We stood in the jaws of a miracle. A true miracle, magic beyond Flame and glyphs. For a precious, wasted moment, I could do nothing but stand awestruck at the enormity of what we had stumbled upon. Even Ebi, who shared the ineffable spark which animated this building and for which we had come here, was encoded as glyphs, potential trammeled into the Vaetna’s programmatic rules and principles by Ai’s genius, fundamentally a feat of human engineering. The entity here was something even more significant, truly raw and spontaneous, something which I could not define no matter how long I sat in my room and stared at GWalk. Until now, I had considered “ambient ripple” to be something different and lesser than the magic of the Flame, undoubtedly paranatural and sometimes hazardous but always less significant than a human or flamebearer’s channeling of intent. In this web of murdered skin I now saw the error in my perspective, and behind it, a glimpse of what I was seeking for Izumi’s sake and ultimately my own, and the profundity was such that it felt like the very world was shifting around me—
Wait, no, it was. The building was trying to swallow us. The floor beneath us slanted sideways. Above us, the hole in the ceiling where we had entered rapidly coagulated with more of the net, shifting into our plane of reality to spread across the gap. A torrent of masonry followed, steel and concrete rushing around the flayed skin to lock us inside. The restructuring was violent and ugly, beams bursting out of the walls with all the violence of a compound fracture.
I was suddenly desperately disoriented, looking around and trying to get my bearings. Wonder ignited into panic that I couldn’t find a fixed reference for the motion around me, above me, and beneath me. My stabilizer module was the only thing that remained fixed, my foot doing its best to stay planted on the shifting floor. My spear leapt into my hand, bidden by some unconscious hope that it would provide a more metaphysical anchor—reason caught up and I stowed it again to reach for Izumi instead, whose balance was utterly unchallenged by this impossible terrain as the floor’s collapse reached pitcher-plant verticality and the wall across-beneath us tore itself apart, opening a path to a corridor that was decidedly not a part of any hospital’s normal architecture: a gullet full of bodies.
This was what had become of the rest of Sugawara’s cult. Tangled carcasses rotting in a net, their souls—again, for some iffy definition thereof—siphoned and merged into something lesser but vaster than the sum of its parts. Most of the dead were in various states of undress, matching what I knew of Hikanome’s practices both pre- and post-schism, perhaps the result of mass suicide to follow their messiah or perhaps simply devoured when this thing had reached critical mass. They could stay rotting for all I cared. Sugawara’s beheaded corpse could have been down there too, a nexus or heart for this thing.
But in that glimpse down the throat I saw that there were others, those that could not have been of the cult. Hikers and police, the sorts that went missing in places like these in yesteryear’s stories of grim magic and crimes against death. Urban explorers who had been self-assured that there was no such thing as a haunted house, people who could not have possibly expected the world to produce an entity such as this. They could not be blamed for this, but they had become part of it all the same.
My Flame thrummed in my chest. We would see them done justice.
Well, that was a nice thought. In practice, I was overruled in action by the two VNTs at my side. Something flickered from Izumi’s hand down into the gullet, a plume of inky smoke trailing behind it into the darkness, followed a moment later by a hail of explosive gemstones from Yuuka. Green and crimson light blossomed at the end of the corridor. There was brutal utility in it, no thought to be spared for the innocent dead who deserved a chance at a proper burial away from the monsters. The two Radiances simply saw hell in the tunnel and responded by raining some of their own.
“Up and out!” Yuuka shouted, before a bright and sharp whine cut through the rumbling of contorting masonry and the world turned red as she blasted the ceiling open with a crimson beam. The idea was plain, we would back out and regroup. I grabbed a firmer hold of Izumi, ears ringing too badly to discern what she was saying, and she hoisted me out of danger, leaping upward toward the hole of blue sky Yuuka had carved. Momentum carried us up and out—
I saw it hit Yuuka first, rocketing upward right above us. She suddenly veered off course and slammed into the charred edge of the aperture. LM beat concrete, but like an out-of-control firecracker Yuuka’s mantle careened sideways on impact and, jets still burning at full throttle, crashed into the far side of the still-transforming room in an explosion of rubble. The moment after she impacted, Izumi’s arm went limp around me.
Then it was my turn.
Concentrated red ripple overloaded my meat suit and the soft animal brain inside of it. Blinding pain killed every thought. The world around me vanished and my foot screamed that something was wrong with every nerve it no longer had. My hoodie pocket felt hot, but it was an abbreviated footnote, washed out entirely by the attack on my nerves, and something altogether more paranatural. I was instantly rendered insensate by bile and animal rage that pressed in on me and tore through the bubble-surface of my consciousness.
I did not touch its mind the way I had Sugawara’s. It did not have one as such, merely a chorused awareness, a shattered mirror. But in aggregate, it did know things, was capable of experiencing and feeling and remembering and inflicting. It experienced death, hallways empty except for corpses with wrists freshly slit and the last echoes of rapturous, desperate, deluded conviction bouncing down the corridors from vocal chords freshly fallen silent, a cult’s final act. It remembered where every flap of skin had come from and could not help but show me each motion of the knife, the knives, all dyed so red it couldn’t not be shared. It had inherited a faint, sadistic pleasure that it was inflicting this upon me, that I would understand all the giving and receiving and the rapturous blood, that I would know that these were all that could exist.
Through the invasive, inviting agony, I clenched every muscle in my body and just tried to keep my mind from unraveling. I couldn’t hear what my Flame was saying beneath the torrent of wanton nightmare, unable to discern what it wanted—perhaps it would destroy this entity out of the same repugnance with which it had burned Sugawara, or perhaps it was so enticed that it would join with it. I could not know. But either way, if it were allowed to fully feed on these sensations, it would bring cataclysm—do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, instant inferno. Either way, I and Izumi and Yuuka would die and whatever remained would bring ruin.
So I told myself that the Spire stands. The idea rang hollow and distant, washed out in the crimson immediacy. The pain was now, the pain was everything. It was simply too much.
Any longer, if I had been tangled in the net rather than passing through it at speed, and I would have been toast. My saving grace was that the mantles had gone first and somehow borne the brunt of the web of concentrated suffering, so I instead only received enough of a dose to make me scream my throat hoarse and spasm every muscle in my body before we must have reached the apex of our leap, arcing up onto the roof next to the hole. I don’t remember that part, that half-second lost forever to agony as we passed through the net. But I do remember that it wasn’t a controlled landing, knees and elbows for me and a full ragdoll roll for Izumi.
Everything was bad for a long time—by which I mean that aftershocks of the red ripple bounced around my system for what felt like days. In reality it was probably closer to ten or fifteen seconds that I spent curled up in a heap on the roof. The magical pain faded quickly in most of my body; it still felt like my foot had been freshly amputated, repetitions of that perfect slice echoing up my nerves and more reluctant to dissipate. So too ebbed the mind-flooding; my image of the Spire was no longer drowned in the torrent of blood. My psyche managed to find its footing on the dermis, and then on the quicksilver bedrock of adrenaline, and I found it in me to roll over and push myself up.
At that point I started to swear, because I had regained control of my voice and it was immediately clear that my stabilizer was fucked. Beyond fucked, actually, rather in the end stages of the process of melting down into a gloop of liquid metal that was burning its way through my hoodie’s central pocket and the skin of my belly. I made a noise of pure get-it-off-me panic and wriggled out of the ruined heart-armor; once it was off and my wits returned, I thanked it for its service, then registered that my exposed shirt had brought with it the smell of charred flesh. But no pain accompanied—a numbness had spread through me, the systems in my brain temporarily burned out except in my foot. That was a hell of a silver lining. I decided that I would simply not look down at whatever had happened to my midriff for the time being.
Izumi was the higher priority. She hadn’t moved a hair in the time it had taken me to recover. I crawled my way over to her, fearing that what had happened last night had just taken place again, kicking myself for thinking it was a good idea to come out here when she was in such an unstable condition. The mantle had stayed deployed this time, which I wanted to think was a good sign, but my knowledge of the mantles’ functionality suggested a bleaker conclusion. Something had gone catastrophically wrong, either with her or with the connection. From what I had just experienced, it might have been both.
“Izumi, hey, hey, up,” I urged the lattice-manifest. “If you’re in there. Can’t say I’m expecting this to work, but feel free to prove me wrong.”
Nothing. Damnable, terrifying stillness and silence. I rolled her over with effort—she was lighter than someone her size ought to be, but that was offset by how I had just been put through the sensory meatgrinder moments ago—and recoiled from her blank, staring eyes. Dread slithered up my neck.
“Oh, fuck. You’re not dead. You better not be fucking dead. We’re gonna have problems if you’re dead,” I babbled.
I understood, logically, that the odds that it had outright killed her were slim. The mantles were designed to be ablative shielding, after all, disposable. But reason could only do so much against the terror rising within me. Yuuka had gone down, too—she was still in there. It fell to me to do something, and I had no idea what.
At this point it occurred to me to do the obvious and slam the big red panic button we’d just installed in my mind. Panic was indeed the main thing I was feeling, tinged with the tiniest bit of humiliation that I needed to use it so immediately. The distress beacon screamed out across the hundreds of kilometers back toward Tokyo—at least, I hoped it did. There was no way of knowing for certain that it had survived intact where my stabilizer hadn’t, no confirmation from Ebi’s end. I fished for my phone as a secondary channel of communication, relieved it hadn’t fallen out of my pocket or been cracked in half by my landing…and then was horrified to find it wet and slippery under my fingers. I pulled it out hastily and found that it was oozing blood from within.
That’s when the fear really set in. I’d always had my phone as a backup, a safe space in my pocket no matter how stressful real life was. Now I was alone out here, isolated and with no way of knowing whether anybody even knew I was in trouble, alone in the woods against a force I categorically did not understand. My hoodie, my armor, had already been ruined, leaving me exposed against the cool air. My spear had appeared in my hand, but what use was it against a foe such as this? The Vaetna, Heung and Kat, they dealt with infernos by striking at the burning heart, and I now knew with certainty this thing did not have one. Sugawara’s grisly unmaking had not been in the avalanche of death that had been forced into my mind—that had been separate, a working of blood magic he had orchestrated toward a specific end, unrelated to this except for shared circumstances. If I managed to fight my way down to that room somehow I would find only remnants of that trick, not something to stab. And the idea of killing anything with this spear was in itself absurd, this piece of wood I’d carved from hardware store lumber in naive aspiration. Like me, it had not really become any more than that, for all the burnt end superficially resembled that of a vaet and I a Vaetna.
And, perhaps most insultingly, I couldn’t even get to my feet, crippled by my dependence on an augmentation that had never been stable enough to see me through even the danger we’d known was coming, let alone the thing I faced now.
I was a larva, helpless, exactly as Yuuka had said.
Fuck that, argued Ezzen, the ideal Ezzen, genius of glyphcraft and proper heir to the Vaetna, that nebulous shape of unbreakable carapace and sharp killing shapes and possibly boobs. Do something, it said. Destroy it, it urged. I wanted to be that Ezzen, who would be strong enough to annihilate this entity—but I couldn’t just become it, drag that construction of my imagination into reality with all its skill and resolve. Nobody was that magical, not unless I wanted to figure out time travel right here and right now.
A different voice butted in, husky and excited. Hina insisted that it could be done. The power I needed was right there. The power to kill, power from pain, strength beyond mortality if only I would embrace it, if I would dive back in and let go and trust the process. The part of me that wanted her wanted to dive back in the hole. I could fight this thing and win, not as I was, but as what I might become, what I was worthy of becoming. I rose to my one good foot, crutching on my spear, drawn toward the mouth of the monster and the laser-blasted opening in the roof.
I stopped when Izumi’s eyes fluttered. They focused on me and she sat up in one fluid motion, an echo of Sugawara’s corpse. Within me, a different Hina-impulse suddenly overruled the self-destructive hunger: make sure she was alright.
“What happened? Are you alright? Is it just the connection or is your actual—other body in trouble?”
She winced tremendously. “Connection. It is…ah, itatatata,” she groaned, clutching her head. “Tangled.”
I understood, imagining what it might be like for the net to be intersecting my connection with the doll. I was surprised she had any command of her mantle or her faculties at all. “Right, okay.” I knelt next to her, temporarily abandoning any interest in the hole. “That’s a relief, if you’re not hurt yourself. That net is fucked up. How’s the system diagnostics looking?”
“They are…not.” She raised an arm. “Weapons are not working. I think I can move my body, but my sensors are…do not seem good. I have eyes and ears and that is all, no telemetry.”
I gasped, connecting the dots. “Does that mean—did we just somehow do what we came here for? Are you embedded in this body now?”
She paused, eyes widening. “Oh.” Then she frowned. “No. Or—maybe, temporarily, because I am touching to this thing? But I do not want this to be part of me. And I cannot fight.” She nodded toward the hole. “Yuuka-chan is in there. I expect she is worse than me.”
I twisted back to stare at it as well. “Yeah. Fuck. I was thinking of just—burning the whole damn thing. Kind of a moment of weakness in hindsight. I don’t want to take you or her out in the crossfire, especially not if we’re making progress with you, somehow, accidentally and against all odds.”
“You think you could? Destroy it?”
I focused on the waves of pain still coming from where the stub of my heel met the prosthetic and ignited my Flame, pale shimmers of frigid heat venting from the seams in my right hand’s bio-gauntlet. “I think so. Using its own power and trusting my Flame to do what it has to. It’s a bad idea,” I admitted. “But I don’t know what else to do. I’m fucked up too, can’t go down in there and save her either,” I explained, indicating my discarded hoodie with its pile of cooling slag. I held up my phone, which was still dripping blood from within. “And I don’t think we can call for help. Don’t think my distress beacon worked, either. Things are fucked.”
“They are,” Izumi agreed, grimacing. “How did Yuuka-chan’s eye not…?”
That brought me up short. “I…shit, I dunno, that is weird, there’s so much red ripple and she’s still in it. Unless she’s not?”
“You saw her fly off, did you not? She lost her connection as I did. She is tangled as well, or worse. She needs help, and we need her eye.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s not in debate, I just don’t know what to do,” I growled, frustrated at my own impotence. “Other than hop back into the hole and pray.”
“That’s not the only way to go to her,” Izumi pointed out. “Her body is in the pod.”
“Yeah, thirty meters from us in a direction I physically can’t point to, when you’re immobilized and can’t get me there, great fuckin’ idea,” I fumed. The stress and pain were getting to me; my nerves had begun to un-deaden and remind me of the fact that I’d been thrown bodily a few minutes ago.
Izumi frowned. She reached out toward me, put her hand in my face, and snapped her fingers. A magenta spark flew between them. “Ezzen. You know everything about glyphs. You know how to make a fourth-dimension navigation matrix. Why are you committed to being useless?”
“Because—because that, this thing down here, that’s real magic, and I can’t—this is real VNT shit, and I’m not—”
“Yes you fucking are.” The curse had an incredible, arid crispness coming from Izumi’s mouth, and it stopped me dead. “I can’t believe you talk about yourself like this after everything you’ve done. You are brilliant and strong even when you are not in the other body. Start believing it, stop making excuses, and go save her.”
Author’s Note:
Short but sweet chapter! Maybe one of the tighter chapters of the story? I’m quite happy with it; somebody really needed to just fuckin’ say that to Ez at the end there. The beta readers really liked that part and I hope you do too.
Apologies for the delay! At least this means I get to wish you all a happy Neil Banging Out The Tunes day! As well as the other thing I need not mention. Next week Sunspot will be taking its usual break, so next update will be Sunday, April 27.
Lastly, we have new art! By Togekko, who also did the arc 3 cover and has outdone herself here. Behold Amethyst and Heliotrope, who are definitely the good guys, meting out a little extrajudicial justice!
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