Nightmare Fuel / Arknights

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The appearance of such an aberration on the battlefield is almost beyond imagination.

Let's face it: living in Terra sucks, BIG TIME. Apart from the ongoing Oripathy disease across the world from the leftovers of the rampaging Catastrophe events, it becomes slowly evident that other than the disease, the world is on the verge of untold threats ranging from genuine Eldritch Abomination instances to multiple factions hellbent on causing destruction for their own gains... and beyond.

General

• The very nature of Oripathy infection. To wit, it takes longer for the infected to suffer its various symptoms before getting crystallized to death, and the crystallized body then will infect everyone in the vicinity. Not only is it incurable with a 100% mortality rate, but the non-infected also treat the victims with fear and disdain instead of sympathy, and ostracize them in every way they can. Most infected are even punished for their status, either with flat-out cruelty like the Ursus empire or in secrets like Wei Yenwu​ does. And with Originium basically being the lifeblood of the world, it is extremely difficult not to come into contact with it and contract Oripathy.
  • In "Stories of Afternoon", Midnight and Orchid stated that they didn't know how they contracted Oripathy. Orchid's employers suspected she came in contact with Originium randomly for a while without her knowing, while Midnight suspects that his rivals sent him to spend time with an Infected without him knowing. It shows that Oripathy can be contacted easily, without being known until symptoms show up.
  • There aren't many cases in that you can actually see the physical effects of Oripathy due to most characters either being in the earlier stages of infection or wearing body-concealing clothing (or both), however, Lappland is in the advanced stages and wears clothes that show off her legs. This lets you clearly see the black, jagged crystal shards growing painfully out of her skin.
  • The collab event "Originium Dust" has us witness firsthand what happens when a person dies due to succumbing to their Oripathy infection. The Oripathy lesions and crystals growing from an infected person will start glowing and get brighter until finally, the infected person's body disintegrates into Originium dust. Despite the whole process being described as a "Brilliant, dazzling, prismatic light" the very sight of it horrified Ash. To add insult to injury, Tachanka confirms that even if the body is buried beforehand, the light and Originium dust can still seep past the earth.
  • Furthermore, the idea is that there are people who actively seek to inject Originium into living people. This was only vaguely addressed by Silence, but the third-anniversary video has a short feature from the perspective of Ptilopsis who accesses Rhine Lab's database. All is fine, introducing the branches and the directors of the scientific sections until Ptilopsis tries to access the highly confidential file about the Flame Demon Incident. The visuals immediately glitch out, the voice gets a dark filter over it, and we see a faded and discolored but rather graphic bit◊ of Originium being directly injected into cells. Some still images don't justify it as it can be seen behaving like any normal piece of tissue would, until what seems like a large syringe injects it with Originium that immediately starts assimilating the cells. As if that wasn't enough, this painful process is already implied to have happened to Ifrit.
• Continuing on that, what we know about the Flame Demon Incident. Rhine Lab is very powerful and seems to have its hands everywhere all over Columbia, and Kirsten Wright is all at the head of it. The same Kirsten Wright, who, by the way, has For Science! as a primary motif. And so, she together with a number of other people took or created a young girl, and artificially infected her body with Originium For Science!.

Main Story

Episode 04: Burning Ruin

• Chapter 4 has Reunion forces under Mephisto round up any survivors they find in Chernobog, before gathering them in one place and burning them alive for the sole purpose of sending a message. Keep in mind that it's feasible that most of these people were innocents who didn't do anything wrong.
  Frostleaf: It's... a burning hellscape of malevolence and madness...

Episode 06: Partial Necrosis

• While Mephisto's zombie horde made their debut in the finale of Episode 5, they were just visually represented in the story cutscene as either recycled Reunion soldiers or Junkmen. Episode 6 however, gave us a more detailed depiction of the horde, As pictured above, they look like ghouls or pale decaying corpses about to swarm their victims. It's something straight out of a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Wei Yenwu raincoat squads executing any living infected in the slums. In an effort to purge Lungmen from the infected, Wei Yenwu used the chaos of the fighting that had rocked the city in order to silently dispose of any possible hint of rebellion, starting with the Infected. The scene of what happened is similar to what happens in the real-life Holocaust, as the raincoats silently eliminated each and every one before they even have a chance to run and even if they did, hunted down relentlessly before their bodies are dumped into the sewers by the dozens. For all of Wei's pretentious acts that he did in service of Lungmen, it was still nothing sort of nightmarish at how easy he is to order genocide.
• In Chapter 6, there's a dialogue that describes Kal'tsit's way of summoning the Mon3trs, which is very creepy. The Mon3trs come out directly from her spine when she calls for them, and even Crownslayer is scared by that scene.

Episode 07: Birth of Tragedy

• Patriot lost his true son, then he lost FrostNova, the former by his own hands no less which inspires his rebellion. His true son had been the victim of a purge under the Ursus Government, a purge that is done under Patriot's own command. The sheer horror Patriot had to experience knowing he had willingly, albeit unknowingly murdered his own son must be frightening.
• Rosmontis is as unnerving as she is powerful. Her behavior is already somewhat off-putting and downright unstable at times, but then combine that with her insanely strong psychokinetic abilities that she coldly sics on the Reunion members she seeks revenge on. We don't see exactly what happens, but what little description we get isn't pretty, to the point where the Doctor is downright traumatized by the display, and Kal'tsit even warns that directly seeing her Arts can drive the weak-willed outright insane. Seeing a 14-year-old girl voluntarily step into battle and wield such terrifying powers is unsettling, especially since they depend on her emotional state in order to not leak out and cause catastrophe like, let's say, obliterating an entire mobile city.
• It is implied the Reunion death squads or looters are still roaming the ghost city still as implied by Guard. Even despite Patriot's warning of imminent execution, death squads and looters are still under his radar; free to engage in barbaric actions that harm the remaining civilians still in the city such as Tatiana. The survivors had to live and hide in fear every day, hoping that they couldn't be found by the death squads like something out of a Dystopian movie.
• In his final moments, as Patriot realizes Amiya is the Lord of Fiends, he utters an ancient Sarkaz prophecy with very grim implications:
  I see cities, devastated.
  I see Originium, blanketing the land.
  I see you, black crown on your head, melting millions of lives, into nothing but memories.
  I see the, King of Sarkaz, enslaving all peoples, everywhere.
  [...]The young, King of Sarkaz...You, you...
  Will be the most horrific disaster to afflict our world.
  She must die! Or else, the world will die!

Episode 08: Roaring Flare

• Mephisto's final fate during Chapter 8 is as equally as tragic as it is horrifying. In his attempt to eliminate his most recent memories regarding the demise of Faust, in desperation, he used the sarcophagus where the Doctor was put under before. What he got wasn't pretty. Instead of losing his memory, he instead transformed into some sort of....mutated Liberi several feet taller than a regular one, with Originium crystals jutting out of him. He can't even fly, nor even walk like a regular avian, he has instead been reduced to just pitifully crawling with his so-called wings.
• The result of Mephisto's transformation wasn't limited to just himself either. As soon as he walked...or rather, crawled out of the sarcophagus, he began passively spreading Originium particles around him that induces bizarre mutations to any living being they made contact with, starting with his Sarkaz escorts by turning them into aberrations that made the Enraged Possessed infected look tame in comparison. The sarcophagus hadn't just devolved Mephisto, it had accelerated his Oripathy to the point he became patient zero of a severe biohazard. It was so bad that Rhodes Island operators under Kal'tsit and the Doctor have to fight the horde using biohazard safety equipment. Be mindful that the mutation begins as soon as the particles made contact, not when Mephisto prompted it to happen with his Arts unlike before. Let that sink in, this happens naturally.
• Throughout the entire experience, it's implied Mephisto is slightly aware of what happened to him. Locked in a constant state of suffering like the very same Infected he used his powers on, all he can do was remember what had brought him here as he waited for his demise.
• Worse, Kal'tsit doesn't even consider Mephisto's fate the worst possibility, recounting a past experience where countless scientists' bodies melted together into a mountainous "flower" of mutated flesh that spread Oripathy like some kind of viral plague.
• The duke of Kashchey's implied method of living longer than he should be? Possession. How many bodies had he used and discarded to extend his life for so long?
• Talulah's parasitic relationship with Kashchey. For the longest time, Talulah is imprisoned in her own body, unable to do anything. She was forced to watch as the the Reunion Movement she fought and bled so hard to build, is slowly ruined by the hands of her so-called adopted father. Her friends are dying one by one and she can't do anything about it.
• Fancy being a victim of dying by being set on fire? The entire village that Talulah burned had to experience that. If they hadn't been lost to the fire, the smoke inhalation would've killed them. Both would lead to death slowly and painfully, both the Asshole Victims and the innocents who had nothing to do with the murder of the Infected. One of the stages in Episode 8 is a fully-automatic sequence where Talulah is depicted pursuing a group of fleeing Ursus civilians into a dead end (the map terrain shows only one entrance, the one that she steps in from), and she proceeds to calmly cut down or burn all of them before the stage ends.
  • Speaking of the murder of the Infected, why did Talulah decide to burn down the village? When a group of Infected survivors appeared looking for help, instead of helping or even refusing or attacking them, the villagers tricked them into entering a building allegedly storing food, then locked them inside and let them starve to death, to the point where the walls are covered in scratch marks from them trying to claw their way out. As Talulah pointed out, they could have chased them away or even straight-up killed them, but they instead chose to give them a false sense of hope before killing them in the cruelest, most drawn-out way possible.

Episode 09: Stormwatch

• The way that Dublinn kills civilians over the slightest of infractions is very unsettling. It's clear that even the person they force to be the executioner is unhappy about it, as merchants have been killed over refusing to sell to Dublinn.
• One of the most terrifying weapons to be used in modern warfare on Terra goes on full display when the conflict really ignites. Originium is already a hazardous substance to handle, and some of the forms it can take are so dangerously active that they will inflict an advanced and difficult-to-treat form of Oripathy if it gets into a person's body via wounds. Thus, weapons made of Active Originium that scatter fragments of the most dangerous form of Originium around, Infecting all who are wounded by it, are the most fearsome of terror weapons. And this episode sees one being deployed. The effects of this weapon are shown by one of the members of Dublinn, who got caught in the blast, and are subsequently rushed to Rhodes Island for emergency treatment.

Episode 10: Shatterpoint

• Kazdel's raid on Eartha's base shows off exactly why the Sanguinarch is easily the most feared of Theresis' generals. With a single, simple gesture, he reduces groups of Eartha's best fighters into pools of blood, and absolutely nothing Rhodes Island throws at him so much as fazes him. All the Doctor, Amiya, and their allies can do are run, and ultimately the only reason they manage to escape is that the Sanguinarch got bored of the chase.

Episode 11: Return to Mist

• The Sanguinarch continues to be horrifying. When Logos needs to distract him so the rest of Rhodes Island can accomplish their objective, he does so by mashing the Sanguinarch's Berserk Button by insulting his and his clan's loyalty to Theresis. The Sanguinarch proceeds to absolutely lose his shit and massacres his own men so he can use their blood to power himself up before attacking Logos in a mad fury.

Side Stories

"Children of Ursus"

• Remember those three (now five) quirky Ursus students who seem oddly cheerful despite being the survivors of a horrific Catastrophe that razed their hometown to the ground? You will never see them the same way again after going through the lore revealed in Children of Ursus. Imagine, if you will, a bunch of school children trapped in the middle of a disaster area with no adult supervision and basically left to rot by Reunion forces under Mephisto. The noble factions promptly tried to hog all the food for themselves, after which the equivalent of war broke out before their food supplies were destroyed in an accident, forcing these students to murder and possibly cannibalize each other in order to survive. Let us remind you that these students are literal children.
  • Of the five members of the group, Gummy seems to be the most cheerful and happy all the time, but in actuality, she's the one hit the hardest by the tragedy. By all accounts, it was her of all people who had to eat the corpse of a fellow student in order to survive. One shudders to imagine what horrors she must have had to go through, and then it dawns on the player, that her sunny, happy-go-lucky persona isn't quite genuine, but a coping mechanism, as her Talk lines after raising her Trust enough reveals. While she does a good job of hiding it, her PTSD does seep through occasionally, if her biting Dur-Nar is any indication, and Gummy will go feral when starved. Worse, she has to keep the lights on even when sleeping, since being shrouded in darkness brings back those terrifying memories and may cause her to lose herself. Though the students may have been rescued and given a new life within Rhodes Island, the trauma might very well haunt them forever.
  • One of Zima's Trust lines becomes Harsher in Hindsight when you read into her backstory:
    Talk after Trust Increase 2: "I found Istina and her gang along my travels. They had some company, but I dealt with them. Had no choice, they refused to behave themselves."
    • Zima killed or gave the order to kill students who are traitors. Keep in mind that she's a student. She had to be ruthless to keep herself and the Ursus Self-Governing Student Group alive. It is also why she is haunted by nightmares of the students she "dealt with". In the event story, it's even worse as she's taunted by her own conscience for various things she'd done during the Reunion's occupation at her school. It's no wonder she still suffers from PTSD from the events.
  • In Gummy: Habits, she listed a few things as her habit, probably adopted during the Reunion occupation of Chernobog. One of them is "Even if there's railing or guard, she will keep away from edges of buildings." Why? She saw Istina pushing her friend (It's even implied to be Istina's best friend) off the school roof for betraying Zima. And this memory of hers is suppressed as a coping mechanism.
  • In Istina: The Chosen Ones, Istina borrowed a machine from Kal'stit called "Self Exposure to Trauma for Self Therapy". It's a recording device she uses to let out her heart and thoughts. During her own session, she kept her teddy bear (the teddy bear from her E2 art) close to her. She reveals to the device that under her stoic facade, she laments what she had done to survive, watching her friend clinging to the side of the roof and watching her fall off the roof for betraying Zima. She was traumatized by that event so much that she kept that teddy bear named after her friend. She laments what she had done and begs for forgiveness from her friend. This is why asking her about Chernobog and her responses is very emotionally charged.
  • Little Miss Police: Before Spring. It shows Absinthe evading several Reunion patrols and trying to escape her school. She succeeds in doing so after a while. What makes this Nightmare Fuel is that the patrols knew where she was hiding and didn't bother to do anything to her. Why? "It's better to let them see what hell the world outside has become rather than killing them in ignorance. " was the reasoning one of the patrols gave when they were talking about her escape.
    • Even worse, the patrols actually contemplated capturing her and torturing her for fun if not for orders from Patriot to not harm any students.
  • While he didn't directly do anything to the students, it's implied Mephisto may have known what would happen when he trapped the commoners with nobles as he did. Yet it's possible that he did it anyways because of this very reason. If this is indeed true, tragic backstory aside, his sadism is sickening as hell.
  • The fact that the noble and common factions of the school were so quick to devolve into mad combat for resources, unable to put aside their differences and work with each other. In fact, even after Mephisto took Reunion and left, the students kept on fighting as if they enjoyed the carnage. The story clearly tries to sell that Hobbes Was Right.

"Operation Originium Dust"

• Levi Klitschko's experiments on the local wildlife and Infected are already unnerving, taking a leaf out of Mephisto's book and turning them into horribly mutated Originium monsters that follow his orders (due to him implanting Originium growths into his own body, no less), but by far the creepiest thing he creates is the Final Boss of the mission, the Essence of Evolution. An Eldritch Abomination that doesn't resemble a living thing as much as it resembles a vaguely spherical, inchoate mass of twitching flesh and sentient Originium, the thing instantly kills Levi after being released and goes on a rampage, tearing up the facility and disgorging a seemingly unlimited amount of lesser mutants from its body while reforming from any damage taken. Even worse, the thing evolves over time in its fight, mutating itself into increasingly grotesque forms, the last of which kills itself quickly as if it had evolved too far and is causing harm to its own body to continue mutating. The descriptions the game gives of it are unflattering, to say the least.
  • Worse still, its description and some words from the protagonists make it clear that this thing is so alien that its very nature contradicts everything in Terra, right from its origins of Levi coming to Terra and Originium existing on Earth. Unlike the mostly neutral data entries for enemies, its data entry seems almost unnerved, warning the player that this is something that fundamentally should not and must not be allowed to live.
  • In the end, the team can't even kill it normally due to its unstoppable proliferation, instead settling to blow it up with the mines it was made in, burying it underground. The scary part is that they never actually confirmed if it was dead or not.
  • Levi himself immediately shows himself to be one of if not the darkest villain in Arknights so far. There's no sympathetic background, no understandable motive such as power or money, and there's nothing he would not stoop to achieve his goals of pushing the boundaries of science, regardless of reason and sanity. Then there's his Slasher Smile when he requests his benefactors to 'Bring [him] more corpses', which is by far the creepiest facial expression in the game.
• Hell, even Team Rainbow, who are unambiguously heroic, become genuinely frightening when angered enough.
  • After Miarow's Heroic Sacrifice, Tachanka flies into a rage, threatening and attacking a captured enemy mercenary who is utterly terrified and begging for mercy. Tachanka would have likely killed him on the spot if Blitz didn't step in to stop him after the first blow. Seeing Tachanka, who is normally calm, easygoing, and amicable, getting this enraged is pretty damn scary.
  • Before Ash, Blitz, and Schwarz confront Levi towards the end of the story, they find a captive and unrepentant Drudge, who shamelessly tries to strike a deal with the three to save his own skin. Ash responds by having him let out of his cell before beating the living shit out of him with her bare hands, and only finishing when he's unable to even speak anymore. It's even accompanied by a CG◊ of her with Drudge's blood splattering over her face and knuckles, with her expression being one of pure wrath. Even if Drudge was a complete Asshole Victim who 100% deserved the beating, seeing Ash enact such violence, and the game depicting it in such detail to boot, is still quite unnerving.
• Equal parts sad and disturbing is that this side story shows us exactly what happens when an Infected person dies because of their Oripathy. While it was hinted at in the main story, it is displayed in equal parts with beautiful and frightening detail. The Infected person's body begins to glow and crystallize and eventually explodes into originium dust accompanied by a beautiful, mesmerizing multi-colored light. Rather telling is the reactions of veteran operators like Franka and Liskarm when they see the telltale signs of an accelerated transformation into an infectious vector - they swiftly grab the body and carry it to an enclosed room and cover any openings with whatever they can find, all with a clear indication that they are legitimately terrified of what would happen if the body transformed in the open. Also telling is what the veteran Tachanka tells Ash when she tries to see what is happening:
  Tachanka: Don't look. Just... don't.

"A Walk in the Dust"

• There are honest-to-god eldritch demons living on the outskirts of Terra. The Emperor's Blades, famed in-universe as being able to each exterminate an army by themselves, are the way they are because they've voluntarily sealed parts of these demons into themselves through pocket dimensions, running the risk of them leaking out and contaminating the world with... something otherworldly if their armor is to break. Not only are these things powerful enough that entire squads of Emperor's Blades are expected to face heavy casualties when fighting them, but they're also explicitly stated to grow stronger simply by being known. During Kal'tsit's battle with an Emperor's Blade sent to kill her, the only reason she's able to convince them to back down is that she's damaged their mask, and continued combat would pose a very real threat of that demon getting loose.
  • Worse yet, the Pursuer was still considering staying and fighting anyway due to how indignant they were towards Kal'tsit's prior actions of seemingly betraying Ursus because their Undying Loyalty is that strong to make them a Super-Persistent Predator that will quite literally hunt their enemies down to the ends of the earth if need be — the only thing making them back off altogether and finally leave is Kal'tsit postulating the idea that if he did let the demon out it would undoubtedly spark an international incident that might spiral into full blown war between Ursus and Victoria which would, if not lead to calamity for Ursus despite their confidence in them winning, severely hurt the country in the long run — the fear of that alone is what finally gets the wounded Blade to back off from chasing Kal'tsit further.

"Under Tides"

• You wanna know who caused the "Calamity" in Aegir? Look none other than the Seaborn, also known as the Abyssals. They are crinoid-like creatures looking like they came straight out of Lovecraft and they come in many different forms, ranging from a feathery flower to a completely boneless dog-like creature. Even worse? They are all led by some sort of Hive Mind, meaning that the Abyssals were mindless and that there could be a much more intelligent Seaborn that's pulling the strings.

"Near Light"

• The Animated Teaser for Nearl's big event shows Flametail making friends with some poor people at the bottom of the Kazimierz megacity. It then shows her desperately fighting to try and save them when assassins are sent after her and nearly kill her friends as collateral damage. She even soaks up an explosion to shield one of the girls and tumbles exactly like her plushie in midair. It's almost a relief that Nearl shows up to cut off the assassination attempt.
• Right before siccing them on Tola, we get treated to a scene where the Armorless Union is injecting drugs into the Corrupted and Withered Knights to prepare them for battle, with their groans of pain making it painfully clear how much they're suffering. The Union member doing the injections notes that they're suffering a Sarkaz-specific reaction to the injections, with the drugs in question being highly concentrated restoration gels originally used for mending armor, not humans. They even express concern that the injections will cause irreparable brain damage, only to continue increasing the concentration when their superior reminds them that "they're Sarkaz, not human". When Tola encounters them, he's so shocked and disgusted at the state they're in that he can't even recognize what they are as they attack him.
• Sure, it's awesome that the Doctor managed to arrange for Rhodes Island to have soft protection from the Armorless Union via a very profitable partnership with at least one core member of the K.G.C.C., but look at it from Platinum's point of view: You've just received yet another mission handed down by the Lazurites to kill another CEO. You sneak into their office, which is seemingly undefended, only for a campaign knight of near-equal skill to you to interrupt and prevent your attack. Not only is your target completely unafraid of your appearance, but they also begin calmly discussing openly with you how they've deduced that you've been duped by your seniors into running a very dangerous and unsanctioned mission. As if they were telling an accurate prophecy, you immediately receive a phone call from your real employer via the Rhodes Island office phone on the table, who tells you to stop the mission as it was not sanctioned, and your 'target' even tells you that the call is yours without even picking up the receiver. Your target then seemingly reads your entire character and desire for a break by correctly intuiting that you looked tired and offered you a chance to sit down with them and even offered you a cup of tea, and all the while you can't even tell if the entire sequence you just experienced was a mere coincidence or some kind of tailor-made contingency just for you. Spooky, isn't it? It's no wonder that Gravel relaxes at that point, she could immediately see that Platinum's will to keep fighting had fled out the window the moment the Doctor started talking - for one wonderful, terrific moment, Platinum and Gravel had a rare opportunity to see past the Doctor's slightly-goofy everyday facade and catch a glimpse of the legendary tactician many once called the Ghost of Babel.

"Phantom and Crimson Solitaire"

• The second boss, Big Sad Lock, is described as the "masterpiece" of the Troupe Master. The reason? Big Sad Lock was created when an Ursus youth, unable to handle being an apprentice to the Crimson Solitaire due to his peers bullying him, killed himself by throwing himself from a tower. The Troupe Leader, forbidding him from leaving, sealed his soul inside of Big Sad Lock, trapping him inside the castle forever.

"Mizuki and Caerula Arbor"

• One of the endings describes in horrific detail the Bad Future that Skadi the Corrupting Heart comes from. The Seaborn threat grows powerful enough to throw the entirety of Terra into utter chaos, to the point where not even the Grand Knights of Kazimierz and the Golden Knights of Leithania could do much to fight back. Remember the major demonic threat hidden within the Emperor's Blades? The Blades were forced to unleash the demons within them to create a defensive line against the Seaborn. It would buy some time, but even that eventually fails. That's right, even the mighty Emperor's Blades with extremely powerful eldritch demons in their bodies still stood no chance against the utter unpredictability and adaptability of the Seaborn. It's only the Doctor's survival and her own duty that leads Kal'tsit to create one last bastion for what's left of humanity to evacuate to. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Kal'tsit, Skadi, or rather Ishar'mla, focuses her gaze upon the Doctor, relentlessly sending out swarms of Seaborn just to rush to the Doctor's side, until everyone is dead and only she and the Doctor remain. And considering Skadi TCH's final entry in her operator record...
• Thorns's Monthly Squad story is also quite bleak. He hears the sea calling him, but doesn't know why. It isn't until the Seaborn threat emerges that he learns that his mentor is an Abyssal cultist and became a Seaborn, who reveals that he secretly made some modifications to Thorns' body and invites him to join the Seaborn too. Naturally, Thorns refuses and kills his former mentor. It doesn't end there, however. As the town he stays in gets overrun by the endless Seaborn, Thorns injects himself with a medicine created from his mentor's corpse, deciding to become a Seaborn to learn the truth and keep defending Iberia to his last breath, holding on to hope that the Doctor will kill him and put him out of his misery. God damn.
• Irene's Monthly Squad story brings up some high-octane Paranoia Fuel. It starts with 2 survivors reminiscing about a base reputedly impenetrable but fell because they rescued a stranded battalion that barely survived a Seaborn attack. The survivors either mutated into Seaborns due to wounds or despair and tore the defenses from within. There are manuals and guides to differentiate Seaborns from regular humans through their behavior from the Inquisition which has become useless due to their adaptability. One of the survivors attacks Irene before it is revealed that he has mutated into a Seaborn while still maintaining his Victorian memories. Paranoia and fear have become common phenomena to all survivors due to the Seaborn invasion.
• One of the most harrowing of all the Monthly Squad stories is Mizuki's, depicting a timeline where both he (acting as the Caerula Arbor's vessel) and Ishar'mla both fall in battle, unable to gain control over the Primordial Lifespring. The Lifespring then takes matters into its own hands, devouring both of them and doing the same to the last Firsborn, before consuming all of Terra in mere moments, replacing it with a homogenous ocean where everything is itself and all lifeforms have been converted into simple resources. The Doctor and Mizuki are left behind as presumably the only survivors, the Doctor already having been mutated into a Seaborn against their will due to being forced to feed on Mizuki's own limbs, but with the complete lack of any form of actual sustenance besides what Mizuki can painstakingly process from the environment, Mizuki admits that he can only delay the inevitable.

"Dorothy's Vision"

• Ferdinand's sociopathically maniacal hunger for results sees him permit and order all sorts of exploitative behavior, as he whips up a fervor in easily-impressionable Rhine Labs researchers like Astgenne and Dorothy that see them taking their research to unethical extremes, with the Pathfinders being exploited as easy test subjects. However, he is not the only corpo executive doing this sort of thing, as the unnamed Colonel from the Columbian Army is shown to have hired many research groups to satisfy his demand for wonder weapons to allow Columbia's military to become strong enough to challenge the Victorian Army in the aftermath of the second main story arc. It's a very dark glimpse into the other unseen costs of a voracious and aggressive military industrial complex, one that Saria has commited herself to opposing in the aftermath of the Ifrit Incident.
• Dorothy's ultimate creation, a means of creating an Arts Casting Gestalt born from the synchronized minds of multiple people, is a physics-defying construct that is terrifying in its unreal power and form. It forms the eye of a large storm of Arts-generated power that tears apart the surroundings almost like a Catastrophe, and it's just about as majestic and wondrous as Ferdinand hoped for.
• It is indicated that the testing site where Dorothy created her Art-driven superweapon is not unique, and that the Columbian wilderness is littered with "hundreds" of ruined test sites where Rhine and other tech firms have been conducting dangerous and destructive experiments. It is unknown just how many Pioneers and scientific personnel have died over the decades to give Columbia the technological advantage they so desperately seek.

"Il Siracusano"

• The storyline doesn't pull any punches with how awful it would be to live in a country run entirely by the Mafia. It's repeatedly mentioned that ordinary citizens who are supposed to be left alone by the familgie are often murdered for making minor missteps or just bad luck. The story even opens with a government worker fleeing from a mafia hitman, who is targeting him for the sole reason of weakening the government office he works for. Penance is only able to work as a judge without fear because she is closely allied with the Bellone famiglia, and other judges are frequently threatened, bribed, or even beaten into dropping their cases against the famiglie.
• One of Rubio's diary entries mentions how a group of government officials attempted to reform the famiglia system against Sicilia's will. Rubio describes showing up at an eerily quiet building and walking down the hall, only to notice pools of blood spreading underneath all of the office doors. A few days later, everything was cleaned up and business resumed with new officials, implying Sicilia had an entire government agency wiped out and replaced.
• As hilarious as her antics are, Lappland is absolutely terrifying because of her insanity, violence, and unrestrained hatred for Siracusan society. She remains completely unpredictable, casually murdering her own famiglia's soldiers and committing mass property destruction, with the sole aims of bringing back the "old" Texas and tearing down her home country's famiglia system. She's so terrifyingly insane and unpredictable that Zaaro himself cannot break her or make her submit to her will, and submits to her instead.

"A Flurry to the Flame"

• This story event finally shows off what one possible Catastrophe looks like, when Rathalos ignites a cloud of activated Originium powder inside a mine's cave system with his fire breath. A massive column of fire erupts as the activated originium powder releases all that energy, producing a genuinely terrifying explosion that destroys a large swathe of countryside and starting a massive forest fire.

"The Black Forest Wills a Dream"

• We get our first real glimpse into the Collapsals threatening Sami, and everything about them seems to completely defy conventional reasoning, with Typhon's unique Arts being pretty much the only thing that can even stave off their influence. Between Magallan having her senses distorted and hallucinating messages that turn out to be premonitions, the contamination causing visible distortions in spacetime yet not being detectable on camera, resurrecting the dead as erratic zombies, or manifesting simply from awareness, it's not just conventional techniques that don't seem to work against the Collapsals, but common sense itself. The worst part is that outside of vague imagery, we never actually see what they actually are, yet even a mere glimpse from Magallan or Gitano is nearly enough to drive both of them mad. It's only because Sami is arguably just as eldritch as the Collapsals that the Samifjod have been able to hold them off for so long.
• Even without the Collapse or the more prickly locals, there's something deeply unsettling about Sami itself in the way that it feels so out of place compared to every other nation on Terra. Even the likes of Kazdel, with all of its primordial history and mysticism, pales in comparison to just how plain inexplicable the things that happen in Sami are. The entire nation is seemingly a Genius Loci with no real rhyme or reason to anyone besides those used to handling it, the techniques used by its folk are less Arts and more just plain magic that can't be explained by modern standards, and just being in the country is to be at constant risk of death, insanity, or worse.
• There's something deeply unsettling about how the Ursus military brutalizes and oppress the Sami under the excuse of "civilizing" their country, to the point where they casually refer to them in the same way that one would address livestock, and anyone that even sympathizes with the Sami is either dismissed or fed endless propaganda until they become just as hateful. Even with the threat of the Collapse sometimes forcing them to work together, many of the Ursus patrols won't hesitate to turn on the same Sami that helped them mere minutes after the battle ends, with many of the more trusting tribes meeting untimely ends as a result. Even some of the less violent and more genuine Ursus patrols, like the caravan that was saved by Gitano's brother, still view the Sami as little more than ruthless savages.
• The "Black Mark" that Santalla has been hunting isn't just a normal rogue Ursus, it's a compromised Emperor's Blade that has fled their own kind and is spreading Collapse across the whole country. Even the notoriously brutal Ursus aren't willing to let this slide...which is why Liebafowl, the spy that Santalla was also tracking, went behind their backs to try and prevent the info from getting back to Ursus, effectively betraying the safety of their own country just to make the Sami suffer more.
• The box that Director Maryam told Valarqvin to deliver to Rhine Lab is a seemingly innocuous, transparent flower with no roots. However, it turns out to be a beacon of Collapse, and the moment Magallan opens the box, all hell breaks loose as it becomes aware of its own presence and begins warping the area around it, which would have corroded everyone in the whole building if Typhon hadn't intervened.
  It was a colorless flower, like a shadow cast by ice.
  But the moment the box was unsealed, the invisible air throughout the laboratory was dyed with myriad colors.
  It identified its current space, reoriented its position, and established its own territory.
  The Columbian researchers had no time to react. They did not realize they were being contaminated along with the entire lab, nor did they hear the thunderous noise that shattered the dead silence.
• A supplementary document released following the event depicts Beachbrella ignoring Typhon's pleas and performing experiments on corrupted animals, even going so far as to feed tainted meat to other animals, causing them to die. This of course backfires horribly when the Collapse starts spreading out of control, and when the security locked the researchers in with the Collapse until they fixed it, one of the lab techs lost their mind and smashed all the equipment, releasing the Collapse and instantly distorting the entire lab, with the exact details being redacted in the document. The only reason they escaped complete annihilation was because Typhon eventually returned with another Snowpriest to quell the corruption.

"Expeditioner's Joklumarkar"

• The Collapse Paradigms showcase just what the Collapsals are capable of in horrifying detail, with each debuff describing how the abominations have so casually distorted and reversed even basic concepts of logic or physics.
  De-quantification: The boundaries between numbers in this area have become blurred. Humans have lost the ability to recognize natural numbers.
  Intense De-quantification: The concept of numbers itself has become indistinct, and humans have completely lost the ability to use numbers at all.
  Non-linear Movement: The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line.
  Terrifying Entity: When innermost negative emotions become an actual monster...
  Pan-Civilization Paradox: The essence of civilization has been twisted, and the value of all products has become incapable of being explained with common sense.
  Barometric Disorder: Atmospheric pressure no longer adheres to any rule, and all matter has unavoidably become redundant from individual distress.
  Convergence Deficiency: An instrument is like a part of the user's body, the wear and tear on the machine equivalent to the damage its user suffers.
  Partial/Complete Cecity: Your brain begins to "naturally" skip some information, and this makes you feel comfortable. If you can't see it, it doesn't exist. If it doesn't exist, you don't have to think about it. It feels truly great to be so carefree with nary a worry.
  Image Corruption/Blackout: The PRTS operation log is not reflecting any system errors, but for some reason the Operators have been removed from the image. Even though the present situation has put a burden on your logistics work, PRTS insists that it is working normally, which is not normal.
  • Those last two paradigms are particularly disturbing due to the fact that they have a miniscule chance of appearing and there is absolutely no indication that they even exist as their slots in the log do not even appear until you’ve seen the effects, meaning you are likely to be completely caught off guard should you see them unless you were spoiled beforehand. And their effects themselves are pure Interface Screws, with the first one hiding enemy life bars and your Life Points, giving you no indication of how close enemies are to dying nor how much life you have left, meaning once you lose track of your life points every leak becomes all the more nervewracking as you won’t know how close you are to losing, while the second covers all your deployed units’ sprites with pitch black silhouettes to make it harder to distinguish who you even have on the field. While these effects affect the actual difficulty far less than any of the other paradigms, the fact that they directly interfere with your interface gives the feeling of the game itself glitching out on you making them arguably more horrifying to run into.

"Come Catastrophes or Wake of Vultures"

• The way in which the bank operating in Davistown systematically takes advantage of a government plan to gentrify the run-down mobile city plate is realistically terrifying. They use a combination of unfair insurance policies, and brutal loan plans with overwhelming interest rates, to grind down the already impoverished townsfolk, repossess their properties and large assets, then pressure them to sign up to be Pioneers in order to have their debts forgiven. Effectively, they are profitting from driving the poor out of town into the wild frontiers while being enriched by government kickbacks. Stubborn townspeople get harassed and even assaulted by the bank's legbreakers, hired to masquerade as bandits to put pressure on them to skip town.

Operator Records

• Sussurro's record Professional Doctor drives home just how inhospitable Terra is, and plays it for gruesome Medical Horror. A Rhodes Island team is called to Leithania for disaster relief after a Catastrophe disturbed a nest full of meter-plus-long, venomous insects and drove them towards an evacuating town. Those that weren't killed outright were left with horrific injuries, including a Savra who lost one of his arms trying to protect his family, with the other left in such a condition that it would likely have to be amputated too, and another victim who was somehow still conscious after having his abdomen torn open and his internal organs contaminated by poison. There aren't enough medics to treat everyone, and worse, many are Infected, meaning there's a high risk of an Oripathy outbreak should any of them die. The fact that Sussurro is able to keep her composure and take command despite this is impressive, but the idea that someone as young as her has been through so many similar, and in some cases even worse situations that this barely phases her is chilling in its own right.
• There's something chilling about how unruffled regular people are by the plight of girls that are abducted by slave-takers to be sold as chattel in Kazimierz. Gravel's Operator Record demonstrates quite clearly that this sort of nasty business has become fairly commonplace, as Gravel suffered this fate herself previously - she was lured out of her hometown with the promise of becoming a Knight of Kazimierz, only to be abducted and branded with a slave's barcode tattoo. On top of that, it's shown that slave-takers routinely ensure that the girls they abduct are transported far enough that even if they attempt to flee or get rescued in the case of would-be slaves rescued by Gravel in her attempts to ensure other girls don't share her fate, they cannot return home because it's too far away and they no longer know the way back. This is something that also befell Gravel, and it's shown that even as a promoted operator with Rhodes Island, her experiences of being abducted, and rescuing other girls who suffered the same fate, haunt her in her dreams.

Character-Related

• Mephisto's abilities are more than a little unsettling. He is able to revive slain infected, but as grotesque corpse-puppets that obey his every whim. However, it's implied that it's a case of And I Must Scream because it's clear that his zombies are aware and suffering all the while, to the point where his soldiers are terrified of the prospect of revival. They're not much better for those who have to fight them, since their insane durability, healing factor from Mephisto's Arts, and total inability to feel pain make them Nigh-Invulnerable to conventional attack.
  • There's also a large degree of Body Horror involved, as victims of his Arts have the Originium within their bodies grow and enlarge to the point where the shards pierce them from the inside out and jut out of their bodies. Worse still, he can force this on living infected.
  • In Chapter 6, it is shown what happens when Mephisto loses it and lets loose. His horde of zombies mercilessly attacks everything in sight, whether friend or foe and turns their victims into new members of the horde. They even resort to means like biting their foes or tearing the enlarged Originium chunks off their bodies and using them as thrown weapons.
  • His enraged horde is not only being driven to primal aggression but is actually being rapidly eaten from the inside out by their Originium infection and being driven even more insane by agony. Instead of regenerating health, the Enraged Possessed lose health over time because of their forcibly accelerated infection. Their descriptions are also more than a little frightening.
    Enraged Possessed Leader: An enemy combatant who has completely given in to primal madness as their life force is consumed. The infection has penetrated their bone marrow, and their death-defying aggression breaks the bounds of reason.
    Enraged Possessed Bonethrower: An enemy ranged combatant who has completely given in to primal madness as their lifeforce is consumed. The infection has penetrated their bone marrow, they will even rip out the Originium lodged inside their bodies to throw because of their deadened sense of pain.
• The sheer suicidal fanaticism some of the Reunion soldiers show can be unnerving at times. Some of them seem too enraged to do anything except scream Rhodes Island's name as they attack them on sight. They really give the impression of people who have had so much taken from them that they're desperate for some form of outlet.
• Will you willingly obey your orders knowing your superior might send you and your squad to die or disobey and risk jeopardizing the entire operation which might or might not decide the outcome of a war? This is the relationship between the Doctor and their operators during the Kazdel Civil War. While the present Doctor is no longer that person, the fact that they used to not see their operators as living people is appalling. Ines describes this well after mentioning how past Doctor saw their operators:
  Ines: We’re all objects. Inanimate objects. There was only one person, one thing really alive on that battlefield. And it was that one.
• The flavor text for Ptilopsis's module reveals that she was the test subject of a brain implant experiment that proved that Originium contained vast amounts of information and that she required an additional chip implant to offset the brain damage she suffered from the entire process (heavily implied to be caused by the Originium speaking to her in an incomprehensible language). This same experiment also wound up infecting her with Oripathy and is the whole reason she ended up attached to Rhodes Island for treatment at the request of Rhine Labs.
  • The mere idea that Originium can store information and "speak" to people given an interface raises some unsettling implications. What information is it storing, and what exactly is it that it's trying to "tell" people?
  • Further, the reason why she uses Robo Speak and suffers constant narcolepsy? In the former's case, Ptilopsis has to suppress her emotions because if she gets too emotional it can cause her brain and implants to overheat. Similarly, her constant narcolepsy is her implant forcing a temporary shutdown of her consciousness to let her brain cool down. If she didn't have these safeguards her brain would literally overheat and kill her.
• Suzuran's second module, "Children of Terra", is a terrifying glimpse at her backstory, as it is her old teddy bear, now burst open by an expanded crystal of Originium. It's a reminder of how violent and ruthless the Famiglia life in Siracusa is, since the booby trap was set up by some random thug from Saluzzo Famiglia.

Gameplay

• The challenge stage, Patriot's Last March H7-4, literally starts with a wall of Shield Leaders led by Patriot slowly approaching your health seal; combined with the OST and this adds a lot of pressure and intimidates any player.
  • Crosses a bit into the Awesome territory when you consider the fact that Patriot goes into battle wearing a suit of poorly-maintained Power Armor...and in spite of that, he is still a Damage-Sponge Boss. Knowing this, it makes one wonder how much harder the fight would be if he weren't a Death Seeker and actually took care of his suit.

Multiple Media

• The Rhine Labs spin-off manga introduced a little girl named Dalia who grew up dealing with a dysfunctional household and an abusive father who always called her a mistake due to having Oripathy since birth. One day, the abuse went far enough that her father killed his own wife who had always been protecting Dalia for years when he is about to do the same to Dalia, Dalia's Arts activated in self-defense and when the neighbors found them, the abusive sod's corpse was found completely dried and dehydrated, implying that Dalia used her Arts to dehydrate him to death. No wonder the neighbors decided that sending Dalia off to Rhodes Island to help her is her best bet for survival and away from her previously abusive environment.