A/N: I started this in April. At this rate, Tyrants would be finished approximately around the year the Sun dies. Skip to the bottom if you don't want to find out about the fates of one of the girls from Calamity's ending, and just want to read me prattle on about why I'm not doing this story anymore. Summation of the rest of Tyrants (this story) is available to any who request it.
The village of Shin-Takizawa was unremarkable in nearly every way. A small fishing village, there was nothing to set it apart from any other. That is, other than one single thing.
One day, nearly half a decade ago, the largest house in the area was build seemingly overnight. One week, it was an empty lot. The next, a sprawling house that looked like it could take a few nuclear blasts and be completely unperturbed. There were no windows, aside from the skylight that could be seen reflecting sunlight at just the right angle, when you were standing on the top floor of the only office building in town.
Plenty of people came in and out of the house. None of the townspeople knew who any of them were. They all looked completely unremarkable. Of course, that didn't stop anyone from trying to find out who any of them were. Not that it ever led them anywhere. These people seemed to not exist at all. It made the townspeople uneasy, to say the least.
But the mysterious inhabitants of the house in the middle of the town never hurt anyone, so everyone just let it slide. Even now, the only thing remarkable about the house was the constant traffic to and from the house.
In the morning, two SUVs would pull up to the gate, and be let in remotely, the gate closing behind them immediately. The vehicles would pull up to the house proper, unload their passengers, and reverse down the driveway, through the gate that opened at just the right time, and the cars would leave the town immediately, always taking a different route.
Their passengers were an eclectic mix of ethnicities, their ages all about the same. Perfectly unremarkable people, who couldn't be photographed with anything but a neutral expression on their faces.
In the evening, precisely at 7 PM, a different set of cars would pull up to the house, the same passengers would get in, and they would leave, and nobody would be any the wiser.
It was years before the townspeople just accepted this weird occurrence as part of their daily life, but the mysterious people in the mysterious house weren't hurting anyone, so how could they do anything but that?
If only they knew that the wanted bulletins that were on the news virtually every night had such an obvious answer, and so close by, too.
Of course, the inhabitants of the house never showed their faces, and to everyone who looked, were nothing more than a business who obviously didn't want to be disturbed.
There was one person who lived in the building full time. A person whose manhunt to find them hasn't ceased, not even to this day. A person that Tsukasa knew better than to keep alive, but had allowed to escape her notice after so long, being wrapped up in keeping her chunk of the world functioning, while continuing her conquest of the rest of the civilized world.
A person that no-one would expect to still live on Japanese soil, in a country that tried so hard to keep crime down, in the most brutal, but effective, of ways.
A person that wished she were dead, and didn't have to deal with planning and orchestrating a neigh-impossible shadow war.
A person that really liked ***e Ge*ss.
If i ever figure out a sensible way to do line breaks, I'll let you know.
The bank of computer screens were slowly dimming as their operators were away for longer and longer. Sitting at my desk, the plans of a thousand small actions laid out in front of me, I sighed.
R-squad had been killed in the past week. No doubt their actions were known to the enemy for months before that. They had been some good men and women, but now, they were gone.
The whole operation was slowly being killed off. Tsukasa didn't necessarily know where they were, or who they were, but that didn't stop her from killing us one by one.
They weren't enough people willing to volunteer to fight this menace, and the ones who did, had a life expectancy inside of a week.
Things had to change, and soon. Or else she would be exposed, and no doubt captured and executed publicly, in a show of power to remind everyone worldwide that Tsukasa was the one in charge. The EU was fighting a losing war against her from the East, and the Americans were doing the same from the West. More than 60% of the landmass in the world was flying an Asian Confederacy flag, willingly or not.
Just after the news of R-squad got to her, so did the news that Jacksonville had fallen to AC forces as well.
Actually, "forces" was a misnomer.
Tsukasa, and her Consumed, are the only ones allowed to kill in the AC. She consumed people, killing their physical form. Then, she relinquished some of her otherworldly flesh into a separate form that could operate independently, with their minds more or less intact within. No-one really knows if that's what you could call alive, it was more like a hivemind of soldiers who knew exactly what to do. The worst part being, just like their 'queen mother' of sorts, they were all but immune to anything you could possibly shoot/throw/fire at them. Not that anyone hadn't tried.
Worse yet, they played with their food. Their conquest of the world was slow, deliberate, doing whatever they wanted to while everyone else fled their conquest.
Of course, people fought back. They always would. It's not like you can tell someone 'hey, you're going to lose the life you've always known because these immortal monsters are coming to conquer and destroy, better offer yourselves up willingly and you might survive'. No, they kept fighting with everything they had, even when that was nowhere near enough to stop them.
It's been years since the fighting in Tokyo, when Hiiragi Kagami dropped a nuke on her sister, which did nothing more than make her laugh. The aftermath of that battle still haunted her to this day.
Watching the monster that is Tsukasa rip out Kagami's heart and replace it with one she created herself on the spot, only to repeat this ad infinitum for what felt like hours. The screams of pain from the strongest person she knew were completely and utterly unbearable.
When everyone went to flee the battle, Kagami was nowhere to be found. Everyone assumed her dead, but I was one of the few that still held out hope.
If there was anyone who could survive torture from Tsukasa, it would be someone who had done so before and lived.
Of course, there was no evidence to suggest that she survived the encounter. No-one had seen her since, and no-one in their right mind would keep the family name Hiiragi. It should be noted that Tsukasa formally renounced her family name as well, calling it 'A tie to the world I am no longer part of'. So really, everyone else's stigma with the name was a holdover before she became an unstoppable killing machine who was now dragging the world closer and closer towards damnation.
I reached over to the bank of switches next to my desk, hitting the lights for the room. I was alone now, so not much in the way of planning our next move was going to be made tonight.
Standing up, I pushed my hair to one side, feeling the weight shift from one side to the other. I could have dyed it something other than its' natural color, but I never went outside anyways, so why bow to the will of others when it would be pointless in the first place?
I walked to the conference room, sat down on the couch, and put on the news. It didn't hurt to know what the media was reporting on any given day.
"...and though the boat fire was put out, there were no survivors. Next up on the news for tonight, Tsukasa has announced that the acquisition of Jacksonville is complete, and now her entourage is splitting up to head both north, to Charleston, and south, to Miami. Miami has been abandoned already by the Americans, which will result in that half of Tsukasa's forces meeting back up with the rest of the force before the capture of Charleston begins."
My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. They took the bait.
Miami was abandoned months ago, yes, because most of the panhandle was deemed a risky place to be once Tsukasa's warmongering started heading east from Texas. But Miami was now the largest bomb that had ever been constructed. This might be the one chance anyone will get to completely destroy some of Tsukasa's Consumed, if it's even possible.
A/N: Hello everyone. This is Arkytal, the author of this..."story". I'm not terribly proud of the stories I've written on this site. Not anymore. They come mostly from a very dark time in my life, and one that I've moved out of, into a different place. Not necessarily a better one, but a different one, indeed. I'm writing this blurb, at the end of document that I have struggled to write even this small amount, over the past 4 months. I have such a definite setup in my head for where this story goes, and I am incredibly frustrated with myself that I cannot get it into words. As such, if anyone expresses interest, I'll be post a short chapter after this one where I summarize the entire rest of the story.
My writing has changed in the past year or so, not that anyone's seen much of it here.
This isn't a goodbye, no. I still enjoy thinking about all manner of things related to fanfiction, it's just...you can't expect another rage and hate-fueled piece such as The Library. Nor my attempts to continue that story. It evolved into something much larger than the very focused piece it was born from, but unfortunately, I cannot find it within myself to bring the final piece of the story into existence.
To be honest, there was only supposed to be two parts, and they were supposed to all take place on the day of The Library. In Chapter 7 or 8 of the Library, I ended it with someone falling asleep. Every single event that took place after that was supposed to be contained in the dreaming world, with them waking up at the end of C+1 and ending their rampage in much the same way that the Columbine shooters did, by committing suicide in the actual Library. This explains why C+1 was so much...crazier than the mostly realistic take on thing from the library.
That's where the title of the fanfic came from, but ultimately it never came to fruition, as I became enamored in a character that is trying to be evil, but is muddled with so much uncertainty, in this case the voices of all the souls Tsukasa consumed, that they become an ultimately morally ambiguous character. Hence the continuation to Tyrants, but that story is being laid to rest before it could ever really start.
To anyone who was really hoping to hear the rest of this story, told in a form longer than a summary, I apologize. I hope some of my fanfics in the future will be more to your liking than one that doesn't update literally ever.
I look forward to updating sometime soon, without this one hanging over my head as a giant raincloud reminding me I never accomplished anything. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thank you for all the support I have gotten over the years for the Library/Calamity stories.