Chapter Thirty Nine.Tears had been turned to rivers in the long history of mankind. But these tears would never flourish, they would never grow to be vitale lifesource for humanity and all the earth's other creatures.
No, these tears had no meaning as those first tears did. They had no meaning. No joy or anger, no contempt or acceptance, neither heartfelt or cynical in nature. These tears, however, were joined by others.
Here, in a dank cellar two bodies huddled together. One wept in jubilation, the other in some sort of half-remembered animal instinct. As one cried out in joy, another cried out unaware of the noise it was even making.
'There, there, my baby boy,' wept the second source of tears. A fine woman, with a head of good, if not dirty and unkept blonde hair. The hair was matched by the first source, but where her hair had been ruined by years of stress and labour, his held a great wonder to it. It seemed to glow yellow-gold, even in the poor lighting of the cellar.
'Mum has you,' said the woman, whipping away her tears and those of her newborn son. 'My dearest boy. My little Dio.'
Dio woke with a start, his body wrapped in a cold sweat. He was tense. Why was he tense? More importantly, why was he sweating? He didn't remember having exerted himself, or having come across something that would result in him becoming drenched in his own stink. Had it been the dream?
No, he had not dreamt that night. He had not dreamt properly, not since the vision which had involved Pet Shop. He searched for the Arrow. He found it soon after waking, he checked it was secure, untouched.
'Perhaps,' he said to himself, alleviating some of the tension in the room. 'My shopkeeper will have the required information by now.'
Dio departed for the store immediately. Compelled by some unspoken necessity. That was when he felt it. That odd feeling that he assumed was because his sudo-body was meshing with this universe. Instead, the feeling was only in his body. That being his face and part of his neck. He scratched at it insistently, feeling that it would disappear if he just cut to the centre of it.
Two days later and Dio Brando was standing before a Yakuza home. Or, more correctly, dying before one.
In the hours since they had attacked the main base of the so-called criminals - who Dio had shrugged off as outdated fools - he had slowly been worn down by the constant attacks of their minions.
As a crackling maul of vulcanised rubber lead piping crashed into him once again, he spun with the hit, absorbing it. His abdomen, be suspected, was the colour of a fresh bruise under his tearing clothes.
He had taken out two scores of these fools, yet still they kept coming. Again and again, one, two three, a dozen at once, they had come against him.
As he slammed aside this one, another came at him, this one wielding a sword and shield of jade. 'Your pretty home is broken, criminal,' Dio declared. He slammed his fist into the jade shield, drawing shards. 'Your little empire is undone, it has finally-'
He was enjoying the roleplaying aspect of his job, for a moment at least.
The blade-wielding thug's blow knocked the words out of his mouth. Blood flew. The pommel, not the long, delicate blade, had slammed into him, that was just insulting. His sword tore into his ribs, Dio lashed out, but found only a shield again.
Another blow like the first. Dio staggered away, then spun, head low, keeping his distance. The thug leapt forwards anyway, slamming into him with his shield. Then, surprisingly, Dio dodged. Or so the thug suspected. But no, he had merely fallen short, or had he?
'We may for this day,' the thug said. 'But I shall bleed you and all of your kind deeply.' At this Dio chuckled. 'What, if anything, can you say or do that will deter me from this path!'
'One,' Dio said, almost surprised with himself. 'I can not be killed by the likes of you. And two, this!'
He stared at the thug. He pressed his hand to his rib-wounds. They closed, the skin re-knitting with a scar.
'Three,' Dio smiled as The World paused. 'You and your friends are going to give me a drink!'
In the small room with a tv that they had given to Fast Kilmister, he watched with eyes wide as he saw the man who had done this. 'H-him, its him, oh God, its him, it's that little blonde bastard who did this, him, the arrow and Electric Eye, that little turd!' He screamed pointing at the tv with his unbound head.
'Y-you see him right, the blonde-haired guy, looks kinda like you old man! You see, you see, it was him with the Arrow and my buddy. He gave me this ghost, eh, Stand, right.' As Kilmister thrashed about in his chair, the Physician sedated him.
As the group looked at the tv and came to a startling realization, only Pet Shop made a sound. If they could understand what the predator bird was saying, they would know it to be a cry for jubilation as the Stand-using animal saw its master.
They could never catch him, no matter how many times they tried. The young man was a blur of charred flesh and blood-stained clothes, cut from the ends of street-gardens. His weeping boots barely touched the ground as he ran.
Knives, bottles and the occasional bullet chased him as he ran. Thugs, drunks and old bobbies. The bullets were flies, knives and bottles equated to the accompanying buzz. He grinned, laughed, and silenced himself once more as the pain returned.
The first bullet should have killed him in the mansion, yet here he was, in the streets he had once called home, killing those who had once bellited him, him and his mother.
On the corner of a roof he stopped. There, he waited like a shadow, all movement suspended.
His pursuers came as a breathless pack, their wheezing gasps scented of poisoned water and their skin smelling of other people's blood. Some went left, some went right, but all went through the puddles that had made the street a marsh of shit and piss.
The former human tried not to smile, their footprints on the muddy pathway would make tracking them the easiest thing in the world. When the sun next rose on that pathway, it shunned fresh cadavers, their skin flenced and replaced by a fine coat of charred meat. But in the recessed shadows of the city of London, there stalked a creature who had been reborn.
First Chapter in many weeks, or months, more will eventually come
