Inside the domain of void... a freezing light chills a hazy fog into being, only lighting up the air. The surroundings haughtily refuse light's entrance.

The source of the only light in this abyss is a pair of glass eyes. Like an exotic dusk, they set cool light upon thick scar tissue carved into deep bags of exhaustion. Though the scabs are mormally healthy brown, keeping the precise slices in the face closed in the day, like a lizard's scales under warm sunlight, they are instead a black-ridged gray against sickly pale white skin. The two eyes stare out intensely, yet still as their silicon derivative, from under a warrior's mane flowing out a jagged hole in a helmet.

The domain of void deepens even further in saturation.

Much like a plane, it experiences rumbling turbulence. A spike in motion sets the glowing lamps of its passenger shaking slightly in the featureless darkness. They flicker in and out, blinking eyelids translucent and veined atop the inner luminescence.

The owner of the eyes pilots Sol on her ferry, a small comet of funeral-black Magic to the next arc of their life. Thoughts run behind the ferrywoman's eyes, all of the capabilities of the little devil's head in her hands running through her head.

She procrastinates, letting her attention be drawn by an threat she can easily take the time to help with. Following her Mesh of Death should help focus her mind.

In reality though, she has always been rubbish at decisions not solved by death. It is why she chose the Mesh of Taxes to focus on later in life.

Her Will simultaneously molds and chisels the Death Essence composing her Magnum Opus, a creation in which she eventually reached the pinnacle of. Her biggest frustration is that even after after a century of working on it, she couldn't push it into the territory of a new Skill.

She did push the boundaries of the System in slightly new directions though. The victory gave her ample benefits, and is really the most the majority of life everywhere can hope for.

Right next to the void, to the perked-up tufts of owl-like, semi-aquatic fish-humanoids in surprise, a scythe made of the same material phases into existence.

A phenomenon similar to an old special effects style, the kind where the invisible actor just becomes slowly more and more substantial. The modification becomes solid right as they pass a flood of Monsters ambulating out from their coral reefs to devour humans.

Though, unlike any of those old special effects, the transportation's newly made, slicing attachment far exceeds any of them in scale. The weapon, larger than a skyscraper and wreathed in black fire, cleaves straight through the army in one single pass through.

And for safety's sake, she ensures the scythe makes six more revolutions around the orb. And humorously, all of this occurs before the Monsters even realize every single one of their brethren are made into precisely 8 pieces.

Narrow snake eyes turn round, a fish-scaled creature leaps up. A toothed grin stretches across his stout face, his beige saws raised above the upraised shield of a human. Copper blue seeps out of his neck, encircling all around his skull cap at a diagonal, cutting through his slit pupils with cyan liquid. Blood beads around his torso and legs multiple times. His body falls apart. His grin is still fixed as he tumbles like a Jenga tower, dead before he even realized.

He is just the first to go.

The cuts are so fine they even managed to take a few steps, before toppling over.

Their sad, sorry pieces fall to the coastal floor.

Much like the slides in a microscope, one could see everything in the monster steaks as they meatily squelched and slapped together. They slide apart like glass across each other too, the precision leaving organ separate from organ, and bone separate from bone.

The orb barely halts in flight.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Passing miles into the stratosphere over a battleground between four Tormented Zones all fighting to introduce their twisted concepts, she slams the mental breaks on her skill, which pushes herself and the others out of the Underworld skill she had evolved into a travel skill.

'Four. In the same place?'

'My.'

A muscle twitches in her placid expression in shock.

A density of Miasma capable of creating enough Torment Miasma to generate more than one Torment in the same location is a force to reckoned with. And for there to be such a diversity to not just coalesce into a Titan... The amount of destructive potential cannot be diminished no matter what perspective one looks at it from. In the best case scenario, it could form a Titan amalgamated from the various Torments at play, and demolish the entire state in its battle with the Magical Girls.

'Confound it. That was not even the most likely possibility.'

The Miasma of the false Goddess Diarrhea is rampant, so this is a clearly purposeful and pre-prepared scheme with a great deal of forethought behind it.'

Thus, in the worst, and of course, considerably more likely possibility, they'll feed into each other. Connected by the shared Essences of the false Goddess, which she has taken care to place in both of them, she'll be able to infect them as they enter a state of accelerated metamorphosis. The fragments in each of them will parasitize them to remake them in their time of change and vulnerability to a higher form of themselves, perverting the perversion itself into the shadow of her image. And if this is not stopped in the appropriate window, she will be able to send parcels of her Divine skills into this mortal reality for meddling beyond what she is allowed to. This will metastasize the four Torments of less-refined concepts into her higher concepts. It would give the Torments the equivalent of hundreds of levels, but each one level will be different even from the Torments' quality of levels, which normally supersede the quality of everything else. They will all be on par with the Magical Girls, who have best quality of levels on the mortal reality.

To illustrate, it is like four large knobs of skin cancer evolving into the creatures from the 1979 film Alien.

'The Familiars really understand the meaning of "more bang for your buck."'

A rare smile touches her mouth.

'In all actuality, I doubt the Familiars are even capable of understanding such a transactional relationship. Or rather, unless it would help improve things, they are not willing to understand such a relationship. It may have a negative effect. Their perspective is probably something genuinely sweet, like "Charity with flare...-ity?"' she realizes.

She cannot let any of these possibilities happen. Imagining all of the taxes at risk, shining and golden, swallowed by all of the property damage these bottomless Torments will cause...

'That will not stand.'

She strains herself to protect the state's future, a fierce headache splitting her head with all of the searing intensity of a laser gun. Her Skills aren't meant to work like this, but her complex series of handsigns kick in, the assemblage tagged at the end with clenched fingers assembled in a skull's grin handsign delaying the effects of her premade manipulation until she made the activation hand sign.

She had not been intending to do anything experimental, but time is of the essence and she intends to save all of these lives... so she can get more taxes of course. Will and Dexterity funnel into her massive display of jujutsu mastery all at once to fuel it. For a flash-second, the impressive Magical construct Reaper's Spaceship completely dissolves, and she tosses her passengers Sol and Dennis into the air, keeping them airborne with her aura like debris atop a sci-fi explosion.

The hulking skeleton shifts, twisting on her hips with her gauntlets holding empty air behind her in an exaggerated baseball elite's pose. Dexterity distorts her, making her double-wielding pose extend impossibly all the way to the horizon, her armor making grinding noises as she is put through the mother of all funhouse mirrors.

Miniature Magical explosions rat-a-tat-tat like a machine gun betwixt the Lady of Death & Taxes' skeletal gauntlet's index finger and middle finger. Black sunspots are multiplying like the skulls in an anaerobic cemetery. The unnatural Death fireballs continue swelling, and growing in size, constructively interfering with each other atop each other into an ever-increasing blobby frame of her signature weapon.

It even goes so far as to blot out even the light of the Sun, casting the Tormented Zones into purple light, and speckling them with unnatural shadow.

Ailing with Love, Drained Lake, Afflicted Gears, Problem Child. They all make their names known, though all are on the verge of gathering wholly new names.

The Torment Problem Child does not even pause to take in the new threat, immediately disengaging from the fight with the Torment Ailing with Love. It does so by hugging Ailing with Love, seemingly taking the Torment in question aback for a second, before disengaging from the "show of affection" to slug it.

The Torment Ailing with Love, a bulbous pustule of a heart growing atop something blue and shriveled, folds in half like a soggy whoopee cushion around the four sausage-like fingers, gripped into a knuckle sandwich, of the more humanoid Torment, Problem Child. The blow leaves the huge heart weeping and sobbing, tears of yellow pus squirting out of two belly buttons growing on it. They claim more pieces of reality for its Tormented Zone, a nasty Skill setting it up favorably while its opponent is gone.

The slugging teleports the Problem Child in front of the Lady of Death & Taxes's legs. The cheek blubber of the peculiarly small Miasmic creature unravels into millions of large fatty strings coated in Charisma and infectious amber stool.

It shrieks.

"You wouldn't hate if your child killed and raped some beauty that caught their eyes, right, Mom? I'm your child. Parents don't hate their children!!!" it screams, oozing heartbroken pain off of every word. But the pair of normal-sized baby eyes under its pair of adult, soulful eyes roll smugly, undermining any truth behind its words.

"Just the nonsense of a Torment," whispers the Lady of Death & Taxes.

The cloud-like purple and black bursts flow away into nothingness to reveal a scythe worthy of a truly finishing move.

It is made of a metal oxymoronically both pitch black, yet as reflective as the Lady's eyes. The pole extends perpendicular to her, at once the width of a normal pole and the width of a mansion, a storm front of smooth metal the impending natural disaster prophesizing the four Torments' ends.

Wiggling strings of yellow fat, legion in number, near to her.

She heaves up her massive left boot made of golden bones between her and the speedy Torment, creating a physical barrier with her knee. Her Will reaches into the concept of the wealth of her agency, and uses it to infuse her boot with the mass of her wealth. Forcefully, the pressure of her mind an iron vise forcing reality itself to match how she wants it be, she compresses the mass into it.

By the narrowest of margins, she blocked the rotting blob's blubbering blubber blabbing bubbles at her boobs to make her babble at its mercy, bobbles babying its innocence. Blorbs blibble blowb blubble, blop blop blop...

Sol can tell its once-true name, even in his half-dead state as a separate head and a body. Out of curiosity and boredom floating an expanded, yet oxymoronically frozen, wave of black, she strains her Fae Heart of the Teen Vixen, pushing their empathy to telepathy-equivalence.

Once named Babs, the Torment, Problem Child, it was a cultist of unsound mind. So ripe with excesses of cruelty, it became a exemplary vessel for to contain Miasma from the deity of blight.

The hints that Torments shed fall like lice and dandruff of their true appearance over the Lady of Death & Taxes. And they leave sensations even worse than the sympathetic itchiness that seeing such nasty infestations and uncleanliness invoke. It makes her shiver all the more, having lived through a time where infestations and general lack of hygiene was unavoidable. The threadbare cottons in England filled with nibbling lice and nibbling rapists scratched at her... the aching of the ship's hull to the raucous crowing of sea birds... the maggots growing and exploding into more maggots in the Demon viscera coating her body.

She slices her arm off, the red blood of a human gushing out. Her arm grows obese within her armored gauntlet before it even hits the floor, bulges of yellow fat like frog eggs massing, until the upper bone geysers out through the hole, propelled by the rapid multiplication of fat through where her shoulder once attached to.

Childlike perversion spills all over the suburbanite rows of houses, smelling like puke and taking its rancid flow through the emptied houses. The classic American homes wiggle for a second, deciding what debased form they will choose. They swell, all realism disappearing in the balloon-like houses as baby blue and light pink swirl up the bricks. Texture becomes frictionless as these bulging, psychedelic houses become Dr. Seussian monstrosities. Each roofing tile and each wall's brick sprouts a fleshy pink tip, before the house collapses out into a 2-D net of itself. The insides, the same pink as the tips wiggling along the ground, get pulled apart forcefully, attached to the walls like organs to a bug's exoskeleton.

All of this to become hungry echinoderms crawling over each other like oversized crown-of-thorns starfish.

'It is disgusting.'

One of the fat ropes the cheeks of the Problem Child had turned into had touched her.

Her eyes increase in brightness, manipulating magic to now attack the Torment Drained Lake. Phasing out of her head, black-tinged Will forms grab arms already in the midst of tinkering with ammo. She reaches up, and her mental constructs drop the coin-shaped ammo in her hands, which she promptly tosses behind herself.

A muppet with big googly eyes, with grey hands and arms, instead of long hair, covering its face like Cousin It lies on an invisible surface behind the Lady of Death & Taxes. The skinny, noodle-like arms laying over its mouth shift in a tired, exhausted sigh. It sounds as if its throat is tight with anxious hopeless, clenching its throat closed and suffocating on its own pain.

The ammo detonates on the still, pallid being like a grenade. Solid black essence shards fly out from the blast, turning the Torment Drained Lake into Swiss cheese.

'It just... died...'

'No tricks.'

Her eyebrow raises, and she taps her foot a couple times, waiting a moment.

Its Essence dissipates, and the Magical Guardians heading in to her location to aid her, give her a shrug mid-air.

"These things happen," shouts a Blue.

She is not built to fight Torments. Very few are.

The logic of Miasma naturally makes it difficult. Though it peculiarly worked in her favor with Drained Lake, the only ones truly able to fight on equal footing with a Torment on this level of reality are those supported by God, Angelic powers, Demonic powers, Fae, those supported by false gods, a very small minority of eldritch vessels, Magical Guardians, and ironically, other Torments, whose relationships with each other are as varied than God's creations.

But she is just that horrifyingly powerful of an existence.

*SLLLLLLLIIIIIIIIICE!!!*

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High above the battlefield, a new star lit up. A necklace's hunger had been sated, and now it could finally fulfil its destiny as a reward for Sol.

Facet assembles out of the broken glass strewn across the floor. Three tiny sheets of crystal stick out of its mouth, turning on hinges in a snake's taste of the empty air. The geometric motion parallels the angle of the bouncing necklace's emblem, the one tied around Sol's ponytail of Prussian blue hair. The jewelry had been the reward for Sol's sacrifice to The King in the final acts of the play crewed by the Great Magical Protagonists, the Tormented Princess, and the Brutal King. It had been so steeped in story, no matter how hard the Lady of Death & Taxes tried to crush it over the course of her - ultimately minor - help this day, it kept avoiding her.

The King's final act was to help his, and he would aid them by consuming Essence kin to the Essences of the burgeoning genius princess who mothered him/loved him/he fathered. The Essence makes a prime crafting tool for the creation of her own kingdom, The strong Essence of the Torment Drained Lake was based all around the truth it was born with: Drained of Will, and the one it was given, Malaise.

It had neither the will to live, or even metaphysical Will, nor even the energy or desire to do anything. Thus, though strengthened by the mass suicide ritual of a cult of otherwise weak souls, it falters regardless. It is the bane of life itself, the absence of drive, of action, and as a result, is easily devoured. Composed of nothing but the most boring, but insidious, elements of depression, its logical progression is a quiet, pointless, and pity-deserving death.

The Jester's face on the emblem could be seen turning from luminescent under the eyes of those with Essence sight, to downright painful, with safety-flare brightness. Although the Stars removed the humanity of Sol to remove the consequences in the Time That Did Not Exist, within the necklace is the solution.

The Fool's School will be grown within a stronghold of Magic. A stronghold within a stronghold, a place of learning within a place of learning. A Matryoshka doll for the Tutored by Suffering.

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The Lady of Death & Taxes eradicates the warped, cragged mess of metal that had been the power-intensive scythe. It had been completely ruined by the death knells of the Torments.

A few gashes and a few ruffled plates are the only signs of the battle on her self. Her exhaustion is immeasurable though. The fight had burned through a vast amount of her stores of Stats. She will recuperate it before the day was over, but she does not enjoy being below certain thresholds at any point in time.

The colorful cast of Magical Guardians waves goodbye, startled by, but incredibly thankful, for her timely aid.

She smiles, her head held up high.

'However,' to her, 'it had certainly been worth the fatigue. All to save my country.'

Her two passengers fall right into her waiting hands.

She sighs, though it quickly builds into a rumbling growl of disgust, audible even through her helmet.

Grey blood oozes down her finger from the decapitated head, the ghostly nature resonating uncomfortably with her Death Mesh. The resonation of her Death Mesh with the blood made her more prone to the effects of the blood. Her Will is too powerful, even for the potent poison of the mind, to be overpowered and turned to hysterics. But it did not mean she enjoyed the melancholic grip wrapped around her throat.

That the phantasmal fluids still succeeded in inducing a minor sensory hallucination was discomforting.

"Disgusting."

Sol’s head is perched on her palm, held just a little too forcefully. Her golden gauntlets dig into the dead monster’s fleshy stump of a neck. If not for her high Will stat and the Essence of Taxes she had worked hard to mesh with, the untouchable resting in her palm would have thrown her into an utter rage.

She wondered.

'Why should I have to keep this monster alive? It is even becoming less and less human than it already was.'

Just yesterday, a barely noticeable trace of a ritual had floated by her eyes. An eye made of the C O L O R S of the foul things that call themselves the Stars tauntingly going pass her like air resistance and gravity meant nothing to it.

And then, right as this tiny organ floated by her, the sensation of Charisma radiating off of the kid carrying its supposed brother changed. With no intermediary stages, this being's body (which influences Charisma) went from matching the shape of the soul flawlessly to being deeply, disturbingly, unfitting. Still exuding all of its perfection, it changed sex from female, and its contours and proportions all changed infinitesimally.

The armored tax woman stands still in a black void; a regal Shakespearian queen; Hel incarnate. Her muscles urge her through muscle memory. The uncanny valley of the soul mismatching so dysfunctionally with the body distressed her.

'The threat is right there. What the government wants to learn is not worth it.' She should put down this creature. It simply keeps getting worse and worse.

'The danger this thing is...'

...

The Academy for Magics, Demonics, and Altogether Eldritch Entities is one of the safest possible locations she could take it to. She hates the idea of it finding solace anywhere. Certainly, this is reflected by her helmet perpetually grimacing, the skull's fragments held together in a frown by half-melted gold coins.

Carried in her other hand by his hospital gown, Dennis was halfway through the mother of all snores. A drop of drool was halfway from his mouth to the floor. The back of his hands and feet lay against the floor. Sol’s body still held onto him, trying to protect him into her death.

The locket given by The King had disappeared from the collar, now tied around the hair of the head of Sol by an unseen hand. She had already tried to crush the death relic, but it would not let her, no matter her efforts.

'Its Truths are too certain, too embedded in reality.'

Wait.'

So my Truths of Death & Taxes did not take priority over its?'

A chill dripped down her spine.

The heart is too strong an anchor for Truths. Which she thought was exceedingly idiotic. An organ from the weak pests humans call Fae should not take precedence.

"This is bollocks," she swears, her American accent making way for a light touch of a British accent.