25

I feel my eyelashes flutter as I blink. The audience isn't screaming now, letting the slow ballad build, and I can hear my heart pounding in my ears.

"There's a risk, but perhaps someone other than Yamagishi should evoke," Mitsuru says behind me. "Just to provoke Ker to action."

"Guys," I say, and it doesn't quite come out, so I swallow, trying to smash flat the fear and nervousness, and just try to tell myself that yay it's finally ass-kicking time. Except that there's this enormous crowd, and these cameras, and what are we going to do about those? And she's Ker, maybe she can kill all of us and – "Guys," I say again, and the others press closer to hear me, Shinjiro and Aigis right at my side.

"'Sup, Mina-tan?" Junpei asks. I don't look away from the stage. The cameras are still on Toshiko, her face emblazoned fifty times larger behind herself.

"Minako?" Yukari asks.

She's singing. Lyrics from her song trickle inanely through my ears: "..thought you'd go, but you didn't show me your heart..."

Another swallow and it's time to stop thinking about everything that will go wrong. "I need to get to the stage."

Some heads turn, and then I hear Akihiko suck in his breath. "You're kidding!"

"Sorry."

Shinjiro shifts his weight next to me, lifting his axe onto his shoulder.

"...are you really going to try to talk to me now?..."

"We're – we're going to attack her in front of everyone?" Ken asks.

"If you can think of some way to draw her out of here..."

"The stage is pretty high off the ground." Akihiko's peering through the artificial gloom. "And it's guarded."

"We can do it," says Shinjiro.

"I will throw Minako-san up onto the stage if necessary," says Aigis.

"Does she know we're coming?" Yukari asks.

Toshiko's – Ker's – face flickers across the screen, tipped, so pale she's unreal, always with that red smile. "...are you really going to try to call this goodbye?..."

In a moment, the cool shaft of my naginata rests in both hands. "Ken?"

He hoists his spear forwards, and I can hear him take a deep breath. "Okay, senpai."

"Guys – whatever happens – " And I shouldn't have tried to speak, because the more I say, the more my energy drains away. So I nod and don't look anywhere but at the stage, glowing – glowing like a clumsy copy of Nyx's egg.

Can't be worse than that. I push off my left foot into a run.

Light and darkness stream in my peripheries, the crowd flailing and cheering as the music swells, my friends lunging forward on either side of me. Any aisles have been obliterated by the crowd. I'm not here to hurt them, so I keep my blade down, angling the butt of my weapon forward.

Ker lifts one hand as her song crescendos, and the floor bucks beneath my feet. I stumble, falling forward, catching myself – and then the ground falls away. The singing stops. Ker lowers her hand to her temple, and for a moment I'm sure she's going to have an Evoker somehow, going to fire it – but she slips her headset free of her hair and lets it clatter to the floor.

The crowd's cheering turns into screams, garbled, incoherent and uncomprehending. Jagged lines have broken under my feet, shifting, toppling. My blade vanishes and I flail an arm out, reaching for Shinjiro, but the ground shifts, rocking me out of reach. I stumble back, and my heels hit empty air, toppling me, hip slamming the shattered floor, glancing down, nothing but darkness –

"Are you serious?" a woman's voice asks, somehow not shouting above the screams.

Thanatos surges free of me.

Aigis sensed the breakage less than a second before it occurred, and she had already braced, shifted her equilibrium, and reached for Minako. They were almost upon the audience, and she had failed to calculate its reaction to catastrophe. As the floor buckled, lunged upwards and over, people tumbled, screamed, threw themselves backwards. Aigis just had time to switch to thermal imaging before she swerved to avoid a woman falling. Aigis side-stepped, searching out Minako. The girl's heat signature was unique, neither alive nor dead, and Aigis found her in an instant. The ground shook and wrenched apart, like a scar being ripped open, leaving a narrow black gulf in the arena's floor. In the mess of falling people, Aigis sensed Minako falter.

The robot lunged, her fingers closing on air. She hesitated, searching the darkness, picking out individual heat sources, hunting for Minako. Then she collected herself and jumped headfirst into the abyss.

Arms stretched, fingers splayed to break her fall – she hit a floorboard and shattered it, then caught herself on jutting rock. Clamping fingers around it, swinging herself around, feet punching, finding purchase in the jagged rock wall. Rock? Dense, dark, igneous. Totally inappropriate for an artificial island, much less fewer than a hundred feet below the stadium. What did it mean?

People fell past her, screaming, one vomiting. No sign of Minako. Pushing away her fear, Aigis switched to infrared vision, searching for the rest of SEES. Their signatures wouldn't be unique, but they hadn't been far from her, and maybe she could pick them out visually. Had they fallen in, or had they been able to –

Aigis read a Shadow, an enormous monster, and she lifted her gun. It swept down through the abyss towards her, falling faster than the humans – and she jerked her gun away as she recognized it. Thanatos rushed, a blast of heat past her, down into the darkness.

Aigis scanned, attempting to map the abyss' dimensions. The gash itself was forty meters long and twelve meters at its widest point. Her scanners failed before she found the bottom, and she could no longer sense Thanatos.

Aigis switched off her scanner, thermal imaging and infrared vision, gazing down. The lights from the arena couldn't reach her, and she couldn't make out her own legs, nor a screaming man who fell hardly five feet from her. It was only darkness.

She switched her thermal imaging back on and released the rock ledge, letting herself fall.

Ken pushed up from the cold ground, the side of his face soaked with blood. He blinked against the soft blue light – had they made it to the stage? No – the arena – everything had broken, and Shinjiro had grabbed him and then they'd fallen –

He blinked. All he could see was a grooved black wall – stone? – with a blue glowing lichen. They'd fallen. His nose had bled and he'd been unable to breathe for a moment, and he'd just been waiting for the impact, one last smack of pain before death. But it hadn't come, and he was sure they'd fallen for at least a minute – but that was impossible, Port Island wasn't that thick, and he didn't think there were any caves beneath it. And if he'd fallen that far, he should be dead. But his knees didn't even feel bruised.

Ken swallowed, somewhere in his mind comforted that he could still think logically, but dimly aware that he was focused on the wrong things.

The stage – killing Ker – wait – where were the others?

He pulled his head around, and his vision swirled, but only for a moment. Not a concussion. He'd scraped his temple on the floor when it first broke open, that's right. He blinked again, eyes clearing.

Shinjiro lay some feet off, hair over his face, one hand on his axe shaft, blade gouged into the rock floor. No visible blood, and in the silence, Ken could clearly hear his even breathing. Just beyond him, Ken made out the pale blue of Yukari's jacket, her arm thrown up over her head, mouth open as she slept.

Ken's knuckles scraped against the floor as he grabbed his spear, and though his legs didn't quiver, he used it to lever himself to his feet.

They were in a wide, almost circular chamber, like a bowl in the cave. Ken couldn't see any caverns feeding into this room, and, tipping his head back, he only made out darkness. All of SEES lay tumbled and senseless on the ground, Koromaru clasped safely to Fuuka's chest, Junpei with the fingers of his left hand clenched around his hat. Akihiko had grabbed the back of Mitsuru's jacket, and her Evoker was drawn.

Ken looked around again, quickly, fear rising as he double-checked, then took a deep breath and shouted, filling the air with echoes. "MINAKO! AIGIS! CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

I've blacked out.

I have just enough time to realize this before my eyes open, and I'm looking up into darkness – and there's a blue haze in my peripheries. Rocks and – moss or something? Wait, how did I survive that fall? I roll to a sitting position, then to my feet, not even dizzy. Fog puffs from between my lips, cold shivering across my skin. I pull my blazer tighter around myself, turning, trying to take everything in at once. Blood in my ears? – No, I'm hearing flowing water, some distance away. What the hell? This isn't Port Island. Where did I –

My gaze snags on pure white and I freeze.

At the far end of the cavern, almost more luminescent than the moss, Ker's standing, hands clasped loosely in front of herself. Her hair hangs long and straight, too white.

She makes a soft sound like a snort, and, speaking, her voice sounds a bit younger than it did singing. "My brother came back for you." When I stare, she makes an impatient movement with her shoulders and clarifies. "He was about to attack me, on the stage, but he saw that you'd fallen and went back for you. What a softie."

Thanatos growls, and it doesn't stay in my mind – I can tell she hears it too, because her lips press into a vague smirk.

"Where are my friends?"

She flicks her hand. "Around. You can find them if you want, but you'll have to go back."

"What?"

"If you're stuck on them, you can't stay here." She brushes her hair off one shoulder. "I thought you'd be here to see me, not find them."

I want to take her white arms and splinter them. "Where are they?"

She points to one rough, stony corridor. "That way. Eventually. But they might be dead before you reach them."

I've started towards the corridor, just to see, but I wrench myself back around. "What? Why?" The naginata's out, my muscles trembling with cold and adrenaline.

"Because I have to punish you somehow. So you can turn back and try to make sure they're okay, or you can do what you're supposed to and deal with me." She crosses her arms. "Death and I, we have things to settle."

I turned back towards her, taking a few steps forward, steadying my muscles. "Now you're calling me Death too?"

"Don't be so pissy, Orpheus. You haven't come this far to choose your friends over me."

"Thanatos!"

He sweeps free from me just as Ker bends herself backwards, turning a light little flip – and when she handsprings into the air, her hair's darkened and black wings have burst from her shoulders. She rotates one hand and an apple appears in it.

I'm running, but there's no way I can catch up before Thanatos leaps upon Eris, metal jaws ripping into her chest. She twists free from him, ichor flickering down, her ribcage showing through the oily clot. No muscle, just pale bone. I kick into the air, met by the blast of Bufudyne. It rattles through me, but honestly, I couldn't feel any colder. I shove my blade into the wound, pushing it through, feeling her back rip. She drags all ten claws down my face, nearly hitting my right eye, heat slicing down my neck. My weight drags me down, taking my naginata with me, and as I pull free, she vanishes, leaving nothing but a black smear from my blade to my knuckles and ten red lines on my face.

Ker reappears and lands, as if her flip was never interrupted, spotless and white with her ankles together. In another small movement, she's elongated, twisted, her whiteness flaking and poked and wrinkled. Like a dry white muscle, she pulls herself into a new form, a towering, emaciated old man with long arched claws.

The images are coming to me already, my friends, decades from now, happy and utterly carefree without me, and I can't fight that, not time, but I can fight Geras himself. I hit him at a run, stabbing bloodlessly through his chest, and his long fingers mesh around my throat. Suspended, I brace my feet against his chest, hauling back, vision popping and sparking, pushing my blade upwards. Geras snarls, releasing me, and I hurtle back, almost losing my weapon as it judders free of him. There's a twisted, dry gash in his chest, the only color on him the smears of my blood on his hands.

Before I've got to my feet, he's lunged, the heel of his hand hitting my skull, pinning it to the rock, shoving my neck around. I kick out, hit nothing, stab upward with my blade. My vision's nothing but black and red swirls, my hands numbing, so I don't feel if my blade strikes, can't reach for Thanatos, can't –

Screams humming through my bones. And a lash of cold air as Geras reels back from me, ripping away from my naginata, stomach torn, leaving something white and dessicated on my blade.

Geras screams again, head, shoulders, hips shrinking inwards, towards the wound – then it spills outward, shattered bones and shredded muscle, scattering across the floor. As I clamber up, shaking my blade clean, the debris reforms, darkens to iridescent green, becoming a gigantic, seven-headed snake. Each head wears a mask with my face in a different attitude – laughing, crying, sleeping, bloodstained, upper lip arched with my tongue slipped out to lick it.

Momos, right? I sidestep, watching as the necks writhe. With so many heads, he can look in almost every direction simultaneously.

You should have told them you were dying –

Nope. Thanatos manifests, Megidolaon lighting the cavern better than Ker could. Momos flinches, necks closing over his body, then unfurls and snaps towards me. I'm good, but I can't intercept seven heads at once. I evoke and dash. Thanatos roars, attacking the heads. I take my first attack at a leap, twisting and slamming blade-first onto Momos' back, his flesh squelching, ichor spraying across my leg. Brace my foot on the blade, shoving down to drive it in – and then Momos bucks, and I clutch my naginata for dear life, but it hasn't sunk in deep enough to hold. I tumble away, Momos' scales rushing across the ground as he hoists himself around, and I've evoked by the time my shoulders hit the stone.

Momos rears, heads flung back, body haloed in Thanatos' Maragidyne. Scales blackening and shriveling, breaking from his body, drifting through the cavern – and then abruptly, his body extinguishes and crumbles, falling to a pile of white ash. I'm not far, and there's no heat rising from it.

A wind – that of course I don't feel – passes over it, ruffling it, and suddenly that soft movement isn't ash, it's diaphanous purple fabric. Just as the ash takes the shape of a tall woman, lying on her back, it hardens to skin. It's a maiden, hands crossed, eyes closed in sleep. This has to be Oneiroi. I struggle to my feet, head spinning.

I'm in our car, the backseat, it's huge, and I can't find my seatbelt, and that's bad, because if I don't buckle up, Mommy might scold me again, and we talked to my teacher the other day and I've been trying to behave better all around. But the seatbelt's not there, and I'm hunting around for it in the cushions, but I'm afraid my hands will get stuck, or maybe there are rats down there and they'll bite me if they see my fingers. And the car's rocking as it takes the corners, Daddy's driving fast, my bottom's thumping on the cushions, and why are they green? Never mind about the seatbelt, I'll just watch out the window. We're coming to the bridge and that's my favorite part. And I'm almost never up this late, so I've never seen it like this before.

So I kneel on the cushions, careful of the rats, and I press my hands on the pane of the left window, and it's so dark outside, the clouds brownish from the city lights. But I can see the ocean and the way the lights ripple and fold across it, and maybe we'll go to the beach again. Daddy? Mommy? Can we go to the beach again? I promise I'll be good and I'll do my homework and I'll say I love you every night before I go to bed.

And I turn to the front of the car, to the driver and passenger seat, and my parents aren't there, only two splintered coffins, and there's a bright green light bleeding through the windshield, Aigis' gunfire, and Thanatos is roaring, because this is where – this is how we –

I can't breathe – I choke out his name rather than shout it.

The memory-dream-delusion breaks apart like a cloud, and when my eyes clear, Thanatos has beheaded Oneiroi, snarling. He has no claws, but he drags his fingers through her body, making long bloody grooves.

Akihiko reacted first, pushing himself up onto one elbow. "Ken – what?" Ken didn't answer, keeping his teeth closed on the panic, watching as Akihiko rose to one knee, looking around, taking everything in. "How did we –"

"S-senpai?" Junpei slurred, rubbing his jaw. "Did the – holy shit!"

Fuuka sat up, Koromaru whimpering. Mitsuru lifted her head, pushing aside her hair to see. Yukari rolled over and shook Shinjiro' shoulder. "Senpai!" Shinjiro shivered, and he pushed himself to hands and knees.

"Ken – ?"

"Where is this?"

"How the hell did – "

The words broke through his composure. "I don't know where they are."

"What?" Yukari asked, not incredulous, just uncomprehending, just as Shinjiro said, "Where's Mina? Did anyone see her fall?"

"What?"

"Wait, you're right – "

"Where's Aigis?"

"This isn't – "

"There's no way out of here!"

"Everyone, be quiet," Fuuka almost snapped, her eyes wide, her head tipped, listening. "Juno," she murmured under her breath.

"What is it?" Junpei asked quickly. They were all on their feet now, circling through the chamber, pressing their hands against the stone walls. "Can you see them, Fuuka?"

"No, but." She drew her Evoker and placed it to her temple. "Shadows are coming!"

The walls bubbled, beaded with ichor.

Oneiroi crumbles in Thanatos' hands, and he vanishes. I climb to my feet, watching as the ashy remains sweep and rock in the wind, coalesce, form Ker's shape, now unmistakable to me. Still only ash debris, she floats downwards through the air, arms raised. Her toes hit the ground and she breaks apart, upwards, forming three sinuous stalks. The ashes flash golden, then solidify as a tree, three women for its branches. The Hesperides.

I launch into a run – then am launched by Garudyne. Hurtling through the air, I flail my center of gravity and don't land too bad, though pain shears up my left leg. I run – land badly on that leg – keep running, swinging my blade, aiming for the tree's trunk. The wind hasn't let down, the three nymphs keening a song that I can't follow, leaves swirling, apples rattling.

My blade gouges up the bark, splinters flying and golden blood spilling out. I step back, giving myself room to strike again, and another Garudyne comes. I sidestep, nearly thrown into the air, but I keep my feet, stumble into my next lunge, piercing one Hesperis through her stomach. Her mouth stretches as she screams, tusks breaking through the lovely lips. I hit the central Hesperis on my backswing, ichor splitting along her face.

You should have taken your chance and gone back to the Seal.

Shaft smacking against my palm, lifting the naginata for the strike to the last Hesperis.

Only on the Seal can you guarantee their safety.

Not while Ker's around. The last Hesperis' head tumbles from her shoulders, my blade flecked with black and gold blood, splattered with my own across my cheeks. I fall back, a gold fountain spraying from the Hesperides' trunk. The flume narrows, softens. The trunk vanishes and the blood pales. Ker, whole again, drops lightly to the ground. She looks unhurt, still wearing her simple dress from the concert.

I slant the naginata in front of myself, waiting for her to shift into another ker. Who's left? Oizys, Philotes –

She isn't smiling, mouth bent with something that might be impatience. "Perhaps it's best to take you out with a ker no one's dealt with yet." She clasps her hands, brings them to her lips, then blows a kiss. "I call upon the Fates."