"Maximus! You’re not — this isn’t — you're the one who's trying to — ?!"

“That would be correct,” she replied, and watching Janus trembled where he stood, Sláine could tell this was going to be a big problem.

The expression on his face, though angry, wasn’t one of hate or malice. It was of confusion, of betrayal, and ultimately, of pained frustration. This wasn’t some kind of combative familial relationship or passive, uncaring apathy; she obviously meant a great deal to him, this little sister of his, and finding her to be complicit in this charade clearly shook him to his core. As much as she wanted to, Sláine couldn’t just remove the issue with her normal bull-headed grace. He would almost certainly turn on her.

If this even was his real little sister. Red had flat-out said that the Dark liked to trick people and play upon their emotions, and based on what she’d seen, it was logical to doubt that she was anything but an impostor wearing the face of his dearly beloved family member. Could she convince a clearly emotional man of that, though? Could she get him to see that, more likely than not, he was being fooled?

No matter where the truth lay, Sláine was a person who could only throw herself perpetually forward, and she prayed that the man would see sense.

“Janus, we have to stick to the plan! Red’s counting on it!”

“I am not watching you try to kill my little sister,” He immediately barked out. Dammit! Why did Red have to have received her heart from a person who was so stupidly, blindly sentimental?

If he wouldn’t, she would, and gritting her teeth, Sláine bolted back towards the entryway. She’d chase her through the entire coliseum if she had to, mowing down everything that stood in her way.

“…It’s endearing that you think you even can,” the girl above said. “She can’t see this anymore. I can drop some of the pretense.”

With a tug of the strings, the puppets jerked into motion, and then with unnatural, twitching movements, all the members of the audience tipped forward and began crawling down the amphitheater walls in a singular, squirming mass. They reminded Sláine even more of spiders now, in a far more visceral way than just their facial markings as they scuttled down stone walls in an indistinguishable tide. Some didn’t even bother with climbing; they simply fell, collapsing with dull thuds before clambering to their feet. Sláine skidded to a stop.

Every single exit was already blocked.

Fuck.

Even if they were unarmed, that was a lot of people to have to face at once. Two versus hundreds — or maybe thousands, all flooding down after them? — those were horrible odds. Should they just run after Red, trying to interrupt this production from that end…? Could she manage it before they were mobbed? Would that even work at this point? If she did do that, what would happen after? Her job had always been to kill things, not to protect others!

“Janus…!” Sláine hissed, backing up towards him and brandishing her weapon at the army of puppets.

The man gritted his teeth, fists balling up in pain, but suddenly he straightened his shoulders and looked directly up at the girl. “Sláine, please, just let me speak to her. I know I can convince her to stop this.”

“She probably isn’t even real!” Sláine snapped.

“Real? Not real?” The girl from above laughed, a sound somewhere between mania and desperation. It made Sláine’s ear twitch with the oddness of it, but she was too focused on sizing up the crowd to care. “What does it even matter? The outcome will be the same. You’ll be crushed beneath the weight of this illusion, I’ll convince the Queen-Consorts daughter to join her again, and at the end, I’ll be awarded custody of your heart, Janus. Just like what was promised.”

Janus stopped short. “My — …Why would you need that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? She already managed to get me your body. You didn’t think I’d let you break your promises that easily, would you? You said that you’d come back.” Maximus raised her arms like a conductor, tugging at the strings and forcing the bodies to lurch forward in slow, monotonous steps. “You said that you wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Janus whispered, quietly and with wide-eyed horror, “You’re, you’re trying to — do you think you can somehow bring me back from the dead?”

There was silence in the wake of his question, silence and the cavernous sound of tmp, tmp, tmp, like a thousand metronomes clicking all at once. Sweat beaded on Sláine’s forehead. Even if she went directly after Red… that would leave Janus unguarded, and at the end of it all, they did have to be reunited, didn’t they? This girl had separated Red from her heart, and wouldn’t Sláine have to put it back? If her ultimate goal was to steal it —

“Maximus, that won’t work, not in the way you’re expecting! Even if we’re not — technically alive in the conventional sense of the word, you know I can’t just, just be revived like nothing ever happened! Dying changes you!” Janus cried out, flinging his arms out to the side as he pleaded with her. “It erases that slot in the world you used to occupy! The only way bringing back the dead is even theoretically possible is if you’re acknowledged by a ‘different’ world. A different reality. Our everyday life is… gone. You can’t just shove my heart back into my chest and expect me to be something that can think and feel.”

“I don’t need it to!” she yelled in return. “If I can’t ‘bring you back’ in this world, I can just create a new one! It doesn’t need to be real to everyone else; it doesn’t need to be more than a private dream. It just needs to be real to me! I can do that, at least. It would be enough.”

Left. Right. No matter where she looked, they still ceaselessly marched forward. So how could Sláine stop that, then? Could she try to plow through the horde anyway, ambush her, and try to kill her? The odds were bad, but they were odds, and ultimately, Janus wasn’t — her concern, his problems weren’t his problems, as long as she could keep him safe. Or she could just sling him over her shoulder and chase after Red, trying to put things right before they could be disturbed even further.

…No, if this person could somehow cut off her connection from Aria — and she didn’t doubt that it was her — they had to be trapped in a very powerful delusion. Worst case scenario, Red would end up being convinced to attack her, and that was not a fight she wanted to have, not without willing back-up from him.

And best case scenario was… what, exactly? They hadn’t been able to escape before.

As frustrating as it was, with the information she currently had, her best shot was still the man at her side.

“Janus!” she practically begged. “I know this isn’t what you want, but we have to do something!”

“Sláine… please trust me,” he said, turning and giving her one of those aching smiles. “And hold out the best that you can. It’s her, I know it is, and it’s my responsibility as a big brother to push her back onto the right path.”

It was then he took a running start, leaping into the air and flinging his artificial arm out. It grew then, sucking up the surrounding darkness and adding it to its length, and his fingers grasped tightly onto the edge of the railing. The puppet audience grabbed at it, but their hands couldn’t pass through the shadow, and he ripped them aside with more limbs formed the same way. It was like he was crashing through a waterfall of bodies, and all they could get off of him was his glove.

"This isn't what I wanted, Maximus!" he yelled, feet making contact with the wall before he grappled his way up to the second floor.

"I don't care what you wanted, and I’m going to see this through to the end!”

Sláine had more immediate problems as the horde closed in on her.

She easily dispatched the forward guard with a cut, a stab, a slice and a whirl, carving out a space for herself to exist among the masses. But they kept coming forward, trampling over the bodies of their fallen comrades, and if she stayed stationary, she’d be crushed by the dead if she wasn’t devoured by the living.

If she could still see those puppet strings attached to them, she’d have absolutely tried to cut them. Logically, they should be tangled all across the amphitheater in a discordant mess, but they didn’t seem to function like real threads, didn’t respond to the space in the same way, and Sláine could only assume that was a byproduct of the altered rules of reality here — and magic being its typical bullshit self.

But Janus was able to interact with them, probably because he knew how all this worked, and he lunged at Maximus then, ripping at the lines connecting her to the people-shaped dolls. His shadow hand forming into a dagger, he slit a section with a swift cut, and Sláine saw a section of the crowd lifelessly fall to the ground. It was only a drop in the bucket compared to the flood before her, but she charged towards that area, skewering a glassy-eyed man and using him something like a battering ram. Her earlier instinct of heading towards the exit had been a good one, she thought; she needed a choke-point, and if she could get to the stairs…

She could keep her head above water for just a little longer.

"Do you — do you think I'm going to forgive you for this?!” Janus fought his own battle alongside Sláine. “Do you think we're going to go back to being a happy family after you do this to bring me back from the dead? Are you, honestly and truly, fine with wiping away the parts of me that had things that mattered just so you could — try to construct some facsimile of the way things once were?"

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“You don’t get to judge me! You aren’t the one who was left behind!”

He grabbed for another measure of threads, but one of the puppets she’d kept by her side heaved him back from behind. Sláine was about to yell at him to be more careful, you idiot, but then he turned and smoothly stabbed it between the eyes with his knife-hand.

Clearly taken off guard by what he had just done, there was a look of horror on his face before he steeled himself with a frown. “Considering I’m just as involved in this as you are, I believe I do get to judge. I will never be happy knowing you did horrible things for my sake, and,” he made another lunge towards Maximus. “Unless you want to tamper with me too, tweak my memories until I exist as the ‘perfect big brother’ you wish me to be, I suggest you cease this abominable charade.”

Something grabbed her from the side, and Sláine retracted her halberd from the body and cleaved the air around her with a [ Reckless Spin ] before plowing onward. She had to believe he’d do the right thing. She had to believe he’d do what was necessary.

"I — I — is it really so unreasonable to be upset? To want to change things?” (Sláine detected a change in the puppet’s movements. To the left they were slower, more sluggish, like she wasn’t paying as much attention to them — Sláine aimed through there, fighting to claim as much space as possible.) “Why does this stranger mean more to you than me? You should want to do this, Janus! If you want to atone for something so badly, make it up to me for every agonizing day I spent worried sick for you!"

Janus dodged another hand grabbing at him, sending the body over the railing. "You know I had to — "

"What, save the world? I don't care about the world! What do you think happened to MY world when you ran away with that stupid princess? Leaving me in charge of, of what, the house? Your work? Did you really think that I would be fine without you? Is that how little you valued yourself?!"

"I... Maximus, I — "

She dodged backwards again, pulling another body between them to give her space to retreat, but Maximus wasn’t really attacking him, not directly. Was it because she was too distracted trying to manipulate the enemies around Sláine, keeping them upright and moving? Or was it because he really was her brother, and she didn’t want to fight him just as much as he didn’t want to fight her?

…The more trouble Sláine caused, the more enemies she killed — would that put even more pressure on Maximus? By the Tree, she wished she had Red’s explosives. Or any explosives, really. She might have to discard her weapon soon; it wasn’t built for a range this close.

Just a bit farther. Keep going, Sláine.

"No matter what you fought for, no matter what you were willing to stake your life on, you still died without a thought to those you left behind!”

"That's not fair!"

"The position you put me in wasn't fair!"

"I’m sorry," Janus shouted in return, pain laced through his voice as he slit through thread after thread, advancing on her position. She could only retreat now, hands moving wildly as she tugged and pulled, but Janus still only focused on the strings, only tried to undo what she had started. "Do you really think I wanted to die? Do you really think I wanted to leave this world behind? No! Not at the end, which is what made everything so damn miserable! I remember now, I remember it all, and it would have been so easy," he spat, "If you could have just, just left me to my damn pity-party! Can you even possibly imagine what it was like, knowing your colleague, your partner, your best friend used your research to tear out a little girl's heart? The daughter of your mentor, the child of the person who rescued you? Who asked you to try to build a better world for her and all the other children stuck in this broken mess we've been left with?"

Janus swung his hand out again, leaving another pile of direction-less corpses, but this time — it was a number of puppets crawling down from the upper levels of the amphitheater, and when they fell, they crushed the enemies beneath them. In normal circumstances, this would have been quite fortuitous for Sláine, but they happened to fall directly in front of the door she was working her way towards, blocking it off with a landslide of limbs.

But she was so close already… maybe she could climb the tower? Claim the advantage of higher ground on the backs of those lifeless bodies?

“I don’t care what it was like, you absolute idiot!” At this, she finally went after him directly. She made some sort of motion in the air, and more strings formed, but this time, they tried to attach themselves to Janus. “Your guilt, your sorrow… no one but you ever thought what happened was your fault! No one thought you deserved to die for it! That was all you!”

Janus ripped them off, fully snarling now. “It wasn’t about deserving or not deserving! As soon as there’s a winner in this Great Game of ours, our broken world will be redefined in their image! Everything that does not fall into line will be destroyed; we will simply not exist anymore. If I wanted to preserve anything of the way we currently are now, and if I want anything that I think has value to be maintained, even if it is not ‘perfect’, I had to do everything I could to find another solution — even if, ultimately, that pursuit resulted in my death.”

“Then why not — let them? Let them do it, let them win? It’s not like we’ll know what’s happening when everything ends, right? Maybe I just wanted to be happy before the inevitable! Or — or you could have tried securing the Dark’s position instead. Why do you care what it costs other people, when they never cared about people like us in the first place?”

“Because I still believe in a world that has enough love for everyone existing within it!”

Janus grabbed her, and with a mighty heave that Sláine had never expected from the man, dragged her towards him and tried to put her in a head-lock. She fought back, struggling like a rabid, caged monkey, and this gave Sláine the time she needed to fortify her position.

Shoving the momentarily frozen puppet-zombies aside, Sláine scrambled up the pile, one hand on her halberd and the other used to heave herself to the top. It was a bit like climbing a pile of boulders, if the boulders were fleshy and some of them could still try to bite at her ankles. By this point, Sláine realized that these things didn’t really… have distinct faces anymore; they were just these melted collection of generic features, like a child trying to make a convincing face out of molding clay.

Huffing, Sláine crested the mountain, and then quickly delivered a few key, critical stabs to the bodies at its peak. She didn’t know when Maximus would regain control of the swarm, and it was best to remove the closest people to her from the available pool of puppets.

“No one wanted you to take all the burdens of the world onto yourself!” She screamed, harsh and trembling. “What I wanted was for you to be alive!”

Stab, stab.

“And what about what I wanted?” He retorted, sorrow cracking his voice. “What was important to me to protect? You think I should have, what, ignored all the things that I thought mattered and lived in blissful self-delusion?”

Stab, stab.

“Yes! You always told me, over and over again, that the people you loved were the most important thing to you! Was that all just a lie?”

Sláine looked up and saw that, from across the arena, Maximus had managed to shove Janus off. The pile beneath her began to shift and groan, but none of the puppets in it could move from their collective combined weight.

Those on the ground below began to climb, though, and Sláine quickly redirected her attention towards defending her hill. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be the one she was going to die on.

Hah.

“No! That’s not what I mean!”

She didn’t know if what he was doing was working, but it was certainly making Maximus upset.

“What do you mean?” she asked, voice choked as if resisting the urge to sob. Sláine took advantage of every momentary lack of focus to hack, to cut, to fight.

“At the end, I truly absolutely didn’t want to die, because I loved you all so much! Every single damn one of you! But it was because of that love that I had to. It wasn’t to escape my crimes, Maximus! I didn’t leave you because I hated myself! It wasn’t even because I thought the world would be better off without me, or that happiness wasn’t available to me because of what I had done, because every single one of you, every single person I cared for, made life worth living! I can’t even begin to count all the regrets I had, and at the end — there was nothing I regretted more than breaking that promise.”

Janus paused, then glanced over at Sláine’s position. He seemed to realize that by now that, in a war of endurance, she was a very difficult opponent to face, but every person had their eventual limit. Near her, a few hands sprouted out of the ground — waving like blades of grass in the breeze — and grabbed any nearby ankles or lengths of cloth, dragging some of the dolls to the ground.

“Thanks!” Sláine shouted, but she doubted that he heard her over Maximus’s frenzied scream.

“Then, if you really love me, you should let me save you!” She tore at him. “Let the world be just that much more of a misshapen and broken place! You keep saying that it hurt you, but that doesn’t matter, because you’re not the one who has to live with the consequences of those actions! Why couldn’t you have worked harder, tried longer to find another solution? Why did you have to go off and die?”

He choked. “I was trying so hard to find another damn solution! There was even someone I wanted to give my heart to; I wish you could have met them, Maximus! They're really a lovely person! But I couldn't. At the end I couldn't, I ran out of time, and all I could do was leave my hopes with the children of the future.”

“I don’t want to hear that from you!” Maximus wailed from above.

“Then what do you want to hear? Maximus, I’m… sorry.”

There were too many for her to cut down. No matter how many times she swung, how many times she used her [ Skills ], no matter how hard she tried and sliced and bled as nails and teeth tore into her flesh, it still wasn’t enough to even begin thinning the mob around her. Their skill didn’t matter, their training didn’t matter. She could feel her limbs growing sluggish, could feel her arms getting tired. She’d been running, and fighting, and bleeding and regenerating and bleeding and trying so hard, and for… for what? In the face of this overwhelming opposition, what was it that she was fighting for?

This truly was it — Boundless, without restraint, the feeling of being swallowed up by the shadows. She was being crushed by the weight of this girl’s desperation, being suffocated by the completeness of her despair, and Sláine felt herself wobble. A hand that she’d missed grabbed at her leg, pulling her down. She kicked at it, but there was another to take its place.

And another.

And another.

And…

Then, suddenly, it stopped.

They weren’t fighting anymore, the two of them on that balcony, or — maybe Maximus could be considered to be fighting still, because she was still struggling against him, though her attempts to break free of the hug he had her trapped in were weak and ineffective. She was crying, Sláine thought, or that’s how she interpreted those choked little gasps, and Janus gently stroked her hair.

“I can’t apologize for dying, because I still believe wholeheartedly in my choice. Because of what I did and what I died for, because of the people’s who’s lives I touched, because of those who can still love due to everything I fought for… there is more hope in this world, and people striving towards a better future. But I apologize for my weakness, Maximus. I apologize for leaving you behind. Not rescuing you from this place was inexcusable. I told myself that I couldn’t get you involved in this, that you’d be safe and fine and it would be better if you didn’t have to see your stupid brother fumbling around pathetically in the dark, but that was my own hubris, and my own shame that left you alone and hurting. But please.”

He took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. "Hate me all you want, but don’t… commit evil for my sake.

They didn’t stand up again, those bodies, and Sláine stared numbly as everything just remained… still, before flopping onto her back and heaving in desperate gulps of air. The corpse-hill was hardly a comfortable place to rest, but honestly there wasn’t anywhere much better, and for the moment, Sláine just wanted… a break.

A single, momentary break.

…Somewhere, someone began to clap.

>> Internally scream about the unfairness of life