Resonance

Guts, Casca, Isidro, Puck, Jerome, Farnese, and Serpico inch along Albion's outer wall, everyone but Casca and Puck jabbing burning brands into the faces of the corpse mounds to keep them at bay. When Isidro asks what the blob-like things are, Puck names them the accumulated malice of those who died from plague and torture, swelling as it drinks in the feelings of all it consumes, thick with resentment and a craving for salvation. Isidro objects that this cannot be the whole of it, or such mounds would blanket other places too, and Farnese agrees, struck by how much the scene recalls the possessed dogs that set upon her a month earlier.

A tendril snakes up from the mass and strikes at Farnese, but Guts pitches a handful of miniature bombs down its gullet before it can reach her. Saved and sunk to her knees, she is raised by Serpico and finds herself staring at the back of the man who walks straight into the dark. Isidro warns that the mass is also stealing up from behind. Farnese's reflex is to pray, but Guts tells her to stop, to open her clasped hands and put them to work driving the spirits off. Steeled by this, she sweeps her brand at them, guarding the rear with Isidro and Serpico while Guts and Jerome hold the front.

Nina, still boxed in her barrel, fares little better, flung about violently as the mass heaves it around. She panics and shoves at the lid, then coughs blood into her hands and remembers Luca's words about the fearful clinging hardest to life. Steadying herself, she curls up, willing to endure the terror if it means she lives. Inside the sealed town, the refugees who barricaded themselves have turned the Tower into bedlam, packed into halls and stairs around a central shaft that runs nearly its full height, and many are jostled into that pit and devoured by the mass rising below.

Puck turns the group toward the Tower as its walls burst apart and the mass surges out to resheathe the whole structure, climbing toward the top. Casca screams, and Guts folds her into another embrace as the brick hand becomes a tower of human faces. Atop each finger stand the incorporeal God Hand, Void on the thumb, Slan on the middle, Ubik on the ring, Conrad on the little finger, with the index empty of Femto. Puck feels every soul, living and dead, yearning for one thing, the world the Egg of the Perfect World means to bring forth. Seated in the palm, its features settled into a human face, it smiles in contentment and weeps tears of blood like a beherit come to life.

Puck identifies the spirit mounds as the massed malice of the plague and torture dead. Guts saves Farnese from a lunging tendril and pushes her to abandon prayer and fight, and she takes up a torch to defend the rear. Nina endures inside her barrel by recalling Luca's counsel. The Tower's walls explode and the mass reclads it in human faces, crowning its fingers with the God Hand's shadows as the Egg weeps blood like an activated beherit.

Running twenty-one pages in Young Animal issue 23 on November 24, 2000, Resonance builds toward the incarnation. It explains the nature of the spirit mass, marks Farnese's turn from helpless prayer toward action, and stages the eerie transformation of the Tower into a hand of faces bearing the God Hand, with Femto's absent finger foreshadowing his coming.