Well, this one took a while, huh? Honestly, though, what did you expect from me?
Jokes aside, though, this Chapter finally includes a little bit of plot progression (finally), and I'm happy to say that Chapter Seven shouldn't take too long to write! But you guys are probably more interested in this Chapter than in what I have to blab about, so without further adieu.
Chapter 7. Enjoy~
Darkness.
Pure darkness. That's all that there was.
No… That wasn't right.
It was close, but it wasn't quite right.
'Darkness' is the absence of light. Even in pitch black 'darkness', a faint trace of light still exists; nocturnal animals can see in the dark because their eyes adapt to see those faint traces better and better as they get dimmer and dimmer.
This wasn't the absence of light.
And without light, could it really even be called 'darkness' in the first place?
No.
And if it wasn't 'darkness', then what was it?
The answer was simple.
This was 'nothingness'.
A black void where there was 'nothing'. Not even something as simple as 'light' and 'dark' existed within this place.
'Up' and 'down' and 'left' and 'right' simply blended together, there was nothing for 'sight' to see, nothing for 'hearing' to hear, nothing for 'touch' to feel.
There was only 'nothing'.
...
"Ugh…" The eyes opened, making light flow back into reality as it created the darkness. From the view of the black sky it could tell that is was lying on its back. The hand touched the forehead to quell an incoming headache as the back lifted itself.
The soft, orange bangs hung down and gently brushed over the hand as the eyes began to adjust to the sudden change in light and scenery.
"It would seem…" And as the hand moved downward to grab the frame of the glasses and push them further up the nose…
Takeyama forced a glare to shine across the lenses of his square glasses.
"I've made a miscalculation. How very… uncharacteristic of me."
Chapter Six: Chase
Shadow City - Northeast Sector, 2:13 pm
The fast paced beating of four sets of footsteps loudly sounded through the wide streets surrounded by decaying wooden buildings. As the noise hit the concrete, it used those buildings to echo the sound even louder. And yet…
It was drowned out almost instantly.
A devastatingly loud roar blasted through the black sky and the even louder footsteps coming from underneath the source of that roar pounded into the earth below its feet.
And I just ran, holding onto the small hand that was gripping mine back, with all my might.
"WHAT IN GOD'S FREAKING NAME IS THAT THING!?" I shouted as loud as I could to the two people that ran in front of me so that I could actually project my voice to them over the sound. "AND WHY WON'T IT GO AWAY!?"
And behind me, it was still following after us.
The massive, black beast that was bigger than a mansion ran after us on all four of its legs, opening up its mouth to reveal thousands of sawblade-like teeth every time it roared.
"How the hell should I know!?" Matsushita the Fifth shouted back to me as we ran. "I don't even think it matters, just shut up and RUN!"
As it let out another ear-shattering roar, we began to round a corner in the street. Gripping her hand even tighter, I picked up speed and turned down the side street without losing any momentum.
It was fine; everything was fine as long as that hand still held back onto mine for dear life. With only that thought in my head, I ran as fast as my legs could move, and then forced them to move even faster than that.
From behind me, I could hear the sound of concrete shattering and raining down from the sky as the beast slid across the pavement as it began to turn. Like a racecar trying to make an insanely sharp turn, it tapped its brakes ever so slightly and turned.
Looking back at it for only a second, I saw it crash into the rotting buildings, taking out an entire block of structures in a single moment, and then pick up speed as it came billowing after us once again.
"Damn… How can it move that fast!?"
"It's almost like it weighs nothing!"
"Aluminum Giant!"
"We have to find some way to get it off our asses!" Matsushita the Fifth shouted that to us, but we all just kept charging down the street in a straight line. "Any ideas!?"
"Intelligence…" The small voice that came from behind me shocked me a bit, and I assumed that it surprised the other two as well as they looked back with wondering eyes.
Kanade paused for a second when we all began to stare at her, but she collected herself and started to speak again.
"The beast's intelligence is probably low… We could confuse it by splitting up, then running in and out of its sight, and regroup when it's thrown off of our trail."
As she finished, Matsushita took a look towards the sky. He scanned around in the distance for a moment before pointing a finger into the air.
"Over there!" What he was actually pointing at was what looked like an office building. "That's where we'll regroup. It may be a bit of a way away, but it gives us time to see if this will work!" That kind of threw me off a bit.
"Wait… Wouldn't it make more sense to regroup back at the auto-shop!?" I thought it was pretty sound logic with even sounder reasoning, but Matsushita only shook his head.
"Now that we've made progress, we have to keep moving! I'll explain in detail later, for now let's put Angel's plan into action!" He focused his attention back in front of him and nodded to the left at T.K.
T.K. nodded back immediately and jumped into an alley as we passed by. Matsushita then looked back at me again.
"Otonashi, take this!" He reached into his pocket and threw what he pulled out to me; a small black box. As I caught it with my free hand, he explained. "When that goes off, run out into the street. Keep Angel with you; as it stands right now she's the weakest link among us. Keep. Her. Safe."
He came to a dead stop, though his sheer momentum made him slide along the concrete for about half a foot, and he swung his machine gun around his shoulder.
"GO!" I nodded.
"Okay… We're going on ahead!" As I said that and charged past him, the sound of gunfire filled the air and I made a dash for an alley on the other side of the street. 'Sorry about this, Matsushita the Fifth!'
Now that I was running to the side instead of forward, I could hear the monster's footsteps getting louder and louder. As they drew dangerously close, I looked back in time to see our 'distraction' dive into the alley he had stopped in front of.
'Guess that makes it… Operation, Start?'
Shadow City - Middle Sector, 1:49 pm
It ended. Finally it ended.
Even after pushing her hands against her ears with enough force to crush a boulder, Yuri could still hear the noise echoing in her head, and a ringing echo in her ears.
"Ahh…" She finally took her hands from her head and began to stand, though she was unsteady and staggered a few times. "What in the hell… even was that?" The shrill roar that sounded like a swarm of locusts buzzing past at Mach speeds had kept up for a few minutes, but most of it seemed like a never ending echo.
The pounding pain in her head was draining her of her strength, and she was forced to lean on the wall for support while she collected herself.
'At any rate… it seems like I'm completely alone in this place. And if anybody - or thing - was near me, they would've come here by now. So, that begs the question…' She staggered a little as she took a step, but the wall kept her from falling. 'Where the hell am I, and how the hell did I get here?'
It had all happened in a flash.
One moment, she had been trying to rescue Kanade from the Shadow Beast's ambush.
In the next, she had woken up in this place; this school devoid of all signs of life and human interaction.
How much time had actually passed between those two moments?
Was Kanade safe?
And, of course, how had she gotten to where she was now in the first place?
Yuri didn't know the answers to any of these questions, and that fact bore down on her mind with an intense weight.
'Why do I never have the answers?'
In the end, she didn't have the answer to that question, either.
Pressing the palm of one hand against her throbbing forehead in a futile attempt to quell the pain, and the other against the wall, Yuri began slowly walking down the hallway.
'What is the deal with the headache?' It hurt. It hurt a lot, actually. The pain was to the point that she felt like she would pass out at any second. 'I've never felt a headache be this painful…'
Step after step, something felt as though it was pounding away on her brain and it only got heavier and louder with every second, until…
"Uh…"
With a thud, Yuri's body hit the linoleum floor below.
The noise of her landing at most certainly sounded.
And yet Yuri was no longer there.
Shadow City - East Sector, 2:27 pm
Fast paced breathing. Fast paced breathing and loud, echoing footsteps.
That was all I heard as I bolted down the alleyway. I felt like I was running out of breath as it was, but now these back alleys were throwing twists and turns into the mix. It was all very…
"DEATH!" I shouted into the air as my legs made their way around another corner against the will of the rest of my body. My hand still gripped Kanade's tightly. "I'm starting to think our chances of survival would be higher facing that thing! My heart can't take much more adrenaline!"
Even as I complained, I kept running. I didn't have time for anything else; making sure she was safe was my number one priority.
"Yuzuru." As her voice came out, I looked over my shoulder in response, though I kept running regardless.
"Are you getting tired?" That would have been bad, but she shook her head.
"There." She pointed into the direction of the street we had been running down. I looked towards that spot and could see the beast rampaging on the other side through the cracks in the buildings and the alleys we passed that led to the street.
I think I knew what she was trying to tell me.
"It's okay." I smiled back at her. "He's not just doing this for you, so you don't need to feel guilty." Though I'd be lying if I said she wasn't the main reason. Still…
I focused my attention back onto the path ahead.
Be safe, Matsushita the Fifth…
Shadow City - East Sector, 2:28 pm
"WHY ME!?" Matsushita the Fifth barreled down a rather small alleyway, his legs moving faster than they ever had before in either of his lives. "WHEN DID I EVEN VOLUNTEER FOR THIS!? DAMMIT T.K.!"
Behind him, the gigantic Shadow Beast followed. With every step that it took, whole sections of buildings were torn apart. This, in turn, made a constant rain of wooden and metal to come crashing down to the ground; this only added to the danger of the situation.
"T.K., you had better hurry up, I don't have all day here!" He kept running with the beast right on his tail, and focused on nothing but distancing himself. "If the beast doesn't get me, this shrapnel will!"
He had been running for quite a while, so he figured it would be time to switch soon.
'Come on… COME ON!' He could tell he was getting closer and closer to a turn that would lead him directly into the street. It was beginning to worry him that T.K. hadn't signaled him yet. 'Don't tell me…'
Bzzt.
"Uh…" His thoughts were cut off by a slight vibration. A small device in his pocket started going off, making a smile spread across his face. "About time."
He made the next left turn into another alley which led him to the street. As he made it out from between the buildings, he saw a familiar face that he was beyond overjoyed to see.
"Tag. You're it."
Matsushita the Fifth's hand collided with T.K.'s as the two ran past each other.
"Hide And Seek." The English speaking blonde pulled two pistols from his waist as he ran into the alley that Matsushita had just came from.
'Wrong game, moron…'
...
Two shots from each gun placed directly into the face of Shadow Godzilla, and T.K. got his attention immediately.
"Heh." A cocky smile.
"Grrr… RAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" An ear shattering roar.
"Let's Go." The beast lunged forward, trying to crush T.K. under its massive body. But the agile blonde simply dove to the side and tucked into a roll to dodge. "Too slow, monster." As T.K. aimed his pistols back onto the beast, it slammed into the street face first. "A Game starts now. Shall We Dance?"
The pistols began to unload into the beast as the wielder turned on a single foot and spun around into a mad dash for the next alley opening. Seeing him run off, the beast picked itself up and began pursuit of a new target.
T.K. dashed into the alley and released all his metaphorical limiters, making his body run as fast as it could possibly go. He wove in and out of the maze-like back alleys dozens of times before the beast even had a chance to get to the place he had entered from.
But just getting out of its sight wasn't going to be enough.
Within seconds, the beast began charging right through the tight alleys, demolishing all of the buildings in its way within seconds.
"The Game won't be that easy, Monster." With a devilish smile, the blonde reached into his pocket and began pulling out a long, thin metal wire. "Here Comes The Boom."
Shadow City - Northeast Sector, 2:31 pm
"Let's see here." Takeyama's footsteps loudly echoed throughout the area regardless of how light they were. The utter lack of solid objects in the area made even the quietest noise echo. "It must be around here somewhere."
Despite only waking up a short while ago, the small boy had already made a large amount of progress, moving from the middle of the south sector to almost the end of the southeast. The reason he had gone that far in the first place was because he was searching.
"After all," moving his glassed up the bridge of his nose, Takeyama made the lenses flash with a glare, "it's not like I'd ever make two miscalculations within such a short time span."
He took a few other steps, each one echoing loudly like the others.
"Now then, I just have to-"
Ka-BOOM!
He was cut off completely.
A massive explosion sounded somewhere to the north, creating an extremely loud noise from all of the echo potential within the confines of the city. Even with how far away it was, Takeyama could see and hear it clearly.
"What… on Earth was that?"
Shadow City - East Sector, 2:31 pm
"WOO HOO!" The tall blonde teen jumped towards the wall, slapping it when he got close enough to, and then used his momentum to spin away from it. As he landed, he crouched and swiped his hand across the opposite wall.
With another spin, T.K. began to run down the alley at full speed again. After he had gone about twenty feet, the beast that was hot on his trail slid to a stop in order to make the sharp turn it needed to make to run towards him again.
But before it could get very far after him.
Ka-BOOM!
An ear shattering explosion set off, blowing a giant crater in the wooden buildings that had been unlucky enough to be next to the center of the blast radius.
That same explosion shook the beast and was strong enough to force him to stop in his tracks. He stopped and his 'knees' buckled, forcing his massive belly to the ground. Afterwards, all it could do for a few seconds was watch the blonde teen run out of his sight.
"Grr… RAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" With a scream louder than a storm of locusts, the beast stood up and resumed its pursuit. It began to charge towards T.K.'s direction without any hesitation, and-
Ka-BOOOOOOM!
A chain of explosions shattered the stillness in the air, igniting all around the beast and nuking the entire area. They kept going off one after the other, forcing the beast to take a step back every few seconds.
Meanwhile, T.K. ran down another alley with a grin on his face, listening to each and every explosion as they went off.
"The Game will be ending soon. Then comes Kiss You Goodbye, Baby."
Shadow City - Border of Southeast and East Sectors, 2:43 pm
Takeyama stopped in his tracks. An unending chain of explosions kept going off in the distance. They were still quite a bit away from where he was, but the clouds of dust they made were so large that he could see them very clearly.
"What is happening…? Hmm?" In the split second pause between each explosion, there was a barely audible noise. Trying his best to drown out the explosions, Takeyama tried to listen to that noise. "It sounds like…"
A roar.
"Some sort of beast getting rained on by explosions? I can't say for sure that it's the SSS making the explosions, however, though I can safely assume it is. I could also assume that they're fighting Shadows, regardless of who they actually are."
He silently stared at the alleyway he faced, not really knowing what to do now that he had come all the way to figure out what the explosions were.
"Well, I guess I'll just head back and… wait a minute." Something had caught his eye. He took a few steps into the alley and crouched down.
What he had saw was an amazingly thin piece of metal wiring. A single strand was floating in midair.
"…It must be attached to the walls. But why is it here? And what even is it?" He ran his finger across the wire. "…WAIT A-"
He had realized something in that moment.
Jumping back to distance himself from the wire, Takeyama then stood straight up and focused all of his attention onto the air in the alley. He stared at the space itself instead of a specific location or object, and it all came into view.
"You… You're kidding me." His glasses began to fall down his nose as he looked upon what he could now see:
Thousands of the same paper thin wires stretching from wall to wall, going on for miles down the alley.
"Th-They're insane!"
Shadow City - East Sector, 2:45 pm
"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN! HOW DID THIS EVEN HAPPEN!?" I wondered if I would be able to hear my own footsteps as I ran this fast if all the other noises stopped, but I knew that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.
Why you ask? Well, that's simple.
"RRAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!"
Because of the gigantic monstrosity chasing me down.
As per Kanade's plan, we split into three groups and ran into the alleys in order to try and throw this giant Shadow off of our tails, and everything had been going smoothly. That was, until I started hearing explosions going off all over the place.
Everything had been going according to plan. That is, until a massive chain of random explosions started going off all over the place. I could only assume it was Matsushita and T.K., but how and why they were doing it I couldn't fathom.
At any rate, that was where everything started to go wrong.
After a few hundred explosions had gone off in the span of two or three minutes, I felt the box Matsushita had given me vibrate in my pocket. As he had told me, I took this as a signal to run out of the alleys and back into the street.
And as I did that…
"Get Chance And Luck." I saw T.K. running across to my side of the alleys, saluting me with a shining smile on his face.
And as he disappeared from my sight, it happened; this massive nightmare of a living creature began chasing me.
This, of course, brings us to the present situation.
'I thought the point of this was keeping her safe!'
Regardless of the utter lack of logic in Matsushita the Fifth's plan, I kept running at full speed. After all, there wasn't really much I could have done about it.
'I just have to keep running, right!? Then let's do this!' Making sure I wouldn't lose my grip on Kanade's hand, I forced my legs to move faster than they were. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to stop, but I knew that we would both die if I did.
"OTONASHI!"
"…Huh…?" Hearing the gruff voice scream my name out so close caught me off guard, almost to the point that it scared me. Looking ahead, I could see Matsushita coming out from one of the turns ahead. "Matsushita the Fifth!"
With the beast still on me, I couldn't exactly stop to chat with him, so as I got near him I motioned for him to run with me. He nodded and began following right along beside me.
"You mind explaining what's going on!? I thought we were trying to keep this thing away from Kanade!" He nodded again and smiled, as if I had asked exactly what he wanted me to ask.
"You heard them right? All of those explosions." Obviously. "That was T.K.'s doing. We kind of just came up with this idea out of the blue, though we haven't had any communication. We just both knew it was the thing to do."
"Get to the part where you explain that idea to the two people who are in the dark right now!"
"This." He reached into his pocket again and started pulling something out. I was actually starting to wonder how much stuff he had stuffed in those pockets. "This is what made those explosions."
"You…" I was dumbfounded. "You can't be serious." What he held was paper thin, metal wire.
A thread of Bomb Wire.
And that is that!
...Was that even plot progression...? OH WELL MOVING ON.
Next Chapter Semi-Spoiler Time!
In Chapter Eight, a whole mess of fun things will happen. We're finally going to see Hinata and them again next time, and the chase will come to an end. We're also going to see two characters that I've been dying to reintroduce, and the Giant is finally going to get a name!
We might even be able to find out exactly what these mysterious plazas are since Shiina's making an appearance next time, too! But, that's a long way off (probably).
Until Next Time~