Hiiro

I woke up in a grey ferrocrete room with no windows, doors or furnishings of any kind. The fact that I woke up at all was surprising, though I couldn't place why that was or why everything had a curiously dream-like haze to it. I strained to recall anything beyond the vagaries of who I was, and failed utterly. I couldn't remember how I'd gotten here or what this place was or why it felt like my head was about to burst. All I knew was that I was in pain and I was warm.

"I would have answers from you." Treu stated, suddenly standing over me.

Had Treu always been that massive? He seemed to fill the room that'd been completely empty just seconds prior. How did he get in here? There weren't any doors. And for that matter, how could I see him at all? There were no lights yet the sealed ferrocrete chamber I was trapped in was illuminated as if there were. What was going on? Why couldn't I understand what was happening?

"STOP thinking." Treu hissed the command and I was powerless to resist, my mind blanking instantly. "Your trifling concerns are irrelevant. You need only know that you can give me what I want, or I can take it."

"What do you want?" I asked. My words had a warbled, echoing quality as if I was yelling into a chasm kilometers underwater.

"What is that creature, B̶͍̌im̵̒, to you?"

Treu uttered her name around a mouthful of bile that poured from his lips. He rocked back a half step, tears of blood streaming down his face and his complexion gaining a horrific, cadaverous mottled-green hue. The room itself seemed to recoil at the mention of her; the walls groaning under sudden strain, finger-wide cracks appearing in the ceiling and each of the square room's five corners stretched out into the distance.

Then I blinked, and everything was as it had been before, hazy and unfocused. My memories came flooding back to me in that blink too, like a book thrown open to a particular chapter. I could remember nothing in detail, except for her.

The way she walked without seeming to lift her feet. Her commanding aura that was indescribably reassuring and incalculably intimidating. The subtle mannerisms she was slowly learning from everyone around her and those entirely alien ones she must have brought from wherever it was she came from. Her reservation, wit, caution, curiosity, grace, tolerance, passion, intellect and every other trait I'd gleaned from our past days of easy companionship all flooded to the forefront of my mind.

I remembered Bim, but the question had not been so mundane. Treu scattered the observations, ripping every subjective impression from the unaltered facts below. He parsed days of my life into neat bullet-point lists where Bim's spawning humanity had faltered. She never slept or ate, and she only drew breath when speaking. Sometimes, underneath the alluring gold of her knowing eyes, there were flashes of an insatiable hunger ready to feed on the minds and souls of everyone around her. There was pain too, something I'd never seen in her myself but Treu highlighted dozens, scores, hundreds of instances where Bim was undoubtedly suffering in silent isolation.

Treu's lightspeed review of my memories found my walk in the gardens with Bim and the terrible, ruthless weight of his primary attention settled there— dozens of other mental probes scouring elsewhere in my mind simultaneously. He replayed our first date in full, over and over again. I was a witness outside of myself, rewatching the same scene play out while Treu manipulated the controls.

"I keep forgetting that you aren't really human." I heard myself say. "What's it like, being a devil?"

"What is it like to be a human?" Bim countered, a note of passion creeping into her otherwise stately voice. It was one of the only times I'd ever heard her so moved by a topic I'd raised. "These are both difficult questions, worthy of a lifetime of study."

Treu spotted a lingering moment of pain buried under Bim's regal disposition. How had I missed that? What was it that had bothered her?

"Many hands make light work." I said, desperate to keep talking to her, even though I could barely follow along with all her talk of the soul and time and our alien, incompatible existences.

You damned fool, ask her what's wrong! My desperate cries fell upon the deaf ears of my past self. All the willpower I could muster wasn't enough to alter the memory, let alone the unequivocal past.

"Would you like to aide my search for the answer?" Bim had asked me. "There's a tangential-probability that there will be some overlap to these lines of inquiry."

"Sure, if I can find the time." I said with a dismissive chuckle. I'd gladly help her out, she was like my little sister after all. You damned fool, don't you see what she's really asking you? She wants to bridge the gap!

"Why do you want to know what it's like to be human anyway?" I asked.

Bim paused for a long moment. A faint landward breeze tugging at her flowing dress and the short cut of her perfect black hair. She had a scent to her, entirely her own and like nothing I had reference for; it was spicy and sweet and so definitively feminine that it could only ever be her's. Bim's golden eyes flicked to my cracked lips—she was about to kiss me, I thought—but then they returned my gaze. When our eyes met, it was communion.

"I thought you were cute." She said, then she turned to regard the gardens once more.

Treu watched our date six times before he'd seen enough. The rest of his probes had scoured my memories of her and found nothing else worthy of deeper inquiry. He had lain me bare, and found the first date of an inexperienced man past his prime. Treu had come looking for some great conspiracy to rend the cosmos asunder, and revealed nothing but a tangled mess of confused emotions.

"Where's the rest?" Treu asked incredulously. "Surely there's more. There HAS to be more!"

"Bim is the most amazing woman I've ever met." I answered, finally regaining control of my facilities. "That's what she is to me."

Treu regarded me slack-jawed. The momentary expression seemed incompatible with the giant's harsh features, as if relaxing even that much was anathema to his very being.

"IT, isn't human. Let alone female." Treu sneered.

"That doesn't matter to me!" I roared, the room around us re-solidifying under my force of will. Heat was building inside of me, conviction too. "I… I think I'm in love with her."

"Love, is a chemical imbalance in the flawed brain of an undisciplined mind." Treu started, his features rigid with hatred. Something seemed to come over him, not a gentleness but something tranquil I'd never seen from the giant of a man before. "You may love a monster—it may even love you in return—but that does not change its nature."

"What's the hell's that supposed to mean?!" I demanded.

"It means, she- no, IT will destroy you. And when it does, there will be no force in this dimension capable of halting what comes next. The only thing to be done then, is to contain her." Treu smiled wickedly, the entirety of his features warping into a thin veneer of twisted humanity that could barely contain the monster within. "I have the answers I need from you, Pyrokine. Now, you shan't recall this interrogation. It is purged from your mind. Await your sacrifice, Pawn. Now, awaken!"

The ferrocrete room crumpled around us, great chunks of rubble falling away into an infinite blackness. Everything, everywhere, there was only darkness and cold. Treu was unmoving, that perverse mockery of delight plastered onto his face the epicenter of the universe's destruction.

The floor gave way under my feet. I scrabbled at the collapsing stonework for purchase, but it was all coming apart. Every jagged piece I grabbed was as malleable as a leather armrest. Everything was falling no matter what I desperately clutched at. I sank my fingers into the yielding stone and some part of my mind was back in the staff car as it rolled. In all this infinite blackness there was sky, then gravel, then sky.

Then water.

I drew in a massive sputtering breath, choking down a lungful of fluid for the effort. I was drowning! I tried to roll over and cough it up but I was strapped down to something soft. My eyes couldn't make sense of all this blinding light. The seatbelt! I reached for it, but my arms were pinned down, my legs too. I was drowning and these straps were too blame.

Heat welled up inside of me to burn my way clear. But there wasn't enough, nowhere near enough. It was like my tanks were running on empty and I'd already used up my reserve. Even my adrenaline was fading out now, consumed to fuel the fires around me. It wasn't enough, I was going to drown and I couldn't save myself.

Another bucket of water was dumped on me, then I was thrown free.

I flopped to the floor and retched my lungs clean. I was freezing, my skin so tightened by gooseflesh that if felt like I'd been shriveled up and shrunken. I was going to die, if the water didn't get me then the cold would. I needed a fire. I needed heat.

A third bucket of water splashed onto my back, as I finally took a breath and blinked something recognizable into my brain. The grey ferrocrete room without doors was gone, I was facedown in one of the palace's bathhouses surrounded by black-armored mercs brandishing tin buckets, fire extinguishers and, in a few cases, firearms.

A hand grabbed my gunshot shoulder and rolled me faceup. Purple eyes, so big and so alien too. A slap found my face while a thumb dug into my wound, rattling my brain into something resembling alertness.

"Hero! You need to stop burning things or you're going to die. You're killing yourself! If you can't get a grip, they're going to put you down."

I started closing my eyes. I was too cold to understand what was being said. Another desperate slap rocked my jaw.

"You piece of shit! You can't die until I get some answers from you!"

"…C-C-Cold…" I muttered between shivering teeth.

"Yeah, yeah, I can see that. It'll have to do, throw him in!"

Then I was is warm water up to my neck. Eventually, I stopped shivering. I took a deep breath that sent jagged needles of pain across my chest. I could breathe. I wasn't freezing. Everything hurt and I was warming up. I opened my eyes millimeter by painful millimeter, properly taking in my surroundings.

Aside from a few bandages charred black, I was completely naked in a massive tub of steaming water. Princess and a dozen other mercs from the outfit were all staring at me like I'd grown thirteen heads or something. Some of them were sporting burns or wearing clothes pocked with scorch marks. I covered up my groin with hands blackened by horrific frostbite— my toes lips and nose, I noted, were similarly colored.

"What's going on?" I asked, barely managing to get the words through my unmoving lips.

"Cat's out of the bag, Firebug." Princess answered. "Everyone saw what you did, we even got it on camera."

"What did I do?" I asked, looking at the faces around me for hints. Some were awe-struck, others murderous, and a few more still were brimming with curiosity. Leeroy pushed his way to the front of the crowd, a heavy pistol in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other.

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"We were hoping you'd be able to tell us that." He said. "Short version, you saved the Client and the others in your car. It's how you did that which has us concerned."

"How did-" I started but Leeroy silenced me with a wave.

"The debriefing can wait until you're off of death's door— and until you have some pants on. The rest of you, we've got a whole mess of work to be done and casualties to take care of. Show's over for now, so clear out."

A chorus of grumbled protests rose from the gathered mercs, but they obeyed. Everyone except Princess, staring down at me with her alien eyes that peered right through me; Frank, one of the outfit's leading medics who was unpacking a trauma kit beside my tub; and lastly Evander and Idris, both nervously flanking the bathhouse's door with carbines held at a low ready.

"How did you do it?" Princess idly mused.

"Do what?" I asked.

"Your body heat, then the ambient stuff, you kept using it after you'd exhausted the rest."

"What?" I repeated.

"For the first time since we've met, you're not hot." Princess stated. "You're so hypothermic you should be a Hero-sicle but you're not. How are you doing it? How are you still alive?"

"I don't know what you mean. I'm not doing anything." Princess clucked her tongue at that.

"Damn!" She hissed. "That's what I thought you'd say."

"Why am I in a tub?"

"You were freezing to death and on fire, plus a few holes besides." Frank answered around the unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. "We needed to raise your core temperature and you kept burning up everything else we tried. Two cows, one pasture."

"So that's why you're here." I said while looking at Frank. I shifted my gaze to Princess. "And you?"

"I'm the closest thing we've got to a witch doctor since neither of our actual experts felt like contributing to your prolonged existence." Princess answered.

"And them?" I asked, motioning to Evander and Idris near the door.

"They're here to make sure you don't leave, or kill anyone else." Frank stated gruffly. He was removing my half-melted bandages and probing at my lacerated arm. Evidently, my wounds had seared themselves at some point, which was the only reason blood loss hadn't already killed me.

"Anyone else?" I asked, struggling to read his meaning.

"No one important." Princess said dismissively. She correctly read what little expression that managed to crept into my frostbitten face and rolled her eyes. "Just the bad guys. Like I said, no one important. Any other stupid questions?"

My heavy eyes drifted to the unlit cigarette hanging from Frank's lips.

"Can I steal that smoke from you?"

"I don't have a lighter." Frank said, surrendering the slim white dart.

"I think I'll manage." I said, and from the second the paper tube touched my frostbitten hands, the tip glowed cherry red. Sweet poison never tasted so good.

Nine hours later, I climbed out of the tub looking like scat in a skinsuit and feeling twice as terrible. Despite Frank's insistence that they were a lost cause, my fingers and toes regained enough sensation to all but guarantee I'd keep them— most of them at any rate. How debilitating the resultant nerve damage was remained to be seen. The medic had left me stewing once it was clear that whatever my recovery entailed, it was beyond anything so mundane as science.

I was never a doughy man, my build had always been solid with just enough fat to fill out my clothes. Now, my pruned skin was hanging off of me as I hobbled towards the clothes that had been fetched for me. My manifestations had trimmed me down and kept on cutting, burning everything they could to feed the flames; fat, clothing, hair, muscle, even my bones felt like they'd been stewed into rubbery sticks. My skin may have been hanging off me, but my clothes could have been curtains from the limp way they seemed to drape off of me.

The trivial act of dressing myself was exhausting. Every centimeter of my body felt like it'd been through the ringer no less than ten times around. By the time I'd gotten my belt cinched onto my protruding hipbones, I was panting from the effort of lifting my arms. My slacks could have been woven from lead given how taxing it was just to take a single shuffling step. By the second, I was already staggering my knobby knees to the floor. Gravity won the battle by the third.

Evander and Idris just watched me fall, unwilling to touch me.

"A little… help." I wheezed, struggling to catch my breath on the floor.

The siblings shared a look, but neither moved.

"Don't make me beg. Doubt I could even get on my knees."

Idris glared at her brother who remained steadfast.

"Fine…" She growled. "You probably weigh less than I do now."

"If I see a single spark-" Evander warned, hefting his carbine.

"I get it." I said, as Idris bent to scoop me off the bathhouse floor. "Trust as far as you can throw me."

"Fecking aye! You're like a doll made of sticks." Idris breathed, lifting me effortlessly in a bridal carry. "I could throw you pretty far…"

"Not far enough, Dris." Her brother warned.

"Guess I'll be needing those steroids after all." I said, the teasing air of my words lost as she carried me over the threshold.

"Not the only thing you need, Freak." Evander growled.

"Xan, look at him. I could snap his neck with my pinkie-"

"And he could burn you to a crisp, Dris! Even if he didn't mean to."

"He saved Alice and Celio-" Idris protested.

"He saved himself!" Evander barked. "You think I like this? He's a bomb waiting to go off, and when he does, it's not going to matter who was nice to him and who wasn't. He's going to burn whoever's close to him because that's how fire works. He's dangerous-"

"And I'm not?!"

"This isn't about that. I'm trying to keep you alive-"

"Because I always need my big brother watching out for me."

I would have backed away from the brewing family argument if I could, but it seemed I'd been entirely forgotten by the squabbling siblings as they walked the palace halls. They settled into a mutual simmering tension that lasted until we reached the east wing's conference hall.

"We're not done talking about this." Evander said under his breath.

"Yes, we are." Idris answered, storming into the room.

Heads turned as what must have been the eleventh hour of this particular conference thundered to a deafening halt. I was the last of the command team to arrive, excluding a conspicuously absent Bim. Even Treu was in attendance, lurking in the corner like a stuffed byakkai, ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness. Leeroy and Princess were leaning over the room's small side table, looking like my arrival had caught them in the second before fists started flying. A medicated Alice was sitting near enough to contribute to a conversation, but far enough that she and her broken leg wouldn't get drawn in on one side or the other. Celio's man—the one who'd survived the rollover with us—was there too, pacing the room while his hand nervously hovered by the golden pistol at his hip.

"Don't wait on my account." I said, trying to diffuse the room and failing miserably. Idris kicked a chair into place and set me down. She remained nearby, like a protective nursemaid, while her brother glowered at us from the doorway. "Well, get on with it."

"Shut up and watch this." Leeroy commanded.

What followed was every second of recorded evidence that I was something abhuman. The initial shots were from my time on the Stalking Shadow, including several conversations I'd thought private. Then came footage captured from the Black Cat as it flew in to rescue Celio from his own stupidity.

The opening scene was an aerial shot of our ambushers bearing down on the staff car after I'd rolled it. My faint heart was pounding as I watched, some part of me morbidly curious to see what came next, another fully dreading discover of what had happened after I'd blacked out. The killing heat that normally would have been whelming inside of me like a building storm, was curiously absent. Finally, the shuttle drew near enough to see the individual players, though through some chance angles there was nothing of Treu or Bim recorded.

Recorded voices were screaming for missiles to finish their lock before the truck was closed the distance, but it was too late, the truck was practically on top of us. We were on our own, the Client would die just minutes away from rescue. Then there was the explosion, like a teardrop of liquid fire splashing off the truck and everything around it. But the flames didn't stop there.

A relentless chain reaction had been started, the fires spreading as if everything it touched was a barrel of pressurized fuel just waiting to cook off. By the time the shuttle had landed some fifty meters away from us, massive swathes of the city slums were burning.

The view shifted, suit cams from the powertechs who'd dismounted. Everywhere, everything, there was only a sea of fire. Except for me.

There was a ring, perfectly spherical centered around my past self, where the fires refused to flow. It was like a polar vortex in the middle of Hell, and there I was standing in the middle of it with great sheafs of ice growing off my flesh.

"Holy shit." I breathed, but the recordings weren't finished yet.

Huge rifles snapped to bear on me. Some of the powertechs were calling out to me, trying to snap me out of whatever this was. There was no conversing with me, nothing they said could reach into that frozen place my mind had gone too.

It was at this point, my ungodly flames required a new source of fuel. I watched myself wither, it was like a terrible movie without an effects budget. In the time it took me to release a shuddering breath, I had grown thin and frail.

The cameras of every powertech in the rescue team all looked at my chest and head down the length of their weapons. They were going to kill me, I realized. I couldn't tell if it was intended as a mercy or simply to stop me- to stop the icy creature and his raging hellfire.

I was so fixated on my own approaching death, that I failed to see Bim walking through the desolate tundra radiating from me to place a hand on my chest. I toppled a second later, the rigor of my frozen limbs making quite the spectacle of my collapse.

The footage that concluded the horror film I'd unwittingly stared in was a mess of smash cuts and testimonials. In the process of transporting me from the desolation I'd created back to the palace, I'd burned nearly everyone who'd attempted to touch me and several unlucky mercs who'd been too close to them. The footage had run its entirety now. I was left staring at my weakened self, mirrored in the lifeless black screen afterwards.

"It's amazing!" Princess said, breaking the silence. "I know none of you can see what I can but… Stars! This is magic! I can't even begin to describe it to you. It's like eight new rainbows of color in infrared alone! It's… It's-"

Leeroy slapped her full in the face, the sound a thunderclap.

"It's dangerous." Leeroy growled. "He's dangerous."

"Roy, Hero's the answer to everything I saw!" Princess said, her undimmed enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. "This is so much bigger than anything we've ever dealt with. You see Hero as a weapon but he's the next step in human evolution. Don't you get it? Talfryn is right!"

"Who's Talfryn?" I asked.

"He's dead, that's all you need to know." Leeroy growled without turning from his albino opposite. "And you need to wake up! We're mercs. We're on a job, not a crusade. If you can't keep your head on mission, I'll bench you for someone who can."

"Roy, none of this matters!" Princess protested.

Leeroy slapped her again, savagely throwing her to floor.

"Our Client nearly died! Celio is the only reason we're even on this planet and he's in a coma. He is the ONLY thing that matters on this hell-hole of a planet." Leeroy collected himself with a growled breath. "Leave. You're off contract without pay until you can get your priorities straight."

Princess wiped at her bloodied lips, smearing the crimson across her ghostly face, and left without a word of protest.

"Now, you." Leeroy said, giving me his full attention for the first time since I'd entered. "Explain. Everything."

"I can't." I said.

"Botshit."

"No really, I can't. You already know everything I do, your little home movie summed it all up. I'm a freak. I make fires. I burn everyone and everything I come into contact with! So if you're going to kill me get on with it!!! My life's enough of a scat-storm without you playing up this witch hunt."

"He won't kill you." Treu stated, causing everyone in the room but me to jump.

"I won't, will I?" Leeroy said, drawing a pistol.

"No, you won't." Treu repeated, speaking pedantically. "He saved your precious client. He is truly the 'Hero' of the hour. And you, Leeroy von Stalking Shadow, are a murderer of honor and principle."

"Are you volunteering to take his place then?" Leeroy asked between grit teeth.

"Better still, I'm in a unique position of enlightenment amongst your outfit." Treu stated mockingly. "When the time comes, I will deal with the monsters in your midst, personally."

"Why?" Alice whispered, the single word slurred from pain, fatigue and medicinals.

"I'm not buying it either." Leeroy added. "You haven't lifted a pinkie for anything else, and now you want to triple your workload. What, out of the goodness of your heart?"

"Don't be absurd." Treu said. "I have a vested interest in preserving this dimension's super-luminal integrity. All I ask, is for a carte-blanche when the time comes."

"And when might that be?"

"At the risk of sounding cliche, you'll know it when you see it."

For a long minute, Leeroy must have considered how likely it was he could actually kill the giant of a man. Evidently, the odds weren't to his liking. With a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, Leeroy holstered his pistol.

"You'll do whatever the hell you want anyway. Fine. But until 'that time comes' you need to start pulling your weight. Those are my terms."

Treu lips twitched.

"We have a deal, Mercenary."