Hold Me Close

by Seraph of Winters Past

Saitama is the strongest man alive, but even he has a limit. The loss of a friend hits harder than any foe he's ever faced: a demon that he can't fight alone. Can Fubuki the Blizzard help him defeat this monster that fists cannot? And will he regain his will to fight as the figures of his nightmares break through to the waking world in search of carnage? (Sequel to "Human Evil")

The following is a continuation of my previous story, Human Evil, which focused on Mumen Rider's life-or-death struggle to rescue a young girl from her kidnapper. I highly recommend that you read that story before this one, as Hold Me Close makes many and constant references to it and you may be confused by unfolding events. The status quo was not restored at the end of Human Evil, and Hold Me Close will continue tangentially away from the canonical events of One Punch Man. You may enjoy what you read, but certain things will only make sense with the proper context.

This is a non-profit, fan-based story and the author is unaffiliated with ONE, Shueisha, or Viz Media, who own the rights to One-Punch Man. Please support the official releases.

^V^V^V^

:: Hold Me Close ::

by

Seraph of Winters Past

^V^V^V^

Prologue

"Terracotta Masks"

So... you've come back, have you?

I'm going to be honest: I'm a little surprised. People don't usually seek me out once they've learned my name. Well, not the ones in their right state of mind. And maybe you aren't. Or maybe you're just curious. Or maybe you're polite, or maybe... I don't know. But you're here.

Thank you.

We can't resume where we left off. We've finished Mumen Rider's story, and I've escorted him away from all of this. In reality, stories don't really follow one after the other in a strict sequence. There's overlap, some stories start before another one ends, and you have to backtrack sometimes because you have to finish one story before telling the other one. Life isn't considerate enough to break events down into perfectly linear chapters: I'm just forced to do that because I can't give you the whole story at once. It also bears mentioning that I'm not Life, so I'm considerate like that and at least try to help you make sense out of things.

Let's take a moment to get our bearings. Or, at least, let me give them to you. We're actually almost back towards the beginning of the previous tale, and very nearly at the same time while we're at it.

Let's start early on a Wednesday, not long before the fall of Watanabe Tanaka, the Cyclist For Justice, Rider Without a License: Mumen Rider. The sun's not that high in the sky but it's already scorching and it's just getting hotter. It's over 30 degrees Celsius right now and dozens of senior citizens will die when the power goes out in a little while and their air conditioning goes with it. Tomorrow, it's only going to get worse in a lot of ways, but it's also going to improve. The forecast doesn't have the clouds rolling in, but there are storm clouds not far beyond the horizon and they're going to roll over City Z and drench it anyways.

Of course, when you're underground, none of that matters. Earth and rock are exceptional insulators. It doesn't really matter if it's hot-enough to boil lead up on the surface: put about fifty meters of sedimentary rock and soil between you and the surface and it's a cool twelve degrees. And it's not just sitting there, either: the air wants to move, and there are enough passageways for it to do so and get some circulation going. If you're in the right kind of cave, then you have natural air conditioning, so good on you: you're in exactly the right place to laugh at the weather if you don't mind the darkness.

"How did they see?" Gideon asks, holding a mask between his hands. "You can't just carry your light source this far underground..."

"You are!" Go says, clapping him on the shoulder. The shock of it knocks the mask from his hands and only a frantic juggle lets him recover it before it smashes to pieces on the hard floor. He turns around to glare at Go, blasting her face with light from his headlamp. Her teeth flash pearlescent in the harsh white and then she's gone. Sighing deeply, Gideon returns his attention to the nearly-lost archeological marvel.

It wasn't made by human hands. At least, not Homo sapiens. In the ancient past, more than one species of human wandered the Earth and skeletons recovered from the caves point to one of those close cousins. Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon... these species coexisted with and eventually merged into the species that we call the modern human. But somewhere, at least a million years prior, their Australopithecus ancestorsplit off into another genus with a name that the anthropologists are still fighting over. Thick brows, jutting jaws, long arms, small braincases, furry hides... they were veering tangentially away from what humanity would become. They were, about as literally as you could get with the saying, little more than animals.

And they were potters.

The earliest-known piece of ceramic ever uncovered is about thirty-three thousand years old, crudely depicting a woman with enlarged sexual characteristics. Educational aid? Religious token? Adult toy? It's still up for debate, but the fact is that archeologists like Gideon and Go have been finding these little trinkets with minimal details about the size of balled fists or smaller for decades, and each new discovery only pushes back the origin of civilization by a few centuries or millennia.

And yet these terracotta masks exist. Twisted things, semi-human things. Some with horns, some with tusks. Some with elephantine ears and some with lupine snouts. Utterly asymmetrical with features distended and elongated in ways that had to be conscious. Personalized. Genuine works of art from a time when humanity's ancestors were struggling to put a blade on a stick and call it a spear. Each mask, studded with mounted garnets and carnelians, is large-enough to slip over an adult's head and envelop it completely, bearing a negative impression of the wearer's face along the inside that would've let the owner wear it like a second skin.

A spelunker discovered one of the masks near the mouth of the cave a couple of years back and turned it over to scientists at the Kurozu Institute for analysis. This eventually led to the mask shipping out to Gideon's lab in the Miskatonic University for Potassium-argon dating, which put the thing's origin to about 3.2 million years ago. Give or take a hundred millennia. Humans hadn't even invented clothing yet, and these lost cousins were firing fitted headgear in kilns.

And that brings us back to what passes for the present. Gideon glances towards his Kurozu colleagues. They're all busy turning over more of these things, snapping pictures and jotting down details in their notebooks. There are hundreds of them in this chamber alone, and he knows that thousands more lie further into the caverns. They're bagging a few – the largest, most intact specimens that they can find – for transport back to the surface. They need a sizable collection of the things to study because, as they say, it's not science if you can't duplicate your results. One sample – just one – was dated to the early Pleistocene, but it wasn't found in its native environment and any number of contaminants could've skewed the results. But two? Five? A dozen? Well, that'll be harder to explain away.

Now they've got their haul and they're about ready to call it quits. It's going to be a long, winding trek back up through narrow crevasses over rough and uneven ground, and they're going to have to get on their hands and knees to squeeze through some low passages. Which brings us back to our original question...

How did the ancients see?

It's wet and hard underground. You don't really have any soil: everything soft was washed away by the subterranean streams that carved out the passages in the intervening millennia, or else was compressed down into sedimentary rock by the unrelenting weight of the crust. So, you're not really going to find much growing down here. Wood? Fie! You need light to grow a tree in the first place, at which point you wouldn't need to bother with the wood to make a fire in the first place. There's nothing for the wayward lizard or mouse to eat down here, and you're not going to find moss unless you shine a light on a spot long-enough for it to grow. So, if you want to see anything underground, you're going to have to bring your light source with you. That's all well and good for a modern human with all of these fancy electronics, but you'd need open flame in the ancient past. Considering the nightmare that Gideon and his colleagues had to travel through to come this far, with their headlamps freeing up both hands to crawl and squeeze...

"Alright, team," Gideon says lowly. The narrow walls and the acoustic properties of the stone ensure that he doesn't need to raise his voice: it carries and nobody can miss it. "Let's start wrapping up. It's a four hour trek down and six hours back up with all this stuff: I for one am ready to see the sun again."

There's some complaining, but that's to be expected. When everyone learned about what the weather was going to be like above ground, everyone in the party pretty much rushed into the caves. He actually had to turn away a few assistants begging to come along. Now, Gideon would have loved to take everyone along for an expedition like this, but somebody needed to stay behind to watch the base camp and he couldn't let a dozen hangers-on trudge through an archeological site unsupervised even if he wanted to. If something happened to any of these priceless artifacts...

Gideon's hands shake with what he at first assumes is the thought of it. It's just this quiet trembling, so subtle that he barely notices it. He initially chalks it up to general anxiety, not helped by Go's little prank a few minutes ago. But then he hears it.

Clink-Clink-Clink-Clink-Clink

It's like a poorly-tuned xylophone, or like long nails tapping against a desk. His first impression is that it's coming from all around him, but that's just a trick of the acoustics. Below. It's coming from below. Underfoot. He looks down, shining his light over the hundreds of masks that yet remain in their resting places, and he notices that they're bouncing. At first, it's hardly perceptible: just enough movement to catch the eye. But the longer he looks, the more the things move. At first, they're just jostling up against each other, making that clink-clink-clink sound like dry bones dropped to the floor, but soon they're actually shifting around and then they're clearing the floor. And soon after that, the first cracks start forming.

And then the walls quiver.

Good God, Gideon thinks. We're under millions of tons of rock and all of it is moving.

"Let's go!" the man shouts, adrenaline shooting through his veins with the acceleration of bullets. He makes these huge sweeping motions with his hands and arms, trying to draw everyone's attention to the narrow passageway through which they came. "Earthquake, earthquake! Drop your things and bolt! Exit's this way! Go, go, go!"

They almost have to be told twice. Not because of misunderstanding, mind: when the walls shake and people start yelling, you don't really need that much of a push. No, they almost have to be told twice because the Kurozu scientists can hardly hear him. They can hardly hear anything, really. The acoustics were great in the chambers, but that's changed almost in an instant. It's like something's plugged up their ears, or drained away so much air that the sound can't travel. Gideon's right there, but he sounds like he's kilometers away. Even from himself.

"Come on, come on, come on..." He growls, watching the others go. His instincts tell him to push on ahead of or, at the very least, run after them. He is, however, bound by his place in the expedition. The Miskatonic University funded this excursion underground, so that put him in charge of the Kurozu scientists. Rank has its privileges, but also its chains: the captain doesn't step off the boat until everyone else has reached the lifeboats, and he doesn't leave the area until he's gotten the rest of his crew to safety.

"Ichi!" he yells into the darkness at the far end of the chamber. "Ni! San! Yon! Roku! We've got to go!"

He doesn't hear any of them. Then again, he can barely hear himself, so that really shouldn't be too big of a surprise. He curses under his breath and runs after them, and his scientific instincts still force him to juke this way and that in an effort to avoid punting the ceramic masks that smash themselves to pieces against the hard stones. It's not a big chamber, so it doesn't take long to find Yon on the ground with his foot caught in a crack in the rocks and the others trying to pull it out.

"Damn it," he's not sure if he says or thinks. He tries to push his way through the others, but again, it's a narrow chamber and there's not enough room to push anyone. He's just acting on adrenaline right now, and every second that he stays here is another second that he's not running away from a cave-in.

"Go on without me!" Yon half-yells, half-screams. Then he lets out real scream as Ichi tries gingerly pulling him again, and Gideon gets a good look at the rocks biting into the exposed flesh of his ankle. "I'm screwed! Get out!"

"To hell with that," Gideon growls. He forces his way past San and Roku and grabs the man by the elbow. "Everyone grab an arm!"

"Wh-what?" Yon asks as the others lay hands all over him, fighting back tears that twinkle like stars in the harsh light of the headlamps. "What are you-?"

"Give it all you've got on three!" Gideon roars. "One, two, three!"

They do, and so does Yon, whose screams fill the cavern and overwhelm the silence pressing in. Yon comes out, and mostof his foot does too. What's left is a shattered, lacerated mess that his boots only barely contain and it's almost as sickening to look at as it is painful to bear. But the alternative is death, so hey: that's a step ahead, right? Yon may disagree, and I like to think that I'm pleasant, but Gideon and the others are able to look at it a little more objectively and hastily ferret the man towards the exit.

Too late.

Down comes the roof in the murder of silence, but not all at once, and not in such volume as they expect. It's more like a hole opens up above them and a shotgun spray of stones and pebbles and ash blasts the floor ahead of them, slamming flesh and bone against the ceramics in a cacophony of ruin. For a moment that echoes out into eternity, the world is just noise and movement and darkness and everyone's hurled from their feet.

Gideon, being the ostensible hero of this section, is the first to recover. He coughs and sputters, spitting out rock dust and ash and staring at the center of the chamber. His headlamp can only illuminate a small portion of the space ahead of him, but that's not exactly going to help much considering that the full hulk of the thing somehow makes less sense than the sum of its parts. Parts made entirely from hands.

Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Hands of every stripe and color. Hands like a man's, hands like an ape's. Hands like a boy's, hands like a woman's. Hands as small as a baby's, and hands as big as a car tire. All of it in motion, all of it grabbing at the air. All of it screaming.

"Don't cry!" a man shouts in a mocking and angry voice. "Don't cry! Don't cry! Just give it up and die! I'm going to kick you so hard that you won't land until next Tuesday!"

"Doctor Gideon!" Go shouts, rounding the corner back into the chamber. "We came back fooh Blast!"

She's farther away from the epicenter than Gideon is, so, while her light's more diffuse, it gives her a wider view. This lets her see a blond man in a blue-and-white spandex attire atop the mound of hands, grappling with it as best he can as it tries to draw him into the center of its mass. Her first thought after essentially invoking divinity is to wonder how such a thing could be possible. Then it flips through recent events back to a news article that she read right before entering the tunnels. Something about a new superhero named the Blond Bomber powering through the ranks of the Hero Association, and having torn through to the center of the Class B heroes.

Now... I'm not going to go into great detail about what his powers involve. After all, you should probably know them by now if you've read Mumen Rider's story. He goes on to play a small but important role there, and, if you haven't read it yet, I encourage you to. But if have, or you just want to keep on going, I'll briefly sum it up for you.

He has tremendous telekinetic abilities, allowing him to hurl opponents with his mind. He also has no control over the intensity: it's all or nothing, which lets him smash enemies into walls and stones with tremendous force, but doesn't let him lightly pick up an egg. It also has the unfortunate side-effect of distorting the world around him, shaking the ground or kicking gravity to the curb as he charges up for another psionic onslaught. As you can imagine, this causes all sorts of collateral damage as he ignores his surroundings and attacks whatever he's focused on. On the surface, on the ground, bystanders have the option to run away. But underground, in close confines, when your opponent is so big that it's blocking those bystanders from getting to the exit...

"God," Gideon gulps, watching thousands of fist-sized pottery fragments rise from the ground like inflated balloons and the noise drains from the chamber. "We're all going to die."

The inessential qualities of Gideon's world are boiled away until only noise, pain, darkness, and Death remain.

And then there's only me.

^V^V^V^

At first, it's just this dull ache. This general numbness all over his body through which the occasional needle jabs to find something soft and broken. The needles multiply and grow into storms of daggers, and that's what pulls Ichi out of his slumber.

Not all at once, no, and not very quickly. He starts out with this general understanding that all isn't right in the world, and it narrows down into specific ways that his life has taken a downturn. His head hurts and his thoughts are fuzzy, and his right eye is killing him. He hit his head at least a few times, he gathers. Hard, sharp stones dig into his stomach and chest. Obviously, he's not sleeping on his waterbed back in his apartment. But it is wet, and cold, and not all of it is from the ground. There's this stinging sensation all over him, and he knows that he's bleeding. Not in any great quantity, mind, but just this general blood-loss that's pretty unsettling. Assuming that he survives the next few hours, it should all patch itself up well-enough to save his life for another few days until he runs out of food or water.

I guess that the next thing to poke into his brain is the realization that it's not pitch black out. Something bright is shining through his eyelids as though he's staring at the sun with his eyes closed.

Right, he thinks. Eyes. I can has eyes. I can has open them pleases. Thank you.

So, he does.

A snarling face stares back at him.

That gets him right and properly awake again. He gasps and pulls away, scurrying up against a close wall and trying somehow to go through it, pressing against the hard rock and breathing harder. He tries to evade the huge, blunt teeth in a cracked and ruddy face, the empty eyes of darkness in distended orbitals. Long seconds that last minutes pass by before he realizes that it's not moving, and it's just... staring at him. More long seconds – shorter than a moment ago, but still agonizing in their duration – and he realizes that it's not even alive, nor it is a creature at all. It's just one of those terracotta masks fashioned after a snarling beast, lent an especially nightmarish aspect by general aesthetic coupled with missing context and spiked adrenaline.

He stares at it for a little while longer and his expression is tinged with sadness. It's broken. Cracked in half vertically and chipped, and at least half of the occidental dome is missing. This thing, having lain dormant in a cavern for millions of years, was destroyed by a monster and a careless hero in an instant. And there were hundreds more like them in the chamber...

"It's a crime against science," he mutters, kneeling before the thing and cradling it in his hands and holding it close. "Things like this can't be replaced..."

How did you see? Doctor Gideon had asked the question, and only now does it press upon him again. He is he seeing? It can't be his own headlamp: the light's not going where he's looking, and a falling rock must've busted it. Better that than his skull, he guesses: the manufacturer gets top marks for safety. Plus, he only opened his eyes because something was shining on them. Something cast its light on his face and that of the broken mask. He turns to follow the source, and suddenly fear of an entirely different kind races through his mind.

"San!" Ichi cries, dropping the mask and rushing over to a pile of rocks. The still-shining helmet lies partially exposed, jutting out atop a pale head crisscrossed with ruby gouges fading to brown. Blank eyes – dry eyes, unseeing eyes, thoughtless eyes – stare out at Ichi while the lips curl back in a rictus of pain. He's mine, but Ichi possesses these twin human traits called compassion and denial. San's dead, but Ichi can't confront that yet. He's got to ignore it in hopes of saving his friend. He's got to dig the man out from the loose cairn. He's not going to be able to live with himself if he doesn't make the effort.

We're far underground. There's no sun shining overhead and Ichi's watch was smashed. There's no way for Ichi to tell how long he works on this macabre excavation. The headlamp's still burning so it can't have been long, but his muscles ache and burn so it feels like hours. Doesn't matter if it's minutes or hours: he pulls off rocks and stones and chucks them away until he can't anymore. Not for lack of trying, mind: he's only human, and even he can't lift some of the larger rocks pinning the corpse in place. The biggest one is probably about as long as he is tall, and it's partially sheared the man's legs off from his body. The only way that San's getting out is if Ichi takes a hatchet to him, and... well... that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

"Gods," Ichi gasps, sucking down cold and wet air into tortured lungs. "Blast, damn it... gods, no... I'm sorry, San. I'm so sorry..."

The energy spike dies away. Ichi eventually regains control of himself and his breathing slows and his heart settles down. When that happens, he's just numb all over again. Mostly in the head, though: there's that murmur of pain all over his body, yes, but there's this gauzy feeling all wrapped around his brain and everything's just quiet and unreal.

He's finally quiet enough in body and mind that he can hear again. There's this quiet whistle of thick, chilly air running over sharp rocks out in the darkness, but that's almost white noise to him and he's able to filter that out: it comes with the spelunker training. Under that background noise, he hears something anomalous. Something... human, perhaps?

"Ugh..."

"Mnanaaagh..."

Two of them. Two of them are still alive. He doesn't know who yet, but he's got to find them. He mutters a quick apology to San and swaps helmets with him: it feels like robbing the dead, but that's pretty much his career description and let's be honest: he needs it more than a lifeless husk does.

"Let's go," Ichi says aloud for his own benefit. He turns towards where he thinks that the sound's coming from and further declares, "Don't know where out is, but... I... I..."

He's still the only living thing in sight: he's not shocked by finding another survivor so quickly, nor is he startled by the sudden appearance of some morlock or troglodyte. Honestly, he kind of half-expects to see one of those demihuman potters staring back at him from the gloom, somehow having endured to the present day. It's just what a mind in the dark would conjure up. As his light flashes over the floor, he sees something more extraordinary.

Masks. Not one, not two, and not fifty. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Free to stab his surroundings with a sword of revealing light, Ichi gets a view of an entire wall lined with terracotta masks twisted into various snarling, distended, screaming forms. The light plays off of dull carnelians, glinting faintly in their mountings, adding little splashes of color onto a brown-grey wall and pale orange pottery. Now, you may not fully grasp the significance of this, but it takes Ichi a few seconds to get it as well. It takes him a few seconds to realize that these weren't masks made for humans, or even near-human cousins. He knows this for two reasons.

The first is the manner in which the masks were affixed to the wall. These masks weren't placed on ledges, and they weren't even glued in place. Ichi can't even fathom what kind of manmade adhesive would last a few million years in the damp. The best way that I can describe it is that they were enveloped by the wall. The rock shifted behind and over them. For that to happen, the masks must have been there before the wall itself. And this rock... well, Ichi knows it well. He's got degrees in geology, archeology, and paleontology: all three inform him that it's brownstone. Triassic-era sandstone, commonly used in building tenement houses in the Western style. There are times when you can actually find a fossil on the walls of one of those buildings, and those fossils help date the formations. In the geology trade, they call them index fossils. This rock formed before the dinosaurs finished conquering the Earth more than a quarter-billion years ago: longer than it takes for the solar system to complete a revolution around the galaxy!

And the second reason? The second reason is that many of those fossils are wearing the masks. He can't see all of their bodies, but enough sticks out to tell him that these are no hominids, nor even mammals. They have reptilian features, with arms and legs splayed out to their sides like lizards. The masks are long and narrow, concealing snouts and horns rather than short muzzles.

Creatures that evolved to walk upright while the ancestors of mammals were just little rodent-things scurrying in the shadows of ancient titans. Creatures with three-clawed hands that somehow invented pottery and made masks in an identical style to that which would follow epochs later. The planet is no stranger to alternative civilizations: the oceans are home to the Deep Sea Folk and their ghastly king, and the ancient past was once dominated by the Terror Lizard Clan. But those masks...

"You couldn't have passed it on," Ichi whispers breathlessly. "It had to have been invented independently. There's no way that a species that old could have carried on for hundreds of millions of years... how did a culture jump a generation gap so huge? How did it cross species?"

For the first time, Ichi looks up. At first, he just assumed that the room had caved in on them. Now, seeing that mural of death, he realizes that they had to have dropped to another chamber. Sure enough, looking at the ceiling, he sees smooth walls covered in calcite flowstone extending up for almost four meters before it gives way to sharp, jagged, uneven, wounded rock. Rock from a cave-in. The floor dropped out from below them and deposited Ichi and San into this primordial mausoleum.

And Gideon.

There's a big, round boulder not five steps away longer on every axis than a sedan and many times heavier. The Miskatonic professor's legs jut out from under it. Ichi starts towards him but stops short. There really isn't any point in checking in on him, is there? There's "possibly dead," and then there's "stupidly obviously dead", and this one's a no-brainer. Considering what fifty tons of rock does to a skull, that aphorism may be more literal than Ichi's comfortable with.

"Rest in peace, Doctor," Ichi says. "I'll see you on the other side."

The moaning continues. Gideon tears himself away from the sight and searches through a narrow fissure in the rock. He doesn't find any sign of Yon – probably for the best, considering the shape that he left him in – but he does find Roku and Go scattered about and still breathing. Their spelunking gear is cemented over from blood mixed with rock dust, but at least they're all in one piece. That's better than about half of the archeologists are doing right about now. That's not going to last long, though. They may be intact, but he can't speak for their bones and any internal injuries. He doesn't even know if they're ever going to wake up again. And food? Pfah. This excursion was set to last a matter of hours, and they already ate their lunches. No telling what poisons are in the water, either. The environment isn't actively trying to kill them, but it'll do the job eventually. Ichi realizes that he gains nothing by waiting around, and things may get worse if that wannabe superhero pulls another stunt like that. And there's no going back the way he came: when the roof caved in, it also closed in. This leaves only one option...

"There's an air current down here," Ichi says to keep himself calm. He starts stripping headlamps and batteries from the others and lays out his plan. "I just have to follow it to its source. It has to open up somewhere. It could take days, but I've got to get out of here. I'm sorry, guys but I've got to leave you. I'll bring help when I can, and hopefully you'll wake up in a hospital or something. Let's just hope that I don't get turned around and none of the passages are flooded..."

^V^V^V^

Now... I could tell you exactly how long Ichi wanders through the stygian abyss, but that wouldn't fully convey the length of it. Oh, sure, knowing the time down to the second will probably be more informative from a technical standpoint, but time stretches and compresses and flows at inconstant rates when you're trapped in a maze. Much like the faces on the terracotta masks, it's distended and twisted and can wrap around on itself, and they can even pass through eons without touching the intervening eras.

For him, it's completely useless. He has no way of discerning absolute time, so he invents a new unit of measurement: the pack. That's the length of time it takes for his headlamp to drain a set of batteries. On the surface, under ideal conditions, one pack will get you up to forty hours of light. Underground, in the damp, banging your head and helmet against rocks that jut at you from the corner of your eye, it's considerably less. And just as the terrain is inconstant, flowing from chamber to ravine to tunnel to cathedral to fracture to pond, the life of the batteries seems to shift as well. Some almost burn out as soon as they're inserted while others seem to go on for days.

Six packs. That's how long the journey takes for him. Ichi replaces the batteries or swaps out the lamps five times. During that time, he's lost all sense of where he came from, where he is, where he's going, which way he's pointed, and whether he's even come any closer to the surface. Ichi squeezes through gaps and canyons so tight that he's got to remove some of his gear just to get through. Even with a light, he bangs his head so many times that his scalp bleeds. Yeah, the helmet helps, but it can't protect against everything. He walks, crawls, and wades past so many obstacles that he loses count and he's pretty sure that he'll never find the surface, let alone the path back to his companions.

The sixth pack is failing, and Ichi has no more. The light is flickering and it just doesn't shine as brightly. It's not the only thing giving out. Ichi himself is failing: so long without food, so long without potable water, and so long without hope... he's had an empty stomach for three packs and now it's burning a hole through him. His legs ache and the bones in his feet have been replaced by dull blades rubbing against shocked muscles. His skin is a patchwork quilt of blue-and-black stitched together by paths of red and his head swoons. Maybe that's why he doesn't react so strongly when he finds more fossils.

They're strange bodies no more than a meter tall. Embedded amongst the trilobites, they're piscine creatures with eel-like bodies and they swim and twist along the walls, entombed by the march of ages and preserved as skeletons of stone. Creatures fossilized amongst arthropods that evolved before life first crawled out of the sea to colonize the land. Cambrian life when jaws were still a cutting-edge invention.

And yet, they somehow invented masks.

Terracotta. Carnelians and lightless beryls. Tiny mountings inserted amongst nightmarish and squamous faces. The antediluvian tribe made theirs with nearly-human hands. The reptiles made theirs with claws. And the fish made theirs without hands or fire. How did they bake the clay underwater? How...?!

Ichi runs a hand over one of those masks: possibly the first to do so since the days of the lungfish, and certainly the first human. His fingers snake into crevasses and explore ridges, and his palms cup the gemstones. He can't pry a mask free: he's too exhausted by now, and the rock's enveloped most of it anyways. He can just imagine himself turning it over in his hands, marveling over every little detail like the ones he saw so many packs ago. Aside from the size and the necessary changes to fit a head without an appreciable neck, he can't tell a single difference between them. The style, the concept, the forms...

The light blinks out, leaving him in absolute darkness. He smacks the helmet, trying to abuse the pack for just a little more juice like he's done many times during his journey, but he's run out of luck: there's nothing left to call on.

Sighing deeply, he closes his eyes and fishes around his pockets. He was saving this for a special occasion, but he guesses that now's as good a time as any. He could use a shot of energy right about now, and he might as well get some light while he's at it. He pulls out a cigarette lighter and the attendant pack of cigarettes and tries to light up for the last time.

"Oh, Blast," he mutters. "Figures..."

It's damp and cold in those depths. He had to wade through ponds and subterranean streams. So, of course the cigarettes are drenched. Ever try to light a wet cigarette? No? Probably because the problem is obvious.

"They always said that these would kill me," he chuckles, dropping the pack on the ground. "There you go, future archeologists. When the sun's burning out and you're plumbing the Earth's secrets, you'll find a Quaternary man next to a Cambrian fish and wonder if they lit up together. Figure that one out, you tarts. I'll wait. I'll wait for five billion years because what else am I going to do? Heh, heh, huh?"

Red's a powerful color, and you can't help but get drawn to it. Especially when you're surrounded by absolute darkness. Ichi looks at his little island of light in bafflement. Fire's a living thing, and it responds to the environment in ways that no electric light can. Aside from the flickering and dimming as the batteries died, the headlamp was constant. The fire wavers. The fire bobs. The fire goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in a regular pattern. It's drawn this way and then that by an air current like a bellows. Like a breath.

Now Ichi's looking for it. Now Ichi's listening for it. A steady beat: something like the inhale-exhale pattern of an animal. It can't be that: nothing so big exists. But it's a source of dynamism in an otherwise tranquil environment. Something that drives the circulatory system of the deeps. And maybe, just maybe, that something is the mouth of a cave.

"Don't give out on me now," Ichi snarls, invigorated. He rushes to the source of the breathing, rushes over loose gravel beds and wends between river-sculpted boulders and scales flowstone domes and trudges through waist-high streams of icy water. He holds his lighter high like a torch and he tries very, very hard to keep it from touching the flame-sapping wet dripping down all around him.

And that's when he sees it.

The shock of it floors him. Literally, it knocks him from his feet. He stops so quickly on the slick stones that his feet just keep going. Before he knows what's happening or he's had time to process what he's seen, Ichi tumbles forward and rolls down an incline, smacking limbs on jagged and unforgiving rock until his momentum finally ends and he rolls to a stop against the gates.

Yes, the gates. Not just some haphazard opening in the rock, nor a tunnel carved by water. A doorway. A true and proper pair of hinged gates. Twin planes of pale and sculpted orange rise far above him, studded with red gems that glitter like bloody stars in the gloom. Mammoth gates cracked open a sliver, locked in place by flowstone as the rocks above degraded and deposited calcite on the flawless hinges. Impossible, wet things that don't show a trace of weathering, their edges sharp and crisp.

Curiosity overwhelms fear and pain. Ichi extends a battered hand and lays it across the stone that so closely resembles terracotta. His fingers brush the things like rubies. They trace over bold patterns engraved in the rock. And these things feel as they should... were they were pulled from the kiln yesterday. But they've been here for eons, and they still carry a residual heat from the fires that formed them.

There are no words for Ichi to mutter. The questions won't come. The confusion – the challenge to his education and common knowledge – is too great to let words form. He was prepared to accept ancient and forgotten cultures epochs apart producing oddly similar pottery, but somehow the presence of a gateway – a manmade structure – this far underground, forged when vertebrae and bones were still new, is altogether too much for him to accept.

"...Ihhhhhhh..."

"... huuuuuuuu..."

Inhale.

"...Ihhhhhhh..."

Exhale.

"... huuuuuuuu..."

It's... it can't possibly be that literal. Impossible doors far underground is one thing, but so ancient a creature surviving down here without food, so huge that it generates a wind current? That's just fantastically ridiculous and Ichi dismisses it out of hand. He just knows that the sound is louder now, and he can almost see vapor-trails gusting out through the crack on the exhalation only to be drawn back in on the inhalation. Much like a true breath, it almost blows out his lighter.

He presses the flame to the crack and peeks inside. A cursory glance tells him nothing: the light just doesn't go very far, and there's just inky darkness inside. Cloying and thick, it almost seems to push back against the flame or swallow its luminosity. Unless he pushes it through, he's not going to know anything about the chamber beyond save that it exists. And you can hardly call yourself a scientist if you leave a matter like this unanswered.

I'm either at the exit to the cave or the gateway to mystery, Ichi tells himself. The others are likely dead, but they're dead for certain if I don't go on. Roku, Go, Yon... one way or another, I'll see you soon.

He presses himself through. He squeezes, wrenches, and shoves himself into the gap. He lodges himself tight and keeps pushing on, ditching his jacket to shave off precious millimeters of width along the narrowest axis. The helmet gets stuck, so he ditches that as well. He's down to his boots, leggings, and an undershirt and the cold is so harsh against his tortured skin which the sharp edges of the door scrape and slice like so much butter. And then, with one last herculean exertion, he's through.

He gasps and moans, and he wheezes and coughs, and he growls and grunts. He didn't have much left after so arduous a trek through the abyss, and he gave up so much more to get past that final hurdle. So, what then is left for him to claim on the other side?

Revelation.

The cave opens up. Just… opens up. It opens up so much that his feeble little light can't reach the far edge of it. He's entered into what's unmistakably an artificial chamber of some kind, with square edges and sculpted platforms and furnishings. Against so much antiquity entombed within the walls beyond, this place is truly and utterly primordial. It's so ancient that geology itself would consider it old: solid and purposeful when the rocks of the Earth were still settling from the heavy bombardments of planetary formation.

It's so old that the steady dripping of water has encrusted the corbeled vaults with stalactites, some of which have grown all the way down to touch the ground and become columns many, many meters wide. Speleotherms of every shape and color proliferate through the room – the dissolved remnants of weaker rocks that formed above this place in more recent ages – almost but not completely obscuring the artifice of this place. He runs his hand over the surface of a stalagmite wider than the radius of his light and can't help but do a little mental arithmetic.

Forty meters. The thing's roughly 40 meters wide. That's 4,000 centimeters, which gives a centimeter-tall slice of the base a volume exceeding 12.5 million cubic centimeters. Multiplied by a height of at least ten meters...

Many factors can speed up or decelerate the rate of deposition but, in a cave, rock formations like these grow an average of two to three cubic centimeters every century. When you multiply the volume by the time, you get numbers that shouldn't be physically possible. You get numbers that, logically, place this room's origin to a time before the formation of the Earth. Billions and billions of years have passed since the architects carved out this space. They were already ancient when Ichi's microbial ancestors first swam a coppery world-ocean. They were already sculpting ruddy clay into writhing forms of torturously-stretched eye sockets and craning jaws along amorphous skulls, and insetting them with precious stones of bloody color. And something rises before him that very well might stand, quite literally, for one of those sculptors.

Graven in much the same style as the doorway and what little of the room has escaped encrustation, a statue of a four-armed man – or something very nearly like a man – challenges his conceptions of geology and natural history, dwarfing him and challenging the columns, stalagmites, and myriad other speleotherms for dominance in the room. The unspeakably ancient thing clutches rods or blades in its immense hands and is framed by the likenesses of creatures that look almost like gargantuan centipedes, but that detail is concealed by the natural march of minerals across the ages. There's no telling if it stands on a plinth or resides in an alcove: nature's wrapped the thing in a translucent, limestone embrace and obscured many of its fine details. Barely, just barely, he can discern the shape of a face or helmet with three eyes in the darkness, staring down at him from well over a dozen meters overhead.

"What are you?" he asks the statue, eyes and mouth wide with awe. "Were you somebody real? Or were you a god from a forgotten religion?"

A moment of hesitation.

"I..." he finally manages, "I have so many questions... but I don't have the time. I have to find the way out. I have to-"

"...Ihhhhhhh..."

Almost like a living thing, the darkness closes in. It presses against the light of the flame, shifting angrily out where Ichi can't see. It claws, scrapes, and rages over him with a sensation like dull razors against dry skin. The predator that hides eternally beyond the depthless night pushes its curtains inward, and the world around the hapless archeologist seems to shrink.

And the wind? That pulls the flame towards the statue. The wind rushes over and, it seems, through him, as though he's nothing but a ghost in the crypts of the ancients. And, I guess, he really is as good as dead by now. He's virtually mine.

And then the exhalation.

The wind rushes over and through Ichi. And like a breath, it blows out the lighter as though it were a candle and the darkness rushes in, snapping up Ichi and smothering him in its cold embrace. Icy fingers squeeze his heart and, like a burst fruit, the nectars and seeds of fear race through his traumatized flesh. In the dark, without hope, he can't tell if this is mere metaphor or the true shape of things. But, I guess, it doesn't really matter when terror grips you.

"No, no, no!" Ichi cries, smacking the little metal thing with his hand, trying to coax some life back into a place that's been dead since before his ancestors condensed out of the lifeless oceans. He shields it against the wind with his body and exhorts it on, snapping, "Come on, give me light! Light!"

Ahhhhh... Well, well...

The word comes from everywhere and nowhere. It comes from somewhere without, echoing through the ages, from outside the universe. It comes from within, forming inside his mind without recourse to sound.

Vermin... harken.

"W-what?" he asks, staring blindly into the infinite dark of the abyss. "Who said that?!"

The wind. The wind returns. In, then out. In, then out. Like a wave, it rolls over and pulls him one way and then pushes him the other. But the pull is stronger. Slowly, surely, the waves of air draw him back. They pull him to the source. They pull him to a master that he never knew he served.

He has invaded my dreams and carved a crimson path. I've looked to the end of it, and there I've found the kingdom that was once mine. I must know if I've merely dreamed of what is to come, or if he has finally incarnated. Tend to me, surface-dweller: still my inner eye cannot look outward.

Three bright eyes open above him. Windows to a nightmare.

Yours will have to do.

^V^V^V^

Originally posted on Tuesday, February 11th, 2020

Well... here we are again. I guess that I should offer my apologies to Ito Junji for stealing the name of his spiral-obsessed city for an easy horror reference, and HP Lovecraft for... well, literally everything else. So, they have my apologies, but I'm sure that the Miskatonic University has enough artifacts from ancient evils to pore through that some terracotta masks won't be too greatly missed. Until the prologue becomes relevant to what was advertised as a romance story, anyways...

I don't want to sound like I'm holding the story hostage unless I get reviews or traffic or anything, but my life's gotten pretty complicated lately and I have to recognize the fact that this is a fan fiction. I intend to finish the story (and even properly start it, this being just a prologue and all...) but I also know that my writing isn't for everyone. The dearth of responses to Human Evil certainly taught me that, and I guess that I've got nobody to blame there but myself. But it does kind of kill the motivation to move forward. However, if this story gets some kind of reaction out of people, then that'll certainly be an incentive for me to give it more attention and push on.

This prologue didn't really need a whole lot of knowledge of my previous story to get by, but you may be a little lost going forward unless you check it out. I'll try to make it entertaining and understandable if you opted to give Mumen Rider's epic quest a pass, but you'll probably get more out of it if you sit back and enjoy the cherry blossoms.