The silence that followed the girl's descent was suffocating.
The girl stood entirely naked on the pulverized concrete, her golden hair drifting around her shoulders as if suspended in water. She didn't look like a beast. She didn't have scales, claws, or any kind of horrific details.
Her skin was flawlessly pale, and the smirk on her lips was distinctly, horrifyingly human and beautiful too.
But it was the figure standing directly behind her that shattered any illusion of humanity.
At first glance, it looked like a tall, thin man wearing a dark, tattered trench coat. But as Hide looked a second longer, his blood ran completely cold.
It wasn't a man.
The figure had no skin. It was composed entirely of tens of thousands of writhing, glistening black centipedes, cockroaches, and beetles, crawling continuously over each other to maintain the shape of a human body.
The insects hissed and clicked in a ceaseless, nauseating rhythm, filling out the dark trench coat.
