CONTENT WARNING: This is the darkest chapter in the story so far. Lots of bad stuff, full list below. None of it is beyond the pale for themes previously discussed in the story, and I worked hard to balance the tone (no glorifying here!) but much of what’s depicted and implied in this chapter is still severe enough that you have the option to skip this chapter and read a little trigger-free summary instead.
CONTENT WARNING LIST (STRONGLY RECOMMENDED ON THIS CHAPTER)
Body horror, gore, mind control, forced nudity, discussion of sexual assault, unreality, torture, intentional misgendering. No sexual assault is depicted in detail.
TRIGGER-FREE SUMMARY
Ezzen enters the dream of the net-entity, which manifests as a twisted version of the hospital full of all the memories of the evil acts that took place there. Ezzen remains lucid, protected by its Flame and its fury, and searches for Yuuka as the halls become more and more fleshy and organic. It eventually finds her in the room where they killed Sugawara, watching all the scenes at once through a bank of CCTV cameras. Ezzen manifests as the doll to convince Yuuka that she’s safe and that the dream isn’t real. Together, they smash the monitors and Yuuka regains access to her foresight. She turns her eye on the net-entity, demanding that it show them how Sugawara rebirthed himself so she can give the technique to Izumi.
Down and down I went. From a rooftop beneath the setting sun, into the lair-gullet trap of the entity that had formed from the desecrated hospital, across into the abyss beyond its mouthparts, and at last into its dream which had infested the cursed eye of Radiance Heliotrope, I dove through the circles of hell to save my friend, all the way to the bottom. A dive the Heron would have approved of, I’d like to think, armored in fire and blood.
And the armor was necessary. The halls of the dream-hospital looked deceptively normal at first glance, much like how it had when I’d seen it through Alice’s bodycam, but the screams that came from just around every corner and behind every closed door told the truth: this deepest pit was no place for soft things. Each step seemed to put new evils on display, jumbled together in a messy cascade and strung together in looping sequences to be paraded before me by the carousel of dream-logic with only passing regard for the building’s proper layout.
Violence was a constant. Pain was not the only form of red ripple, but it was one that Sugawara’s true believers had clearly prized and at least crudely understood how to harness. I glimpsed bound and gagged figures being stabbed and beaten through doorways purposefully left ajar, carried out with slow and ritualistic care between members of the cult and with sickeningly eager abandon on outsiders. Other times I saw bodies bent over, grasping and humping and grunting. Though everything in the dream was happening at once, I could tell that these were older moments, from the years Sugawara’s comatose body had been imprisoned here and his cult had infiltrated and taken over in his wake. I recognized in them the same consumptive desires I’d felt in him, echoing through the memories of his cult and their victims.
More recent and vivid were the skinnings. I turned a corner to see rows of flayed carcasses hung from the ceiling, straight down the hallway and in the open as people came and went, human lives reduced to being simply part of the furniture. Men naked to the waist carefully sliced and scraped while others cycled buckets and plastic tarps to catch the blood. One of them turned to me. In the real world I would have braced for him to lunge; I’d like to think I might even have struck first in order to never give him the opportunity. Here in the dream, I simply waited. He did not grapple me but instead simply held out his knife handle-first and smiled warmly. “You have to give it a try,” he urged. “We’re going to make it all right again. They’re fresh and ready, you’ll be forgotten if you don’t.”
The dream wanted me to take the knife. It was a pressure just shy of physical, a strong intrusive thought, the same call of the void that made people jerk the steering wheel into oncoming traffic. The blade he offered promised excitement and novelty, and what he was saying was eminently reasonable; there was no way making it all right could be a bad thing, and they were fresh and ready, it was true. I’d miss my chance if I didn’t join in now.
Those were the net’s thoughts—or more accurately the thoughts it was relaying, the impressions and memories of when this had taken place in the real world. Either way, they were not mine, and it was profoundly horrifying to feel the net crawl across me like that, trying to bind me up and puppeteer me to play the proper role, the inevitable role. The dream and the entity dreaming it wanted my experience and that memory to become indistinguishable. I would take the knife and join them in skinning, reenact the memories of a man weeks or months dead who had done just that. Then I would be shuffled deeper through the exhibits to repeat the experience, force-fed every morsel of disorienting violence and hedonic excess.
This psychic entrainment was the entity’s proper feeding process; to continue the metaphor of carnivorous plants, the dream was the sticky resin loaded up with paralytic and digestive enzymes, where the final immobilization and consumption of the unfortunate souls took place. The prey would experience every act in these halls as both perpetrator and victim. I’d had the briefest taste of that the first time I’d touched the net, and it had almost taken me entirely. Now it was obvious what would have happened had it taken any longer. I would be inevitably drawn to partake in the recollections of twisted hedonics, my need to escape and even my awareness that there was anything to escape to washed away in a crimson tide, my soul paralyzed to witness and become complicit in the carousel of atrocities until my selfhood dissolved into it, digested into the entity. It was the automatic result of contact with the net, as simple and mindless a process as any chemical breakdown of prey.
Mindless or not, it was still horrific. That feeling was a potent seed of resistance inside me, and though it clearly had not been enough for any of the other victims I’d encountered thus far, my Flame gave me an advantage. At a mechanical level I assumed it was mainly scattering the red ripple into other colors, but I suspected the reality of my atemporal Flame’s interaction with this time-flattening bundle of suffering was far more complex and hateful than what glyphs or colors could sum up. Whatever the case, the simple result was that “armor” was acting like a wetsuit, insulating me and making me aware which thoughts and feelings were my own and which ones sounded more like stage directions.
I did take the knife, and for a long moment I weighed the temptation of driving it through the man’s eye in violent, petty vengeance, before tossing it aside. I was Ezzen, paradox heir to the Vaetna, not an actor on their stage. I couldn’t deny that I was disturbed by each tableau of torture or mesmerizingly nauseating fragment of animal pleasure, but instead of eating away at me until I dissolved into the soup, it all turned into further concern for Yuuka. That kept me lucid and pushed me forward. I kept running.
The abattoir hallway ceased to exist behind me as soon as I left the scene; the first few times I’d acted to interfere, I’d naively hoped I had destroyed it by refusing to participate and incapacitating the perpetrators, but those had been dashed when I’d realized I’d passed by the same scenario twice and the surgeon’s jaw was decidedly not shattered the second time around. So now I didn’t bother, bleakly admitting that there was no point in attempting to free the victims, salve their wounds or attempt to reassemble each lost soul. These were not ghosts, I told myself, nothing I could save. This thing was made from people in the same way that a house was made out of trees. The net was made of skin, but it was made of only skin, not enough to reassemble a person.
Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps, with time and study, I could have unraveled the mechanisms behind this grisly fate and undone them. Perhaps that’s what a Vaetna would have done in my shoes. Too bad. I was here for Yuuka. I’d figure out how to put the skin back on a body if she needed it and not before.
The labyrinth unfurled ahead of me, damp and inviting, bidding me deeper.
—
My search had little direction to it; my grasp of the hospital’s layout was secondhand to begin with, and this version’s broken-neck corners and looping stairs and yonic doorways didn’t subscribe to its shape in life anyway, mere connective tissue between the memories of bliss and murder and things between, none of which I stopped to indulge save to peek my head in and verify that none of the cast were Yuuka Hirai. The horror of this theme park of sadomasochism grew stale quickly for me when I could freely move through it with no regard for its intended pacing or the delirium that was surely meant to take hold. So my primary emotion soon cooled from rage to frustration; it was unclear whether I was making any progress at all.
I looked up at the ceiling, the only direction I hadn’t yet attempted. That’s when I noticed the cameras growing from above like inverted mushrooms.
They were everywhere and watched everything. Some were those bulbous, glossy black domes, obtrusively sticking out of the gray fireproofed ceiling, opaque as to the target of their attention. Others were boxier and had a clear dark glass eye that gave them a sense of direction and purpose, perching in the top corners of waiting rooms to watch the more private depravities unfold. Still others were a hybrid of the two, blurry dream-amalgams that did not need a coherent form to function. Some of them swiveled off of their respective scenes to track me as I ran through the halls.
These artificial eyes were conspicuous. Both the entity and I had entered this place through Yuuka’s cursed gemstone eye, and to me, that made it all too likely that I would find her wherever these cameras fed their vision. I stopped in front of a rack of drying skins and placed myself in front of the camera that had been watching it.
“Yuuka, if you’re watching me, show me the way?”
The camera stared back at me, impassive. After a long moment of waiting, I grumbled to myself and got moving again, continuing down the hall.
From then on, the building’s texture began to change. For all the hospital’s irredeemably violated layout and the atrocities taking place within, it had at least still looked like how one might expect an abandoned hospital might, with broad hallways, plain colors, and simple right-angle geometry. As I progressed deeper it slowly began to lose that cohesion, first with corners blending together where the wall met the ceiling, and soon after the materials themselves became corrupted.
It felt like I had passed from a branching arterial bloodstream into long, digestive bowels. Drywall and paint turned to soft, glistening membrane. The easy-to-clean linoleum tiles took on a hollower and stiffer sound beneath my feet as they turned to bone or cartilage until occasionally my step landed a little too hard and cracked through to sink a little into mucosal linings beneath. The hallways began to constrict and wind, and side rooms became less and less frequent, sometimes crudely blocked off by tumors of unidentifiable flesh. The cameras began to have eyes for lenses. Humidity clung to me as I ran.
The screaming grew more distant and less numerous. The memory ghosts grew fewer, and when I did see them, the acts of carnage had grown more abstract. The skinning rituals and drying racks gave way to ceremonies of geometry, masked men cutting leather into triangles and strips. Where there were still recognizable thresholds between halls and rooms, they were adorned with geometric patterns I didn’t recognize as any sort of glyphs.
I had passed into this thing’s memories of the acts leading up to its birth, I realized. Deeper. Good.
That thought emerged right as I rounded a corner, and of course, that was when I came upon a corridor I did recognize. It was the final redoubt before the Radiances had reached Sugawara, where they’d sent his mercenaries packing with pure intimidation before busting down the door. There was no sign of the hired guns here, which I took to mean that they’d scarpered immediately after that encounter and not gotten caught up in any of this.
The hallway was two places at once. It was lined with doors as I remembered, yet the corner of my eye insisted they were wet and glistening and much narrower, a tighter fit than before, one I’d have to squeeze through. This second version of it was a fleshy tube, another mimicry of potently remembered biology like the creature’s throat in the real world. This did not feel consumptive or digestive in the same way as the previous corridors, nor was it a memory. The threshold I stood at was a vertical slit and the walls were lined with eyeballs. Crude literalism reigned here, inseparably reproductive and voyeuristic at once.
Instead of trying to dissolve my thoughts and selfhood with temptation and sensory assault, this thing had changed tactics and decided it would have my participation in the most basal way it knew. It wanted to watch me penetrate through, fill it, press all the way down to the door at the end. There, in the womb, I knew I would find Yuuka, right where her eye had claimed Izumi would find what she wanted. And now I feared she would not be alone.
That was where Sugawara had died and been reborn. By all rights, I knew it would be the most powerful nexus of red ripple in the real building and the strongest memory. But his ghost, or at least the memory of it, had been absent from this place, conspicuously so, unmentioned even by the rapturous members of his own cult. Against this grotesquely vaginal framing, it now made all too much sense for him to be in that room with Yuuka, in some way enfleshed and empowered and in control.
He had violated her enough already. So I did as the corridor asked, just not how it wanted me to. This thing still did not know me.
I was a spear. Still phallic, but beyond the context of this thing’s memories, the motions and acts of flesh it understood. Of course, I’d plainly seen in a dozen ways that it understood stabbing, but only in depraved eagerness and mortal terror. I was eager, but not for this absurd metaphor of sex. I was afraid, but not for myself.
The memory of my vaet lanced down the tube of flesh, and me with it, and we punched a hole clean through the door. The burning line of violence was hardly the shredding whirlwind I had watched Sani and Bri employ, not enough to destroy the dream or even puncture to the outside, but it got me through. An infinitesimal gap for me to enter while leaving the rest of the hallway untouched. I arrived as an omen of violence, no longer caring if that would play into this thing’s desires, ready to behead Sugawara a second time.
The room was mostly as I remembered it in the last moments I’d seen it, blood and all, save for the absence of the symbolic splatter of gore behind the bed that Sugawara had used. It was hot, sweat-slicking, seeking the memory of fevered delirium or the motion of bodies. A choking atmosphere of red ripple filled this place. The thing orchestrating this carnival of horror was most present here and practically salivating.
Sugawara was not. That was a true relief, but only for a moment, crushed swiftly by Yuuka’s appalling state. My fears about what the dream might do to her had been woefully close.
She was naked, lying unbound in the gore-dampened bed where Sugawara had breathed his last, her legs held up and spread. Both her eyes were human, looking across the room with boredom. I followed her gaze and saw that she was watching a bank of CCTV monitors—glancing at them made me dizzy, unable to tell if there were dozens or hundreds. This was where the cameras led. This was clearly a metaphor for how the net had infested her mind via her eye. Yet it had also taken that away from her, the relic of blood magic meant to be her greatest weapon, reducing her to a mere damsel in distress, an object for me to pursue.
“Hey,” she greeted me without looking. She made no attempt to get up.
I didn’t want to look at her nude body or the monitors, so I turned, scanning the room for…anything, really. Yuuka’s clothes, signs of sexual violence, anything that the net-entity might see as a fittingly grim punchline for all of this.
“You’re alright?” I asked warily. “That’s—a relief, this place is horrible. We’re getting out of here.”
“Out of…?” I heard a frown cross her voice. “There’s no out. This is it.”
My blood ran cold. When Izumi had said she wasn’t fighting back, I’d feared this might be the case. Yuuka didn’t have her flame buffering between the dream and her consciousness like I did. I had to do so instead. I stepped between her and the monitors and made eye contact. “Yuuka, this is a dream. The net-entity’s dream. All that on the screens? That’s not real, neither is the building. It’s just a hallucination, a bunch of patched-together memories. I came in here to get you out. We have to go.”
“Oh, you don’t really fuckin’ believe that, do you? You came here for these,” she said, rolling her shoulders to shift the twin masses on her chest, then spread her legs further. “And this. ‘S all anybody wants me for anyway, so hurry up and rape me already.”
I was horrified. This thing of memories was playing on her own worst ones, trying to build a scene that would recreate them so it could siphon the potency of her distress and harm, and it was messing with her head to further that end, to make her an actress in the performance. Its lead role, and everything I had seen in the twisted halls had merely been side shows and supporting actors.
But I was sure she had never played this role, not like this, not the jaded, expectant passivity. Alice had implied that Yuuka’s use of sex to bait human traffickers in pursuit of Amane had been entirely more calculated and ruthless than this. I didn’t know for certain—it wasn’t my place to know and Alice had been wrong to share even that much—but if I had to imagine how she had gone about it, there would have been far more cherry-sweetness and dopey innocence before she slit their throats to rifle through their files and manifests. Still horrific, but full of desperate volition. This arranged scene was a false construction of the role she had played and an insult to the woman I knew.
Perhaps it was in part how she remembered it, but even then, that meant that the dream was boiling all the vicious drive out to leave behind only the harm and trauma of what had been done to her. It didn’t even leave her the gemstone eye. Her character was irrelevant to it, only her hurt and the power that lay within it.
It filled me with rage.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” I retorted. “I’m not one of those fucking animals outside. I’m Ezzen, you know me,” I said, hoping she even recognized me.
“Really? You look like them. Spear and a spear, practically walking innuendo. I know you’re itching to stick at least one in me. Look, they’re all waiting, too, so hurry up.”
She pointed up and my stomach dropped. The ceiling was festooned with cameras and eyes staring down at us, watching. I turned jerkily to check the bank of CCTV monitors—so many of the screens were different angles of this room, her leaned back on the medical bed, me standing over her, naked, dick out—
My rage on her behalf was overtaken by resentful proprioception, the damnably concrete awareness that I did have a penis and it did nominally find Yuuka attractive. This was the trap; I had been braced for Sugawara to play the opposing part to her worst traumas, but the dream wanted me, because that was how she was seeing me in this moment.
It struck right at the heart of my insecurities to still be seen as another unknown predatory man, another monster meant to have his way with her. Yuuka had neuroses, but surely she didn’t truly see me as that, not any more, not with all we’d been through and the open attempts to trust me. No matter how far gone and strung along to be an actress on the entity’s insulting porno set, I thought I had earned her trust more deeply than this. It hurt.
With that hurt, as always, came the desire to change.
What was on those screens was a lie. That was not me. No part of me found this attractive, this farce, this flaying humiliation of a woman I’d come to respect. I would not be party to it. I had been invited onto this stage, but I refused to play the matching role.
With a thought, I morphed, my armor wrapping around me into a smooth, flat, synthetic shell. I lost the pretensions of muscle mass and organs and a face. Two breasts of my own hung duct-taped to my chest, silicone softness atop the shell. I showed her that which was truer and sharper than the dream’s lie.
“I am Ezzen,” I repeated, my voice synthetic, softer in tone but as sharp as any blade. “I am not a man.”
I could have sworn I saw a puppet string sliced asunder as a flash of recognition crossed Yuuka’s expression. “The…sex doll,” she stumbled, the wheels turning in her head.
Nerves bubbled in the stomach I didn’t have. That moniker left little ambiguity indeed; this was hardly a full-throated rejection of sexuality. The form of the doll had been chosen in haste, and no matter how I felt about it, this was still undeniably a sexual object. I banked on the hope that whatever acts she had witnessed or participated in with this drone had been lesbian, within the confines of the penthouse, with people she loved, and was thus not a shape that bore any resemblance to the men in those dark places of her mind.
“Nothing will happen to you,” I promised, silently urging her to fight it, too afraid to say anything more.
A long moment lurched between us. Then it happened—reality, harsh and frigid, intruded on the dream’s dense, sweltering atmosphere. The performance crumbled as I felt the entity recoil, dropping its strings in confusion. Eyes overhead winced shut. In turn, Yuuka’s widened in recognition, then fluttered, blinking away the pacifying glaze of her role. She jerked, then hastily closed her legs. “Ezzen, oh, shit, what the fuck, how did I—no, you’re not like that, I know that, shit!”
I breathed a simulated sigh of relief. “Oh, thank fuck. With me now?”
“I—you didn’t see that. You didn’t see that,” she repeated, voice beginning to shake. Reality was a terribly cold thing. She breathed hard, sitting up and crossing an arm over her boobs.
“You didn’t want it,” I assured her, averting my eyes again and turning away, scanning the floor again in the hopes that her clothes would manifest so I could hand them to her. “It’s this place, the fucking net-entity, these cameras. It’s gotten into you and we have to get out.”
“Just—shut up for a moment. Shut up. I know it’s not real, it’s not, I just need to—” I heard her strangle what might have been a sob. “Fucking cunt. Clever fucking brainless thing,” she cursed up at the nest of cameras. “Got in my head because it’s not wrong.”
“No, Yuuka, of course it’s wrong,” I urged, “It’s—”
“I said shut up. It’s not just a fucking dream! It is, but it’s not!” She took another rattling breath. “This is what real life is, Ezzen, this is how the world works! Just a bunch of—stabbings and skinnings and rape, that’s what actually drives everything. I’ve seen it. I lived it! All this thing is doing is cutting out the middleman.”
We were quiet for a long moment until I found what to say.
“I understand.”
“You don’t. Not like I do. I see it everywhere. That’s how it got me. I couldn’t tell the difference when we were coming in. The building looked—it looked normal. That’s normal to me.”
I wanted to point out that her eye was usually wrong, but that wouldn’t get us anywhere. I emitted a sigh and half-turned back to her, shuffling very slightly toward the bed. “Can I sit down?”
She gave me a wary, hunted look. Her eyes slid down to my boobs and stayed there for a few seconds. Then she nodded, curling her legs toward her so that she was mostly out of arm’s reach. “Yeah.”
I sat. The positioning felt too much like I was a parent about to give their kid a pep talk, and Yuuka deserved better than that. I swung my mechanical legs fully up onto the bed and crossed them beneath me instead.
“Not like you do. True. You’ve been through some horrible stuff, Yuuka.”
She rolled her eyes. The effect was stronger when she could do it with both of them. “And I’m so strong for keeping on with it despite that, is that it? I’m gonna punch you in the tit if that’s where you’re going with it.”
“Nah. I mean, yeah, but not my point. My point is that…world’s fucked, and I should be dead, or worse. But I’m not. I lost a foot, almost got captured by the Peacies and…well, I’d like to think they wouldn’t have turned me into a battery, I’m more useful in other ways. It still woulda been bad, is what I’m trying to say, and instead, I’ve had it pretty good. Pretty bloody good,” I repeated. “Thanks to you. Todai’s power and your…kindness? Tolerance.”
“Your accent’s so weird,” she cut in a little too airily. “Brit, but you talk like an American and the accent kinda slops off, until those words come out and you sound like Alice again.”
I took the needling as a tentatively positive sign for her mood and elected to play into it. “Says the Japanese girl with an Australian accent. Do you want to talk about that instead? We don’t have to—I mean, we do have to get out of here, but if you just need to talk about literally anything else…”
“Well, my accent comes from learning English by flirting with Aussie dockworkers twice my age to promise them a blowie if they could tell me when the next ship from Malaysia was coming in. Y’know, because it was a ship that might have had Amane on it and that’s the only lead I had. This is all I’ve got, Ezza, this has been my entire fucking life from the day the Flame hit us. It all comes back to that. So no, I’d rather not. What were you saying?” she asked sweetly.
“Uh. Fuck.” The admission was one thing, the flippancy with which she’d delivered it was altogether more saddening. I hoped what I said next would help. “I just—you’ve all done a lot for me, is what I wanted to say. Taken on a lot of risk with the Peacies and maybe a bigger one letting me just…be in the penthouse and hang out with you, as an unknown. I’m…grateful, and I feel like I haven’t really shown you all that and it’s just been a lot of shame instead. And you specifically, you’ve given me more grace than I could imagine after how you’ve been hurt. If the world is a big pile of murder and other bad shit, it sure seems to stop at the penthouse’s door. So…thanks,” I trailed off awkwardly, running out of steam.
Yuuka gave this a moment’s consideration, running her hand down her hair. She shook her head sadly. “And I’m still selling my body to keep that sanctuary. Same engine, just more flash. Here’s my tits, money please, don’t ask what happened to that oil rig. Yoyogi Park? Ah, infernos happen, mate, Sapphire actually stopped it from being worse, promise, she’ll go do some meet-and-greets to make up for it, that seems fair, doesn’t it?” She pressed her arms together to scandalously show off her cleavage, then snarled up at the cameras on the ceiling. “Those? Those are real, even if they’re a lie.”
I didn’t know enough about Todai’s celebrity activities to argue that with any nuance. Instead I threw a hoodie across the bed. One of my big, bulky, oversized ones that hid the form well, summoned from my memories. I wordlessly produced a second one and shrugged it on to hide my own breasts. When my head emerged, I was pleased to see Yuuka had done the same and was now staring at the design on mine quizzically.
“Have you even seen Sailor Moon?”
“Hina got it for me.”
She glanced down at her own, brow furrowed. I hadn’t had particular designs in mind, and as she focused on hers, it changed to a different set of magical girls. I knew that was Madoka Magica because Star never shut up about it. Yuuka harrumphed. “Oh, fuck’s sake. I can’t believe you’re actually making me feel better with an anime hoodie.”
“Armor’s important,” I said simply.
“…It is. I hate when the Vaetna are right about shit. They’re right about all that sanctuary stuff, too, fuckin’ damn it all. We made a place for ourselves, a place without all…that.” She indicated the CCTV monitors. “Mostly. Enough. Glad you were here. And it’s good. I know that.”
She hopped off the bed, suddenly full of energy, and stomped across the room to the monitors. The short woman bunched up a fist and drove it straight through one of the screens.
“It’s good!” she repeated, heedless of the blood dripping down her knuckles. “And you don’t get to fucking hide it from me!”
She smashed another, and then another. I would have smiled if I could. I leapt off the bed to join her—she held out her other hand to halt me. “Only the ones with all the kemono shit. Not the ones on us.”
I understood. My plastic fists smashed glass and rent circuitry asunder, following her lead. There was meat within some of the screens, unidentifiable giblets joining the mechanical trash rapidly covering the floor. The entity had exposed its nervous system directly to Yuuka, and now we were tearing it apart. The entity was powerless to stop us as we turned the brutal literalism of its control over her into so much scrap.
It was decidedly un-magical, pure and simple violence, and it took its toll on her especially, slicing up her knuckles and nicking her face with flying glass. I saw her wince and recoil as a piece flew right into her eye; instead of calling for a pause, she just laughed and hurled the next monitor across the room to dash it against the door. It happened again a few moments later. This time Yuuka didn’t even slow down, and neither did I, even as her eye dripped blood down her cheek.
I, on the other hand, was impervious. My knees and elbows and the not-quite-feet at the ends of my legs were capable tools of destruction, and it felt good to finally have something to take all my horror and rage out on. I hoped that each smashed monitor also destroyed the scene it was depicting and laid what remained of these poor souls to rest. In the remaining cameras, the ones showing us, I saw us ruining this thing’s nervous system, and it was good. This was me and her as we were supposed to be. Yuuka saw it too and laughed even harder. Her right eye was swollen shut.
When almost all the screens were destroyed, and it was only us left, Yuuka turned to me. Her eye was ruined, a gory mess of gouges and gashes, taken to shreds by our raucous violence. She kept laughing, properly villainous and mocking, as she reached in and scooped and scraped with her blood-slick fingers and removed the lie the monster had placed over her vision. In her eye socket glimmered red and black, reborn in violence.
“Houseki hikare!” Radiance Bloodstone roared, knee-deep in triumphant gore. Then she turned to face the cameras cowering above us. “Behold the dread prophet,” she intoned, looking the net-entity in its cluster of eyes. “You will burn. But first. Izumi Takagiri needs a future, and I will give her one.”
“Yuuka?” I asked.
She pointed a finger up at the entity.
“I will see the monster that made you! He died here, right here, in this bed, where we killed him. He was here, and now he is not. You were there, and you were a part of it. He remade himself from you. I will have that secret and every other! Show me how he did it. Show me where he has gone. Show me everything.”
Author’s Note:
This chapter was pretty mean to Yuuka (and Ez to a lesser extent), so thanks for bearing with me. I worked hard on getting this chapter as right as I could (three days of delay!) and I hope you can feel what I was going for. Special thanks to the beta readers for helping me at every turn, they helped me realize at the eleventh hour that there was more that could be done, and I’m proud of the execution. I’m a little nervous too, but if you’re reading this you’re four hundred thousand words in, and I had to spend that trust eventually. If you liked the chapter (or if you think I missed a CW), please let me know in a comment!
Next chapter will be brighter. It’s definitely not coming this Sunday; I’m tentatively saying it’ll be next Sunday, May 17, and if I get it done before then it’ll be up for patrons.
That’s all for this week!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
