His face was covered in dirt and pine needles, the earth beneath him was soaked in his blood.
Eighteen had arrived too late, now she wasn't even looking at the blood; she was terrified of feeling cold under her hands.
She feared that if she touched Seventeen's skin and felt it cold, she would stop living.
Eighteen did not breathe.
She was incredulous, in denial. It couldn't have happened a second time.
But perhaps it wasn't about before or after; perhaps, there was no hope for them.
Everyone had felt the force of the blow that had ripped Seventeen. Even the humans in Verny had sensed an invisible shock wave.
Gero and Sixteen had turned around, halting their fight. Then the doctor had attacked Sixteen, treacherously, while once again he rushed to the aid of his allies.
Gero had stepped on the android's body, finally caught in his shocks and had reached Cell.
Cell was not in a hurry to dispose of Seventeen: Gero knew they would win again, they might as well dedicate themselves to other minor hunts.
Perhaps free from everyone's attention, Gero had commanded: Cell would finish 17 later, it was time to go get his human.
/
The compartment was dark and narrow, especially for someone the size of Hacchan's. All the big cyborg wanted was to contribute. Perhaps, for the first time, to fight.
"If Cell becomes perfect again, it will be the end for everyone."
Carly walked around the small enclosed space. She didn't know what to answer, she was still very confused and the kicks in the ribs didn't let her breathe: even Lapis's child was restless.
One hand stroking up and down her belly and the other clutched around the weapon made of Lazuli, Carly looked at Hacchan with vehemence and even fear.
She had too many things to do to let herself be killed: first living her life with Lapis and the baby, then receiving her diploma in September.
"That ... terrorist killed so many people in my city. What does he want from us?"
"Cell wasn't always what everyone saw on TV. Before, he was incomplete."
Did Seventeen really tell her nothing?
Hacchan turned to her gravely.
"Cell is destined to feed on # 17 and # 18. And the time everyone saw him on TV, it had happened."
Carly couldn't contain the shock as Hacchan explained impossible biology to her and recounted what he had learned from Eighteen: now she could explain some of Lapis's moods and the new, insidious aversion to enclosed spaces.
They weren't bad boy idiosyncrasies.
It was trauma.
"But we won't let him!" Carly took up Lazuli's weapon/blood, turned a dial near the trigger. "I won't let him."
She was dauntless, like his Suno. Hacchan smiled at her fondly, with fear.
"That's why I have to go, now. He's here."
/
Eight didn't let Cell approach the aqueduct and see Carly with his own eyes. He ran away from there and saw Cell chasing Krillin in flight.
Someone was needed to stay at the aqueduct, Krillin exchanged a simple sign of agreement with the cyborg and flew on to the compartment.
Finally, Cell landed in front of Hacchan - he wanted to make it an opportunity.
"You don't care who I am," Hacchan struck a blow. "But I care who you are. You are Evil."
Hacchan vibrated and took blows with dignity, generated air currents with his arms and repelled the corrosive jets of his enemy.
Hacchan wanted to fight by remembering why he had joined Sixteen and Eighteen: in every move he gave vent to all his love for the world, which Cell threatened.
He thought of his village, he thought of Suno.
Cell, on the other hand, had nothing to think about. As he had done with 9, he hit Hacchan with a barrage that robbed him of his cybernetic components: large chunks of his limbs, head and torso unhinged from him and landed on Cell, merging with his skin.
Cell didn't waste any more energy on the mutilated cyborg: he took off on the trail of Krillin, toward his first prey.
/
Krillin had told her that she couldn't handle the weapon that contained Eighteen's energy on her own: the recoil would have slammed her into something and she would be injured at the very least, as had happened to Kate that same day.
"We will do it together. Me or Hacchan will pull the trigger, you will take the aim."
Carly's eyes were clear, dry. "All right."
Krillin took a deep breath and left the compartment: he greeted Cell with a discharge of scatter bullet, giving the possibility to damaged Hacchan to reach them without being attacked, and to Carly to prepare to take aim.
That rifle was so heavy, in every sense.
It was armed with Lazuli's life, Carly knew, it was made of the blood that also flowed into the creature inside her: Carly had no right to miss the shot and waste Lazuli.
Seven months pregnant, determined and irresponsible as never before, she still knew how to wield a weapon: she hugged it and let her muscle memory work.
Carly wanted the monster that had made her Lapis suffer excruciatingly to watch her while she shot him.
Krillin was still fighting, knowing that his defence would soon fall; Hacchan had limped into the compartment and Carly hadn't allowed herself to react to his dismantled body -now circuits, now living flesh- or to wonder if Lapis's inside looked like that too.
Hacchan saw Carly's quivering lip. She had just defended him from Eighteen (verbally) he put his hand on her shoulder, smiled at her.
"You are brave. #17 chose you, after all."
Under other circumstances, Carly would have hugged him. Those words of encouragement convinced her to fight with the strength she had, no matter how little it was.
Krillin had thwarted Cell's intentions to approach the compartment; Cell had lifted him by the neck, placing him against the light, tearing the stump of his corroded arm. Krillin couldn't perform a true Solar Flare with one arm, but he had channelled a brief glow into the monster's pupils.
"HACCHAN!"
With a kick the warrior had pushed Cell away, toward the aqueduct.
Carly winced and screamed at the sight of the monster, her hand slipping on the trigger. Cell's four fingers were now reaching out to Carly, closer and closer; soon he would tear the sleeve of her blouse, the skin and muscle of her shoulder.
But Carly wasn't unsupported: Hacchan's hand wrapped tightly and securely around hers, around the trigger. His movements had been so fast, so surreal.
Cell's hand was already gripping her blouse, but Carly chose not to fear him: Cell was alone, she wasn't.
With Hacchan holding the weapon with her, not for her, Carly couldn't fail.
The jade eyes of the human challenged the ember ones of the man-eating monster: only then did Carly activate the weapon and fire.
There was a brief mechanical hum, the weapon vibrating so hard it made her scream from the effort.
And then a huge burst of energy, much larger than the nozzle that produced it shook the ground, crumbled the rock and dazzled warriors and spectators.
The very proximity of that energy had robbed Carly of all her strength, Krillin saw her fall in Hacchan's arms. He also saw, with his own eyes, Cell's body dissolve in that energy.
/
Eighteen chased her own monster in the forest, cutting his way with a web of long thread-like blades, projecting it into the sky above him, weaving it around him.
Eighteen ran, focused to the max, target in sight: and just at that moment Eighteen could no longer sustain her own attack, all the energy in her seemed to burst.
An immeasurable force withdrew from her reactor, a deadly suction tore her to the bone; blood shot from her eyes like a cry, from every cavity of her body, every pore of her skin.
Eighteen landed on her back, momentarily blinded and crushed by the outpouring of her own life force.
Disfigured by love.
Her weapon had been used.
Gero still stood, but Cell was gone: the cyborg created for homicidal purposes had saved four lives.
Hacchan also counted now.
"Did I do it for you, Seventeen?"
Eighteen panted on the ground, alone with her own thoughts, ignoring the battlefield for a moment.
At first she heard the bounce of something falling from above; then a distant cry, Krillin's voice, pierced her brain.
"EIGHTEEN, NO! THE HEAD!"
Eighteen didn't know that his head had been saved and that this had allowed him to regenerate.
Eighteen didn't see that Cell was regenerating, trunk, limbs, fingers: she believed she had avenged Seventeen, until she had regained control over her nerve endings and had seen the Creature on his feet again.
It was that sight that froze Eighteen; that, and the fear of that new Cell so bestial, now pointing his wide open tail toward her.
Gero watched with folded arms; perhaps he understood that he couldn't play around so much, or perhaps seeing Eighteen so wounded in the body -by her own blow- and in the mind -by trauma- had given him the orgasm he was seeking.
Down and down came the tail, Eighteen was frozen with shock, unable to move.
Once again.
Before the cyborg girl could scream, Cell began choking and pawing with his feet off the ground. It looked like a garrote was strangling him and he was trying to get rid of it.
Eighteen saw Gero deflect a destructo disk by Krillin, but get hit by Sixteen's fist.
Eighteen saw the garrote too: an arm wrapped around the beast's neck, pulling the beast back away from her.
And behind the beast, Eighteen saw Seventeen's bloodthirsty, icy gaze.
His body was enveloped in an aura that flared upward in black flames.
Seventeen was still standing, still almost halved: he realised he was giving himself a chance, perhaps his last.
The distant silhouette of Carly protruding from the aqueduct made him realise that the strength to finish it all was still his: it wasn't over until it was over.
Eighteen's astonished gaze almost amused him, but he didn't smile: he felt dirty with blood and didn't want her to see.
"Trust me," he told her again, this time with just his eyes.
Without hesitation, Seventeen projected his boreal prison around Cell.
And the monster, for a moment, didn't understand what was happening: he struggled in the force field, hitting it with fists so strong they cracked it like glass, but at the command of Seventeen the cracks recomposed, darkened.
Soon, the green barrier was tinged with shiny black.
Everyone heard Gero swearing and screaming, as the walls of the prison-barrier closed on Cell and turned into an explosive hell.
The muffled noise of that execution boomed low, shook objects in houses, resounded with the same emotion given by fireworks, filling those who listened to it with shivers and hope.
Seventeen bombed Cell inside the barrier relentlessly, for several minutes, so that his worst nightmare, the one who had let his guard down while waiting to dispose of him forever, would never return.
The cyborg kept his hand raised, but had fallen again; his broken back had no longer supported him.
"What's happening?" Krillin gasped, not expecting a real answer.
"Cell's blow is killing him, his systems are shutting down...What?!"
Already suspicious of the new colour of the barrier, Sixteen scanned Seventeen hastily to figure out what was really going on inside his body.
Prone, Seventeen kept his arms outstretched: his veins had not burst with Gero's shock, but as the life force flowed en masse out of him and into the barrier, the cyborg felt every part of his arms compress, implode.
Eighteen stared in disbelief at what Sixteen had seen too: Seventeen shone from within, through his wounds, now filled with a dark glow she knew well.
How could that be?
The barrier was a bubble of incandescent energy, and the energy that was unleashing within its boundaries was dense, heavy: under all that weight the outer black layer no longer maintained its spherical shape and began to collapse, to shrink.
Cell's aura was barely perceptible.
And then Krillin and Sixteen hit the force field together: a last gesture of help for a dying brother, and of self-affirmation.
/
As a battle between superhuman beings raged at Verny's gates, the fire raged on in another corner of Royal Nature Park.
The forest set on fire by Gero still burned: the firefighters, already not numerous, had hurried where the blaze had started, the service station.
People were panicking, John bit his nails: where was the army? Hadn't they heard the sirens?
Moreover, he had once again allowed his pupil to risk her life.
"Lillian, you can't go up the mountain!"
"I have to! There are people up there."
The campers. Those whom no one had mentioned to John.
Fires were Lillian Dahl's worst fear, from her earliest days as a ranger.
Yet, together with Fabien, she had driven up the winding roads lapped by the flames, coughing in the smoke, running to the clearing.
Few campers remained, many had fled in time, others hadn't had time. One of them cried over the body of a youth, the boy who had spoken to Lillian and Seventeen just a few days earlier.
Everyone ran into the ranger van.
All right, the surviving campers had been recovered: Fabien, now driving, was just waiting for Lillian to leave with them.
But Fabien understood what Lillian wanted to do, seeing her look up to the east.
"The tank? Aren't you thinking ..?"
Lillian was thinking.
"Lillian? The firefighters will put out the fire with the liquid extinguisher. From the plane!"
The firefighters, the firefighters.
Slow, inefficient and too few.
The stubborn former top ranger watched the tsunami of fire that surrounded them. "Do you see any planes around here?"
/
Before returning to the valley with the campers, Fabien agreed to drive again in the middle of the fire and to give her all his ammo; Lillian then began to climb the path to a huge, almost inaccessible cistern, perched in the void not far from there.
Woman VS element fire, what Lillian was trying to do was almost superhuman: if Seventeen had been there…If only Seventeen had come to their aid!
But Seventeen wasn't there and Lillian was on her own. As it once was. As he had always wanted.
At the end of the short climb Lillian crossed a massive bridge and took up her shotgun; she had never shot as a ranger, things could have gone wrong in a hundred different ways.
In the end she was not the Sev, a Terminator; she was not even Carly, who behind her naive air and that belly that looked like a planet hid a fearsome sniper aim.
But Lillian couldn't stay there, full of doubts and bullets, waiting for the tank to pour out all its contents itself.
In the end, doing nothing was like letting the flames continue to engulf the mountain: how many people had already lost their homes, loved ones, their lives?
Lillian had managed to overcome her fire phobia, she didn't look at the flames below her.
She fired in bursts at the base of the cistern, the compressed water in there starting to gush through every little hole, still timidly.
Shooting took more effort than it seemed.
Lillian emptied all her cartridges, grateful to be able to do the same with Fabien's: as soon as the tear opened by the continuous shooting was large enough, the power of the water element and gravity finished the job.
A mass that would have filled a lake burst out of its container and rained down on the bridge, Lillian and a piece of burning valley.
/
Gero was still standing watching the Masterpiece being destroyed by his killer (and by Sixteen and Krillin).
He understood that sooner or later it would be his turn, he was alone against everyone and no one would spare him.
However, he would not go with his throat slit like an animal.
Gero concentrated all his strength, seeming to light up with his own energy: his half artificial body was stretched in all directions, hands to the sky and feet to the earth.
Eyes on the massif behind him.
That corner of the world felt the earthquake, the force of the wind, the weight of Mt. Severny uprooting from the ground and ascending toward the stratosphere.
Soon no one could see it, but the cyborgs and the android knew that the rock had been moved over Verny.
And when Gero dropped it, the catastrophe would be incalculable.
The twins had stopped bleeding, but they were still exhausted.
Gero, vibrating with magnetic energy, looked so calm: aware of his disadvantage, but determined to fight to the last.
When the doctor let go, endless tons of rock became a meteorite: Gero would leave that battle with a slaughter, something that would leave a scar. An entire city, with all its inhabitants, would be wiped out of the world.
Eighteen, Sixteen and Krillin flew at breakneck speed to the houses: they had to destroy the Severny from below before impact.
And again, that would only have served to contain the damage. They resigned themselves, slapped by the wind that preceded the crash; charged their energy blast, hell's flash and kamehameha.
But the Severny never touched the city: the rock didn't withstand the impact against an iridescent, almost invisible dome that had intercepted it at the last moment.
Never had such an extensive one been made.
The explosion rumbled under the dome, the shock wave knocked down the pylons and raised the waves into the distant sea, cities and villages lost roofs and windows, a sandstorm obscured the shield suspended in place of the sky.
The inhabitants felt a shock in the air; the shield emitted small flashes, created a surge that overloaded the electrical grid and turned on all of Verny's lights.
Eventually the street lamps, shop signs and light bulbs all burst together and half the world's power grid went short.
People started to talk about it on the news, but no one ever knew that a villain had thrown a mountain at a city, and that a force field had made it sand.
In Bulma's living room Marron sat, fat and peaceful, in front of the TV set. Trunks played with a tablet, but both children protested when the TV whistled and the screen went black.
West City ranted when the trains stopped running and everyone had to walk home from work.
/
The city of Verny looked like a desert, but was still standing.
After the last effort, Seventeen had begun to cough again and had fallen back to the ground; Eighteen could not perceive ki, but she had felt that.
She no longer cared about the cold on her skin, she wanted to hold him.
She needed to be next to her lifeless younger twin.
Another of those terrible shocks hit her from behind: an intense tingling went through her whole body, spotted her with new under-the-skin bleeding, and left her on her knees.
Gero loomed with outstretched arms, still eager to take his toll.
Eighteen felt the ferrous taste in her mouth, but one movement alone gave her tortured body the reason to fight again.
It had been the provocative movement of Gero's eyes, glancing at Seventeen.
Gero dodged an angry kick, but Eighteen was ready: she unleashed a machine-gun volley of splinters from her blade-arm, so many tiny needles that hit the doctor like a gust of solid wind.
Gero stood frozen in place with his face contorted, almost petrified.
Krillin, Sixteen, Hacchan, Carly, and Verny watched the eldest twin gather all her anger: for what that monster of a man had done, for what he had still wanted to do, for Seventeen's life.
He was only twenty-three.
They had been only eighteen!
With a gesture that required much more strength and fortitude than she imagined, Eighteen clenched her fist.
And then Gero, now black and shiny with kachi katchin, broke into a thousand pieces like a mirror.
Forever.
An incalculable number of fragments captured the afternoon light, returning it to the shadowy undergrowth in a thousand facets.
Then the fragments became dust.
Eighteen could finally breathe.
/
Twenty minutes after the alarm went off, the army found the city of Verny buried in sand, swept by the wind.
Deadly silent.
It was already the aftermath: bodies lay in dented houses, survivors began to come out of their hiding places and others were standing on balconies and embankments.
An aircraft had also flown in from nearby West City; two women and an old man had run out of it.
Then there was a girl.
Sick and suffering, she trudged among the splinters of victory and knelt by the body of a fallen.
Eighteen turned him on his back to see his face: his eyes closed, his lips serene, the locks of hair on his nose, the cut that broke him looking tighter, not wider.
He looked like he was sleeping.
Whatever strength had kept Eighteen alive up to that moment suddenly failed: she held Seventeen and wept softly, without being heard.
Eighteen cried and everyone watched.
Hacchan held Carly still while she sobbed, covering her face.
A distant voice rang out.
"Ma'am, you can't get close!"
"No! Let me see them." Another desperate voice retorted.
"Ma'am..."
"Lapis, Lazuli! They are my children, let me see them!"
Eighteen vaguely heard Kate, somewhere in the crowd; she turned to look for her, but didn't have time.
The last thing Eighteen saw herself do, as her body fell to the side of her brother's, was she taking his hand.
/
Seventeen climbed a path along an unknown coast.
He walked as if he knew where to go, not feeling the pain of his wound, guided by a sunset sky.
His footsteps led him to the peninsula where the path ended, a strip of land the water eroded in anger, as if to claim it back.
He could see a white cottage and farther away, a lighthouse stood as the last bastion of human presence in that dramatic Jurassic landscape.
Seventeen could be the last man alive in the world, or perhaps the first of a lineage.
The roar of the waves drew him to the back of the lighthouse, where the cyborg spotted a childlike figure in white.
The figure stood with its back to him, brazenly enjoying the dangerous sight.
Seventeen didn't recognise the jagged coastline and the child's clothes - it looked like some sports uniform- the word Dragons and the stylized drawing of a dragon on his back.
Still, part of him wanted to acknowledge.
When the boy looked to the side and revealed the outline of his profile, Seventeen knew he was in the past: he was looking at himself as a child.
Young Lapis didn't care about Seventeen, he had no sorrows, he took pictures of the same sea that threatened to make him fall; he turned a lacquered wooden box bearing the initial M in his hands.
Seventeen observed Lapis as a child running in his direction, with his eyes down so as not to stumble: he recognised as his own the movement of the black hair, the crease of the eyelid over his upturned eyes.
Young Lapis held out the box to Seventeen: he wanted him to have it, he told him with his own smile and with eyes that were his own indeed, always and forever.
But it was when Seventeen saw the child's eyes, at last up close, that he no longer recognised himself.
The boy who looked just like him, except for the sliver of his irises, closed Seventeen's hand around the box: warmly, as if he loved him.
Seventeen wanted to call the boy, his lips knew his name and spoke it! But his mind didn't remember it, his ears didn't hear.
The boy reacted, as if he had heard himself called, but their time together was over: an abyss opened behind the lighthouse.
"It's me, Seventeen! Wait for me. "
A sidereal suck tore the whole landscape away from him, or him from that landscape.
Seventeen screamed the inaudible name again, "Wait for me in this time."
The jagged coastline and the child disappeared, Seventeen fell; he landed and ran, almost floating, along the corridor of his chalet in Verny.
Before Seventeen opened his bedroom door, that timeline crumbled around him and the dream came to an end.
/
Thoughts of the author:
Phew ... I can finally unroll my sleeves! Action + emotion (and making each character participate) is a delicate balance that made me work hard, but that I'm happy to share with you.
I would then like to say a few words about Sev's trip. It is not the first time that in moments of stress he has good trips thanks to dreams (indeed, it is the third).
The first was when he dreamed of Future Trunks destroying him and Eighteen, which absolutely happened ... but in another timeline: I guess I introduced in chapter 11 that maybe he has this ability. Here he's almost convinced to be in the past. Is he?
In any case, don't forget either the trip or the box with the letter M: they will be quite important later in the story.