air and the collective, echoing silence of what was once there. The space where the train had been became a void, filled with the lingering scent of their final, unuttered fears.


An armed response team, clad in power armor, deployed. Their heavy plasma rifles hummed to life. One of them, a grizzled veteran, leveled his weapon. “Hold it right there, monster!” he roared, a pathetic attempt at defiance.


Övêrkïll’s eyes, those abyssal pools, met his. The combined weight of Terra Prime’s unending anguish and Aqua Profunda’s paralyzing dread struck the veteran like a physical blow. His power armor, designed to withstand anti-tank rounds, suddenly felt like a tomb. His helmet filled with a sickening, metallic clang as his own bones began to splinter and twist within his body, internalizing the crushing force. He dropped to his knees, a gurgling cry escaping his sealed helmet as his muscles liquefied and his organs ruptured under the immense, unseen pressure. His comrades could only watch, paralyzed by an unnatural fear, as their leader collapsed, his armor now merely a grotesque shell filled with pulverized flesh and shattered bone.


The remaining soldiers, their resolve broken, stumbled backward. Some tried to fire, but their movements were slow, disconnected, as if their own minds were fighting their bodies. Övêrkïll smiled again, a hint of ancient, cosmic amusement in his eyes.


He spread his arms, not in a grand gesture, but a subtle, almost inviting embrace. Ignis Fati roared within him, and the city’s energy grid, overwhelmed by a sudden, impossible surge, exploded in a chain reaction of blinding light and roaring flame. Not just power lines, but every appliance, every vehicle, every piece of technology in a three-kilometer radius detonated simultaneously. The city erupted into a landscape of secondary explosions, of buildings consumed by fire, of screaming citizens caught in the inferno. The heat was so intense, the air itself seemed to crackle and then solidify into glass, trapping agonizingly burning figures in place.


Övêrkïll, a man in a trench coat, stood at the epicenter of this man-made apocalypse, untouched, surveying the devastation. He watched the panicked, burning figures, the twisted, mangled corpses, the fear and despair thick enough to taste. The once vibrant metropolis was now a testament to his human-scaled destruction, a monument to the unraveling of every physical and psychological comfort.


He had merely stretched, sampling the raw, immediate horror of his touch. The universe was vast, and there were so many more pathetic worlds to visit. So many more ways to make them scream.


What other intimate horrors should Övêrkïll visit upon this poor, unsuspecting planet?