Punishment

"You are going to pay."

(CRACK!!)

Those were the first words of the woman who, without giving him time to process the danger, grabbed his arm and snapped it in two, causing the fractured bone to tear through skin and muscle in a grotesque display of raw flesh.

"AAAAARRGGHHH!!!"

(BAAMM!!)

Immediately after, she landed a brutal punch to his face that shattered his jaw and sent him soaring through the air until he slammed violently against the floor.

"... A-aaagh... Gugh... ¡Bluagh...!"

The clown rolled across the pavement while spitting out fragments of teeth, cartilage, and thick threads of black blood.

"Get up, I'm not done with you yet."

With those ice-cold words, the woman began walking toward him at a slow, methodical pace, completely shutting down any gap for escape.

"How dare you...?!"

Desperate, choking on his own blood, and with his mind overwhelmed by sheer panic, the clown shrieked toward the crowd of empty shells surrounding him.

"P-puppets, attack! Kill her!"

At his command, the dozens of humans under his control charged en masse directly at the intruder.

"In the way."

Believing that she would waste time attempting to evade or incapacitate them without killing them, the curse tried to crawl backward to take advantage of the distraction.

"{Blood Manipulation: Thousand Needles}"

However...

(Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!!!)

From the woman's hands erupted gushes of hyper-condensed blood that petrified into thousands of fine red spikes, fired at supersonic speed.

(¡¡¡Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack!!!)

The needles pierced through skulls, chests, and throats of the puppets, tearing their bodies apart in an instant shower of viscera and severed limbs.

"..."

And without altering her indifferent expression by a single millimeter, the woman kept advancing over the mangled flesh.

(Tap... Tap...)

Faced with this scene, the clown scrambled backward on his hands and knees through the viscous mud of blood and human remains, raising his arms in hysterical trembling.

"Hellooo... Please forgive me... Aghh...!!!"

But...

(BAAMM!!)

Before he could articulate another word, the woman stomped his face into the ground and, gripping his neck with an iron clutch, began slamming his head against the concrete over and over.

(Baam, baam, baam, baam, baamm!!!)

The sound of cranial bones fracturing and skin bursting echoed through the room; the strikes were not meant to kill him immediately, but to grind his anatomy with precise force to inflict the maximum pain possible without knocking him unconscious.

(Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why?!)

With his eyes bulging in agony and his face reduced to an amorphous mass of exposed flesh and spinal fluid, the creature let out a guttural shriek.

"WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!"

At the scream, the woman stopped the blows only to drive her sharp nails directly into his trachea, piercing the soft tissue and twisting her fingers inside his throat.

"Arrgh...!"

The woman's gaze, burning in a toxic crimson, locked onto the clown's dying pupil.

"Do you want to know why you are about to die?"

Through her buried nails, the woman began pumping her own blood inside the curse's vascular system. The foreign fluid acted like pure acid, eating away and scorching the blood vessels from within.

"You and I are trash... However... If there is a difference between the two...?"

The clown felt his veins swell abruptly beneath his skin like black snakes, bursting at multiple points as the alien blood burned every nerve and internal organ in unbearable agony.

"... And that is that you have laid your hands on what belongs to me."

And with that ice-cold sentence, his fate was sealed in the purest horror.

"{Blood Manipulation: Blood Explosion}"

The injected blood began to boil wildly, forcing the clown's biological structure to expand monstrously.

"¡¡¡Ggguuuaaa-AAAAAHHHG!!!"

His eyes popped inside their sockets, his skin tore open in dozens of bloody fissures, and his limbs contorted backward as his body turned into a pressurized container on the verge of detonating.

"¡¡¡Kggghhh-AAAAAAHHH!!!"

With his perception of time tragically slowed down by the trauma, the curse experienced every single microsecond of the agonizing process as his entrails liquefied before the internal pressure utterly destroyed his existence.

(BOOOOMM!!!)

Until finally a detonation of organic matter, ground bones, and thick blood painted the walls of the room, leaving behind only a studio soaked in grotesque remains that slowly faded away into the void.

"..."

So all that remained of that curse in the silent study was a bloodstained room as space crumbled.