_ _ _Hiiro

"You boys are fucked now." I growled, spitting out a mouthful of blood and what felt like a tooth too.

I don't think they heard me. I couldn't even hear myself. The grinding, world-shattering earthquake went on and on. Until it didn't. I could barely hear the sound of my chains clinking while I trembled in the silence that followed. I was still shaking even after the earthquake had stopped but it didn't really seem that way.

"What the hell was that!?" Diablo demanded of his now-silent radio. For once, I answered honestly.

"I'm pretty sure that's my girlfriend. And she sounds pissed."

Mudo reached inside his shirt once more and two pistols materialized in the flat dim light. Diablo wasn't as smooth on the draw, a shaking revolver made its way into his hand after a few seconds. He listened in to his radio but no one was talking. The line had gone completely dead.

"Get out there, see what's going on." Diablo said, a slight crack to his gentlemanly demeanor.

Mudo tried to open the door. It was stuck fast. He put some muscle into it and that didn't make any difference. They were both as trapped in this cell as I was. I had a small chuckle at the irony of that.

Diablo forced my stool upright without emptying either of his hands. He fiddled with his radio for a second, then held it to my head. He aimed his revolver lower, down towards a non-vital organ that most men would consider otherwise.

"I hate to do this when it felt like we were getting along. On principle, I dislike the use of human shields. It's an open line. If that is your 'girlfriend' out there, then tell her who you are and that she holds your life in her hands."

I don't know what was funnier; the fact that he thought I could actually stop whatever the hell was happening, or that I would even if I could. I could practically picture Leeroy standing by a radio or on a ship in orbit bombing the hell out of us— once I'd spoken up, he'd just shrug and intensify the bombardment. I had a little chuckle at the idea. Then the hammer cocked back on the pistol pointed at my balls and my martyrdom suddenly became a lot less appealing than my life.

Before I could speak, two more earth-rending cracks tore through the world. The ceiling cracked into a spiderweb, a fat shower of crushed rock dust pouring down on everything. This was it. The ceiling was about to collapse and a million tonnes of rubble would have the last laugh.

A new sound raked over the cacophony, like a million nails clawing on a planet-sized chalkboard. It was metal tearing. The sound alone had my bones feeling like jelly.

The cell went completely dark. The soul crushing total darkness you could only find buried in a lightless void. Whatever emergency line had been powering the backup lights and alarm must have been destroyed.

Everything went quite, truly utterly quiet. I couldn't even hear my captors breathing. Couldn't see the gun pointed at my balls. Couldn't imagine whatever the hell was going on outside.

But I could feel the entire mountain looming over my head, just waiting for one last kick to send it all crashing down. There was another thing too. I felt a warm glow inside of me.

Six perfectly spaced, perfectly smooth, perfectly triangular triangles of blinding twilight appeared around the door. It was unnatural, too perfectly mathematical in execution to be the product of a human mind. The sight alone had me thinking I'd never seen a straight line or even spacing until this very moment.

Metal tore, stone crumbled and the door flew like a thrown brick into the night sky.

The night sky I could see from the underground depths of whatever prison I'd been taken too… The night sky that should have had hundreds of meters of stone and steel and guards between me and it… The night sky which was perfectly outlining the demonic monstrosity hovering outside my cell with two eyes blazing like miniature suns… Eyes locked on me.

I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. I saw slashes and tears all across her skin, black-gold roiling insanity bubbling within. Eyes… Eyes of the lost and damned pleading for release flickered in the negative space behind her. A sickly sweet reeking scent of cinnamon sewage, sulfuric rotting fish and the ozone tang of lightning-struck iron all mixed into one. The smallest hint of a smile on a face I thought I'd known.

<"Her H̸̖͇̒͂i̷͖͝i̷̮͐r̸̼̝̓ǒ̶͜"> Unmoving lips roared the words and thoughts smashing into my head as one. It was a mess of half-formed sentiments, turbulent raw emotion and an undeniable certainty of fact. Possessiveness battered my brain into a stupor and all I could do was stare in awe and terror.

"Bim?" My voice was a faint shadow burning away in the light of twinned suns.

Where there should be an entire underground compound, there was open sky on the cusp of dawn and a satellite station on the horizon like a setting moon. Bim hovered in the air like a vengeful angel, phantom wings of pleading eyes shown in negative by the rubble dust and flames. And the absolute carnage she had wrought to get to me. It was too much.

I couldn't bring myself to look at what she had done, so I locked my eyes on her.

Diablo made a soundless twitch. The spark of command racing to his trigger finger so fast no human could have reacted in time. The right half of his skull imploded.

No sound, no flash, no hint of movement on Bim's part but I knew she'd done it. Diablo crumpled, braindead before he'd hit the ground.

"What'd you do that for!?" I demanded. "He might have known something useful. Now we'll never get any answers out of him."

Bim didn't move. Her eyes, those twinned burning suns didn't flick a millimeter and I couldn't tell where she was looking anymore. I didn't know if she was really seeing anything right now.

"The fleshling was going to kill Our H̸̖͇̒͂i̷͖͝i̷̮͐r̸̼̝̓ǒ̶͜"

Again, the words roared from her sealed lips like a thunderclap. Vertigo struck me in a wave at the mention of my name. Nausea followed a second after. What little I had in my stomach, the second after that. I bent double and my chains came away like softened butter.

"You don't know-" I started, mewling the words around the bile coating my mouth.

"Yes, We do."

Diablo's body spasmed on the ground, half of him anyway. His left side was completely stilled but the right shuddered. A bone-rattling wheeze sagged from the ruin of his face. I plucked the pistol from his writhing, curled fist.

"Can you… fix him?"

"For Our H̸̖͇̒͂i̷͖͝i̷̮͐r̸̼̝̓ǒ̶͜, anything."

Bim barely spared a thought for it, her main focus somewhere a trillion kilometers away. She flicked a hand and Diablo's skull grew outwards in even jerking pulses. I could have been watching a time lapse of a man's head inflating if it hadn't been for the sounds he made as his bones scraped together while slithering into place.

For a single blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Diablo was healed. I didn't blink. I saw it and I watched that healing continue when it should have finished. Rampant, freakish, mutant growth started exploding out of his head.

Diablo's skull kept growing bone into horn-like spikes and armored plate deposits at random. It reminded me of degenerative radiation poisoning and how the body slowly forgot what a human was supposed to look like. I watched in horror as the flesh change took hold of every bone in his body and began warping it into… something monstrous.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

It wasn't just his skeleton either. Brains, muscle and little fleshy nubs that might have been tongues radiated outwards from their cranial starting point. His left eye popped out of his face with an extruding growth lumpy grey matter. His jaw fell off, reveling scything bone mandibles and the meat of what had been his airway and esophagus. Everywhere I looked the change had taken hold of him.

"Bim! Stop this." I wanted to roar the words, to assert some sanity over the madness unfolding a meter away from me, but the words came out in a desperate plea.

She didn't respond. Didn't tilt her head like she always did when something confused her. Didn't pull her focus back to me from wherever it was. And she didn't stop whatever she'd done to Diablo.

Then I saw a meaty piece fling itself free of the undulating flesh. It splattered on the ground and spread veiny webbed claws into the ferrocrete. It was like the roots of a tree. Then that flesh started growing. It was spreading like a fungus of living cancer. A seed landed on Mudo and in an instant the man was consumed.

Something in my mind snapped once I saw the living cancer forming triangles that formed helices that formed hexagrams that formed shapes I didn't even know the names of. I stole a single terrifying glance at something human's weren't meant to see. I wept at the sight.

As I wept I screamed a bare-throated wordless roar.

Flames lashed out form my gaping maw but it wasn't enough. I hefted Diablo's pistol and blasted into the cursed ruin of man. Each panicked, berserk pull of the trigger incinerated swaths of the living cancer yet still I raged in berserk insanity.

A condensed inferno of golden-white light poured from me, striking the living cancer and latching on like jellied napalm. With the living cancer to fuel the fire, the flames bellowed an oily black-green smoky-tar that reminded me of every person I'd ever killed in cold blood. It was sickening. Maddening.

And it was only a fraction of the roiling orderly insanity I saw churning through the gnashing lacerations in Bim's skin.

My knees slammed into the uneven, charred floor once my fire was spent. Portions of the interrogation cell had been chewed up, consumed by the living cancer now rendered into a brittle ask by the cleansing flames.

Bim hadn't moved this entire time. Just looking without really seeing. Like she is and was and will be in a million places at once and none of them are here and now. She was right there, so close I could reach out and grab her, but somehow she'd never been further from me.

"Bim…" I struggled to get the words out around the tightness on my throat. "What happened to you?"

"We… No, she… She has to save him." Bim spoke the words in a broke chorus of whispering voices. Hundreds of dissonant hissing throats all funneling the words through a single set of unmoving lips.

Something was wrong with her. She had broken somehow. This wasn't the same as after the rollover but it was similar. Bim needed my help. But I had no idea how to fix her. No idea if she could be fixed.

I stumbled on rubbery legs to her. I reached for her hand and she felt like she was made of ice. She felt as cold as I'd been when I first heard her sibilant hushes whispered between the fury of nature and the beauty of the cosmos. I remembered how I'd felt her calling me across the stars and the haunting familiarity I'd known as soon as I laid eyes on her.

Above all else, I felt the burning love I'd never known until I woke up beside her.

"B̶͍̌i̶͉̅͝m̵̭̼̒'̶̙̙͑̑," Her name leapt from me as my soul soared at the utterance. "Come back to me. I need you."

"She has to save him." A hundred voices said using Bim's mouth.

"You did. You did save me." I was choking on the words. I couldn't swallow this growing lump in my throat no matter how many time I tried. "I'm right here, so please, please come back to me."

I could have been begging to a statue. The twinned suns of her eyes didn't move, not a flicker of indecision. What little humanity Bim had picked up wasn't just diluted in all her star-god power trip, it was completely gone. This… thing wasn't her.

She was the only thing I wanted, everything I'd never realized, and now she was gone. If the gods or God or whatever, if any of them were real, they had a pretty fucked up sense of humor.

Bim's body was right here in my arms and there wasn't a spark of life anywhere to be found. If I ignored the millions of wriggling writhing things slithering under her skin, she could have been stone-cold dead.

I reached for my inner fire. It came with hesitation now and somehow, it seemed almost sympathetic. I could feel it howling inside of my bones, the mournful haunting cry of a lone wolf calling for a pack that had been slaughter. It was a chilling note, as real to me now as the life-sapping arctic winds had been in months long past.

Bim's body was ice in my arms. I had a fire in my soul and a blizzard in my memories. Something was going to break, and if it had to be me I think I'd be fine with that. So long as Bim came back. Arctic nightmares tore through my mind, but one struck a cord. The first time I'd ever heard her voice calling out to me on the brink of death and despair.

"What's-" I started, fighting down a fist-sized lump in my throat. "What is it you desire?"

She blinked. For the first time, she blinked! When she opened her eyes the twinned burning suns were gone, replaced by her usual golden-amber eyes and all her insatiable curiosity.

Bim was in there! Trapped in her alien body, pleading and detached from the human world. I saw it in her eyes, she was clinging to the question with all that she was. I was her lifeline and I could feel her slipping away from me.

I wasn't going to let that happen— even if it killed me.

My voice was a rasp of emotion but I kept digging for every memory, every feeling, every single ounce of love I felt for her and I forced it all into a single word. I bled my heart and bared my soul and put every fiber of my being into calling her back from the abyss.

"B̶͍̌i̶͉̅͝m̵̭̼̒'̶̙̙͑̑k̵͚̿e̶̫̿l̴̢͔͒a̵̘͉̒̌ỉ̷̡̼̀ḓ̶̓̈́h̶̢̢͒̕z̴̡̀͋͜a̷̤͎̓̂" I purred the alien word, drowning in its power as it coiled from my tongue. An utterly alien concept hammered against my mind threatening to devour me but I held fast to the burning desire to save her and pressed through. "What is it you desire?"

Tears like liquid gold fell from her eyes as her lips trembled.

"You," She whispered. "Always and Eternally. For the rest of your life and all those that come after this. You, my H̸̖͇̒͂i̷͖͝i̷̮͐r̸̼̝̓ǒ̶͜, are the only thing I could never be without."

She fell from the air into my waiting arms. She was freezing to the touch— shivering, trembling as she threw her body against mine. Fear be damned or maybe because of it, she was eager and so was I… Until my fingers grazed the soul-numbing contraption embedded in her back. Suddenly, there was no solidity to her. She was less than a ghost as she pulled my arms.

"We… I, have to save you." Bim whispered, uttering each syllable like it was a battle. "It's not safe here."

Bim turned her head back towards the way she'd came. She flicked a single finger and a rubble-dusted tapestry snaked its way through the air to us. Bim stepped aboard and offered me a hand.

I took it without hesitation and suddenly, we were flying.

We flew out from the depths of the earth. Past the thousands of men she'd slaughtered to rescue me. Past ground zero where I spotted the wrecks of tanks, cannons and fast-attack cars all poking up through the rubble. Past the fortress that had been laid to ruin.

We lifted higher, pulling away from the cliffside that looked like a titan had clawed down into it. We were soaring over the city in chaos I'd spent the past few weeks living in. It looked like a giant had swatted over a tower of building blocks, scattering them into Crucibab. I spotted columns of soldiers arrayed against crowds on the edge of the disaster zone. A wing of flyers were racing across our path and Bim dropped our flight lower.

We were practically scraping the rooftops, serpentining between boulders five times bigger than any house. The streets below were dark except for where fires had started burning out of control or rescue workers had erected floodlights. I saw a cone of light panning over a familiar street of identical townhouses that had never known electricity.

A colossal pillar of stone had toppled end-over-end as it smashed its way through the neighborhood. I saw twelve houses obliterated, two spared, then another thirty demolished. The pattern repeated over and over again.

I knew what I'd see before we reached it. I wanted to tell Bim to take us higher, to veer off course, but I couldn't find my voice. Even if I did, it was taking everything she had to keep us pointed arrow-straight for Celio's estate. I couldn't turn a blind eye to the cataclysmic devastation below. My eyes were searching for my safehouse— for Sophia's home. To my dismay, I found it.

Right where I thought it would be, at the edge of destruction, I saw the unfamiliar ruin of a once familiar house. The rescue efforts and their heavy machinery were far off. Instead I saw a crowd of neighbors, faces I knew even if I couldn't put names to them, working by the light of a neighboring house in full blaze.

They were trying to get the bodies out before the fire spread. Three men were tearing through the brickwork of Sophia's house looking for her before the flames took what was left of her home. They clawed at the scattered bricks and splintered timbers like men possessed but they were nowhere near fast enough.

The men broke off their search, the fire was spreading too fast. I tried to take a breath but all I could taste was ash and the iron-tang of blood in the air. We were flying past and I couldn't tell if they'd found her— if she was buried under the wreckage. Maybe she hadn't been home. Maybe she'd gone shopping during the night.

But then I saw a splash of color in the firelight.

One of the men had a scrap of cloth wrapped around his arm and even with the growing distance, I could tell it was a hideous mix of yellow and blue. I could have sworn it was half-soaked in ruby red, but I was hoping that was just a trick of the light.

I hoped it was… but I knew it wasn't.