"I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of my time."
As per wiki policy, spoilers are off. You have been warned.- Let's start with Spite. Spite, Spite, Spite. Where do we begin?
- Spite is a terrifying Serial Killer who relishes killing and does it purely for fun. He lures his victims through deceit and lies, whether it's pretending to be a friendly stranger to little girls or a penitent supplicant to well-meaning priests.
- He is Nightmare Fuel incarnate, especially since he specifically goes out of his way to prey on the lonely or vulnerable where possible, particularly people who live alone and have few friends.
- He is an extremely accurate recreation of a serial killer in every way, even down to using whatever seems to be the victim's most prized possession as his weapon and then keeping it as a trophy afterwards. He later gets super strength and durability and ability to life drain people among other terrible powers in an experiment on death row inmates, which turned him into an Implacable Man vampire serial killer.
- That's not even getting into his eventual death at the hands of the heroes and resurrection, where a demon god offered him a deal to bring him back to life if he continued murdering people to help bring the god into our realm, and Spite agreed, despite resurrection usually being a very unpleasant experience in the game's universe.
- And if you think there's ever anything that lessens the terror here, You. Are. Wrong. Every single time the story hints he might have a change of heart (such as the priest incident), it turns out to just be the writers pulling Yank the Dog's Chain. There's reasons he's on the game's Complete Monster page despite being a street-level villain.
- Inverted Universe Guise. According to the Letters Page he's still a goofball who thinks he's in a comic, but he's now also an unhinged psychopathic madman. He does things like beat people with baseball bats while cheerfully asking the readers to watch him because "every comic needs a villain", and it's implied he does the awful things he does solely to try and get attention from and entertain the readers.
- Later, he finds a way out of the Inverse-Verse and into the space between time where he has a fight with La Comadora. It turns out he's so dangerous and powerful that the only way she can think to stop him is to send him into a dimension literally full of black holes. And even then, this only traps him, not kills him.
- Gloomweaver is terrifying. Makes sense for a guy whose cult started out in a horror comic (pre-CCA, of course). And, unfortunately, unlike the Letters Page Cult of Gloom, this cult isn't fun. They sacrifice humans and babies. Gloomweaver himself started out as a necromancer who performed a ritual to turn himself into a demon god, and he continues his old magical ways by resurrecting dead cult members as zombies. The cult goes out of their way to generate as much fear and misery in the world as possible to bring their dark god to our world. Gloomweaver feeds on that generated despair and grows stronger every time. And if he breaks out he'll turn the world into a living nightmare where everyone is perpetually scared and miserable.
- The Void is in many ways Nightmare Fuel: The Cosmic Force. It's a realm that is essentially "Ur-Magic" and is full of chaotic energies that shift constantly into strange surreal landscapes and creatures that operate according to Blue-and-Orange Morality at best and are actively malevolent at worst. When it comes into contact with "normal" matter it essentially erodes it like a magical acid, so even people who are experts in using it for magical power have to actively protect themselves in some way from direct contact with it. In the Tactics universe where the cosmic protective barriers are gone, there are entire planets and regions of space that have succumbed to it. In both main universes The Scholar is eventually killed by it after accidentally coming into direct contact with it. Even the main hero who uses the Void—Argent Adept—while he's very much an actual hero and not an Anti-Hero, he still has his creepy moments:
- He's willing to use as last-ditch desperate maneuvers the Dangerous Forbidden Technique of destroying one of his instruments (which severs the connection to the Void of the Virtuoso who owned that instrument, a connection they retain even after their mortal form dies, and which would kill a still-living Virtuoso) not once but twice. Including doing so once to his own instrument, which he only barely survives due to using a Blood Magic ritual on himself first.
- Thanks to said ritual he accidentally becomes partly possessed by the Crimson Conductor, a Virtuoso creepy in his own right who practiced Blood Magic (and "taught" AA the ritual that AA used) extensively himself and would track down other potential Virtuosos and drain them fatally of their Void energy rather than train them. This results in AA not only becoming incredibly domineering
◊, but the digital game gives his matching in-game variant the world's most insanely creepy◊ Slasher Smile, on someone who generally almost never smiles to boot. - Then there's his time in the Bloodsworn Colosseum. Kaargra gets fed up with him hanging back and supporting and protecting everyone else rather than actually doing any fighting, so she offers a prestige title to anyone who can drag him into fighting. When many of the gladiators rush him, he responds by opening portals into the Void where creepy Void spirit... things... start dragging the gladiators one by one into unknown probably deadly fates within the Void. Kaargra decides to give him the prestige title instead in response—that of "Death-Caller", as he "calls Death itself to fight for him". Yep.
- One thing that even the creators themselves admittedly might have been a little over the top creepy was the fate of Mister Fixer, who after being killed was resurrected... in the form of his body being zombified and then his ghost being forced to possess his own zombie body. It takes the closest thing the game has to actual creator gods to put him back to rights.
- At one point the creators had a "Behind the Scenes" episode where they created an entirely new thing on air. What they created were Oni Masks, which are created by arcane rituals which trap the spirits of people who died violently into a mask. When put on they not only merge the spirit and the person wearing the mask permanently into some new monstrous being, but that being is consumed with rage up until the point when the rage and magical ritual causes their heart to explode into essentially a cloud of dangerous magical shrapnel. And one of the game's arcane villains creates these masks regularly and gives them to his minions, effectively turning them into magical suicide bombers. C&A even refer to it as a magic Cyanide Pill at one point.
- The Miststorm. A magical anti-life mist created after Nightmist became the gate. The storm is slowly taking apart the tactics timeline. Worse yet, it succeeds. But that's not the worst of it. It does the one thing thought impossible. It kills Haka! Multiple times! The only reason he survives is because the power of all the different Hakas he's absorbing keep resurrecting him.
- Iron Legacy is what happens when Legacy snaps, and it's not pretty. To summarize: in an alternate universe Baron Blade kills Legacy's daughter, causing him to murder Baron Blade and subsequently go on a rampage in an attempt to kill anyone he perceives as a evil. Pretty much every hero in the world (and some villains) makes an attempt to stop him and he's just too strong for them. Not even Haka, arguably the strongest hero in the Sentinels Universe, can damage him. Eventually it gets to the point where things are so bad that destroying the Iron Legacy timeline is considered a mercy.
- Void Guard Writhe is terrifying. Because he has an OblivAeon shard embedded in his forehead, he is constantly moving closer and closer to insanity. He has a tendency of Mind Raping his opponents and leaving them gibbering, traumatized messes. He also enjoys toying with his opponents, playing terrifying mind games with them. The only thing that even remotely keeps him on the good side of the morality scale is that he only does these things to villains. To make things worse, he actually does become a villain in the Vertex Timeline and kills Mainstay and the Idealist. Oh, and it turns out his Shadow Cloak is actually a Scion of OblivAeon. At the end of OblivAeon, said Scion manages to tear the cloak off of him, but it's a painful process and leaves him with a feverish desperation to somehow get it back.
- Absolute Zero is a slight twist in that while he himself isn't really any more inherently terrifying than any other powerful hero, his life is an endless string of horrifying incidents. It starts off with an argument with his fiancee leading her to storm off in a huff and get killed by a drunk driver in the process, leaving him with feeling like he was to blame. Then after spiraling into depression he ends up as a janitor in one of the worst companies in the Multiverse to keep the bills paid, which leads to him getting his powers thanks to an accident caused by his employer violating virtually every OSHA regulation in existence. Said powers come at a cost of making his body temperature so low he both can't exist outside of a suit or special chamber without being severely burned and he also can't touch another human being ever again without giving them severe frostbite, leaving him forcibly socially isolated. Then the US government decided to essentially blackmail him by only offering said suit and chamber he needs to live in exchange for forcing him to be a hero on their behalf. And said hero job frequently involves the enemies deliberately targeting his suit for destruction and leaving him in the resulting incapacitating pain. No wonder the man is a deeply cynical, cranky mess much of the time.
- Dark Visionary showcases exactly how powerful Visionary's Story Breaker Powers are. Her first act upon fully taking over Visionary's body is to banish Skinwalker Gloomweaver from reality with a wave of her hand! She then proceeds to murder an entire lab full of scientists and erase the memory of the events from Tachyons mind and almost Mind Rape Citizen Hammer, among other horrible things.
- The regular version of Sergeant Steel has an amusing image on its Incapacitated side, showing him freaking out (cigar dropping from his mouth and all) as the Bomb Specialist shrugs, the bomb behind her about to go off. The Collector's Edition version's Incapacitated side shows the outcome: Sergeant Steel on a stretcher, entire body burned to a crisp, his left arm gone. In-story, that bomb kills his entire team except for the Bomb Specialist, who "merely" gets out with severe scarring.
- In Dark Watch Vol. 1 #137, the Dark Watch team is captured by Werewolves. All of them are trapped in suitably creepy ways (Harpy is magically drugged, Nightmist is trapped in a tube of blood, Mr. Fixer is buried alive with a metal stake driven through his heart, etc, etc.) but the trap that takes the cake in terms of creepyness is Expatriette's trap in which they magically reduce her mental state to that a of a child. When Setback and Harpy (the only two to escape) find her, she's having an imaginary tea party with sticks and stones that she believes are dolls and a particularly scary werewolf that she thinks is her father. The worst part is that she consistently mentions "Citizen Mom" with what is clearly fear, talking about how if they're too loud she'll hear and they'll all get in trouble. Then Setback and Harpy incapacitate the Werewolf and she loses it, forcing them to leave her there.
