Chapter Thirteen: The Clone and the Cosmos, A God's Trial
With the agonizing hour complete, Jasper's soul fragment was violently yanked from the Prison Realm and snapped back into his physical body. He gasped, his sweat-drenched frame slumped over the stone table. He was exhausted, but the fear was gone, replaced by a cold, hardened resolve. He was no longer just Jasper; he was the Tyrant.
Urca observed from the Throne. The boy had paid the price in full—no lingering weakness. A necessary expense for a high-quality asset.
"The trial is complete, Jasper," Urca said, his voice flat with satisfaction. "You have proven that your will for dominance is stronger than the totality of despair. Now, you return to your insignificant life with significant power."
Urca rose, extending his hand, and tore a portal using Origin. He then pushed Jasper through the dimensional seam.
Jasper stumbled, landing on the cheap, worn carpet of his small, sparse bedroom. His school uniform lay draped over a chair. He was alone—or so he thought.
A figure was sitting on the edge of his bed, perfectly still. It was himself—a clone, a flawless, living replica. The clone smiled, its eyes holding a subtle, empty light.
"Ah, good. You made it back intact," the clone said, its voice an exact, chilling echo of Jasper's own. "I'm here for crowd control. Your original body was quite visible leaving your room earlier. I have been attending your classes, answering your calls, and ensuring that no one associates the disappearance of those pathetic souls in the alley with you."
The clone's smile widened, lacking any genuine warmth. "Perfect alibi, Jasper. Everyone saw you in your room last night. You have no association with the 'disappearance' of those bullies. That body—this body—went to school today and sat in the back of the room, looking tired but utterly normal. Enjoy your clean slate."
With a final, knowing nod, the clone began to shimmer. Its edges blurred, and it dissolved into faint, shimmering motes of light that smelled faintly of ozone, sinking into the carpet. Jasper was left alone, holding the terrifying knowledge that his identity was now fully protected by a god of lies and damnation.
He looked at his hands, now clean and strong, and a chilling sense of exhilaration replaced his weariness. The power was real.
Back in the Cult Domain, Urca lounged on the Throne, feeling a distinct sense of dissatisfaction. He was growing tired of the petty, predictable nature of his immediate surroundings.
"Well, that was tedious," Urca scoffed inwardly, the thought laced with casual contempt. "I've had more difficult games of checkers. The boy was ripe for the taking. No finesse required. You call yourself a Totem, a primal force, yet you were too timid to even fight the child's fear with complexity. You relied on the crude shock of despair. You're weak and cautious. Are you even worth the trouble of hosting?"
He leaned back, waiting for the familiar, cold resonance of the entity.
Instead, the response was immediate, absolute, and terrifying.
The cold, cavernous space of the Cult Domain was violently erased. Everything went black—a crushing, suffocating blackness that had no dimension and no sound. Urca felt a physical, wrenching force tear him across the cosmos, a journey that lasted only a fraction of a second but felt like an agonizing eternity of spiritual compression.
He was deposited onto a surface that was rough, jagged, and soaked with warm, alien blood.
Urca gasped, the air he inhaled smelling of brimstone, spent power, and ozone. His immediate, instinctual reaction was pure terror.
"What is this place?" he thought, the sheer scale of the surroundings instantly diminishing his ego.
He was standing on a horrific battlefield in the Outer Verse, First Plane. This was the lowest rung of the cosmic ladder, yet it was a warzone for beings that dwarfed anything Earth could conceive. Colossal, multi-limbed Eldritch Horrors locked in battle with gleaming, towering figures—fledgling Immortals and minor Gods of chaotic pantheons. The ground was littered with the grotesque, decaying remains of cosmic entities. The atmosphere was a palpable wave of pure dread and conflicting, vast spiritual power.
Urca looked up at a creature whose body seemed to be made of constantly shifting mathematical equations—and he felt genuine, unadulterated, human panic.
The ongoing, chaotic battle—a cacophony of cosmic shrieks, grinding power, and spiritual detonation—halted abruptly.
Every monstrous eye, every burning orb, and every eldritch gaze on the battlefield snapped to the sudden, unassuming figure in the center.
There was a tense, absolute silence that stretched across light-years. The terror was mutual, but for vastly different reasons.
"What is this place? By the abyss… the sheer size… the dread. This is not Earth. This is… chaos. The things here are too large, too powerful. I am nothing. The fear is real. Pure, unadulterated panic."
But the beings of the Outer Verse were experiencing a different kind of terror. They did not fear Urca's human body. They feared the terrifying, primordial, and utterly unknown power contained within him—the ancient, hungry force of the Totem that defied their local cosmic hierarchy.
An Eldritch Horror—a colossal, grotesque thing whose limbs stretched for what seemed like miles—shrieked, but the sound was not one of rage; it was a psychic burst of profound, instinctual terror focused entirely on Urca.
The Totem, finally retaliating for the disrespect, seized absolute control of Urca's voice and body, imbuing them with a crushing, resonant power.
"You thought me weak, little vessel?" The voice that emerged from Urca's mouth was not his own; it was an echoing, cosmic rumble that vibrated the very essence of the battlefield. It spoke not to Urca, but to the entities watching. "I plucked you from the mud of a backward world and granted you the stage of eternity. You dare question the efficiency of the primal?"
The towering Immortals and the chaotic Horrors recoiled further, a silent chorus of alarm running through the entire plane.
"Look upon this little, insignificant patch of sand, and tremble." The Totem threw its head back, and a laugh erupted from Urca's throat—a sound that was not humorous, but terrified the Immortals with its boundless, consuming malice. "Let me show you the power of a god. Even a newly born one, plucked from the mud of a backward world."
The Totem paused for a final, heavy second, allowing the dread to fully settle across the cosmic plain.
"Absolute power is absolute, everywhere. Even in the First Plane of the Outer Verse."
With that declaration, the Totem initiated the final, horrifying transformation.
Urca's body began to twist and contort. His skin melted away like wax, replaced by a dense, obsidian-black armor that seemed to absorb all light. His frame expanded, his bones cracking and reforming into a grotesque, inhuman height. Spikes of crystallized power erupted from his shoulders, and his eyes became twin, swirling vortexes of primal Origin energy. This was the true, horrific manifestation of the Totem's Battle Form, a terrifying fusion of human rage and cosmic consumption.
The metamorphosis was a silent promise of absolute, devastating power about to be unleashed.