It had been two hours of unloading, securing and sorting supplies and personnel from the choppers. To Yumiko, who jogged down the hallway without being seen by anybody, it felt like forever with all those eyes staring at her. Upon reaching her quarters, she slipped in quietly and closed the door behind her. She spent a second locking the door before fully retreating into her chambers. There, the scent of burning wick drew her mind in, relaxing her flowing mind. The candle that it burnt from was nearing its base. Another thing to address in a long list of things she had no time to deal with.
What was something that she could address, however, was the soundproofing in her room. There was only silence here. No wind, no outside interference, no souls to read within twenty metres. The only sound that broke this spell was the clinking of glass bottles as she walked under dim lighting. Yumiko didn’t remember when she started downing what Dylus called a ‘one way ticket to the curb’, but there were plenty of them in her room; some that she nearly tripped over on the way back to an elaborate ritual.
As she sat down, she observed the little implements in front of her. There sat an unloaded pistol and an empty magazine. Nine blanks were neatly arranged in a line right in front of these implements. To the untrained eye, it seemed that Yumiko really was a witch, that these implements were part of some arcane ritual to summon dark things beyond reality. The truth of this setup, however, was more mundane.
Yumiko shut her eyes. Slowly, she began reaching into her mind. Once the formless jelly that was the base of her powers was grasped, Yumiko weaved it into shape and turned it into a deformed hand. It was spindly and, in trying to use it, incredibly weak. It struggled to even grasp the magazine’s form, despite her being so used to its weight, shape and size in the real world. Each attempt to grab it was gradually more successful until at last, in a sea of scrambled black noise, her invisible hand clutched the magazine.
Some relief poured over her, grateful that she could hold on to the basics of her training. The rest of her mind, however, shared none of this. Instead, they were thoughts of annoyance and frustration. Even without having a drink to stave off her intrusive memories, there were already totems of loathing looming in her mind. This was simple, they read, a technique that they taught to you as a child. No matter what Yumiko tried to do to stay on track, they haunted her.
Mother would be disappointed.
When her eyes opened, the room suddenly took on a white glow for a split second. The sight was disorienting, but fortunately it was not enough to break her focus. In that moment, her eyes had taken on the intense shine of Warp gemstones; almost blinding, had it been somewhere more public. Now came the next step of the ritual.
Getting the magazine upright was a breeze. To load it up, however, that required a bit more shaping. Yumiko bent, pulled and stretched the bark of the invisible limb in front of her, creating branches that wavered in the non-existent wind. They were even more fragile-looking than the original limb, more basic as well. There was much care taken into preventing their breakage as she directed them towards the blanks.
The human body was not meant to handle more than four limbs. It simply couldn’t. Here Yumiko was, however, trying to control eight of them. Then again, she mused, psykers weren’t humans after so much tampering. For now, she discarded any idle thoughts and focused on the one bullet to her left. Its shape, like the magazine, eluded her, hidden behind black noise. While the act of unravelling it was seemingly simpler than before, Yumiko began hearing whispers circling around her. Each voice brought upon a long, echoing strike of a gong, quiet at first, but eventually growing louder with each sentence.
You are anathema! A vatborn! You enforce the old, dying ways! You and your kin will bring us all to ruin-
This was a dangerous voice. She quickly crushed it and threw it away into a deep dark pit in her mind. The mind couldn’t afford to be caught again by them, especially while she handled something still so potentially volatile. Then another one came.
Miss Harshaan, I think- I think I did good. I protected my brothers, right? Please tell me they’re safe. I can see the night falling, but I won’t give out ‘till I know I’ve done something good for my home.
That voice was thrown away as well. When she moved on to loading up the second bullet, three more became louder, then four more. She was halfway through loading in the third blank when the voices became a horrible sea of incomprehensible speaking. She covered her ears to no avail, almost giving in to the temptation of shouting for them to go away.
Yumiko, my daughter, you are the greatest of my creations-
The bitch working with the traitor! Kill her-
I’m sorry, lady, it’s part of the job-
Help me! Please! They’re coming-
I WILL SAVE THIS CITY AND YOU WON’T GET IN MY WAY!
The third blank shivered violently in mid air. The sea continued to increase in ferocity until her torment came to a climax with shattering sound. It began with the voice of an older man; familiar, tempered, and one she sorely missed. Yet, as much as she longed to hear him again, this was a memory of him she wanted desperately to erase.
“Young one, there is only one last request I have.”
She was no longer in her quarters. Yumiko, stuck in her body and only able to move her eyes, stood under the roof of a burning school. Outside of its walls and holes where artillery had pierced through, the familiar visage of Ishimura’s signature stacked condominiums were visible. They too were lit ablaze, morbidly decorated by the permanently-frozen remains of metal monstrosities. Eventually, her eyes could not resist looking across her. It prompted her to speak forlornly.
“Kaneshira. Please, no.”
The old man was bruised and battered behind his ruined coat, with the right side of his face covered by red scars. He looked at her with a sword in hand, ignorant of her plea.
“Clear up one last loose end.”
A gong rang. Yumiko felt tears rolling out from her eyes.
“Don’t do this, please.”
Another gong. Her body started backing away, feeling the heat of the flames around them.
“By our code, this blade cannot be kept until there is death.”
The old man prepared to strike. She couldn’t do anything to convince him, except scream.
“I won’t!”
He charged. Every single time, he never failed to charge. Every single time, she remembered with clarity the aftermath of such an event. Her mind thickened with a toxic fog, as the vision began to collapse on itself. Most terrifyingly to her, her body raised its own weapon to defend itself. Yumiko had no control over this, left at the mercy of watching the inevitable end of her old master as he shouted in Ishimuran.
“Clear your name, child! Clear your heritage, separate from a den of monsters! Fight!”
The blank exploded. Her old master’s voice faded away with one last gong as she rolled backwards from the psionic backlash. The ‘jelly’ in her mind had been corrupted by her emotions, turning her limbs against each other until they retracted and collapsed into themselves like the apex of a black hole. The sheer, unstable mass bubbled and communed with the voices, pumped into the bullet and turning it into an implement of localised destruction.
The raw, unrefined power of the outburst left the ritual circle a complete mess. Unaffected blanks were scattered everywhere, while the magazine itself had split itself into two in different places. What loose things were around her had flown about, making new homes in the crevices and nooks of the room. The sight of it all made her head hurt.
There would be no more attempts today to regain her powers. Trying again later would just bring about more pain, if not more. Yumiko crawled somewhere quiet and attempted to soothe herself by vacantly reaching out for a bottle. Most of them were empty decorations, uncleaned and untouched; the ex-Yakuza couldn’t be bothered to tidy up the place after settling in. Some, however, had trickles of alcohol left. A drunkard replaced the disciplined warrior, one that feverishly clawed their way towards a bottle and thirstily consumed all that was left inside it until, alas, she was left more thirsty than ever. There wasn’t even enough to give her a hint of tipsiness or reprieve. Such a waste.
The woman slumped against the wall. What a miserable wreck she was, Yumiko thought as she looked around. The ritual’s setup was about the only properly arranged thing in her quarters before the explosion. Everything else had been haphazardly strewn about on her bed, on rotting cabinets and on the floor. From spare magazines, to a few backup weapons, to her blades and even some personal memorabilia to keep her sane, they found no proper refuge. They had been treated like unwanted children, whose mother had been buried by somebody else’s sins, and she knew it. Once or twice she would attempt to clean up. Without fail, Yumiko gave up on that with weak spirits.
Try as she might, the aura of professionalism and dignity she carried as ex-Yakuza would instantly be broken once somebody realised the rank conditions she kept herself in. The thought should’ve rightfully moved her to action, but instead it only dragged her down. The only saving reprieve of today, then, was that nobody seemed keen on checking up on her at the moment, the one benefit of being mysterious towards everybody but Dylus and Miriam.
What rotten luck she had, then, that someone was heading her way deliberately. Her powers may have been weakened, but some essentials were kept alive purely out of instinct. This presence wasn’t going anywhere else. Not to another lieutenant’s quarters, not to the restroom, not to retrieve anything necessary; only her way with a trail that was immediately familiar to her. Elusive and cloaked in a strange ‘fog’, the only little bits she could make out from its intentions was that it was borne from regret. It was coming her way at a hurried pace, mixing up that regret with an inconsistent level of anxiety, confirming who it was that was coming to visit her.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
To say that her senses had galvanised her into action was an understatement. When this person inevitably knocked on the door, Yumiko had bounded and worked herself into a frenzy to hide everything from the ritual. By the time the person actually got around to making themselves known through an exhausted voice, she had swept away the remains of the ritual elsewhere and put her weight against the door.
“Yumi? All’s good?”
Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Yumiko could feel Dylus putting his hand on the door handle. He didn’t twist or turn it, simply laying it atop the dented piece of aged metal. Its growing coldness was dissuading him from pushing on with his initial promise. Eventually, he worked up the courage to speak again.
“It’s Dylus. I heard the noise.”
Had it been anyone else, Yumiko would’ve been able to easily discern what they wanted to do and say. Peering into the human mind was like looking at an infinitely expanding spiderweb, but most trains of thoughts were exactly that, linear paths born from fear, determination, whatever emotion sustained the mind at the moment. For Dylus? She had a year to try and find her way into his mind. That damned ‘fog’ prevented her from getting more than five steps in before it gave her mind the boot and a hint of music in her ears.
However, it didn’t mean he wasn’t readable from the outside. As it were, she quickly guessed he was here to apologise over the airfield battle. His voice had been feeble, lacking any of his usual chaos or a hint of comfort. Having seen Lieutenant Miriam with him much earlier on in the midst of cataloguing ammunition, Yumiko also estimated that he had been coerced into this.
She was proven correct, and it infuriated her, “Look. I came here to apolo-”
The sentence stopped halfway through. It lacked any sort of genuineness, the one that apologies are supposed to have. She kept her weight on the door as he spoke again.
“I’m here to make amends,” he stopped again, and she heard him sigh, “no, that’s not gonna work.”
Eventually, he figured out something to say. It was not good or bad, just something that could get her attention.
“I want to talk to you. Just a talk, then I’ll be gone.”
His voice was even weaker when he spoke those words. There was melancholy in his tone that simply bounced off her. Anyone could tell that to attempt this was a huge betrayal of an earned pride for Dylus, a fact that gradually drove her mad. The small shivers in his body language and the way he couldn’t finish his sentences all pointed to a little death inside him that he had no time to bury. The fog surrounding him gave hints of this while still being impenetrable. There were little clouds of rising anger and clouds of honest confusion, fusing into each other as he struggled to process why he had to force his way here. Her sight of it all invoked more frustration than pity within her soul over this soldier of a child.
In her mind, the man simply didn’t understand how to be human. She was no better at it, only that her life had made her better at pretending to be one. How could this be?
Three minutes passed. Neither of them had moved from their positions. What was supposed to be some kind of conversation and perhaps some reconciliation transformed into a strange, deadly game won by whoever went first. When the three minutes finished, it seemed that she had won this game. The door suddenly felt less heavier, with most of the weight going into the fog that surrounded him. There was aggravated muttering, words she could make out- and get even more annoyed by.
“So fucking useless, should’ve never come here,” he spat, angry at himself, “I have shit to do. How’d I get Miriam to pressure me about this on the spot? Tuah damn it. I’m just gonna go. Waste of my time.”
His trailing off voice should’ve made her feel relieved. It was now, however, that the small drop of spirit had mixed itself thoroughly inside her. It was not full-on drunkenness, instead an aggravation of frustration that Dylus would treat something like this as a joke. Hell if he actually didn’t treat it like one, the way he expressed himself now was pungent with the smell of arrogance. Instead of using up the empty air to clear her mind and take a break, Yumiko impulsively grabbed whatever was nearest to her and stormed out of the room.
In less than three seconds, the ex-Yakuza had him by the neck with the flat end of a bottle. It was too big and unwieldy to use as a weapon without even factoring in the fact that he could easily counter it. She no longer visibly cared and snarled,
“Waste of your time? You can’t even abandon your mercenary pride to do something honest. What a miserable creature you are, boy.”
Dylus’ body was screaming for him to react defensively as he slowly stretched his arms upwards. Knowing that this was already the summation of her grievances towards his attitude, he elected to fight against his instincts and simply let her finish.
“That you had to shoved to come up to me shows much of a fucking coward you are. You lift your hands from the graves you dug and pretend the blood and dirt on them is nothing you’re responsible for.”
An unusually low, deep voice responded. Dylus’ bevy of experiences left him no stranger to assassins threatening his livelihood, even if they were holding a seemingly harmless alcohol bottle. His response was of the danger-close variety, a last minute chance for the aggressor to reconsider their action or warn them of the fate they would suffer. This time, he was a little more careless with his words.
“Pots full of incense and prayers can’t fix what I left behind. I’m- I’m sorry that you’re still like this-”
“You are not,” she hissed angrily, “you aren’t even close to sorry. That word only comes out of your mouth because it’s in the script, isn’t it?”
He continued raising his arms up as she circled around to meet him eye-to-eye, still keeping the bottle’s end trained at his neck. Without the mask, her visage was made even more terrifying by the tenfold, added by the purple glint in her eyes glimmering with rage. Even then, he maintained his cool and responded, “That script keeps me running, lets me sleep where nobody can sleep. Every one of us learned it when we became mercs, for better or worse.”
“Even your master?” Yumiko said, “I’m disgusted that he would let you go on like this in front of an army instead of whipping you down to size.”
“If that’s the case, then you’re better off walking away knowing the person who took you in out of pity is a tired, old idiot.”
“Perhaps that’s the best option,” she said, pointing towards the building’s walls, “These woods outside are not ours. Nothing can or will stop me from leaving this company, and you won’t find me ever again.”
“Then why won’t you go?” said Dylus, “Why haven’t you left already?”
“Because there’s nothing out there for me, nowhere that these horrible, horrible visions and sounds won’t follow me ‘till I rest forever.” The last part utterly stung Dylus, a reminder that not everyone painted on the bounty board were horrible people. Yes, they could be crooks, but they had family too. Yumiko was one of them caught in the crossfire. Yet it was this knowledge, this volume of experience, that dictated his next words.
“I can’t help you with that, Yumi. I can’t say the words she wanted me to say, because it’s all happened and done and I can’t lie to you about it. I pulled the trigger, smelled the gunpowder. That’s how it is. Everything else crumbles with or without me.”
“But you can acknowledge your part in it. Just- acknowledge!”
Dylus’ chin was forced upwards as she pressed the bottle against him like a knife’s edge. Her mouth was nearly frothing alongside some bad timing- there were other voices coming back into the barracks. He didn’t know if it was Miriam, but it was clear this was not going to end well.
“It would all be so much easier if the person I needed to work with didn’t pretend that the reason I’m here was just a paycheck! A person of skill, of something better and a whole fog around his mind!”
She was seriously intending to strike him in the next few moments from the way she tensed up and grew stronger in her words. Instead of relenting, the mercenary kept on going with his own point of view, “If I do, then what? It’s what we do, Yumi. It’s what father taught me to live by. There was nothing personal about what I did!”
She bit her lips hard at that statement, cringing and scrunching her free hand into a fist, “Everything you’ve done in their service is personal to me, you little wretch. I watched you kill them, my siblings, and I watched you leave with a smile on your face. To say nothing of how much you helped Mishima to tear it all down and sang while my home burned. All that just to dig out what remains of his riches to fill your pockets like a carrion feeder.”
That statement made Dylus’ blood boil. The earlier intentions to follow Miriam’s advice in apologising and making up with Yumiko had now entirely vanished. Here was a person so buried by their grief that they considered no other opinions but their own, savaging him for being involved with a ticking time bomb. What did Yumiko expect from him? Weeping, lamentations maybe, or perhaps collective grieving for people he didn’t and wouldn't know personally?
That couldn’t happen. That’s not how this life works, not how it will ever work. Had he taken this path, the guilt would’ve left him dead in a ditch. This was no longer a matter of pride in his mind. This was just tasteless ranting, one that made him cross the line between sitting passively and acting out of spite.
The next few seconds were spent in a great struggle. Dylus had gone first in trying to steal the bottle out of Yumiko’s hand, only for her to strike back at him so hard he felt his head spin. Her retribution was rapid but unfocused, slamming the bottle on his metal arm until there was a loud smash in the air. A whirlwind of violence ensued as both sides attempted to gain the upper hand over each other, dispelled when Dylus finally restrained her. There were glass shards all over the floor and a shallow, but long cut on the side of his neck.
“Those ‘riches’ is how we get another day to walk what’s left of this earth. You think you can talk high and mighty about me and my job because of what it’s cost you? Ever stop to think that you’ve always pulled the same shit as me, just with a different reason, looking for an excuse for all that’s happened? You killing me here and now won’t fix anything.”
The exhaustion of the fight made Dylus’ harshness seem much more poignant to her mind. Yumiko fired back with a blunt, uncaring statement, “It will solve one problem.”
“And only one.”
“That’s all I need. The rest, I’ll figure out for myself.”
Neither side wanted to relent in their positions, both eyes locked onto each other with hateful gazes. It was only when the both of them heard those voices from earlier jogging down to investigate the noises did they finally let go of their murderous impulse. Dylus let go of Yumiko and backed off, while she pointed the sharp ends of the broken bottle away from him. They shared a similar grimace, reminiscing about their time as enemies in Ishimura.
“I don’t like the idea of shanking my guys, it’s a fucking waste of my time. This war’s only getting started, Yumi, don’t make this a damn habit down the line. Maybe one of these days I can muster up an apology you can accept, but after what you said, don’t expect it anytime soon. ”
She let out a thoroughly unfeminine burp, the spirit from earlier having been jogged up by the scuffle, and spoke, “You’re a piece of shit, captain. Your father should be ashamed of you.”
“Likewise.”
She disappeared, the wind behind her furious and in pain. All he could do at that moment was lean on a nearby wall for a few seconds to catch his breath, thinking how this had all gone so wrong and that he had failed his father with flying colours. When some of his mercenaries came around the bend, the only hints they had of what had happened was a small trail of blood that was going down the back of his neck and all the shards on the floor.
They wisely decided to keep their mouths shut, watching their mighty leader hobble away elsewhere.