Dancing in the distance, a new orb of flickering, red light spawns in front of Yume. It sparks and shoots tiny spirals of particles throughout the fluid that encases her. From her current distance, it is humming a low tune. As she inches towards it, the noise grows in clarity. She immediately perks up as she realizes what lies ahead. A dull, heavy blade scraping against a creaking floor.
The desire to turn and run away is festering within, but she knows all too well what good her resistance is in these waters. Even if she flees, her body will still meet with the same fate. She decides to stand her ground as the orb only moves when she does.
Got ya! She thinks, as the orb and herself engage in a standoff. The more time that passes, the more animated the orb becomes. It violently sputters and pops out trails of light, while expanding in size. It grows until it reaches near her body. Yume lays flat, hoping to slip beneath it as it balloons away.
The orb instead continues to enlarge and hovers above her, before completely engulfing her. It shoots her aggressively into the memory, as if it were angry at her. She drops onto the floor of her dormitory, and coughs as the wind is ejected from her lungs.
She looks down at her hands, realizing that she has both of her arms intact, along with her up-to-date memories. They do not faulter or dissipate, it seems they are here to stay for this one. Confused about where in the memory she is, she calls for her old companion.
“…Nurse?” She sheepishly asks the wall.
…
“Nurse?!” She yells.
With no response again, she slams her fists against the wall. The shutters on her window react to the transfer of energy, and creak open, revealing the dark city alit with synchronized, animated billboards. Hundreds of them all displaying an image of a cheery looking bot holding the door open to golden steps. Superimposed over the image, is a countdown.
26…25…24…
“Oh no….no no NO!” She screams.
Before she could even remove her arms from the wall she was pounding, the music hits her ears. Each haunting note sends a shiver down her spine, and she collapses against the wall. Her head falls in anxiety, and she catches it with her trembling hands.
Then comes the scraping. The horrible, penetrating noise comes shooting down the hall until it consumes the acoustics of her room. Her door shoots open and collides with the wall behind it. Yume panics and tries to remember where she was when this had originally happened. She paces around, fumbling as she searches for the knife she had set down earlier.
“PLEASE LAY DOWN SO I MAY OFFER YOU PEACE.” Commands the bot.
She stumbles to the sound of its voice and immediately picks herself up, scrambling onto the bed in a prone position. It hovers over to her and presses her node in, trying to get a read on her identity. Her old wounds of trauma rip open at the pattern of its movement. She has been here once before and doesn’t intend to let it play out as it did in the past.
She waits for it to go into its glitchy, data processing mode and then makes her move. She reaches over to her nightstand and grabs ahold of the butterknife. She made the mistake of grabbing it blade first and got a handful of raspberry jam. She wipes it off her hand on her comforter and readies the blade against the bot’s cordage.
It comes to and snatches her hand before it can make the first incision. It grips tightly around her wrist, and she is forced to let the knife fall against her mattress. It holds her hand into the air and steadies it.
“PLEASE REMAIN STATIONARY” it says while using its other arm to slice her hand and forearm clean off her.
She belts out in agony and clutches the spraying arteries of her stump.
“I fell for it again, dammit!” She cries.
The GuideBot grabs ahold of her forehead and shoves her body back into a laying pose. It presses onto her node once again and scans it, trying to transmit her faulty data once more. She knows she must act fluidly, as she did in the past.
Without any hesitation, she grabs ahold of the knife with her left hand and jabs wildly at the bot’s underbelly. She tries to cut or saw at it, but there’s a strange sensation as she strokes it against the tube. To investigate it, she slows her speed and stares at it, the moment it should be connecting.
Right before the blade touches it, it curls backwards. She pulls it back and stares at it. It doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, at least through her vision. With her thumb, she bends the top of the knife back and lets it flick out. All seems to be in order.
She jabs at it again, and the knife falls flaccid. It has been reduced to gelatin within her grip. Dumbfounded, she pulls it towards her face to look, and it melts down her wrist. She stares up at the GuideBot in complete disbelief, as intense waves of déjà vu tickle the back of her neck.
“HA-HA-HA…FICKLE ARE THE DREAMS OF THE WEAK.” It speaks.
Yume’s anxiety turns on a dial at the sound of a familiar cadence. A furious rage overtakes her, and she grabs ahold of the bot’s tube with her hand and digs her nails into it. Little by little, she is puncturing it and making tiny incisions. She grows impatient and fears further retaliation, so she lunges forwards and bites down. She rips it in half in a tooth-fueled frenzy.
The GuideBot crashes to the ground and its undercarriage breaks open, spilling its innards onto the floor. Yume tries to avoid looking at it, as she’s aware of what it harbors, but it explodes.
Thousands of tiny strands and scraps of colored paper rain down upon her. Her dormitory becomes littered with confetti and glitter that continuously shoots from the bot. For a few seconds, she stares down at the amassing pile, moving her hands through it in absolute confusion.
Her bewilderment is interrupted by the noise of stone grinding against the linoleum flooring of her hallway. The glitter and confetti begin to shine from bright, gold beams of light from the doorway. Yume looks back at the entrance to get a look at the commotion. Golden steps have moved themselves right to the frame.
Through the warbling speakers of the dying GuideBot, congratulatory music begins to play. From the molding stretching along her walls, several confetti poppers manifest and then explode, sending more strands dancing down upon her.
“C-C-CONGRATULATIONSSSSS, YO-YU-YUME!”
She gets up and walks towards the steps.
“YOU, H-HAVE MET THEEE REQUIREM-M-MENTS FOR ASCENSION! PLEASE PROCEED TO THE PINNACLE!” Says the GuideBot, as the stairs grow brighter and more inviting.
Yume lifts her foot to the height of the first step and moves it towards it. She presses it down and feels her full weight go onto the steps. She looks up and sees nothing but bright, golden clouds above her. The pain from her arm has dissipated, and she feels full of love. She swings her other leg and sets it down upon the first step.
With a giant smile, she steps onto the next step. As she’s lifting her foot to continue, her footing is erased. The steps beneath her and all her surroundings cut to a brief void, and then she feels herself falling. She gains speed until slamming into the side of something metallic. She crumples in pain and falls towards the floor.
When she collides with it, she is met with a pool of liquid. Its scent fills her nostrils and spreads to her lungs. She tries to push herself up off the ground to get out of the fluid, but it is deep and its current strong. She coughs and gags as her head flows in and out of it.
The waters pull her off another steep fall, slamming her against several walls before flowing into a grate. She clambers onto it and pulls herself out of the rushing torrent of filth. With most of her body out, she uses her one hand and wipes away the coagulation from her eyes. Her location within the drainpipe is familiar, but the surrounding scene is out of place.
Just outside of the grate, there is rubble, smoke, and smoldering piles of destruction. She is within the grate that Junker had saved her from, yet before her eyes is Junker trapped beneath the rubble of his home.
Yume jumps up and lowers herself past the grate. The drainage from the pipe is flowing directly into the ground. It simply vanishes as it collides with the dirt beneath it. She pushes her pained body to its limits and sprints over to the pile he is impaled under. She knows he is on the other side, yet there is an unfamiliar, squelching noise.
As she closes in and turns the corner, she can see the tail end of Rosie. The sight of a familiar friend brings a smile to Yume’s face, and she moves further to run up and give her a little scratch. She runs her hands all down the middle of her back, until she reaches her head.
Her head is bobbing up and down and produces the source of the unnerving sound. As Yume’s hand nears the base of her head, Rosie abruptly stops what she was doing and flips her head around. There is blood dripping from her mandibles and her eyes are alit with a sinister red.
Yume tumbles backwards in fear. Rosie has been gorging herself upon Junker’s corpse. Instead of Yume and Hypatia coming to his aid, Rosie took it upon herself to turn him into a meal. The once friendly giant-centipede whips its body around and charges right at Yume.
Yume frantically tries to crawl backwards but rams her head into a pile of debris behind her. Rosie closes the distance between them all too fast, and steps onto Yume’s chest, rearing her head back to strike. Rosie lunges forwards, and her entire front section morphs into a thin, black cord.
It implants itself into her forehead and she spasms against the ground, trying to fight it. It coils around her body, sliding upwards to coil around her neck several times. She stares down at it as it is slowly constricting her.
It seems that it will continue to wrap itself around her, until she is engulfed entirely. She moves her arms around, trying to free up some movement, and notices that her mechanical hand is upon her now. A smile creeps over her as she can see the shimmering, cleansed node still half-pressed into her socket.
She reaches over with her left hand and pushes it into place. With its energy now flowing into her muscles, she has but one thought in her head.
WHEN ALL ELSE IS LOST, CUT THE CORD.
There isn’t a fiber of her being now that hesitates as she grabs onto the cord with both hands. She belts out a guttural scream, and her hands violently combust in a blinding blast of blue. The cord, now split in two pieces, falls against the ground. She pulls the plug from her socket, and all cuts immediately to a new vision.
Swaying above her, are long, flowing pieces of flesh. They are weeping thick mucus onto the corpses beneath it. These flaps of skin used to contain the king. Yume realizes that the explosion within her vision had manifested itself. Her hands still glow a soft green light, and have bits and pieces tacked onto it from the black cord. She can see the connection for it lying next to her, along with its other half tattered and dangling from some conglomerate of mechanical parts harbored within the shredded skin. She thinks the explosion must have caused the cocoon to rupture.
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Laying on top of her, clutching her mechanical hand, is Hypatia. Yume feels a cold wet spot on her stomach, and pushes Hypatia off her. Her body rolls off and then rests gracefully amongst the others. The damp spot on Yume’s stomach is the now, cold blood of Hypatia. Yume looks towards the hand that Hypatia had been clutching. The cleansed node is pressed into its socket.
She sobs as the realization of what transpired hits her. She gets up and immediately begins searching for Shingetsu, as this was certainly his doing. She parses through the corpses near her and finds only her fellow Splinters.
Some twenty or thirty feet from her, is a smoldering corpse that catches her eye. She runs over to it and picks it up. The tattered face attached to it no longer has a curled smile or produces heinous speeches. The scraps of his robes are still smoking from blue embers. Shingetsu’s corpse in her hands brings her momentary joy.
With the battle won, she turns her attention towards her other comrades still yet to be seen. She paces the stage, searching desperately for Junker, Lucien, or Rosie. All the corpses are unfamiliar or destroyed beyond recognition. She grows desperate until she looks to the audience and sees a hand waving towards her.
“We’re up here.” Shouts a raspy, beaten voice.
Yume immediately perks up at the sight of Junker, Lucien, and a dimly lit Rosie all staring back at her. She gracefully traverses over the bodies on the stage and makes her way to the edge, about to jump off. A deep, warbling hum fills the air around her and she can feel each individual hair prick up on the back of her neck.
She can hear thrashing and frantic slithering behind her and gingerly turns her head around to see what is happening. She trembles and falls to her knees as the body of Shingetsu wriggles and pulsates. His head lifts into the air and twitches towards his back. The lower half of his jaw stays stationary as the rest of his head curls behind him.
“I thought you were dead, Shingetsu.” She whispers in a quivering tone.
He does not respond to her words. His lower extremities convulse and twitch in what looks like a completely involuntary motion. Life has left his eyes, yet his body is animated.
From within his throat, an immense tentacle shoots out. It’s an impossible sight, seeing such a massive thing emerge from an opening that small. Two more tentacles grow out of his mouth and wriggle out. They soon spread out to the length of the stage and spill over its edges.
Several more tentacles make their way out and prop his body in the air, with his legs at the top. Shingetsu’s body sits upside down atop a leviathan of wriggling arms. The shell of his body tears open and its remnants blow away in the breeze from the massive fans circulating the room’s air.
A pair of serpent heads emerge from his remains and coil upward. Their collars glow from several dull, crimson orbs lining their edges. The larger of the two heads moves up at the steaming hunk of mechanical mayhem within the shell of the cocoon.
It gapes its mouth to an inconceivable width, and swallows it, sending a massive bulge down its gullet and into the center of its tentacles. The two heads join again in a demented, yet beautifully framed helix. Levitating above them is a burning, pointed, red crown. The abomination coils tightly and faces both sets of eyes right towards Yume.
The dominant head opens its mouth slightly and without moving its lips or jaw, it speaks.
“It appears as though I miscalculated, Katsuki.” It says, in an all-consuming, angelic voice.
The mention of this name sends ripples and waves of remembrance through her. Visions of her being cradled in its veins as an infant come back to her. The spite it once showed her, as it cast her down a series of pipes for being born without the gift of power. She was sent to death by its volition all because she couldn’t telekinetically lift a pebble. She bitterly reminisces before being interrupted by the creature’s words.
“You have changed. Far beyond just your body. Perhaps I was too harsh on you.”
“Too harsh?!” she screams, “You sent me to an almost certain death!”
One end of a tentacle creeps over to her and caresses the tip of her chin.
“Yet here you stand before me, a hardened soul, outliving your counterpart. You have earned my respect, Katsuki.”
“That is not my name” She snarls her lip and clenches her fists, “and I do not care about your respect.”
She reaches to her mechanical hand and presses the node into position. Her hands now glowing a subtle blue, she rushes to the nearest tentacle. With two thin, sparkling blades in each hand, she cuts and slices at the beast. Chunks and pieces fly around her alongside its blood splattering onto the bodies beneath them.
She jabs and jabs, but the flesh is regenerative. The split seconds between gashes she finds it regrowing. Her weapons act like a mosquito against the skin of an elk. The beast’s appendage hardly twitches in response to her.
“How dare you strike at your own father.” It says and snatches her away with a free tentacle, “I suppose I have neglected your discipline, Yume. Perhaps a lesson of respect is in order.”
The lesser of the two heads lunges towards her and strikes at her arms. In two, precise bites, it removes both of her hands, spitting them on the ground. She screams out in agony as blood pours from her open flesh.
“That should teach you to behave, my child.” the king says, and gracefully places the tip of a tentacle upon her forehead, “Now then, let’s not hide our heritage.”
As much as she tries to squirm from its grasp, she cannot escape its advances. The tentacle latches onto the center of her forehead and places a suction cup upon her skin. Tiny, razor-sharp teeth emerge from the inside and slice the top layer of her skin off. Hidden beneath is a symbol. The king is taken aback and drops her to the ground.
“This…cannot be.” it growls, “You are no child of mine.”
Upon the pool of various fluids on the ground, Yume can see her own reflection. A bloodied and beaten face, with a thick, black outline of a sun etched into her temple. She has not a moment to process before she is peeled off the ground within the grasp of a tentacle again.
“Adam sure had a way of poisoning the water. I think it’s best we drain it for good.”
The slimy arm slams her face down into the stage floor, shattering several bones in her legs and chest. It scrapes her from the surface and brings her towards the ceiling, before driving her to the ground again and again.
Her eyes burn and her body spasms in pain. All she can see is the blur of her face being lifted and then crashing into the bodies below. Occasionally she catches a faint shimmer of blue somewhere near where the creature is pummeling her. Just before all sensation leaves her body, she feels a sudden pressure on the section of her forehead that was sliced off.
The king sends her down into the bodies once more and lets her rest motionless amongst the dead. All the pain leaves her as the nerves and veins in her body have been thoroughly pulverized. She rests face-down on the floor, faintly clinging on to a sliver of life. The dominant head of the King comes down to her, right next to her ear and whispers.
“Rest now, child. You fought well enough.”
His words soothe her, and she drifts away, entering a serene emptiness. There is no pool of liquid here, nor any orb to drift towards. There is nothing, an absolutely quiet stillness. Her body has left her now, and she drifts aimlessly through the void.
The very edges of this scene begin to glow in a subtle blue. It gives off a heavenly hum and pleases her deeply. So, this is death? she ponders, and her internal monologue echoes through the space.
Shards of deep blue begin to tear through the emptiness, trailing tiny sparkles behind them. They rain down around her soul and whisper to her. Their words are foreign and unintelligible, until one strikes right through her.
A brief, powerful vision of a man welding steel beams some thousand feet in the air above The Rung enters her. A new shard passes through her and joins in the vision. Paired next to the first man is a woman chopping lettuce and dumping it into a container on a conveyor belt.
More and more pieces of lives lived in The Rung pass through her. A man feeding scraps to pigs. A person dragging a hoe through soil. They do not budge those before them out of view but join in together. A vast population stands before her, tearing off their individual uniforms in solidarity.
A raucous symphony of cheering overtakes her, and she feels an immense rush of courage and determination. The individuals before her fade into silhouettes with burning, blue eyes piercing through the darkness. They spread in her vision, taking up the space around her. She lies in the center of a galaxy of souls, watching them all twinkle in glory.
All at once she regains the sensation of owning a body. The flashing lights around her converge into the center of her forehead and she spasms as their thoughts and desires rush her mind. All their wishes and goals, hopes and dreams become her own. They all want the same thing; to live and love, free of torment.
She comes to on the surface of the stage and gasps out, coughing up the blood of her comrades that she had choked on while being driven into their corpses. She uses her arms to push her body from the ground, realizing that she has become a vast source of light.
Her once severed arms have regrown in a blinding hologram of effervescent blue. Confused and startled, she grasps at her forehead, remembering the moment of pressure before she fainted. Lodged into the center of the sun, is the cleansed node that Shingetsu had thrown upon the ground.
The king’s attempt at killing her had shoved it into the central port where her lunar node once rested before she was disowned. She feels its full, un-filtered power course through her skin and through every fiber of muscle. All her injuries and abrasions have been erased in this purifying incandescence.
She jolts up, standing proudly atop her fallen comrades, staring at the looming presence of the king, who is in a slumber several hundred feet from her. The air around her sparks and cracks as electric energy branches from her body and ripples through the cadavers on the ground. She takes a step forward and feels a hand upon her shoulder.
“You just can’t die, can you, kid?” Junker says, with a nod and a smile.
Yume turns behind and sees him, Lucien, and Rosie all with burning blue eyes waiting for her to hug them. She grabs at them all and brings them in tightly, feeling her tears fall upon their clothes.
“We’re with you to the end, Yume.” Says Lucien.
She can barely hear their words behind the wall of encouragement still emanating from the fallen souls residing in her head, but she holds them still, feeling their presence. She relinquishes their embrace and turns again towards the king.
With her first step towards him, a wave of energy surges outwards from her foot. The body that she stepped on glows in a static current of blue and attaches itself to her foot. It does not weigh her down nor hinder her movement; it enhances it.
“Uh, Yume…you got a little something on your foot” says Junker, trying to stop her.
She turns around to him and he sees her eyes alit in a determined fury. He immediately backs off and grabs onto Lucien and Rosie, holding them back as she progresses forwards.
With every step towards the king, a new corpse attaches itself to Yume, raising her height and fueling her rage. She holds a hand up at the king, with bodies lifting from the floor and connecting to her chest and wrapping around her arm. Each additional body causes her to grow more and more passionate.
She screams out and grabs onto a tentacle of the slumbering beast. His twin heads perk up and coil towards the ceiling, stretching like a cat who had just finished bathing in the sun. He seems entirely uninterested in her, until he feels the first inkling of her wrath.
Now standing atop a tower of her co-candidates, she clenches her massive, decayed fist around and severs his tentacle clean off. The king shrieks and scuttles away, nursing the gaping hole in his body. She doesn’t let him get away that easily.
She is now in control of every corpse that littered the stage, becoming a monster herself. She holds an arm out and focuses her energy at the end of it, sending a single body jetting towards the lesser head of the king. The body slams into its eye and explodes in a blast of light upon it. The king howls and his blood begins to flow from the vacant socket where his eye once resided. Yume’s face contorts in a harrowing grin.
“That should teach you to behave, father.”
The king frantically raises his remaining tentacles, slamming them all over the stage. In his desperation, he grazed Junker and sent him tumbling off the stage. Yume catches a glimpse of it, and suddenly the voices of her fallen brethren fall silent.
She cannot hear or see anything anymore. In a blind fury she lunges forwards, slicing and slicing. She’s going off of sensation only and continues to rip his limbs from his body until there is but his middle section and two heads left.
Her vision slowly comes back, and she realizes that all the bodies have been spent. She stands alone before the king, still fuming in anger. The two heads join together and begin bubbling down to a smaller size. Their anatomies melt away and the form of a man manifests. The thick, red sludge around the man’s face drips off and he turns his head to make horrid eye-contact with Yume.
“Please, Yume, have mercy!” Says the amalgamation, now partially formed into the loving image of her father.
Yume’s face contorts and spasms in a vicious conflict of emotions. This is troubling her to her very soul. From Adam’s mouth a thin, black cord slithers its way out. Adam pleads with her, desperately, but Yume’s expression has shifted. She has fallen ill to this demon’s illusions far too many times. With her face now sullen and wet with tears, she speaks to him.
“I’m sorry.”
In a swift motion, almost too fast to see with the naked eye, she slices upwards. All Junker or Lucien could have seen was a line of blue static starting at the base of the stage and extending to the ceiling. She cut straight through the king’s body and coiled heads.
The flesh of the king splits perfectly in half, with each side collapsing heavily against the floor. All that remains before her is a hunk of sputtering mechanical nonsense. It wheezes and blows plumes of dark smoke from its ventilation. Sludge is oozing from several damaged pipes along its sides.
Yume walks towards it, with Junker and Lucien now trailing close behind her. The two of them catch up to her with Junker scratching at his forehead.
“The hell is that thing?” He asks.
Yume laughs and walks right up to it, placing her hand upon one of its steaming pipes.
“This must be the king’s brain…or maybe his heart?” she responds.
The three of them stare at it and ponder what to do with it as it doesn’t appear to be a significant threat anymore. Above the pipe that Yume’s hand rests against, a dusty CRT screen lights up and displays a face composed of large, green pixels. It smiles and moves its mouth in an incredibly outdated animation.
“Please, have pity upon me.” It speaks in a bit-crushed tone, “I cannot harm you in this form.”
Yume’s fists and eyes glow once again in a bright blue.
“Why shouldn’t we tear you apart? Give me one reason!” She screams at it.
A black window appears on its screen with a play icon in the center.
“Let me show you my purpose.” It pleads, as it begins playing a video.