Not A God

Chapter 24 - Puzzle

Dr Beak in the Age of Steam

When Lederer finally came to his senses from the magic of the parchment in his hands, he suddenly found himself alone in the house. Dr Kaye and his sister Mary were long gone, and outside, a loud rumbling sound irritating his eardrums. Lederer looked at the book in his hands with a complicated look in his eyes, knowing that it was a deeply sinful book, but he kept it on his person in a special place for his notebook, before walking out in the direction of the sound.

The scene that followed made his expression go blank.

He looked up and looked into the distance, it was near morning, the morning light was faint, he could vaguely see a huge black shadow that covered almost half of the town. The rumbling sound was from this huge black shadow. He looked at the black shadow and saw its true form, which was a huge mountain of flesh made of monstrous pieces of flesh stacked on top of each other, and countless tentacles extending from the mountain of flesh supported this huge mountain of flesh. Comparable to a small mountain range so that it could slowly wriggle and walk, and the factories around the town with their towering chimneys and pipes looked as small as gravel in front of this huge mountain of flesh, and humans were even smaller here. The human race is too small to see.

The sight of a monster the size of a small mountain walking on the far horizon as if it were strolling through his back garden would have been unbelievable to anyone who heard it, but it was real to Lederer. He recognised the mountain of flesh, the Evil God that Kaye had summoned, and in one night the monster. Was only a few dozen feet high, had become a mountain of flesh and blood beyond the reach of mankind for all eternity. The brutal reality of the shock was so intense that Lederer was in a trance, shaking and almost fainting, but he gritted his teeth and held on as he saw countless deformed-looking townspeople emerge from the shadows and follow the mountain of flesh.

He knew he had to do something or this evil god would soon be leaving the town limits.

But ...... what could he do?

Bewildered, Lederer stumbled to keep pace with one of the monstrous townsfolk ahead of him and walked for a while before he saw the townsfolk stop in their tracks.

"Why did they stop?"

Lederer frowned, a sudden and extremely unpleasant feeling in his heart as he looked up and saw the distant figure that had grown larger and larger as he approached stop. A huge shadow hit the ground in front of him, and the bulging, twisted flesh of the Evil God's body covered the entire sky with a sense of great terror hidden in the deepest recesses of human perception.

Meaningless murmurs emanated from the fleshy mountain's lips, and Lederer saw the monstrous townspeople beside him cover their ears and grin a hundred and eighty degrees, emitting a shrill, wholly unhuman hiss. Lederer didn't know if the townspeople were human or not, he just watched in a trance, dizzy, and the next moment he saw the huge black shadow overhead explode into a glorious blood-coloured flower as if the gods had sent down a miracle of unprecedented proportions.

Rumble - ！！！！

The sound of a million tons of explosives exploding together is not enough to describe the magnitude of its sound in Lederer's ears, as if he was hit by a hammer hard on the temple, instantly deaf. Eyes also became blurred, a few moments later to see everything in front of him, countless spore-like pieces of flesh with the explosion shock wave flying in the sky. Lederer's eyes widened, and he could even make out the tiny patterns on the spores, twisting and writhing with tiny tentacles, like a shrunken version of the monster.

The roar still echoed in his head.

The huge mountain of flesh in the distance had all but dissipated into these spores, like ripe dandelions spreading their transparent umbrellas in a breeze. Flying over the edge of the town and out into the wider world, with a startling beauty against the faint glow of the sunrise. Lederer, barely able to stand up from the blast, wiped the dust from his face and saw that many of the deformed townspeople around him had become even more deformed after exposure to the spores, completely devoid of the human form, and had become bloated, deformed monsters, more irrational than the fiercest beasts.