Waves battered the pitch-black shore, like a stranded whale telling its final story.
He had never spoken of these things to anyone. Or rather, there was no longer a single creature around capable of communicating with him. He had lain here for an eternity, perhaps ten thousand years, perhaps a hundred thousand. But who could say?
Yet none of it could change the fact that he was a coward.
The waves rose and fell.
Like an elegy for a life drawing to its end.
Lynn and the Flesh Dominator listened numbly to his whispered account of that unknown past.
"You never escaped Hell, did you?"
The Flesh Dominator murmured to himself. His entire form had begun to waver from the moment Cthulhu started speaking.
"You were only exiled... you never found a way out at all. You never broke through that border..."
Cthulhu's enormous eyes watched him and Lynn.
A black, putrid breath poured from his massive body, and his blood, polluted by those chaotic colors, seemed to have begun its final disintegration.
Yes.
He had never told anyone.
Compared with the Old Gods who had fallen beneath the border, he was a coward through and through.
Because he had begged for mercy.
The comrades beside him had died, one after another, or been obliterated.
He had watched them charge toward Hell Borderland like moths to a flame, then watched them fall from the sky one by one. Those deities who had existed in Hell for countless epochs, those supreme Origins who commanded vast domains-some had been so powerful that even he knew nothing of their beginnings.
But without exception.
They had all died.
And what about you...?
*When the torch passed into your hands as one comrade after another perished, could you fight fearlessly to the death as they