It was dark. Unquestionably and unfathomably dark.

Kruu had scoured all of the oceans, and all of the sea floors. Yet somehow, this area was so dark, so pitch black, that not even SHE could make anything out. Not the glowing eyes of her monster allies, not the ethereal glow of the ghosts, not even any light that could've shown.

The water retreated like mad when the falling approached, joining back together after they passed. It was like they behaved as if they were still on land. They fell for what seemed like hours, the pressure doing nothing to crush them!

Finally, magic caught their fall, and they landed on the dark bottom of the depths. Nothing was heard. Not even the rush of water that could've filled the air. It was an eerie silence. As if they were in the cosmic depths of space and the abyss itself.

"Is this what…being DEAD feels like?" Mirpo whimpered.

"Only for a moment." Hannah answered. "Then you enter the Shadow Realm. But that place must've fallen as well."

"We don't know what's down here." Van Helsing said, preparing all of his weapons. "Be ready. For ANYTHING."

"I do know what's down here." Lovecraft replied. "Evil. Pure, chaotic, nightmarish, cosmic, unprecedented, incomprehensible evil."

"Eugh. You said it." Primor stated. "I'm not sensing any souls down here."

Eternal torment in Hell seemed like the lesser of two evils. But even the Devil would go mad at a sight such as this. They kept walking across the sea floor, with Lovecraft sensing a massive storm on the rise.

The planets and stars were nearly in position. And throughout all words, warriors prepared themselves for battle. Amazons, Atlanteans, demons, Okash, superheroes, unicorns, dragons, all fighters throughout all dimensions.

Max stayed close to her mothers. She seemed the most terrified, holding their hands. Even her sentient shadow was on edge. Bigfoot could've sworn he heard chantings. But it was all in his head.

It was in them all. As if a warning to turn back, but at the same time, saying that there was no escape.

Dylan felt a chill go down his spine. Jack Black and Eric Affabee only readied their weapons and magic. With Providence leading them through the black abyss. Through the infinite void. Even the ground couldn't be seen. The darkness consumed all.

Only when it was revealed did it fade. Something so massive, so ominous, and so nightmarish that Cory realized that Dead House itself seemed normal in comparison.

Green lightning from the chaotic storm above illuminated the waters, revealing the slimy green city. It was so big, so intimidating, that he nearly jumped out of his skin. That all-too familiar feeling of pure fear was back. And now, it is more powerful than ever.

"Oh my god…"

"God cannot save us now." Lovecraft said. "The cursed city of R'lyeh is far worse than the Ninth Circle of Hell. Let alone the Tenth. Those who enter never come back out."

The city reached up into infinity, the landscape appearing as if the city was deformed, having entered through a portal of madness. At the mere sight alone, dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness, and darkened with dread of a giant monster's maligned pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad, and a sculptor had lapped suddenly into delirium!

A great stone pillar stuck out into the submerged sky, and the ground was of a mingled mixture of mud, ooze, and weedy cyclopean masonry. Which could be nothing less than a tangible sustenance of Earth's supreme terror.

This was no city. And it was no prison. It was a nightmarish corpse. A dead place that had existed long ago. Far more deader than Dead House ever was. And there was a dark feeling. That the team was NOT alone.

Yet there were no sounds. No signs of any Abyssal Lords or Deep Ones or even any Great Old Ones! Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong!

Were even THEY terrified to even DARE to enter these ghoulish accursed gates?! The gates of the same city that was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars?!

Within lay Cthulhu, the physical form of Fear itself, dark and horrible mastermind of all monstrous hordes both fathomable and unfathomable alike, hidden in green slimy vaults. And sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the insensitive, and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration.

Cory felt his mind turning to mush. He felt like one simple look upon this city was enough to kill the brain, leaving the body vulnerable to whatever desired to feast on the flesh of the carcass! He could not BRING himself to step one FOOT upon the city! He just couldn't!

Not even God himself knew what this sinister abomination of a city-sized corpse even was, for it hailed only from a fictitious universe far beyond our own! It seems to serve only as an omen! A warning of a dark and twisted fate, holding within it a force so horrible, so incomprehensibly evil, that when released the whole entirety of the universe would DIE!

And then it would appear in ANOTHER universe, until the last star in it ceased to exist! Then another universe! Then another! THEN ANOTHER!

Until finally, when the multiverse was murdered, it would appear in the NEXT multiverse, and so on! It would appear in every single universe, of every single multiverse, of EVERY SINGLE OMNIVERSE! And it would not stop, EVER, until all that is and ever was and ever will be…cease to be.

Only a single mountaintop, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, would soon emerge from the waters. That would be the beginning of a dark apocalypse, a terrible armageddon, a terrible end so fierce that NO ONE would be lifted into Heaven by God! For all would be left behind.

Cory felt his stomach churn. Oh, God! He thought. I think I'm gonna hurl!

He wasn't sure if he thought of it, or if it was a whisper planted into his mind like a seed, but SOMETHING inside it told him to kill himself! But he was petrified. He couldn't run, couldn't move, and he couldn't even speak.

Yet still, at the same time, he was awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon, of an Atlantis that should not, COULD NOT, even exist! It was the capital of Elder demons. Truly, it was not of this, or any sane planet. Let alone any sane universe.

Awe, at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks! At the dizzying height of the great carven monolith! And at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs! With a queer image found in the shrine. All of it, and so much more, is poignantly visible in every line of the unspoken and frightened description.

Whereas any sane man would've described any definite structure rebuilding, the Midnight Society dwelled only on broad impressions, vast angles, and stone surfaces. Surfaces too great to belong to ANYTHING right, or proper, for this earth, and impious with horrible images and disturbing hieroglyphs.

It was wrong. It was all wrong. What seemed like an acute angle may actually behave like an obtuse angle, and an obtuse angle behaving like an acute one! And the geometry of the architecture was abnormal, non-euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours! The geometry was all…wrong! He couldn't be sure if the sea and the ground were both horizontal, as the position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable!

The strange architecture of the city seemed to make navigation on foot disorienting and treacherous; surfaces that seemed to appear flat felt like they were actually tilted, and what looks like angles of masonry that appear to be convex at first glance may actually feel concave.

In other words, they could clip through the map like a video game glitch. Only far more deadlier.

No one. No one dared to step FOOT on this monstrous acropolis. Max Dark began shaking and whimpering, hugging her mothers for comfort from sheer terror. She did not want to go in there alone! No one did! Even Van Helsing himself felt hesitative! And R.L. Stine thought he could fear nothing worse than living ventriloquist dummies and Pinnochio…

"LOOOOOOOOVECRAAAAAAAAAAFT…"

When they stared into the abyss, the abyss looked back. And it whispered the name of Providence. He could not tell if only he heard it. All those with him seemed to be frozen with fear. Nothing they had faced could EVER prepare them for such horror so immense that the mind could not simply handle it!

"LOOOOOOOOVECRAAAAAAAAAFT…"

It called. It called again! It kept calling him! Dear God, WHY?! Why him?! Of all the damn people in all the universe, WHY did it have to be him?!

Lovecraft felt himself moving, whether on his own free will or against it he couldn't quite place. He tried to resist it, but at the same time…he didn't want to.

He felt the nightmares rushing back to him. The same cosmic nightmares he had every time he closed his eyes. Every time he let them open his mind! Every time he fell into the cold hands of death, which in truth was just the sleep of the gods!

No. Not gods. Not monsters. Not demons. These were the sleeps of things that were far FAR worse…

He stepped on the sloppy mud bank of the monstrous acropolis. No one made a move to stop him. No one said a word, not one single utterance of "No! Turn back! Don't go in there!".

No voice was heard. If any was said at all, the chanting drowned it out. Soon, it was all he heard. Lovecraft had heard of how, in this universe, those in scary stories and movies did really stupid things when panicking under pressure. Stupid things that got them killed.

This was the stupidest thing of them all. The audience from another universe tried screaming at him, but their pleas and commands failed to reach him through the dimensional walls. He was an idiot. One puppeteered by an even greater idiot.

Lovecraft continued onward, clambering slippery over the titan oozy blocks which could have been no oozy staircase. The very son of Heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out of the sea soaked perversion, and twisted menace, and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock!

Where a second glance showed concavity after a first showed conveity! Something very like fright had come over them all, with Lovecraft feeling the most fright of them all! Slowly, he stepped onto the foot of the monolith. And it was there that he saw it. The immense carved door.

On it, it contained a familiar squid dragon bas-relief. It was like a big barn door. He knew it was a door because of the ornate lintel threshold and jams around it. But he couldn't make out whether it lay flat like a trapdoor or slantwise like an outside cellar door. How could any door in the universe be so vast?! It looked like he could climb it as if it was horizontal!

Then, very softly and slowly, the acre great panel began to give inward at the top, and he saw that it was balanced. Lovecraft only watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion, it moved anonymously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset!

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material! The tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality. Port obscured, such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its eon long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky.

It seemed to call to him again. Beckoning him inside. Once again, Lovecraft could not resist its call.

He entered the massive door, fearing that, at any possible moment, it would slam faster than any known supernatural speed behind him, trapping him within for an eternity. Yet it remained still. The chanting was faint now, as he heard only his own echoing footsteps more loudly than them. It sounded like he was not alone.

What was beyond the door was…a chamber. A dark massive ancient chamber, which felt just as dead and wrong as what lay on the outside of the city. What dark and twisted race used to live here? The Great Old Ones were truly like the gods, yes, but did any worshippers live here once upon a time, long long ago, in such a dark and grimm fairy tale?

Lovecraft's own twisted and mad mind seemed to frighten him. How he wished so desperately to be this alternate version of himself, where he would never be plagued by such figures of imagination that he created. But back home, it was HE who was imaginative. Dreamt and created by Azathoth itself, whereas in this universe, it was he who dreamt and created Azathoth.

Finally, at the end of the massive and long chamber, Lovecraft came face to face with the most terrifying sight of them all: The monster to end, scare, and kill all other monsters! Dead, in an eternal slumber, yet dreaming as well.

Cthulhu.

The massive giant, miles tall and as high as a mountain, stayed eerily still, restrained by magical energy bindings. They wrapped around his arms, his legs, his shoulders, his wings, his entire body. Here, he was a soulless vessel. For Fear to possess and inhabit.

There had to be a way. A way to destroy this accursed creation of his once and for all. And yet, as he stared upon the fearsome form, Lovecraft wondered how he was not mad. Perhaps his sanity had been long gone, vaporized long ago upon death.

He guided his vision to the nearby R'lyehian text carved into the walls and stone tablets, frantically trying to translate it. He had to hurry. He could sense something happening. A dark chaotic source of magic, growing stronger and stronger!

"The…Ultimate…" He read. "Will bring…terror…and…chaos…by…becoming…the key…to…to…to…"

His eyes widened with sheer horror. No…no, this couldn't be! NO!

"No…no, no! NOOOO! What have I done?! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!"

Lovecraft sprinted out of the chamber as fast as he could. The chants grew louder and louder. He had to get out of here!

He couldn't look back. He dashed to the exit door, praying to God that it would not close until he escaped! But then…before he could leave…

Fear seized him. And he looked behind him. No…dear God, NO!

The dark chaotic energy seeped into Cthulhu completely, the booming echo of thunderous laughter roaring throughout the city!

He couldn't move. He couldn't run. He couldn't even scream for help! His presence! His mere presence alone as the Ultimate, in the presence of Great Cthulhu in his house of R'lyeh!

"IA! IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN! IA! IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!"

The chant grew louder and louder, faster and faster! Madness seized Lovecraft's mind once more, and as he felt the last of his remaining sanity break, he heard a dark and terrible voice speak in his mind…

"AT LAST."

With a terrible sound the likes of which cannot be described to the mortal sane mind, the dreaded Great Dreamer opened his dark and glowing pale green eyes!