A/N: I won't lie, this has been written for years. If anyone is still interested in an age-old story, well, here's what could've been.
City: H-405
Chapter 21: Sir Fettel, the Satanic God
The heat of the desert would have been stifling and potentially lethal when combined with the radioactive air that hung dry and immobile around the area, but the pair of armored vigilantes astride a sleek, black hovercraft paid no mind as they drifted quietly over the ruined soil, steadily approaching a large metallic ball that sat silently in the middle of the cracked wasteland. A shapely crater held the magnificent creation from moving, lest it roll across the land and crush all in its wake.
The craft stopped, allowing the duo to step off. "That's H-311?"
James nodded. "This should be the last control center before The One is totally isolated. So long as even one outpost exists, we have no chance of returning home."
Cynthia took the first step forward. "Then we'd better eliminate this threat before it gets worse."
A crunch underfoot stopped her dead. She slowly looked down, raising her foot from the stained dirt, and saw a broken human skull in the tread of her step.
"What...?"
She looked around. It was at that moment that she noticed the slew of bones, slightly hidden by the red ruination fused into the topsoil. Ribs, hips, tibias, femurs, skulls littered the ground as far as she could see, all scattered and pointed as though attempting to get away from the ball.
"I have a feeling this structure was dropped here in the wake of an explosion," James commented quietly. "They weren't running for their lives, they were tossed out here after their lives were extinguished."
Cynthia continued forward, picking her way through the bones and taking great care not to step on any. The distinct crackling behind her indicated that James was taking no such liberty on the tarnished souls and was only concerned with making his way to the sphere. She said nothing; they would continue to disagree on the issue of propriety versus importance no matter her gripe.
The boneyard spanned a massive stretch across the terrain, as far as the zoom lenses on the helmet could detect. Cynthia grit her teeth in disgust.
"The sooner we get in, the better."
She then came across darker and darker soil, progressively darker red until it neared black. Small, fly-like insects began cropping up, hovering around darker patches of the earth as they began to clump together.
"James, I don't like this."
"Press on. The more you dwell, the worse it gets."
"I don't want to know what this is."
Then the first corpse appeared.
The skeletons paled in comparison to the sight of a recently deceased body lying free of its skin on the dirt, a black smear beneath it that used to be the blood in its veins. Flies, cockroaches, maggots, and other insects of various breed crawled along the fetid remains, feeding on the mortality of human existence. The hair was all but rotted away, and what was left in the puddle that hadn't been dyed red was a soft hazelnut color.
And the young girl lay helpless as the maggots crawled between her eye sockets and nostrils, snapping up all the dead flesh they could lay their puckered teeth into.
"Goddard."
The dog sniffed in reply. "Yes?"
"What the hell is this?"
"Just that: Hell. I will assume, then, that you've found H-311."
"This is the body of a child."
Goddard sighed. "It would be best if you put it behind you. You cannot save a doomed soul from its fate."
She couldn't tear her eyes from the corpse. The sight sickened her, fed bile up her throat, and still she could not move, could not retch, could not even feel the ground below her boots.
"I don't want to do this anymore," she finally choked past the lump in her throat.
"You've already come this far," James voiced. "Are you giving up on me, on all that we've worked for thusfar?"
She shook her head, eyes still bolted to the body. "Just get me in there so I can kill this bastard."
James grabbed her upper arms and pulled her away from the corpse, giving her the ability to finally shut her eyes and blink the foul images away. She kept her eyes shut, believing that bodies were becoming more and more fleshy as they walked due to the increasing hum of the flies that began to accumulate around the rotting flesh.
"Don't open your eyes," James muttered through gritted teeth. "This is unbelievable."
She stared at the insides of her eyelids, imagining a happier place and time, one that failed to come to her in lieu of seeing her hometown in ruins and the bodies on the ground. She tried not to imagine the world around her, the one that she couldn't seem to escape, tried ignoring the drone of the flies and the sound of her boots squishing through the damp soil as she progressed blindly through what she believed to be a flesh-strewn wasteland.
And when a husky male voice from her left suddenly coughed and faintly called for help, she nearly lost it.
"Keep walking," James growled. "We're nearly there. We have to climb through the garbage chute."
"Where the bodies come from."
"Try not to think about it."
Squelching and popping became more and more common underfoot until they stopped walking altogether. "The garbage chute is in front of you. Start climbing; I'm here to catch you."
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, reaching up and forward to dig her hands into something squishy and stringy that rolled in her hands as she pulled, hoisting herself easily into what felt to be a very cramped tube.
"Be careful; this chute is still live. It's possible that things will come down and hit us in transit."
Something chunky and thick clouted Cynthia in the forehead, slipping off the back of the helmet as it fell down the near-vertical shaft. "No need to tell me twice."
"I'm looking around for the quickest exit from this trap. The sooner we get out of this mess, the sooner we can get down to business."
She continued hoisting herself up the chute, grasping blindly in the darkness to find any form of hold for her hands and feet. Around her, she could hear dripping, popping, squelching, and muttering. The endless cacophony of voices that twisted eerily down the unlit sewage passage unnerved her; it meant that living people were nearby and she couldn't see a single one. Even with audio amplification inside the helmet, words were indistinguishable in the dank, oppressive atmosphere.
"Hold on to something," James suddenly urged.
The tube began to vibrate. Cynthia scrabbled to find whatever she could grab while keeping her eyes closed, settling for clenching her fists around the snaking tendrils that hung around her, elbows and knees dug firmly into the wall.
"Brace yourself."
Fluid blasted down the tunnel, flooding the passage and nearly tearing Cynthia from her precarious perch. She felt herself slide at least five feet backward, her boots colliding with what she presumed to be the top of James's helmet.
Something solid collided with her shoulder and nearly knocked her arm loose. Given the intensity of the pressure and the weight of the object, she couldn't accurately gauge its size or weight, but it slipped past as soon as it struck, rushing to the bottom of the chute just as the rest of the flood had done. Within a further few seconds, the flood ceased, leaving both Alumni to contemplate continuing the journey. Cynthia grunted and hauled herself forward, scrabbling across the slime and filth to ascend the tube as quickly as possible.
In a matter of seconds, she crashed headlong into a steel grate, judging by its circular poles and their spacing. She grasped blindly for the grate and felt her feet leave the wall; were she not strong enough to hold her own weight with only one hand, she would have screamed and plummeted to an all-but-assured death below. James cleared his throat.
"You aren't going to want to know what's beyond that grate if you don't know already."
"My eyes have been shut, the visor blacked out."
"Then it might be best for you to stay that way until I give the all-clear."
He then fell silent, leaving her to wait patiently. Incessant dripping from above began to unnerve her somewhat, moreso than she had already become by that point from the gruesome atmosphere.
"From what I can deduce, we're still somewhere within the sewage line, although I believe that grate is as far as we need to go vertically."
"Then what's our next course?"
"Geographic east," Goddard chimed quietly. "There should be an oblate tunnel. It will bend up sharply after eight point seven feet and continue vertically for an additional two point four feet before coming to a close at a lower-level drain."
"Like a sewer drain?"
"Precisely."
"Cynthia, make your way to your left along that bar. Stop when you reach the wall; the tunnel should be near your left foot by then."
She reached up with her left arm and grasped the bar, sliding herself sideways along its grimy expanse. Several times her fingers made contact with foreign objects on the topside of the grate; she lacked the bravery to ask what they happened to be. Her elbow met the wall rather suddenly and she reached with her foot, feeling in the crushing blackness for the pipe.
"It's below your foot. You may have to let go and catch the lip."
"I can't see, James."
"You may need to open your eyes, then."
She ground her teeth together, aware that the squeaking and scuffling would register through the link. With a silent count in her head, she released the bar, feeling the lip of the tunnel make solid contact with her left foot before her body flipped itself the wrong way.
She immediately kicked with her left foot, flipping her body airborne into a black abyss away from the lip. With a concentrated burst of thrust energy from her sheathed hilt, her body jettisoned forward and she felt her fingers smash into an unwanted fist as the lip of the tunnel folded them with brutal, relentless force. She scrabbled with her good hand to make up the deficit and pulled her body into the tube, aware of the dull throbbing in her hand that only served to irritate her further. She shook it off, jumping slightly at the sudden thump of James landing in the tunnel behind her.
"Forward and up. We're almost outside."
"Inside, you mean."
"Outside for these people is inside for us. Hopefully any return voyage we may need to make will go more swiftly than it has thusfar."
She trudged forward, arms held somewhat aloft, and stopped as they collided with the far wall. She felt around and grasped at rungs, pulling herself up two arm lengths before bashing her head against another metal grate, this one vastly smaller than the tube she'd just exited. She then opened her eyes, shoving the thing from her view as a dark canvas above graced her with its presence. She hauled herself out onto what appeared to be a street, lit by eerie red lamps that hung every fifty feet along its stretch. People shuffled about, aimless and unresponsive as zombies.
James stood beside her, covering the sewer once again with the grate. It clicked behind them.
"Did that grate just lock shut?"
James nodded once.
"That means we're expected."
"We were at the last two venues we visited. Apparently, with no front door through which guests can be welcome, we must take the back entrance."
A light to their left that had glowed a constant red began to flicker erratically. Both Alumni focused on the sudden distraction.
"Let's assume for a moment that we're expected. Are we then required to investigate the light that blinks at us, too?"
"Yes."
She scoffed as James strode for the light. He then stood directly under its flickering beam, gazing at the bulb. Faster than Cynthia could blink, he disappeared without a sound.
"What the?"
She stepped cautiously into the red halo, gazing warily up at the red light above. Without warning, the ground below her tilted and pitched her forward into a black space not unlike the one she'd crawled out of. She felt certain that her face would meet the floor, but miraculously she landed back on her own two feet. However, she could not move more than one step in any direction.
She began pounding on the walls of the circular prison, screaming murder to her captor. Nothing she did with her fists nor swords had any effect on the cylindrical tomb she found herself trapped within.
Until the light met her eyes.
Blinding white suddenly erupted from the bottom of the canister and slid upward, forcing her to tint the visor in order to see her surroundings. What she saw was an identical canister lowering down a large, glass tube to her left. In the canister was James, looking alert and relatively calm given he was standing in a prison cell that gradually lowered itself down a seemingly endless shaft.
"Welcome, Alumni," a calm, condescending male voice echoed through the cylinders. "We here at Warphole, Inc. have a strict regimen for all new test subjects to follow before they may contend with the esteemed leader of City: H-311. At this time, we will begin calibration testing to ensure that all subjects are in formal working order."
The cylinders stopped their descent in front of two large screens divided into a tic-tac-toe board of nine smaller squares. Inside each square were various configurations of letters and numbers.
"From now on, the Alumni formerly known as Neptune will be called 'Blue' and the Alumni formerly known as Uranus will be called 'Green.' This is to ensure that all testing protocols proceed without hindrance and offer the most accurate testing results through dehumanization of the human species."
"Dehumanization-"
"Now, Blue, please gesture to any atomic element on the screen. It is recommended that you choose your favorite, though this is not a test requirement."
James raised an arm and obediently pointed at a large letter B on the screen.
"You have chosen the chemical element 'Boron,' a word which rhymes with moron, which is a word to describe what you are."
The element floated into the middle of James's screen.
"Now, Green, gesture to the element that your partner has selected."
"What the hell am I, a lab rat? I'm not your guinea pig; let me out of here!"
"Testing cannot continue unless Green selects the proper element from the list."
"This is ridiculous."
"Obviously I was mistaken," the voice continued without hindrance. "Green is clearly the moron in this equation. Blue, how did you get so unlucky to be paired with a partner unsuitable for science?"
"Oh, for the love of-!" She pointed angrily at the large B in the upper right square.
"Oh, Green finally woke up. Very good. We can now proceed to do science. Blue should clearly be the leader of the group, and thus will receive a science apparatus first. Green is penalized fifteen science collaboration points and will not receive a science apparatus until Blue assists Green in attaining such."
The cylinders descended out of the white room and stopped. The floor opened beneath them and both parties dropped onto a concrete floor inside a large room split in half by a massive glass barrier. James had a glowing blue glove on his right hand that split his index and middle finger into one slip and his ring and pinky into another, one colored a deep cobalt, the other colored dark purple. He looked around at the walls, unaware of the scrutiny he was receiving.
"So, what's on your hand?"
"The apparatus. It's called a warp glove."
"What does it do?"
The walls in the chamber were made of a matte-black steel construction that offered no clues to the next task. Cynthia could only see a concrete wall to her right and a concrete platform across a large span of air. She looked back at James only to see him holding the glove in her direction. She stepped back and he mimed tapping something with his first two fingers.
A blue double-helix belted from the glove, slipping through the small opening in the glass and smacking against the concrete wall, forming an oscillating blue gate that was just tall enough to fit through. Cynthia pressed her hand against the ring and blinked.
"It's still solid."
Another pulse and suddenly the image on the wall changed, as though she were looking at a camera observing the far side of the map. Distantly, she could see James pointing at the lens, and her own body observing the ring. And as she twisted her helmet to look off in the distance, the far-off camera observed the same, relaying the information instantaneously to her vantage point.
"It's a portal. Walk through."
She eased a foot into the translucent surface and found herself stepping onto the steel platform she'd seen off in the distance. Another step had her completely free of the opening, and on a pedestal to her left she saw a similar glove to the one James wore, colored green. She slipped it on, noting a neon green for her first two fingers and a dark, forest green for her second two. She flexed her hand, feeling a bit odd wearing a glove over a glove.
"This is strange."
"It will make sense, I'm sure. We're in a computer program."
"What?"
"That lightbulb digitized us in a split instant. We're now data within a machine."
"How do we get out?"
"By solving the challenges presented to us."
She sighed and walked to the edge of the platform, gazing about as she stood on tip-toe.
"Don't fall, whatever you do; I don't know how the program handles the parsing of human life in the event of in-game death."
She looked around the semi-empty vista, noting that a small ledge off in the distance behind James's area had a glowing blue particle field in front of it.
"Is there a Help button anywhere around here?"
"What is the query?" the male voice commanded.
"What form of trajectory physics exists within these warps?"
"Objects passed through one portal to exit from another will retain any speed and drag built up prior to and post passing through the warp. In layman's terms, speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out."
"Wonderful."
She sprayed her light green portal on a small, angled pedestal out of James's view. She then zoomed her visor in to the platform he stood on. Directly below the edge of his box was a concrete plate large enough to house the dark green aperture she sprayed at the floor.
"Alright James. Jump off the edge."
"Are you sure I'm the one with insanity, Cynthia? That would be known as suicide."
"Help!"
"What is your query?" the voice asked again.
"How do we ensure safe passage through warps?"
"Warps have automatic funneling through particle manipulation based on gravity wells. Objects falling within relative aim and range of the warp will parse through, retaining all properties of physics after shifting to the far side."
"So, that means that as long as you aim, you'll be fine."
James approached the edge and gazed down. "This seems like suicide."
"Guess we'll have to find out. Act of faith."
He fell forward off the edge of the platform and accelerated rapidly toward the warp, unmoving as he dropped through the air. Upon reaching the warp, he slipped through and blasted out the far side, flying through the air like a trapeze artist. He landed squarely on the small ledge, just in front of the particle field.
"There's a wall up here," he commented.
Cynthia turned to face the purple-ringed warp behind her only to discover that the image on the far side changed; she could see James with an outstretched glove on the other side. She stepped through cautiously and gazed at the particle field.
"What does it do?"
James stepped through. Immediately, the blue and purple warps vanished.
"A reset field. It's supposed to make challenges more complicated, I assume."
Cynthia stepped through and felt the glove warm momentarily as the green warps disintegrated. On the far side was a door with a camera above, the eye gazing curiously at the pair.
"Blue, please step forward and stand on your corresponding marker. Green should learn what to do and follow suit."
James obediently stepped forward and stood on a blue dot on the floor. Cynthia scowled and took her place atop a green square. The door clicked and slid upward into the wall, allowing them to pass through. The instant they were clear, the door slid shut behind them.
"I would imagine we have a series of tests to pass through."
A large panel lit up on the wall to their left. 02/06 glowed brightly on the monitor.
"I think this is test two," Cynthia replied dully.
They stepped forward to the edge of the platform. To their right was a large platform that housed an orange button. Thirty feet away, in the middle of the air, rested another particle field. Beyond the field stood the exit door, beside which rested a concrete panel.
"So if I step here," Cynthia mused, standing on the button. The field disappeared and the concrete panel flipped backwards. She growled.
"What now?"
James turned and sprayed a warp on an angled panel over the door. He then dove off the edge of the platform and sprayed the remaining warp on a small concrete panel forty feet below. He flew through the gap and cleared the span easily, landing in front of the door with no trouble. He began looking around at the walls.
"Step off the button," he said. Cynthia moved off the button, replacing the field and flipping the panel back around. He then sprayed the darker warp onto the visible panel, leaving the lighter one on the angled surface.
"Now what?"
"Jump and pull yourself through."
She ran at the angled platform and jumped, grasping at the edge with her fingertips as she flexed her arms, hauling her body up the gap and through the warp. Level ground met her feet, and the door opened to reveal a second field through which they passed.
"Good. Blue and Green are learning standard testing protocol, which is that teamwork works best."
The third chamber came into view. Two platforms spaced across a vast gap were angled slightly toward one another. James stepped forward and flexed his glove, spraying one warp per angled platform.
"Here's the idea. The two platforms below us should have one warp per person. We fall into them and shoot out where those warps are, colliding in midair and falling onto that little ledge in the middle."
He then repositioned his darker portal to the bottom of the vertical drop. Cynthia mimicked his warps in perfect mirror.
"One."
"Two."
"Three."
They both stepped off the edge at the same instant, falling through the air into their respective warps. The world phased as they rocketed through their warps, suddenly facing one another as they flew through the air.
"Left arm."
Cynthia complied without processing the command, locking her left arm against his to twist them both around in a vertical spiral to the platform below, upon which they both tumbled and rolled. Cynthia stopped just shy of the edge, splayed on her back as she gazed up at the round white ceiling. She waited for her head to stop spinning before getting to her feet. She saw the platform she'd fallen from and above it, two sloped concrete panels. She redirected her lighter warp to one of the panels, taking a mute disinterest as James did likewise.
"And we jump again?"
James leapt from the platform and dove through the warp, careening ungracefully through the air as the warp spat him out.
"There's a platform up here. But I need to go higher."
He then dove off the upper level and pointed straight back into his warp, gaining a better angle and more speed to translate him further into the air, beyond Cynthia's view.
"Perfect. Dive in, then dive again. And don't miss."
She jumped into her warp and found herself being tossed toward a stairstep series of platforms, landing on the lower of the two. She then turned around and catapulted herself off the platform, hoping beyond hope that James was right, and as she fell through her set of warps and found herself terrifyingly high in the air, she realized that trajectory wouldn't fail her. She collided knees first against the steel mesh, sliding and tumbling across the floor until she smacked the wall.
"Halfway there," she grunted as she stood. Another particle field greeted them, eradicating the warps as they passed. The door opened to reveal a fourth test chamber. This one once again featured a large, spacious gap, in the center of which stood a small alcove. No surfaces presented themselves as being feasible for warp placement.
"Here."
James pointed at a large, oblate panel on the floor with a glowing orange dot in the center. He scratched his head.
"Wonder what it does."
Cynthia boldly jumped onto the panel and felt her knees buckle as it blasted her high into the air, throwing her at a short angle toward the alcove. She kept her knees loose and landed on all fours, creating a loud grating noise as the steel mesh flexed beneath her.
"Did that break your legs?"
"No, thankfully. This suit is a life-saver."
She stood up and looked around, unsure what to do next.
"Altitude-enhancement panels can be utilized to attain great height and momentum with little to no effort, provided the legs stay in-tact. Momentum attained while using an altitude panel can be translated through warps."
"Is there anything we can use?" James asked.
"Not unless the panel can be removed," Cynthia replied solemnly.
"Then this might be a broken test chamber. We may have to break some rules to get to the exit."
"Which means?"
He experimented by pointing at the bottom of the large white sphere that surrounded the chamber. Strangely, a warp appeared where he pointed.
"Fascinating."
He then proceeded to place one on the ceiling.
"Right. Seems as if this might just be a fluke chamber. We might be able to get to the door if we can use trajectory. Remember when we went skydiving?"
She did, all too clearly. She sprayed a warp directly overhead, maintaining the orientation with how she intended to fall. She then dove over the edge and angled her knees and elbows to fall at an angle toward the curved wall near the bottom of the sphere. Two hundred feet passed before she fired the second warp, and she suddenly saw the platform with the door approaching at hyperspeed.
With a roll and stretched limbs, she let her back smash against the platform and slid into the door, sparks flying as she broke the links in the mesh floor from the impact. She stood up, watching as smoke fizzled up from the floor.
"How was that?"
"Not bad, all things considered."
James suddenly flew into view and landed legs forward in a jog.
"But a more lateral angle would have given you a smoother landing."
Suddenly, a red light flashed over the door.
"Warning. Test subjects in breach of impossible chamber. Eradication required."
James drew his blade and hacked the door open. "Somehow I think this was supposed to be the end of the line."
They dove through and passed a darker particle field, noting that the warp gloves disintegrated as they fell. They both landed on the concrete floor below in a large, darkened room lit only by red and orange lamps.
Toward the center of the room stood a massive ziggurat, its six plateaus rising skyward without hindrance and elevating the columned shrine above. The massive sandstone stairs that appeared to have at one point led straight to the temple had been destroyed, leaving only a vertical sheer face more than one hundred feet in height.
"James, why are the suits reaching a heat peak?"
"External temperatures are beyond standard levels, meaning we run the risk of being cooked alive if the thermal coils can't properly regulate temperature ambiance."
"How far beyond standard levels? This suit doesn't have a thermometer."
"My digital read-out says an excess of one-hundred-fifty degrees on the Fahrenheit scale is present around us."
"One hundred fifty?! How could a space this large maintain that kind of temperature?"
"We're inside a large, steel ball in the middle of the desert with no ventilation system to regulate heat transfer, though we are no longer inside the computer program. The door we walked through was the matter recompilation system. Obviously, this leader is well-versed with technology I invented when I was ten."
"After sixty years, it's a wonder your technology hasn't overrun the entire planet."
"It seems as though such is the case, though not at the severity that you'd believe. Much of what I've observed is only based on my own inventions and theories at best; from there it's anyone's educated guess how it morphed into this sort of disastrous escalation."
"So we're going up?"
"As the temperature has done."
He stepped quietly and carefully over to the vertical face of the ruined staircase, unsheathing two swords and slotting them onto his knee spikes before splitting two more and securing them in his hands.
"Grab on."
"Can't you just climb with two swords?"
"The stone runs the risk of crumbling if only two points of weight distribution exist."
She let her eyes travel slowly up the face of the climb before resigning herself to hang on James in a makeshift piggy-back as he dug the first blade in.
With surprising agility, he raced to the top of the face in no more than forty seconds. He then stowed his blades as she stepped off, gazing at the remaining stairs to climb that led up into the black mouth of the temple. Cynthia kept a watchful eye aimed at the temple as she drew her sword and split it, body teeming with energy.
"So many vanquished souls to avenge."
"This isn't vengeance. This is salvation."
James strode forward, blades ready. "This could end very well or very badly for us, depending on how this leader plays out."
"This is H-311. Goddard said it was hell. Where is my proof to believe this will be any kind of easy or painless?"
James was neglect to reply, instead filling the silence by planting the antenna on the back of his helmet. "Alpha, we're at H-311. The leader is just ahead. Anything you can tell us about this ziggurat or the leader inside?"
He listened intently for a moment as he slowly trudged up the stairs, swords blazing restlessly in his fists.
"Right. Perfect."
Another few seconds and he popped the antenna free, slipping it back into the hypercube. "Cannibalism."
"Come again?"
"Those bodies out there. Victimized by cannibalism."
As if on cue, a stream of crimson slithered down the stairs to their right, dripping and pooling as it fell. Muffled moans came from the top of the staircase, less than a third of the distance left to cross. James growled.
"Seems there's another sheep to the slaughter. At least now we know why the people are so militant and disheartened."
"Wouldn't anyone be, cannibalistic leader or not?"
"To be eaten, though? That has to be in the top five most gruesome deaths."
"Which says a great deal, given all that we've seen."
Cynthia could feel his rage, felt it pooling into her own as she mounted the final clump of stairs and locked eyes with the innards of the cursed temple.
Beyond the columned entrance stood a massive room bedecked in gold and sparkling jewels that looked polished to perfection. A thick tapestry of blood-colored carpet spanned the entire floor of the room, though whether or not the color was natural could not be ascertained. As it was, the rivulets of blood pooled under the dying man who laid, broken and beaten, dead center of the floor. The throne toward the rear of the chamber held a single deified being, looking as though he'd just cast down the unforgivable from heaven to fall through the clouds into the fiery pit he'd created. And it was an excited cry that met their ears from the man on the throne.
"Alumni! Wonderful, wonderful! You've made it just in time!"
"Apparently not soon enough, judging by his condition," James countered darkly. The man gurgled as life slipped through the gashes in his skin and the missing limbs that lay, picked clean to the bone and cartilage, on the floor in a demonic trail toward their consumer.
"Oh, come now. A few innocents are often ransacked for the glory of the greater good. Even you must recognize that."
"What greater good does consuming this man's flesh offer to you?"
"Why, it keeps me alive! The blood of a fellow human has natural healing qualities within its composition, not to mention the simple fact that I now have one less mouth to keep track of."
"You are no human, to do this so openly and without remorse."
The man cackled at that, finally standing from the throne. He picked at his teeth with what appeared to be a bone, possibly a remnant from the man's consumed arm or leg; Cynthia dared not guess which. "You're quite right, dear boy. I am no human, just as you are no more than human. I am the invincible and the never-ending. I am the quantified form of the darkness that hides in the hearts of man, in the shadows of the mind. I am the one to rip consciousness from carcasses, to separate man from his sins, and I take them all within myself to liberate their bodies and minds of the foulness that pervades the very air they breathe."
"You are no human. You are no savior. You are a monster."
"Monster? No. I am Fettel, a force with which to be reckoned. I am the voice of those who have none, the eradicator of evil. You, my dear boy, are a poison, as is your comrade. To ruin the powerful jurisdiction of The One so willingly? To fight the ideal that this country strove to attain right from its initiation, the reign of manifest destiny? No, boy, you are the monster that is raping this land of its fruit. You are the rotten seed that corrodes the good soil below you, and I am the eradicator of your evil. I will have my fill of you, and then I will kill you and absolve you of the sins you have committed. I will forgive you even if this world doesn't, even if your God above doesn't."
"Science doesn't allow explanation for a god in any form."
The man shrieked with laughter, tossing the bone from his perch and sliding the twenty feet down from his throne on a thin golden banister. "Then whatever science you study has some holes in its argument, boy. You don't have to believe in a God for Him to exist, the same way you don't have to believe in love or communism. You don't have to believe. But just because you don't believe doesn't mean the rest of society should follow suit.
"You are a pimple which I seek to eradicate, clad in your shining hand-built armor that was stolen from my dear friend many years ago, clueless as to its higher purpose and function, imbecilic enough to believe that you stand for the cause of 'justice' and 'dignity' as if you were a saint."
Horns sprouted from his hair, curling around his ears to appear like a hybrid of a bull and a ram. His hands sprouted claws, deadly spines punching through his flesh across his arms and shoulders. The elegant clothing he'd been wearing shredded, revealing a sudden height change and musculature increase. At ten feet tall, with thick, knotted muscle rippling and pulsing across his crimson body, it became deadly apparent that he was indeed a force to be reckoned with, and the temperature rose a further twenty degrees as a result. Warning icons flicked onto the visors, denoting extreme heat without proper diffusion.
"You are no saint," an evil, pervasive voice echoed throughout the chamber. "You are a cancer to be eradicated, and I am the power capable of doing just that."
Never would Cynthia have expected his brutish form to possess lightning speed, but faster than she could process he was upon her, wrenching her arm behind her back as he twisted her into the air over his head. With a cruel laugh, he began bending her back as though he were attempting to break a stack of graham crackers in half.
Splitting pain began ripping through her spine as the tendons and nerves began to reach their breaking point. Numbness began to swell in her ankles and feet, arching up through her calves as he continued to fold her into a shape reminiscent of a rainbow. She screamed; the agony became too much to bear and she squeezed her eyes shut, hoping it was all a bad dream as she felt her armor shifting. Alarms began sounding in the helmet, signaling critical damage imminent.
And suddenly, she was being thrown through the air, crashing face-first into the golden steps leading up to the throne. She sank into them, tumbling and rolling toward the bottom without ability to stop herself. Every bump, every little jolt sent her spine into another convulsive spasm of pain and torture. Every muscle in her torso ached for release; she nearly lapsed into unconsciousness twice before landing stomach-first on the carpeted floor of the chamber. She forced her eyes open, gazing blearily at a sight worth witnessing.
James had become the force to be reckoned with, effectively floating as he was in the air while blow after blow rained down upon the ten-foot-tall superhuman figure, back splayed against the floor.
"Get up!" he cried, lashing several cross-cuts and vertical dive slashes into the monster's chest and forearms.
Cynthia summoned all her courage and strength, feeling for the energy she knew she had. Rage. Anger. Hatred. The fire began to warm her, stifling all the pain and stiffness she felt, and she found herself sprinting at the monster, swords flared, flames raging down her arms as she swung a lethal hammer-strike at its head.
The blow never landed, as the demon rolled away and darted across the room, knocking Cynthia from her feet once again. The demon, to his credit, lacked a single mark of injury across his ropey body.
"Pathetic," he spat, panting slightly. "If that is the best you can do, you are a waste of my time."
Cynthia got to her feet, feeling less angry and more lethargic about the situation. The flames had died; her swords glowed half as brightly as they had at her entrance. She watched with mute fascination as James launched himself at the monstrosity, slashing and cutting every which way to try and inflict damage to the seemingly invincible devil. The muscled man roared in anger and back-handed James hard enough to send him skidding across the carpet, still on his feet, knees bent, swords blocking the swing as he slid out the door. Not even a half second passed and the sapphire-edged blades began launching themselves at the creature from outside the temple, smashing repeatedly against the creature's bulked body to no visible effect.
Cynthia growled; she was too involved to be fatigued so easily. With nimble feet, she rushed the monster, blades flared, and delivered a whirlwind of slashes that bounced harmlessly off the nearest bicep, leading her into a complicated series of cartwheels and twists to dodge his swinging arms and crushing feet. The satyr lunged for her once again, but with a more prepared stance, she collapsed his grasping fingers into his palm and flicked the massive body with the tip of her blade, smashing him into the wall behind her.
He flew from the wall and darted at her, still under the continuous onslaught of cobalt blades that rent the air with their passionate rage. She vaulted high into the air, using him as a pommel-horse to spring-board into a midair somersault. Mid-flip, she began twirling laterally, oscillating her blades as she fell; the confused monster had left his back exposed and, on a whim, Cynthia slashed at it with as deadly a strike as she could manage from her aerial position.
Taking to the offensive proved positive, as she managed to earn a feral cry from the enraged beast and noted that a small section of the knotted muscle on his back had been severed, spraying blood across the floor and darkening the carpet below. She landed on bent legs, crouched at the ready to strike again. The kick that struck her helmet was entirely unexpected and crushed her fighting vigor, sending her flying backward to smash viciously into the wall. The critical analysis alarms sounded as she felt something flex the wrong way. She slid to the floor and coughed; blood flecked against the inside of her visor before slipping clean off and away to be reused by the suit.
The words 'stay still' broke onto the screen, and she watched as a progress bar began filling, indicating the scan and repair of her organs. Beyond the information existed a livid James, crushing pieces from the devil's body as more and more rope unknotted and severed, letting more blood fly.
The helmet dinged and Cynthia jumped to her feet, feeling bruised but unbroken. She rolled her shoulders and moved to charge into the battlefield once again.
And she gasped when the satyr grabbed her comrade with one clenched fist around the helmet.
Rather than trying to futilely squeeze the helmet and crush it, the sadist contented himself with whiplashing the body around before violently releasing the helmet mid-swing. James flew limply through the air and smashed against the ground, a cry sounding over the link as something snapped. He slid out the door once again, but this time blades failed to reappear on the horizon. The monster laughed cruelly.
"Such imbecilic fools. I am the cleanser. You cannot win a fight against the divinity."
Cynthia didn't know she was moving, didn't know she was swinging, didn't even realize she had taken an unbelievable chunk from the demon's back as she scored clout after clout into his skin, snapping bone and ripping tendons to shreds, ruining the muscular back that had been left as a weakness to their blades. She smashed and slaughtered, flames boiling down her arms and into the ruined flesh, and yet she could not control herself; everything was a hazy dream to her.
One final blow to the back of the head sent the demon straight into the floor in a dead face-plant. She finally came back to herself and breathed deeply before striding out the door of the temple, eyes locked on James as he slowly got to his feet. She reached out and grasped his left arm, hauling him to his feet. He left his hand locked over her forearm, visor tinted black.
"Are you alright?"
His response came in the form of a shove, pitching her from the narrow stone platform into open air. Shock caused her to lose grip on his outstretched arm, falling through the air to certain death below. She couldn't fathom it. James had just doomed her to death by impact.
And that was when she saw the blood-red laserbeam slice cleanly through his left shoulder, dropping the severed limb onto the stone below.
She crashed against the second highest tier of the ziggurat, sliding on her back a solid ten feet before stopping; James had given her quite the mighty shove to get her out of harm's way. He'd saved her life and sacrificed his arm.
The stump didn't appear to have any blood loss, judging by the blackened cauterization of the wound. And still, a blue sword glared dementedly from where a hand should have existed, from empty space that should have remained that way.
James was no longer where he'd been standing. Rather, a blue streak of his essence followed the space he'd been occupying with a crack, and suddenly loud, angry bouts of rippling, crackling electricity split the air inside the temple. Blue flashed through the columns, cutting them to shreds, blasting them away as the roof crumpled and sagged forward. Cynthia blinked and stood, wondering what to do. The roof gave way as another sickening bolt of electricity raped the air, sending the mountain of stone that had once been the temple roof cascading to the floor, to then teeter without balance over to her side of the stone structure and fall from the decrepit remains of the stairway. She watched in horror as James's arm plummeted in the rubble, and without much thought to the contrary she dove after it, landing squarely on a flat piece of stone that was sliding its way down the incline. She followed in the wake of the destruction, engaging an infrared setting in her visor.
The air lit up red around her, with a large purple mass sliding away from her that struck the bottom of the massive enclosure, toward which she was suddenly moving far too fast. She jumped, focused on the settling mass, and saw a heat signature under the stone that looked to be roughly circular and decently flat, cooling quickly under the mess. She switched back to normal view and began hacking at the roof, disassembling it as fast as possible to get to the limb. Chunks of rock and dust blew into a cloud of debris around her, and she finally cracked the slab enough to split it in half and drag the broken arm and its armor from within, raising the limp appendage into the air in victory.
The temple chose that moment to spontaneously combust, and with an explosion that rocked the steel ball to its perch, thousands of tons of gold and jewels and stone and marble blasted outward in every direction, spraying the enclosure with a grenade of shrapnel and ruin. Cynthia ducked as the scatterings spread across the floor of the enclosure, some dripping with blood, others fragmented and cracked irrevocably from the force of the bomb.
"You saved my life," James commented calmly in her ear. "And I've just saved yours."
She couldn't help the crooked smirk that struck her cheeks. "So we're square now?"
He came sliding down the gouged surface of the ziggurat. "Yes, we're square. Now, let's leave this mess behind."
"What about your arm?"
"I have another medic's tent. It's not important right now."
Cynthia felt warmth creep through her body that had nothing to do with the intensity of the outside temperature, and with a firm grip on the severed limb she followed James to the edge of the steel ball. He smashed through three feet of solid steel and dove into the outside world, landing easily on the ground below mere seconds before Cynthia did likewise, and as they worked their way back toward the craft, she felt less sickened by the sight of the bodies and more liberated, knowing that they'd spared the remainder of that society from a similar fate. She had never before been a particularly religious person, but she felt as though she had become the angel to answer the prayers of the damned city's patrons, and with such a light thought in mind she stepped lightly over bones and blood as though they were rocks or puddles in her path, with not a bit of remorse in her soul.
I don't write like this anymore. Actually, I take that back: I DO, but not to this extent. Chapter 22 is unfinished, and I don't know if I'll ever get back to it. I really don't. Anyways, um...long time no see, and maybe not again for this story. I haven't totally shelved it, but I'm not motivated to finish it. I almost need someone or something to write for, because trying to pen this thing down was a lot of work. It's certainly the longest piece I've ever created.
Talk to me, snowflakes. Are you actually interested in more? ~Kyttin