_ _ _Hiiro

The sky was bleeding… Bim was screaming… There was a hole in reality and something was coming through. It was all too big to grasp, too insane for me to wrap my head around. I'd known she wasn't human but I'd never expected anything like this. What was I even looking at? Her? Her father? The devil cops? I didn't have the scope of reference to even begin making informed guesses. Bim was screaming a wordless blood-curdling shriek from everywhere at once. The sound turned my veins to ice and left my nerves raw. It sounded like she was being tortured along with every single bat in Hell and a few million tons of steel for good measure.

Treu was taking care of her.

I may not have seen the bigger picture but I knew that much. The crowd had melted away from the plaza where this new throbbing-black and blood-red star was drifting down towards the land— directly towards where I'd seen Bim last. I could barely feel her tugging on my heart but it was there, faintly. The blood star was like a black hole in reverse, trying to quash me into the stone while every step felt twice as difficult as the last. I was drawn to Bim and repelled by this new aberrant thing.

I wasn't the only one affected. I caught glimpses of helicopters warring to regain control so they could set down or stay aloft, planes tumbling through the air firing at everything as they went. Soldiers and mercs were skirmishing through the alleys and streets as they fled the falling star, entire buildings toppling into the walkways they'd been fighting over. No one spared me a second's notice as I ran towards the danger, a lone man racing against the black star.

My blood was boiling. Heart pounding and legs pumping. I wasn't fast enough. The enormous black star touched down a half kilometer ahead of me with all the weight of a feather, a swirling dome of smoky-crimson cupping a portion of the city. It was massive! Monstrously huge, devouring everything for kilometers and flattening its surroundings with a slow pulse of irresistible force. I couldn't run anymore. My lungs were burning! The path I threaded through the rubble was mostly level yet I'd have sworn I was climbing up a mountain.

To my left and right the smoky crimson dome dominated half the horizon. The hellsphere was growing more agitated, the swirling tendrils of oily black just under its skin writhing faster and faster. It made a sound, somewhere between an explosion, a retch and an earthquake. There was a wash of inhuman heat that stank of melted rubber and meat, then the air around the dome went fuzzy with dark specks.

I wondered if that was how it had looked just before Bim scattered a mountain unto the city. Specks in the distance that struck down as boulders bigger than skyscrapers. They were scattered at random, propelled by impossible forces that should have destroyed them by fatal acceleration alone. Then they were raining down, too fast to avoid. That I should live or die by random chance seemed absurd but there was nothing for it. I pressed on, throwing my life to the cosmic dice and the gamble that I could reach Bim before it was too late.

One of the specks grew to full size in a blink. It struck the street fifty meters ahead of me, half-splattering on the cobbles and sprawl of bricks. Forty meters later it finished toppling end over end in a splay of twisted limbs. It was a body. Charred black, mangled beyond all recognition from its terminal impact. I think he was a man, possibly a soldier who'd been inside that nightmare I was headed for. I didn't spare him much thought. I couldn't waste a second on anyone else right now.

Bim was somewhere in there and I was going to save her. That was all that mattered. It was a fool's plan, equal parts insane bravery and lovestruck insanity but it was all I had. Treu was taking care of her. That meant that somehow, I had to take care of him before he could manage. A fool's plan indeed.

There were more burnt bodies the closer I got to the dome's edge. Every single one was more or less identical. Horrifically burned, probably male, a muscular physique on the shorter side, and badly mangled from splattering on the ground after being thrown hundreds of meters into the air. I must have walked past scores of them, there must have been thousands being cast aside from the dome, and every single one looked similar. Too similar to be anything but flawed copies of each other. I stopped maybe ten meters from the dome's edge and found a lightly scorched body that'd had a very short flight.

Same build, same height, I even peeled back his seared lips to look at his teeth. He could have been my brother. He was an almost-perfect copy of me. They all had been. Not quite right, just a few small things out of place. The body in front of me was more like a caricature, what someone remembered I looked like without me standing there for reference. The shoulders a little too broad, my mongoloid features a touch stronger than they were, the burn scars too proud.

Thousands of Hiiros all dead and burned. Thousands of copies drawn from the mind of someone who knew me almost as well as I knew myself. What the hell was Bim playing at? Just what was Treu doing to her in there?

"I'm not doing anything to her."

I spun on the voice, arms wreathed with killing flames I hadn't thought to summon. Treu was digging equipment out of a giant metal coffin half buried in an impact crater. Boxy rifles bigger than I was tall, talismans and trinkets that made my teeth itch, and long scrolls of crumbling papers burning at the edges like incense, all came together in a growing heap. There was a tall poleaxe of silvery metal standing at the crater's lip like a standard, the blade's edge etched with sigils so fine they gave the weapon a wavy, acid-etched look.

All of that paled in comparison to the armor Treu was wearing. Treu, an inhuman monster that had walked unflinching through months of gunfights in naught but tee-shirts and cargo pants, was wearing a hulking dreadnought of power armor. It was similar but different from the designs used by the mercs; it wasn't any less armored but the thick limbs were longer and less stocky by comparison. How anything with vaned limbs thicker around than my torso could look almost spindly was a mystery but it did. His armor was lean and lethal, and still Treu slotted more armaments home.

Each forearm sported inbuilt thick-bored pistols. His thighs had a pair of curious beam rifles fastened to gimble mounts so he could fire them from the hip. Treu's waist was thickened by munitions and ordinances. Four stubby wings were folded at his back, each ending in a cannon of some kind. The there were the rifle and halberd that would occupy his hands once he decided to charge into hell. Once he decided he was ready to take care of Bim.

Treu, already a monster of a man, was armored and armed with enough hardware to make the best-equipped gun-totting merc envious. He was so beyond the idea of a highly-trained weapons expert it was ludicrous. Treu was a living weapon clad in the pinnacle of human and probably alien technology. I had a broken arm half-healed and what was left of the clothes on my back as they were consumed by my spreading flames. It didn't matter.

I charged him.

Three steps later, I hit the ash-strewn ground completely paralyzed. My entire body cramped like I'd grabbed a live wire. I thought I saw the big bastard flick a finger but I wasn't sure if I really had. His gaze hadn't so much as graced me. I tried to curse Treu but all that spilled from my lips was an agonized groan.

"I said, I am not doing anything to your precious Devil. Yet." Treu enunciated with haughty condescension. "The time is not right for me to strike. What you are seeing is… Well, you wouldn't understand the details, but think of this as your precious Devil warring with herself for control. The creature you know as Bim will soon cease to be."

"No!" I growled, fighting against my failing body to rise.

"Yes." Treu stated factually. "Even now she clings to these disgusting remembrances of you to retain her individuality. The remainder of this Abomination is rejecting her— and by tertiary extension you. In a few more minutes it will have completely erased your existence from all thoughts and what remains of your precious Devil will be ripe for consumption."

"How do we stop It?" I asked, finally regaining enough motor functionality to stand.

"There is no stopping It, not indefinitely. That is the parts of your beloved Devil she left behind to come to this plane. An insatiable hunger, Its entire being composed of desire to devour and know. She is clinging to you, It is fighting her. You are a poison to It-- as is she in her present state. What you are seeing is your fault. We do nothing. I am preparing to resolve the situation."

"How!?" I demanded, dreading the answer.

Treu spared a single eye to glare down at me with contempt. He didn't answer save to heft another weapon into its hardpoint and wrap another smoldering scroll around his silvery halberd.

"No! You can't."

"Oh, I assure you, I most certainly can." He sneered with perverse delight.

"There has to be another way!"

Both eyes snapped towards me. Hatred flared across his face but there was something playful about it too. Treu was glad this had finally happened, a patient hunter who'd been rewarded by sighting his target. Now I was standing in the way of that. Treu was going to take care of Bim, and when the time was right he was going to take care of me too. That didn't mean I'd go down without a fight.

"If you're going to kill Bim, you'll have to go through me first!"

"I intend to." Treu sneered. "But not yet. Save your pointless bravado until then. She has lost her focus, the vessel is rebelling as the greater mind of your precious Devil seeks to reassimilate her. It is rejecting you and she's fighting against It. If you can distract It, draw its attentions unto yourself and into the present then your precious Devil may be able to reassert some small degree of control."

Draw Its attentions? Was that all I'd done in the past when Bim was lost within herself? I thought back to the first time, just after the rollover. What had I said to her then? I couldn't remember doing anything special. I just remembered blackened, abyssal flesh-goop like a flower in bloom imploding back in upon itself to reform the shape of a human being. Then at the heart of all that writhing, slithering, undulating, rigid wrongness, I remembered her seeing me through hundreds of eyes. She had seen me, looked into me, with an intimacy that made my heart weep. For the first time in my life, I truly felt like someone saw me as I was and accepted me flaws and all. I hadn't done anything, all she needed was the sight of me.

The second time hadn't been so easy, when she'd rescued me and nearly destroyed herself in the process. I hardly remembered that chaotic night through all the fighting and the pain and loss. It was all flashes. Bim floating in the air like a vengeful goddess. The living cancer she'd spawned trying to heal a man at my request. The soul-rending agony in her eyes as I called her back from the abyss. The devastation of the city, the palace under siege, Zoe's death— all of it my fault. I couldn't let that happen again!

"Fine, I'll do it." I said, sound more confident than I felt. Comparing then to now was like candles and volcanoes. "Any advice on how to do that?"

Treu shrugs weapon-clad shoulders. "If you can't figure it out in short order, then I will."

I tried to ignore the comment. I couldn't let it come to that. I wouldn't let him hurt her. I followed my heart and pressed into the nightmare dome.

Everything went alien as I crossed the threshold from a very real warzone into an unreal alien hellscape. The colors were wrong here, it was like the entire rainbow spectrum had been dropped an octave so that deep-red was the brightest shade on display. I couldn't make any sense of the rest of the spectrum, I saw red and black and a bunch of other colors I couldn't put into any shape of reference. There wasn't any green or blue or anything cooler than maroon. My painter's eye was going insane trying to make sense of these new sensations assaulting my eyes. I saw hues of knowledge, a shade of suspicion and absolutely everywhere the color of corruption.

There was no hints of the city streets this hellscape had landed on. I was on craggy plains in the barest suggestion of a valley with… Something at the valley's center. It was like a titanic tree made of fleshy bark and limbs that could have been sinewy branches or bony tentacles. There was a skinny trunk area that broadened the higher from the ground it went and no matter where I looked it was perfectly symmetrical without being round— more like someone had shoved a mira up against my nose but only when I was looking at that tree-thing. There was a tint opposite black that wasn't white and this thing had what could only be teeth spotting its limbs; teeth the color of learning and destruction and devouring. There was a throbbing-black and blood-red star positioned like a great cycloptic eye at the heart of all those branch-tentacles. There was no pupil, no way to gauge where its focus lie. It was always observing everything at once.

I felt its scrutiny upon me, an entire ocean of crushing curiosity battering down on me.

What was I, this fragile fleshthing to stride so boldly into the unknown? A kindred spirit? A threat? Something else entirely? This flesh-bound slave of time intruded, it bore the attentions of a Cosmic God and it persisted? A champion of the Mortal Minds? An Outsider? A fellow Monster? It came to this existence and endured intact? Human minds break so easily yet you do not? You are… a curiosity.

"My H̸̖͇̒͂i̷͝rr̸̼̓ǒ̶͜!"

I was falling! There was nothing. I hadn't even blinked but I'd missed the moment when everything vanished. The hellscape was gone, the alien colors, the tree-thing. I was myself again and only now did I have the faintest recollection of seeing myself from the outside. A haunting memory of Bim calling out to me from somewhere far away. I was floating in an empty void of total blackness that wasn't dark. I looked down and flinched when I saw myself and the ashy remains of my clothes still here. Wherever here was…

There was Nothing.

No light but it wasn't dark. No ground and I wasn't standing on anything but I wasn't falling anymore. No sign of any planet or stars but I could still breathe. There was nothing, except there wasn't. It simply was. As was I.

I didn't bother trying to wrap my head around it. I knew I was so far into the unknown that I'd never make any sense of what I was experiencing or seeing or feeling. It was all so utterly alien that a human mind didn't have a prayer. I was somewhere I had no right to be and somewhere in here Bim needed me, that was all I had to know. I just had to find her and save her.

I tried walking. It felt like I was but I wasn't moving, not that there was anywhere to go. I spoke and my words barely reached my ears, like I was in a room too big with air too thin for an echo. I reached for my inner flames and tossed a fireball into the void; it flew straight and true for a distance that had no meaning until it burned itself out.

How the hell was I supposed to find anything in all this nothing!? If Bim was in here somewhere then why couldn't I see her? It's not like she could have hidden behind anything. If she was here then I should be able to see her on the horizon. There was nothing here, except for me.

"Aw crap." I uttered, realizing how completely screwed I was.