Possession/mental violation (Takagiri has a rough one)
I’d repeatedly heard Sugawara referred to as “comatose.” This was true, but what everybody had left out was that he was also mangled. His body was a patchwork of burn scars, and there was no hair left on his head. His nose was destroyed. He was surrounded by beeping and humming medical equipment: a forest of IVs and intubation surrounding the central megalith of a heart bypass machine. He was effectively already dead, even though the vitals signs insisted he was alive.
“No boss at the end of the dungeon,” Hina quipped, leaning over the bed. “Looks like him, smells like him.”
A buzzing sound pulled my attention away from the screen. I looked over at the source: Amane, clenching her bionic fist so hard the tiny actuating motors in its joints were crying out in protest. Her delicate features were twisted by an emotion I couldn’t name and had never known, something in that bitter space between terror and profound loathing.
On-screen, Yuuka made a similar face for just a moment before her mantle’s mask dropped to neutral impassivity. A spike of jealousy crawled through me at her ability to simply choose not to emote within her mantle. Alice caught the expression.
“Yuuka? I need you to give us an honest answer, disregarding your own feelings. Is it safe for us to kill him right now?”
“Yes.”
Hina frowned, squatting at the side of the bed to look at Sugawara’s ruined visage in profile. “You absolutely sure, babe?”
“The sooner the better for Takagiri,” Ebi pointed out.
“Barring the bomb,” I couldn’t help but insert. I knew the Radiances onscreen couldn’t hear me, but I felt like I had to bring it up to the others in the room with me. “We still don’t know if—”
“Ezzen,” Ebi interrupted. “C’mon.” She said something in Japanese to Amane, who replied curtly and instantly. Ebi made an ‘OK’ symbol with a robotic hand. “If there is a bomb, Amane will handle it. We’re out of time.”
I was in no position to argue that. We were out of time, and there was absolutely no chance I was going to be able to convince any of the Radiances to delay. I took a deep breath and decided to trust Amane on this one. “Fine. Can we at least put her in first?”
“No,” Takagiri broke in, the first English words she’d said in what felt like hours. “I—I want to…” she blinked too slowly. “See him die.”
“…Fair enough,” I conceded, feeling rather overruled. Everybody else here had much more investment in this moment than I did; for them, this was the killing of one of their old monsters.
“You don’t have to watch it yourself,” Ebi pointed out. “You didn’t do so good with the last murder.”
I found I agreed with that and tried to focus on the coffin’s final checks. Some indicator lights had come on and were holding steady, which said we were as close as possible to turning it all the way on short of engaging the main wards. The coffin might have wound up being redundant, but it was something to do instead of bearing witness to Todai’s latest crime. I didn’t even want to know which of the three girls present would be the ones to do the deed.
“All good on our end,” I heard Ebi say.
As my hands traced along the coffin’s ward emitter mounts one last time in a final sanity check that everything was installed where it ought to be, I heard some shuffling and quiet discussion from the Radiances on the screen, which fell into silence as final deliberations concluded and the moment of execution came. I heard a hiss like a valve releasing air, then a wet noise that suggested a horribly manual and mundane killing, blade through flesh and sinew rather than any sort of magical annihilation. Then Amane exhaled, and I knew it was over.
The next few things happened very quickly.
The first is that Yuuka shrieked. “Ami ga—”
The second is that her voice was muffled, drowned out by a sound not unlike the sensation of one’s ears being waterlogged. At the same time, there was a flash of light on the screen, and in the moment that my eyes were reflexively drawn to the commotion, I saw that she had drawn her cloud of crimson glitter around herself and was in the middle of frantically weaving silver thread.
The third was that Sugawara’s freshly beheaded corpse sat up.
Faster than a blink, Hina punched it in the chest with such force that her fist went clean through. Gore splattered onto the bed and medical equipment behind the exit hole into a shape that was too perfect—a glyph, one I knew intuitively.
{TRANSPOSE} ignited into harsh yellow Flame, and burning brambles blasted out from the corpse, a sickly yellow slithering and whipping out through the room, attacking the girls, attacking everything. A part of it came directly at the camera—directly at Alice—
Directly at us. The video feed cut out from Alice’s end; the static dripped out of the projected screen like sap, taking on a branching, thorny aspect as it traveled and pooled on the floor. Then something rose up from the malformed transmission, there in the room with us, having made the same impossible leap as my flamefall.
The thing that entered our basement room of Lighthouse Tower was a nest of brambles in the shape of a man, blazing with the same sick yellow fire that had illuminated the glyph, and it stood wide and hunched, arms dangling beneath it. It had no hands and no face, but as it raised its head, I felt it see me, inspect me. Agony lanced up from the stump of my foot, freezing like icicles were spearing through my veins. The pain made me stumble for a moment before the stabilizing unit in my foot caught me. My spear was in my hand.
To my right, Amane blubbered an awful noise of pain that indicated she was feeling the same or worse, but she didn’t stagger. Instead, something glimmered around her bionic arm, shapes crystallizing from nowhere as the indicator lights along its shell flickered from their usual purple to a violent red. Her mantle was still in a state of ruin—but evidently, she still had contingencies, magical firepower spooling into existence around her arm even as she raised her clenched fist in the apparition’s direction and squared her stance.
Takagiri’s mantle was similarly ruined, and she made no attempt to weave any magic as she stared at her tormentor. But her eyes were full of hate—and fear. This entity was no glowing specter or bedsheet-covered figure, but it was unmistakably Sugawara’s ghost. He stepped toward her unnaturally quickly, as though on fast-forward—
Ebi reacted before any of us. In the same moment that her physical body stepped forward to stand between Takagiri and Sugawara, something deployed from pocketspace over her shoulder and launched itself forward. It unfolded from nowhere into the vague impression of a polyhedron before it flashed outward into an emerald-green bubble, surrounding the spirit.
I raised my spear, finding that I wasn’t feeling so squeamish about murder at this particular moment.
Amane barked something, which Ebi interpreted with a seamless shift of her synthesized voice: “We’re killing him here and now.”
The bramble figure turned his head to look at Amane and reached a burning arm out to the bubble, pressing his twisted fingers against the barrier. He began to push on the barrier, extending an arm against it, straining the barrier and stretching it like taffy, his unsettling yellow Flame angrily scattering along the surface. The way he was reaching out, the strain of the bubble—why did that look familiar?
“Ez, get your Flame out,” Ebi said, shaking me from the odd moment of deja vu. “Amane, you ready?”
Amane grunted confirmation as her gun finished manifesting. It wasn’t the same weapon as the one typically embedded in her mantle’s arm; instead, it was a surprisingly familiar shape, a gemstone version of the enormous energy beam weapons that came on a Peacie AC-130-R heavy gunship, absolutely comical against the regular size of her human frame as its four barrels bristled above her shoulders, hovering as though fixed to an invisible armature.
Without any further indication from Ebi, the bubble vanished. In the same moment, four lines of purple energy ignited the air between Amane and Sugawara. The weapon emitted an awful, teeth-aching whine as she held the searing beam for several seconds, trying to burn through his chest and head. She was yelling invectives at Sugawara, voice breaking in what could not have been anything but rage—was she literally powering the attack with her fury?
Maybe, but that wasn’t an option for me. While Amane unloaded on her kidnapper, I called on my Flame the only way I knew how, biting my lip and attempting to will it forth. It sputtered for a moment before a sensation like heartburn splashed through my lungs and my Flame ignited within me. Frigid energy lanced through my arm and bubbled to the surface of the scars on my right hand, which I clenched into a fist as the pure white of my shard of the Frozen Flame made its presence known. I didn’t know what exactly to do with it yet, but that was answered for me by observing Amane’s own attack.
For all her weapon’s power, its impact on Sugawara was underwhelming. The weapon’s effect was blue ripple, and Sugawara’s spirit, whatever it was, was certainly not a physical thing, some amalgam of raw Flame. For the most part, the beam passed straight through him and ate away at the wall behind him, blasting through the drywall and sending sputtering globs of magmatic concrete onto the floor but failing to meaningfully interact with the thorns. The yellow of his Flame shone through the purple as if to taunt us. It did slow him down some, resisting his movements like the barrier from before—still damnably familiar—but that was all.
He shuffled forward through the beam until it flickered and then failed, the barrels of the weapon fracturing and decohering above Amane’s shoulders. The indicator lights on her arm died, and the limb flopped uselessly downward as some operating limit was overwhelmed by the surge of magic she’d summoned, her contingency expended for naught. Sugawara’s spirit was not a complete person, lacking a face and speech, but as the last dregs of purple energy faded, the vomit-yellow fire pulsed a few times, and I saw his ‘shoulders’ shake as he laughed at us. Then he blazed toward us, far too quick to make sense, an impossible burst of speed just as one of his cultists had performed dozens of kilometers away and hardly a minute earlier. He covered five meters in a step—panic found me in a critical moment of indecision, unsure whether to brandish my Flame itself or to grip the haft of my spear and bring its warped and heat-blackened tip around to face him.
That moment of hesitation had a terrible cost. The brambles twisted and writhed past me before I could act, tongues of yellow fire passing so close to my skin that some of it tried to cling to me, grasping and stabbing in a blind desire to possess, to control, to grasp and devour everything. But the moment a tendril of thorny flame actually touched my skin, it recoiled, jumping back as though startled, and Sugawara avoided me as he passed me by—
But I was not Sugawara’s prize. The brambles lunged at Ebi, who was shielding Takagiri with her body. The spirit of malevolent Flame would rush straight through Ebi and fry the fragile magical circuitry that made up her being as a simple side effect of seeking his true target, and she stood poised to accept that fate if it meant buying her patient another moment of time—
Takagiri shoved her aside. It was a sleepwalker’s motion, half intentional and half inevitable, impossible to tell whether it was defiance or acceptance. The mass of twisting thorns loosened and spun into a torrent of grasping Flame that blasted directly into her chest as she met her tormentor head-on.
The way Sugawara entered Takagiri’s body could only be described as violation. The brambles wrapped around her limbs and dug into her flesh, rising up around her head and forcefully trying to infest her mouth and nose and ears and eyes, clawing and digging, demanding access to her body and soul as they tightened around her. She remained standing, but not under her own power, instead animated to plank-stiffness by the constricting force of Sugawara’s will.
I tore my eyes away from the sight as I scanned the room, trying to understand what to do. Time slowed to a crawl. My gaze alighted upon the whiteboard; if I could only intuit the sick processes animating Sugawara, allowing him to cling to the realm of the living, then I could formally describe them and crack the code; obliterate him utterly through glyphcraft where Amane’s brute firepower had failed. But that was an absurd notion, desperation asking me to reduce the work of hours down to minutes or seconds, however long Takagiri’s already-failing mind could resist before it collapsed, and he slithered in to claim lordship over the ruins.
There was no time for all that; there was only one reasonable option. I found myself stepping toward the effigy of nightmare and pushing my hand to ignite some more.
“He avoided touching me just now,” I explained to the room as I moved—mostly trying to psych myself up for what I was about to do. “Because of my Flame!”
“Christ almighty, Ezzen—” Ebi began.
I ignored her, reaching toward Takagiri with my blazing hand and searching for a relatively non-spiny segment of the brambles that were constricting her arm. My fingers, or at least the Flame wreathing them, found purchase on the magical emanation of Sugawara’s twisted desires, and I tried to tug.
I felt an emotion that was not my own. Something wicked and covetous flowed through me, a vile and potent desire. I wanted—Sugawara wanted—to have his way with Takagiri in a far more sickening way than even that phrase would suggest. He sought to devour her, to supplant her, to dominate her Flame and puppeteer her body as his own, the final parasitic effort of raw malice attempting to claim a new mind and body before it dissipated forever. He already had a doorway into her soul, the same one we’d been holding shut by forcibly keeping her awake and had been hoping to bar by using the coffin. And he craved to pry that doorway larger, to flay away her already-tattered defenses and scoop out all that was her to replace it with him.
Sugawara’s raw, unbound emotions surged into me and made to seep deep, infest and control me just as it was doing to Takagiri, because that was all he was now—blind want, not only to keep existing but to continue exerting the power over her that he’d had for years, first in the abstract binds of a poisoned friendship and then in a more literal sense as he’d dug his thorns of Flame into her and made her his slave. That avaricious, solipsistic egotism was all that remained of him, what passed for thought in this remnant shadow of the man he’d been. Somewhere beneath the weight of his basal ego, I could feel Takagiri fighting back, but it was a losing battle. Her mind was like layers upon layers of kindling for his rapacious Flame, unable to truly resist the overwhelming desire to dominate, half-ruined as she already was by the extreme exhaustion. She couldn’t even muster her own magic in any meaningful sense.
For a teetering moment, I felt that I might also be ensnared and devoured, paralyzed and reduced to so much soul-meat for the carnivorous beast Sugawara had become by simple contact with its consumptive nature. He had become a singularity of such concentrated malice that it seemed impossible for the delicate, fractal complexity of any wholly formed human soul to persist under the conditions of his presence.
But I was more than just a human soul. A knife-flash of clarity pierced through me, a frigid cold from the backstage of the universe that cut deep into the brambles and drowned the sickly yellow Flame in blinding white. Something rang in my head, a voice I’d only heard a handful of times until now.
Repugnant, declared my shard of the Frozen Flame.
Sugawara may have lost almost everything that he once was, but he still had a capacity for pain. I felt him hurt as the brambles under my grip wilted and then withered, dissipating away. I sensed something buried within the nest of brambles move where it had previously been restrained. Emboldened, I thought to reach toward Takagiri’s chest, where Sugawara’s thorny presence had tightened most thickly, hoping to break his hold on her there. I reasoned that her mind may have been ostensibly in her head, but if my experiences with my own Flame were any indication, the chest was what housed a Flamebearer’s soul, their final redoubt of selfhood alongside their Flame.
All this happened in the time it took the nerves in my arm to reach my brain and report an explosion of pain. It was from many sources—both Takagiri and Sugawara were radiating their own kinds of agony from their struggle, my own Flame was scorching my hand with frostbite, and the whole storm of magic we were creating was only amplifying the soup of red ripple. My mouth was filling with the tang of iron, and my face was wet. Nonetheless, I tried to move my arm further in, but some part of my subconscious simply wasn’t having it and said no more, overruling my conscious desires. I instinctively jerked my hand back, then shuddered and collapsed to the ground.
I felt arms on my shoulders as someone—Ebi—pulled me back, away from my goal.
“That’s enough.”
“It’s—not,” I blubbered, realizing the wetness on my face was a mixture of tears and blood. Had I been bleeding from my tear ducts? Certainly from my nose, at least. My Flame sputtered in my hand—the pain was keeping it fed as embers, but my concentration and willpower had reached their limits.
“It is,” Ebi insisted, wiping off my face with a rag she’d produced from somewhere. “She’s fighting it now. Don’t gotta explode yourself any further.”
I blinked away the remaining residue of bodily fluids and squinted through my wobbling vision at Takagiri. Bright white dots of my Flame still smoldered on the brambles, and she was now visibly struggling against the brambles with her limbs—and more importantly, something was flickering in the air around her. Her mantle had been destroyed in our battle, but something remained, and that she was calling on it was all the proof I needed that I’d helped weaken her attacker, or empowered her, or both. Either way, what had been a one-sided ravaging now seemed to be more of a struggle of wills.
And Amane was walking—limping, really—closer to the struggle. I only had a view of her left side, so it took a moment for me to figure out that she’d entirely removed her fried right arm, which made it all the more insane that she clearly intended to mimic what I’d just done.
“What’s she doing? Amane! What are you doing?” I looked up at Ebi. “Why aren’t you stopping her?”
“Because she’s not doing what you’re doing.”
“Ezzen,” I heard Amane say. “The coffin.”
“What?”
She held up her remaining fist, the flesh one, and clenched it. “Hold the…tamashii ga…” she faltered, glancing at Ebi, and started rapidly spouting Japanese. Ebi listened for a moment, then picked up.
“She’ll beat him, push him out. But she can’t destroy him, and he’ll just try again, and he’ll never stop. But if we put them in the coffin, once she kicks him out the first time, we can pull her out while keeping him trapped. Then we find a way to kill him.” She mimicked Amane’s pointing at the coffin. “Help us get them in there.”
“By…what, lifting her? Neither of us are at what I’d call—” I coughed, and the taste of iron in my mouth thickened, “carrying capacity.”
I glanced down at my own right arm, which neither looked nor felt great after being the contactor for a terrible collision of arcane wills. My fingers only weakly responded to my attempts to close them into a fist, and it hurt like hell to do so, cracking the abused skin. It felt like the scar tissue might flake right off. That was still a degree more useful than Amane’s now-removed arm, but it meant we effectively only had two and a half arms between the two of us to try to lug Takagiri’s still-mostly-bound-or-otherwise-unresponsive body into the coffin. And that was before considering the psychic onslaught I’d endured.
“I thought you couldn’t let him touch you or…bad stuff.”
“Before, probably. But he’s reeling now, and he’ll have to split it four ways. Besides, I’m built for bad weather.” She reached out a hand. “Up!”
She delivered that last part with such authority I found myself using my good hand to reach out and take hers. She pulled me to my feet with almost contemptuous ease. As she helped me find my footing, something pinched my neck.
“Ow!” My yelp only lasted a moment before relief washed through me. “Oh, that’s nice. Morphine?”
“And other stuff.”
We went over to stand an arm’s length from Takagiri. Ebi released me to join Amane on Takagiri’s other side. For a moment, I felt the absurdity of how we were solving this problem—three flamebearers and a cutting-edge AI in the room and we were reduced to literally dragging a person with our bare hands, a far cry from anybody’s image of magical warfare. It was ridiculous. But as I prepared to grab hold and Amane held up three fingers to count us in, I figured that it maybe wasn’t that much more brutal or inelegant than the blood magic I’d recently been so fond of. The last of Amane’s fingers lowered, and we all reached out to Takagiri.
Without the direct protection of my Flame, I’d been bracing myself for another helping of the crushing weight of Sugawara’s desperate desire, but Ebi had been right—he was weakened, and now his attention was split four ways, unable to smother any one of us individually. Where previously he had been an overwhelming force of concentrated, avaricious desire to dominate, now the pulse of emotion I got was tinged with the animal need to survive. Still not fear, per se, but he was recognizing the danger he was in.
That wasn’t to say this close contact was safe. Hopped up on morphine, I arguably fared better than either of the women helping me; Ebi’s motions didn’t falter, but the moment she touched Sugawara’s brambles, her digital face scrambled into static, which was mildly terrifying, and Amane would have probably been screaming if her teeth weren’t gritted in a mask of focus as she did her best to help with her single arm. I hooked my arm under Takagiri’s armpit and we started to drag her stiff, twitching body toward the coffin, step by heavy step.
Our goal was the bench-like cot that was set on rails to allow the coffin’s occupant to be slid in and out easily, and it was only two or three meters in total to carry her there, but it was a struggle all the same. The soul-combat taking place in our arms was a miniature inferno, and the random bits of orange ripple distorted the space of our steps, making a step forward turn more diagonal before we readjusted. Some kind of fungus was growing in the wake of where Takagiri’s feet dragged along the concrete floor. I was too focused on the physical exertion at the time to worry about the long-term ripple effects on my own body.
We managed to lay her down on the bench, Amane and I grunting with the effort. Takagiri’s eyes were open, staring upward, but not focused on anything, instead flickering left and right in something akin to REM sleep; she was presumably battling Sugawara in her dreams now. The flickers of her mantle were intensifying, too, never quite coalescing into recognizable portions of the woman we’d battled but undeniably becoming more present, more real. Ebi pushed the cart into the center of the coffin’s main body, that mangled and haphazard nest of metal and wiring, as Amane and I limped over to the laptop that controlled the whole thing.
“This better work,” I muttered, glancing over the machine, trying to ascertain if there were any last-minute changes we could make in order for this plan to happen as Amane had described. By way of answer, she hit the ‘Start’ button on the program that was supposed to run this whole thing. I crossed my fingers.
Indicator lights flickered on, and power relays hummed. I saw the ward emitters within the cage of scrap metal shimmer, then glow—then go dark, which terrified me for a moment before I remembered that they weren’t supposed to emit light at their operating levels. At the same time, the overall level of aching in my body, and especially the sharper pains in my hand and foot, began to ebb and reduce. It seemed the coffin was containing the red ripple—and presumably all the other colors we’d intended with our modifications.
As if to put that notion to the test, there was suddenly a flash of light in the heart of the machine as the struggle reached its conclusion. Takagiri vomited out a cluster of brambles, the ones that had infested deep into her body. They were rotting and blackening, the shadowy aspect of her own Flame finally asserting its dominance in the struggle for control. Something shimmered over the gaunt, sickly mask of pain—a narrow, feminine aspect, teeth set in defiance. Her own face, her true face.
She screamed something, and the brambles tore off of her body as though scoured by a pressure washer. I didn’t need translation to get the message.
I reflexively braced for another surge of red ripple to come at us…but there was nothing, no more pain. The yellow energy of Sugawara’s soul was ripped off of her body and slammed into an invisible, bumpy barrier at the perimeter of the coffin’s interior, looking like the world’s most repulsive corncob as he attempted to flee from Takagiri in all directions and found he could not. I watched the ward emitters’ readouts on the laptop screen as the strain steadily but evenly rose among all nine nodes. Once it stopped growing, the moment Sugawara was fully expelled, Ebi would yank Takagiri out.
But then all the pressure began to concentrate on one emitter, the one mounted directly above her head and held in place by the clamps we’d used. I was helpless to do anything but watch as the yellow Flame bundled around it and pressed outward. I looked frantically at Amane, who returned the gaze with fear, at a loss for what to do. I opened my mouth to call to Ebi to just pull Takagiri out now as I tried to muster my Flame once more—
The ward exploded upward with the tremendous screech of violated metal into a spray of molten aluminum that splattered against the ceiling. The yellow Flame shot out after it in a stream of brambles, but stopped midair, collecting itself in a flash. Before any of us could do anything, the space around Sugawara’s spirit tore, flattened, and shrank to a dot of nothingness, taking every scrap of that bile-yellow with it. Whatever remained of his intellect had calculated—or even overheard—our plan, decided it didn’t like its odds, and fled the premises of Todai’s domain.
Sugawara had escaped.
But Takagiri was free.
Author’s Note:
Whew, a lot of action! This will be the first ever time that we end an action beat and stay in the scene without Ez passing out for a day (well, there’s 1.14, but he wasn’t physically there and injured). Surely Sugawara is gone for good, right? Right?
Important: Sunspot is on its usual one week break! The next chapter will be July 18.
No newly commissioned art this week, but somebody in the Discord (Karidyas) took it upon themself to touch up last week’s Alice+Amane art with lighting, and holy crap did they do a good job:
I’m so ridiculously jazzed about this; it may well become some kind of banner art or find some other home here on the site.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
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