“Help me.”
Fresh off the heels of Mike's death, Jack had reacted on instinct, the two words uttered by his sister snapping Jack from his stupor.
His hand had come up, gunblade firing an armyrethium tipped bullet that ripped through the teenager’s chest.
Tangerine fell to the side, his face one of confusion and rage as he moved to fire at Jack yet lost balance and fell.
Yet... what was done was done as Jack stood atop the cockpit of the Khloros bleeding from his shoulder, head, and left eye.
Despite being wrapped in pulsating flesh and wearing some odd mask fixed to the machine, Jack could tell it was Jill.
After so long, he had found his sister. Just not in the way he had hoped.
“Jill?” Jack whispered, despite bleeding from his injuries yet to heal, he reached down, ignoring Sahaqiel and Lilith warnings.
-D#&10(//*
HelpNogoaway! StOp! heLp! RUn!
Jack recoiled, his mind beset by a flurry of foreign voices that lashed out at his psyche, causing an influx of system glitches to fill his vision.
Recovering quickly Jack shook his head, his vision picking up traces of red energy latched onto Jill.
The same energy he saw before Colette and the others collapsed.
In a frantic rush Jack reached out, his body immediately racked with pain as system notification after notification flooding his senses.
He could hear-no, see voices, the data clouding his vision giving him a migraine that threatened to break his skull apart.
Still, Jack clenched his jaw and wrapped his hand around the mask on Jill’s face and pulled, attempting to rip away the strange device that tethered the strange energy.
“NO!” Jill screamed, her voice akin to a banshee’s wail before the Khloros moved, sending Jack flying with a smack of its arm.
Jack bounced across the ground of mud and broken debris, the only sound echoing to his ears being the crunch of his broken bones and Jill’s wail.
Rising to his feet with his clavicle bleeding profusely Jack gawked, staring at the monstrous MECHFrame suddenly expanding in mass. Black flesh grew from the cockpit, putrid and vile with tentacles sprouting forth to wrap the metal humanoid in muscle.
The Khloros shrieked, unleashing malevolent energy that rivaled that of a Nest Heart.
Jack recoiled, the corruption in the air so vile his surroundings began to fog up with corruptive smog as the nearby flora wilted.
Sara! Sara what the hell is going on?!
“I don't!! I don't know! Keep your mana barrier up and don't breathe it in!” Sahaqiel warned, the panic in her voice clear.
Then Jake began to hear it, echoes of voices, a singular word chanted by the chorus that sung a singular word of Brother.
The Khloros screeched, racing towards Jack with its new arms of corpse flesh that reached out with bone-like talons.
“Brother…BroThEr? bROtheR?brother?brothErbeothe!"
“Jill?” Jack whispered to the cacophony of hundreds of voicing calling for a brother.
Frozen, Jack could only stare as the machine neared, the Khloros casting a shadow over the warrior with tears in his eyes.
Then, it stopped, merely a few inches from rending Jack, its metallic fleshy body visibly straining from some unknown force holding it back.
“Brother…”
A whisper before the Khloros spun, racing away from Jack as it trailed corruptive smoke towards the Selfian lines.
“I…” Jack reached out, unable to stop his sister.
“Jack!” Selfia called out.
Selfian reinforcements, a dozen MECHFrames flying past Jack with Selfia's own machine landing beside him.
“Jack! Are you okay?!” Selfia yelled, piloting a MECHFrame with the name of Jormungand stenciled on its white and gold plated chassis.
“No! Selfia! Stop! Call off your soldiers! That's Jill! That's my sister in there!” Jack snapped, attempting to move yet his injuries just weren't… healing?
Sara... what's wrong with my eye?
“The effect of the Excalibur, it's dampening your recovery and cut off a bunch of data. Lilith managed to blunt most of the impact but healing your injury will take some time!” Sahaqiel reported with Jack gnashing his teeth.
Never mind that! Tell me how to save my sister! Jack barked, summoning his feathers, still attempting to get into the fight.
“I…” Selfia went silent for a moment, “I can maybe, maybe figure something out, but it would involve getting close!”
“Are you insane? Jill is-” Lilith began but trailed off.
“Then I'll do that,” Jack winced, the vision in his left eye extremely blurry.
From within her MECHFrame Selfia furrowed her brow, one good look at Jack and she could tell he was injured and exhausted but just pushing through.
“Jack, I need you to retreat from the field,” Selfia ordered, blocking Jack's path as made to intervene with the squadron of Mech's attacking the Khloros. “Now. We will handle your sister.”
Despite a one versus eight, Jill was holding her own, the Khloros now morphed into a wolf-like beast equipped with a multitude of tentacles that were tearing the Selfian's apart.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Handle?” Jack muttered as another Selfian MECH lay in the ground destroyed.
No. Jill was his sister. He had to be the one to… do something.
“Jack? Jack?!” Selfia barked as Jack stood firm with fresh resolve.
“I need your men to pin her down. Do whatever you can. Just buy me a few minutes to close in,” Jack said, gathering his mana.
“Jack, we can't deal with the Solarus, demonspawn, and your sister! If she gets closer to our lines she could infect-”
“Do it!” Jack turned and spat, the mana in the air wrapping around her Mechframe and causing it to groan, “I have done everything you've asked, now, now you will do what I need you to do.”
“Fine,” Selfia said before issuing orders to her MECHFrame team who began switching from lethal to non-lethal tactics. “I pray you know what you're doing.”
“I thought you didn't believe in a god,” Jack retorted, healing his shoulder with healing hands.
“I don't, but if there is one listening I'd hope she won't fuck me.”
“Let's get to work,” Jack said, taking off with Selfia at his back.
“For now, we can't have Ruby engaged, this smog is extremely corrosive, more so than the attack on Frelia. We need to be careful and limit our injuries,” Sahaqiel advised as Jack drew close to the battlefield around his sister.
The Khloros was still spewing vile energy, shrieking in tandem with the girl exposed in its cockpit howling her anguish at the world.
Jack grit his teeth, the malevolent energy almost calling out to him. The Khloros suddenly sprouted wings, its wolf-like features metamorphosing into something with scales and spikes.
“Pin it down! If that thing gets airborne we're all fucked!” Selfia ordered, the multitude of Mech's firing cables to capture the Khloros.
Two MECHFrames rushed in, the titans raising massive metal shields to slam into the Khloros from both sides while a third one slashed at the mechanical tendons behind the Khloros's knees.
Jill screamed at the indignation, stabbing at her assailants with fleshy tendrils that were caught by several fresh MECHFrames that joined the fray.
Selfia’s machine moved in, severing a wing with a pure armythieum black blade that sent the Khloros into a frenzy.
“Jack, we're detecting a massive spike of mana! Whatever you're gonna do! Sara you've gotta do it now!” Selfia barked as Jack raced forward, dodging tendrils that arced out to claim his life.
Jack moved past the damaged MECHFrames locking the beast in place, using their sacrifice to climb upon the Khloros where Jill convulsed uncontrollably.
“Sara! What do you need me to do!” Jack asked, hoisting himself up while taking care not to touch the tendrils of flesh.
A moment passed as the storm picked up, Jack's eyes scarcely able to comprehend what he was looking at. Jill's form was shifting rapidly, afterimages of herself flailing back and forth inside the Khloros's cockpit.
“Sara.”
Give me a moment!
“Sara we don't have a moment!”
“I… I don't… I don't know,” Sahaqiel said much to Jack's dismay.
What?
“I said I don't know! I'm sorry but I don't! Not if we're trying to save her! Fuck! I didn't want to resort to this!” Sahaqiel replied, her tone laced with fear, something he hadn't known from Sahaqiel.
“That's… no! That's not good enough!” Jack said, shaking his head as he reached out to touch Jill’s mask.
Like before he was met with pain and a flurry of voices that screamed his name with Jill opening her mouth to release a blast of putrid energy at Jack.
[-ERrOr Data corrUption. WaRning! WARNING!]
“If corruption was so simple, we'd have solved it back in my day, the truth is, it's not, it's complex and-”
“TRY SOMETHING!!!”
“I AM!” Sahaqiel snapped, “Please, Jack I'm trying everything I can, racking my brain for every code, every data sequence I know and I… I… I need more time.”
Jack opened his mouth, closing and opening it repeatedly as he felt the corrosive energy eroding his control over the nearby mana that shielded him from the smog.
“Jack! The smog is getting worse! Our scrubbers can't hold under this pressure!” Selfia called out, “Squad! Prepare to disengage!”
“Selfia!” Jack snapped, yet he could feel it.
The situation was getting worse, too worse, each moment that passed another that ate away at Jack's protection.
“Jack… we… we have to, I'm sorry. Please forgive me-”
“Sahaqiel…” Jack whispered, his hands shaking as he drew closer to Jill. She was so close, so very close! Yet as much as he tried he just couldn't reach her. “There's gotta be something I can do, Lilith, please! ANYTHING!”
Jack screamed, pushing against the malevolent energy to reach his sister who looked up at him.
“Jack… I can walk,” Jill whispered, lighting a spark of hope within Jack that his sister was still there.
“Yeah! I can see that! Everything's going to be okay! I'm here! Your brother is here! I'm gonna, I'm gonna get you home! You're gonna meet your niece and your nephew and I-”
“Kill. Me.”
In that instance, the world froze, the two words uttered by his sister stopping Jack cold.
Jill's mask fell away, revealing her long green hair that obscured her emaciated head. She looked up, staring at Jack with a face divorced of its eyes.
“KiLl… mE…” Jill’s voice quivered, the air around Jack dense with miasma as she suddenly burst free from her MECHFrame captors, dragging Jack along.
“Jack!” Sahaqiel screamed, “Jill’s going to explode! We have to get-”
“NO! I can’t leave her! We still have time! Still-!” Jack yelled,before screaming out in pain as the corruptive energy began to seep through and burn the tips of his fingers.
“Damn it Sahaqiel! Get him under control or we'll all die!” Lilith spat, busy deleting as much invasive corrupted mana code that began seeping into Jack. “She’s corrupting too much mana! If she blows up we won't be able to escape the blast radius! DO WHAT YOU PLANNED TO DO! DON'T BACK OUT NOW!”
Despite Sahaqiel not wanting to agree, Lilith was right. Jill was dangerous, a ticking time bomb priming with energy that would wipe out and infect everyone on the battlefield, Jack included.
"If only we had more time..." Sahaqiel lamented.
Jack and the Khloros was still rising, the monstrous thing hanging above the battlefield with a multitude of Selfian cannons firing on the pair.
They wouldn't survive if Jill finishing priming.
Sahaqiel made a choice and enacted Selfia's plan B.
“I'm so sorry,” Sahaqiel said through Jack's mouth, her will piloting Jack's body.
“SARA NO!” Jack screamed before Sahaqiel plunged his hand into Jill's heart. With Lilith's help, the pair pierced through the veil of corruption, attacking the source of the machine that didn't fight back.
“Ah… was I help..ful?” Jill's final words, her body limp as the Khloros released her, allowing Sahaqiel to grab the woman and fly away from the exploding mech.
The resulting explosion sent Jack reeling, his body tumbling through the sky before he lost consciousness.
***
A moment, perhaps an eternity passed before Jack woke, his mind a mess, body burning, vision blurry before his working eye fixated on the figure laying amidst the debri.
No strength in his broken arms, Jack crawled forward, kicking at the dirt, calling out his sister's name until he finally reached her.
With his arms healed, Jack dragged himself up to hold the body of his sister in his arms.
“Please… please…” Jack kept whispering, his voice the only sound that echoed across the battlefield. “PLEASE!”
Jack released a cry to the sky, a howl of pain that contained the burdens of his soul.
That cry soon turned into a chuckle and then a laugh, a maniac laughter as the mana in the air responded to his madness.
The earth shook, the sky wept, the very molecules unseen to the naked eye reacting violently to the laughter of anguish that compelled it to move.
Finally, something inside Jack snapped, shifted, his enter morphology now tuned to the fracturing world around him.
[Congratulations, On Completing the System Tutorial, Angel.]
Brilliant gold and majestic energy of white left Jack's body, radiating with such purity the Black King could only smile as he stood at a distance watching with glee on his face.
“Ah… forty thousand years later and a new angel is finally born,” Micheal said as across the globe, old things began to stir, beings of malevolence, and forgotten gods reacting to the presence of a demi-god awakening.