The air around Belphegor tore itself apart.

It flexed, like tendon writhing under too-tight skin. The world convulsed, folding inward – folding around him – as if reality itself had become infected with his anatomy.

He stood in the centre of the broken bridge, arms outstretched like a conductor at curtain rise.

And then they came.

Not summoned, nor born.

Exhaled.

From his ribcage, from his spine, from the weeping mouths that lined his back – they ruptured.

Flesh tore, and meat slithered out.

Belphegor's lips peeled back in delight. Not just a smile – a hunger. The kind of grin that stretched too far, like skin tugged over teeth it didn't belong to.

"Ahh," he whispered. "Born ugly. Born honest."

Six grotesque shapes poured from his body, dragging umbilical cords of tendon and pus. Each was carved in his likeness, but none truly his. They carried his memory twisted through their flesh — shame sculpted into form, hunger dressed as devotion. When they moved, the air seemed to recoil.

They were his children, his mirrors.

His teeth.

The Chloe-puppet was the first to finish forming. It made no sound – no gasping breath, no scream. Just silence. It stepped forward with a glide, like fog in a closed room. Skeletal beneath translucent skin, its head tilted in a slow, unnatural lurch, vertebrae cracking like dry sticks. It had no face. Just sockets, hollow and pulsing. Its skin phased in and out of visibility, revealing strips of blackened tendon underneath. But when it moved to strike – it became real. Entirely, terrifyingly real.

Its hands were jagged blades. Its mouth – when it opened – was Chloe's scream, played in reverse.

Alyssa's puppet slammed into the ground next.

It wasn't just large. It was obscene. Bloated like a drowned corpse, veins bulging with black liquid beneath yellowed skin. Every step it took cracked the bridge's stone, seismic and slow. Its limbs were short, stubby, but each finger ended in a cracked, oozing nail. Its belly dragged the floor, distended and misshapen. Its eyes bulged, set too far apart. Its voice was slow and glutted with phlegm: "We eat. We eat. We eat…"

Victor's puppet was next – and it wept. A giant mass of muscle, hunched over like a beast dragged from a cage too small for its form. It had hooves for feet. A lion's mane twisted into a wolf's snout. Horns curled like blades above its ears. But none of it compared to the face – a child's face, pale and soft, mounted too small on its massive shoulders. It blinked at Victor with tearful eyes and babbled between sobs: "D-daddy, don't hurt me…"

Its claws scraped stone with every shuffle.

Then came Ying's clone – and the world bent. Literally.

Where its chest should have been, there was only a hollow void. A gravitational sinkhole that tugged at the air, at the dust, at the loose cloth on Ying's sleeves. Anything that drifted too close began to disintegrate at the edges. Its limbs were rail-thin and sharpened like sickles. No face. Just a sliver of polished bone. Each step it took didn't touch the ground – it hovered just above it, leaving no print, no echo, only absence.

Then came Liz's puppet.

A meat pile. That was all it was, at first.

Then it stood.

Its legs were fused masses of thigh and intestine. Its skin was translucent and stitched from the inside, so that its organs were on the outside – wrapped like a butcher's apron. Its face was a melted approximation of Liz's, with eyes too far apart, one cheek entirely missing to reveal teeth and muscle twitching beneath. It had no mind. No precision. Just rage. It howled and drooled like a rabid animal, every shriek vibrating with inhuman bass.

Psychic pulses bounced off it. It didn't feel.

And finally—

Dan's clone.

It descended from the sky like an angel rendered in reverse. Cloaked in a hood of black sinew, its wings were formed from flayed tendons and crumbling bone. But the true horror was its shadow. The shadow did not follow the light. It spread outward like smoke in water, and everything it touched – died. Moss withered. Stone cracked. The air chilled.

Where its foot fell, the bridge began to rot.

Dan's own halo dimmed.

And none of them looked at Max.

Not one.

Max stood behind Victor – tensed, fists curled, heat boiling behind his teeth.

But the puppets ignored him.

Belphegor's voice slithered from somewhere unseen, smug and cold.

"No need for a Max," he said. "We don't sculpt statues when the real messiah's already in chains."

Then the puppets began to speak. They oozed words – half-formed, rotten with meaning.

The Chloe-wraith was first. Its jaw unhinged, twitching like a broken hinge as air scraped through its throat. The voice that came out was Chloe's— almost. But deeper, rasped raw, like it had clawed through plaster and darkness just to speak.

"You left me buried in that wall."

Chloe flinched – not from fear, but recognition. That phrase. The memory buried beneath a foundation slab in Berlin, where she had nearly died trying to phase through a wall too thick, too fast.

The wraith hadn't guessed. It had remembered.

Then came the Alyssa-mass. Its jowls flapped as it moved, and thick spit drooled from the corners of its lips. Its voice was sluggish, choked with meat, as if every word had to punch its way through layers of fat.

"Too much," it said. "Always too much."

The Victor-beast didn't speak so much as whimper at first – sniffling, gasping like a child lost in a supermarket. The beast's massive claws twitched. Its head drooped.

Then its tiny, human face looked up and sobbed.

"You made me."

Ying's clone stood utterly still – its blade-arms splayed like spider legs. And yet its voice was the softest. A whisper that wasn't sound, but pressure. A breathless gravity that curled into the ear like grief wrapped in silk.

"I was empty first."

The Liz-meatpile shrieked – not a sentence, not even a thought, but a need ripped from something primal and starved. Its voice gurgled through blood and mucus.

"I'M STILL HUNGRY."

And then the Dan-shade moved forward.

One step. That was all. And the air around it blackened, the shadows drawing tight as if recoiling.

Its voice was soft. Intimate. The voice you heard in prayer – or at your deathbed.

"Your light dims, Brother."

The words didn't just echo. They struck.

Somewhere between voice and memory, they dug.

Max stepped forward, lips parting. "Liz—"

Chloe grabbed his arm.

"Don't," she said.

He turned. Her eyes were locked on the Liz-clone, watching its spine uncoil and tighten like a spring. It had spoken in Liz's voice.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The voice of a six-year-old.

The voice that used to ask for bedtime stories.

And it was coming straight for them.

…………………

Belphegor extended one perfect, gloved hand. And then, like a puppeteer yanking taut strings – he moved.

The bridge beneath them convulsed.

Not stone anymore – muscle. It flexed like a dying animal, shuddering with pulses of rotten heat. The cracks that had once been fractures of age now split wide like incisions, and from the depths of the bridge's spine, flesh erupted – pink ridges of sinew and cartilage spearing upwards between them, forming walls.

Not barriers. Wounds.

One tore between Dan and Liz in a spray of wet stone. Another split the air between Victor and Chloe, like a massive artery peeling open. A third drove itself through the stone under Alyssa's feet, hurling her backwards.

The team was torn apart – not by violence, but surgery.

Chloe reacted first – her form flickering translucent as she phased through the rising wall.

She grabbed Liz's wrist just before the sinew sealed behind them. Her arm slipped through viscera that pulsed like breathing meat. It was warm. Slick. Alive. And when she yanked Liz through, it shuddered as if in protest.

They tumbled across the slick meat-floor, landing hard, together.

Victor had no such luxury. He snarled and threw himself over Max's body just as the baby-faced beast came crashing toward them – its stitched hide rippling with impossible strength. It screamed like a child having a tantrum, voice high and wet.

Dan vanished. One moment he was lifting his blade. The next, shadow swallowed him. His mirror had spread a curtain of darkness from its wings, and everything it touched decayed. The bridge beneath Dan's boots began to rot, stone curling inwards like burned paper.

Alyssa collided with her double mid-step. Their fists met with a thunderous crack—stone shattered beneath them, the force spiderwebbing outward in a visible shockwave. The abomination across from her didn't flinch.

Ying held her ground just beyond the pull of the void.

Her clone's chest yawned open, revealing nothingness. A gravitational well, small and black and hungry, was stitched into its ribs. Stray chunks of gravel and bone already spiralled toward it, sucked forward only to be bisected by the waiting blades on her double's arms – fluid, graceful, precise.

And through it all, Belphegor walked.

He strolled the crumbling parapet like a director among actors – hands behind his back, head tilted slightly. Watching. Enjoying.

His voice echoed not from his mouth but from every surface – from the ridges, the floor, the puppets themselves.

"Let's see who's truly better," he cooed.

"You… or the truth you're hiding from."

…………………

The banshee came screaming.

Chloe yanked Liz down just in time – its cry tore through the air like shrapnel, stripping bark from nearby trees. The sound wasn't sonic. It was surgical. A frequency that split nerve endings.

The wraith hovered mid-air, her own face stretched thin across a skull too long, too wide, jaw dislocated in a permanent scream. It had no feet. No weight. Yet when it struck the ground beside them, the earth cracked.

Chloe phased them both backward through the ridge – too fast to think, too close to vomit. She thought of the girl she couldn't save last time. Blonde hair. Buried under rubble.

Not again, she told herself.

They re-emerged in the space between two meat walls, lungs burning. Liz pushed off her, eyes glowing red, and fired a blast of psychic force.

It slammed into the Liz-beast – a grotesque, swollen parody of her own body, stitched with organs outside its skin, eyes bulbous and wrong. The blast hit square in the chest… and did nothing.

The thing didn't stagger. Didn't react. It simply roared, foaming and bleeding from its gut and mouth, and charged.

It wasn't mindless because it was dumb. It was mindless because nothing else remained.

Alyssa met mass with muscle.

Her clone weighed twice what she did – an overgrown caricature of her body, rolling flesh compacted like industrial steel. She struck it in the throat, the kidney, the knee. Each blow landed, but the thing didn't move.

It smiled. Then punched.

The impact hurled Alyssa twenty feet into a ridge. Stone cracked. Her ribs flared with pain. She rolled, gasping, and shifted.

Mid-motion, she amplified her own density, just enough to match. When the clone lunged again, she ducked low – and struck upward with a fist like concrete rebar.

Its jaw crumpled sideways in a wet crack.

Ying didn't hesitate.

She flicked her wrist. The void opened like a wound. Her blade arced forward – pure blacklight aimed straight at her twin.

The clone lifted one arm – and the voidslice hit it, then bent. The blade didn't stop – it curved, unnaturally, as if the creature's ribcage was a lens warping reality.

It folded in. Like the puppet absorbed the tear in reality itself, redirecting it backwards.

Ying dove. Behind her, a tree vanished, severed at the trunk, gone without a sound. Only the roots remained.

The clone tilted its head – no malice. Just precision. As if it knew what Ying would try next.

Victor roared as the beast tackled him.

It had his claws. His muscle. His rage. But its face— a child's face, stretched across its skull like wax melting. It screamed as it swung, crying like a baby, moaning through sobs.

"You made me!" it howled.

Victor blocked high, low, redirected but every move he made, the clone matched. Not mirrored – anticipated. When he went to feint, it was already shifting. When he lunged, it had already rotated its hip for counterweight.

Victor's mouth twisted. This thing… it knew his instincts.

Dan stood in pure black.

Not absence of light – absence of divinity.

His wings glowed with fractured gold, but the moment his clone stepped forward, that light bent and dimmed. The darkness it carried wasn't shadow – it was entropy. Decay made flesh.

Where it walked, the bridge beneath withered.

Dan flared his aura and thrust his spear forward but the air around him muffled, as if God Himself had turned away.

He couldn't see past two steps. He was fighting blind. Fighting alone. For a heartbeat, he wondered if he'd already died. If this was Hell – not flame and pitchforks, but silence where God should be.

And somewhere inside the chaos, Chloe felt it first.

She phased again to dodge a bone swipe from the banshee. She grabbed Liz's collar, pulled her down, and saw it.

Not just imitation.

Prediction.

The clones weren't reacting. They were planning. Calculating. Moving before the team moved.

Her stomach dropped. "Liz," she said, voice low, tight. "They're not just puppets. They know us."

She ducked another scream-slash. The air peeled in ribbons.

"They're not fighting us like copies," she whispered. "They're fighting us— like us at our worst."

…………………

Belphegor strolled the parapet like a man admiring his garden.

The ruined bridge groaned beneath him, flayed stone pulsing with veins of wet pink. Below, the battlefield churned – screams, fists, power colliding. The scent of blood lifted on the wind, rich and heady, like incense at a funeral.

But Belphegor remained untouched.

He walked without hurry, hands folded behind his back, his borrowed face smiling softly. The skin he wore rippled as he moved – never quite solid. Never quite real. He was the reflection, not the man.

"Ah… Daniel," he cooed, voice velvet-thick with amusement. "That flicker in your left hand – still hiding something, I see. Still pretending your wounds aren't prayers."

Below, Dan lashed out at the shadow-clone with a burst of golden flame. But the light sputtered mid-air. The darkness bent it inward, like shame swallowing hope.

Belphegor tutted. "You burn so prettily. But only in the dark, hmmm?"

He turned, peering across the battlefield.

"To Victor," he said with theatrical reverence, "I give my sincerest thanks. You never fail to pause before the killing blow. Even now. Even when they deserve it. How sweet."

Victor snarled, ducking beneath the monster's swing. The baby-faced beast shrieked, claws slashing inches from Max. Victor deflected again – hesitating just long enough for Belphegor's words to land like rot behind his ribs.

"I wonder," Belphegor mused, "what it is you think you're sparing."

He walked on. The wind picked up. His coat flared behind him like shed skin.

And then he looked at Chloe.

His head tilted. His smile widened.

"You know," he said, almost gently, "I stitched your double from three sisters."

Chloe froze mid-phase.

"One screamed too long. The second just whimpered. The third… she begged me to stop."

Belphegor's voice dropped to a hush, intimate. "I did. Eventually."

Chloe didn't scream. She didn't speak.

But her body flickered – phasing in and out too fast, her outline stuttering as her heartbeat shattered rhythm. Her fists clenched so tight her nails split skin.

The banshee-wraith lunged from behind her. Chloe spun – mid-phase – and kicked it back into a stone column, sending cracks up the wall. But she barely looked at it.

Her eyes were fixed on him.

"You son of a—"

"I am," Belphegor agreed, smiling. "A son of man. Woven from parts. Just like you."

Chloe stepped in front of Liz, breathing hard.

Her voice wasn't steady when she shouted.

"They're not just puppets," she said. "They're made from people."

She turned in place, eyes wide, scanning the battlefield. "He's using real bodies – souls – people."

"You're just now realising?" Belphegor said, softly mocking. "Darling, everything I make comes from somewhere. That's the charm. That's the art."

Liz didn't hesitate.

Her halo flared, eyes glowing bright as furnace glass.

"It's too late for that now," she said, voice flat, cold. "We kill the puppets. Then we kill him."

The banshee screamed again, high and furious.

The stage was set.

And the curtain had only just begun to burn.

…………………

Liz gritted her teeth as the meat-pile bore down on her.

It wasn't fast. It didn't need to be. Each footfall landed like a butcher's slab thrown onto tile – thick, final, reeking of old blood. Veins pulsed across its chest like ropes strung too tight, and its arms – stitched from three different bodies – grasped with mindless, brutal force.

Liz blasted it again.

A psychic shockwave rippled out from her palm, but the creature didn't even flinch. It just kept coming. No hesitation. No fear. No soul.

It pinned her with one heaving shoulder, pressing her back against the broken stone. Her halo sparked, crimson threads coiling around her brow as she shoved with her mind—push, push, get off—

She tried to push again – mind reaching like a flare into darkness – but the clone absorbed it like flesh drinks fire. Nothing stuck. Nothing sank.

The clone didn't react. Didn't scream. Just leaned closer.

And then—

It opened its mouth.

And spoke in a small, tremulous voice.

"Daddy… are you coming home?"

Liz froze.

Her breath stopped. Her eyes widened – too wide. Every muscle in her body locked as if something ancient had reached up and snapped her bones from the inside.

The voice wasn't just close. It wasn't just mimicked.

It was perfect.

Her voice. Age nine. The night her mother April died. The same question she'd whispered to the dark hallway after the flames took everything.

"Daddy…?"

"No," Liz choked.

But she couldn't move.

Not in time.

The clone's hand rose – fingers stiff, curled like meat hooks. It lunged to finish the job.

Chloe saw it all.

From across the ridge, through banshee screech and blood-haze, she saw Liz freeze.

She didn't think.

She moved.

The wraith intercepted – screeching like metal peeled back from bone – but Chloe dropped low and phased through the spectre's screaming mass. The air around her rippled cold. Her heart stuttered once from the chill, but she kept moving.

And then she was behind the Liz-clone.

Her blade slid into the thing's spine with a wet crunch.

It didn't die. It didn't even scream.

But it spasmed – dropping Liz to the ground like a discarded rag. Enough.

Chloe stepped over her, back curved like a shield, eyes locked across the field.

Belphegor stood watching from the parapet. Still smiling.

His smile widened.

Chloe's voice cracked the air like iron snapping in frost.

"You don't get to wear her voice," Chloe said. Her blade trembled. "You don't get to keep it."

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