Chapter 9 – Bothersome Rival

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He just stared at it for half a minute. ‘This is big,’ he thought. ‘This is huge…’

After a good while of just staring at the name and thinking about synonyms of large, he closed the diary and put it in his shirt, on the back side, followed by him tucking his shirt in his pants so it wouldn’t slip out.

He walked to the ladder and climbed. It took him three pushes to loosen the trapdoor. When it opened, he just saw darkness, yet knew he had to climb out. When he did, the orange hue coming from the still open trapdoor presented him a staircase. He closed the trapdoor and climbed the stairs in complete darkness, trusting it’d get him out of here.

‘This isn’t just a stairway. The room must’ve belonged to the previous Shitman. This is a paved road,’ Kuno thought as he ascended, eventually reaching a stop, bumping his head onto a wall of some sorts and almost tumbling down the stairs.

A simple touch let him know it was wood, making him instinctually search for a knob to confirm it was a door. And it was. He pushed, yet to no avail, but a pull did work, allowing cracks of light to fall on his retina.

Before him lay another piece of wood, but looking through the cracks on the left, he could see he was in some sort of storage room and the thing before him was a cupboard.

He squeezed his fingers through the left and right crack, using his left toe as well to push the cupboard gently forward, enough for him to enter.

He closed the door behind him and pushed the cupboard back into place. ‘Secrets,’ Kuno thought. ‘Only love the ones I know.’

It was indeed a storage room. Around him lay a bunch of boxes and tools, neatly stacked in doorless closets. Kuno felt so comfortable he just casually moved to the door. When he opened it, he was greeted with even more light.

His comfort faded, seeing the backs of two guards twenty feet away. More than that, above him were the stands, the stands he had seen before. When a voice shouted:

‘Hurry up! How many times do you have to prepare this thing before it’s engrained in your system!’

Kuno knew that voice. It was the first one he heard upon entry to Terra Two. He silently closed the door, going back into the storage room. ‘Alrighty then… destination reached…’ he thought, putting his hands in his hair as his heart began to race.

‘It seems like they haven’t started yet,’ he thought, lowering himself to the floor. ‘Why am I panicking? I wanted to be here. I wanted to see this?’

The lights dimmed in both the summoning and storage room as the sound of heavy footsteps traveled through the air. ‘You’re already here,’ he thought. ‘Just try to sneak and take a look!’

He opened the door again and crawled forward. The guards had their eyes on the circle, which had the faint purple glow to it like Kuno remembered.

‘The preparations must’ve been taking longer than desired,’ he thought, seeing only the summoning circle in the complete darkness of this room.

Apart from vision, there was a lot going on. He heard a bunch of whispers and what seemed to be cries, together with the shuffling of metal.

He gave it little thought, until he saw the sounds approach the circle, and the purple light illuminate who made them. The chained bodies of twelve people. Eight men and four women, chained to each other by the ankles and wrists. Their skin was dry and shrunken, like they hadn’t drunk for three days. The shackles had bruised their arms and legs. Their eyes lay low, together with their jaw, their gasps for air audible through their dry throats.

Kuno had seen enough to know where this was headed. When all the people had gathered in the circle, he heard the same voice that’d introduced him clear his throat before chanting:

‘We offer you plenty, so gift us, we beg. We the people request a savior, so bring us what we lack. A warrior who’ll face hell and come back. Aid us dear sister, we beg, we beg.’

And with those words, the bodies in the circle began to vanish. Their bodies turned to dust, starting from their fingers. The particles turning finer and finer, until invisible to the naked eye, and then even smaller, until nothing but nothing remained.

Kuno felt an odd sensation in his body. Sounds entered his ear differently, softer, clearer. His eyes were locked on the circle, staring at the emptiness where ten whole people stood a second ago. He didn’t feel fear. He didn’t feel anger. Somehow, he didn’t feel there.

Not until he heard him.

The circle glowed, its light turning brighter each second, until it began to cry in a high tone, and cause a small tremor in the room. The tone went gradually from high to low until the voice of a man got discernible. A voice shouting out of fear, a cry for help.

His cries cut when his body appeared a foot above the circle, causing him to smack down. Startled, he frantically looked around him as the spotlight flashed, shining on him, and him only.

Kuno hadn’t seen many men for someone his age, if we don’t count 2D, but the figure laying before him was by far the most beautiful he had seen. Somehow, the dumbfound look on his face supported his beauty. His hair was messy, wavy, shining, laying peacefully on his head and shoulders, colored like milk chocolate. His skin was tan and smooth, like he knew the sun personally. His eye-lashes could birth a hurricane over the Pacific, protecting the wide opened light brown eyes.

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His mind raced at the speed of sound, and even faster when the Order spoke.

‘We don’t want to overwhelm you,’ the man at the center of the Order said. ‘Information is very potent to you right now.’

He raised his head to the voice, his eyes twitching as a thousand possibilities crossed his enhanced mind. ‘Where am I? Why? How?’ He thought and thought and answered and answered, more than a thousand per question, each spawning more.

‘Where am I?’ he asked.

All knew the answer, even Kuno, but upon hearing that question, he got one of his own. It had nothing to do with his, but it did have something to do with him.

For the reason Kuno wondered, came from the voice of the man in the circle. ‘Who are you?’ he thought. Kuno knew, knew for certain, he had heard that voice before. ‘That voice… Why does it feel so familiar…?’

‘You’re in an alternate realm, Raphael,’ the Order said, somehow knowing his name already.

The possibilities shrunk immensely in Raphael’s head. ‘Alternate realm…’ he thought, his empowered brain allowing him to grasp the situation much quicker than others. His brain continued filtering, as Kuno’s did too.

‘Raphael?’ he thought. ‘I definitely don’t know anyone with that name…’

The Order slowly brought him up to speed. They knew he was the Brain, so there was no need for a Class Teller. Even if they didn’t, the way he acted was enough to figure it out. The look in his eyes, his gestures, his words - they had seen it twenty-two times already.

With each bit of information, the expression on his face molded to one of pure neutrality. Alternate reality, summoning, war, magic, levels, ranks, each piece dimmed the chaos in mind until there was nothing but silence.

They answered his questions, these figures who to him still lay in the darkness. Then suddenly, he asked something the other Brains hadn’t asked before during the introduction. He asked:

‘Will we, the people of Earth, return home safely if we win the war for you?’

A moment of silence lay between the question and the answer, millisecond longer than those before. ‘Yes,’ the Order said.

He followed up. ‘Even me?’

They were faint, but to him, loud enough. The signs of deception most of us are blind and deaf to – the sound of a shuffle, a hesitation in the voice, a sigh. To Raphael they spoke, they warned him of a lie.

‘Naturally,’ he heard.

While Raphael was busy, already a master of this new version of himself, trying to draw a conclusion to all of this. Kuno saw something. He saw a change in Raphael’s stance, and he didn’t like it. He focused on his hand, and thought about what Don had told him. He thought about yesterday. He thought: ‘is he thinking… maybe…?’

When Raphael put his hand in his pocket, Kuno saw as he drew the hilt of a knife. He was sure the guards saw it too, but he doubted they’d raise their voice or act at all. They could save him, but not only would Raphael hurt himself, he’d be stripped of even more rights.

It was just him who saw and cared. Without a second of thought, from the darkness, when no one was aware of his presence, he launched himself forward.

With a fart to boost his dash, he tackled Raphael, pushing his hand back in his pocket to try and hide the knife.

Everyone, every single soul in the room, even Kuno, was shocked as Raphael and he fell on the floor, away from the spotlight.

‘Lights!’ the man speaking for the Order shouted, illuminating the room in an instant.

The man slammed his hands on the desk. ‘Of course, it’s you!’

‘By God… He’s only the second, but I already see the trend,’ a gray-haired woman in a ponytail spoke from the second chair of the order.

‘What’s the meaning of this, Kuno!? You’re not supposed to be here. Where are the guards? Argh!’ the man said, a surge of rage filling the vein on his forehead.

‘Calm down, Kilroy…’ the woman said.

Kuno stood up, but had no idea what to say, so just vomited a bunch of words, hoping they’d form something. ‘I… uh… thing… just… uh… you know… yeah…’

‘Kilroy,’ a bald man from the order whispered. ‘This isn’t a good sign. We should consider, you know what…’

Kilroy clenched his jaw and exhaled through his nose, counting to ten in his head to calm him down. Meanwhile, Kuno helped Raphael up, whose eyes had returned to the shock of before. ‘Sorry for tackling you, bud,’ Kuno whispered. ‘But you really shouldn’t do that.’

‘That voice…’ Raphael thought, his mind starting another process.

‘You were peeping, weren’t you?’ Kilroy asked, looking down at Kuno.

There was no way he could refute that accusation. Even with the few seconds he had gotten to think, he still couldn’t come up with an answer. He raised his shoulders. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I like to know things. Is that bad? You guys should inform me more. I’m the Shitman, haven’t you heard?’

He saw the faces of the guards light up, but those of the Order turned cold. They knew more than most who he was – what he was.

Kilroy’s eyes flicked to Raphael, who was scanning the room still. ‘You’d wish you were him. I only see a troublemaker before me,’ he said. ‘Raphael, our Kingdom has a lot of troublemakers. One of your duties is to find those. With all that has happened just now. With the things you’ve seen. I order you to tell us: is this boy a danger to our Kingdom?’

Kuno frowned. ‘Danger? What do you mean? What kind of question is that? Of course I’m not a danger!’

The Order knew of the power Raphael possessed. The chilling power to find the answer to questions with the most minimal of information. To Raphael, the fact that Kuno was here while he shouldn’t be – the fact that he had sneaked past the guards – the fact that he saw what he was planning and went out of his way to stop him – the looks the guards gave him, compared to those of the Order. All of these things spoke the thickest of volumes to Raphael.

He had formed a conclusion, and the Order knew.

What they didn’t know, however, was that he had formed another.

‘This man’s of low value and an insignificant threat. He acts on his impulses, like a wild beast. He’s no threat to this Kingdom, no more than any other person in this room,’ Raphael said.

Kuno should be happy, since Raphael’s words essentially helped him out tremendously. But instead he got ticked off, slapping his upper arm with the back of his hand. ‘Yo, why are you dissing me? You got any idea who the fuck I am? My headshot percentage is 78%. I’m a mother-fucking menace!’

‘Don’t touch me, you clown,’ Raphael said, moving his hand towards his forehead to move his hair to the side.

‘What did you just say?’ Kuno said, but as he did, saw something that connected the dots he had placed in his mind.

When Raphael moved his head to the left, he swiftly made a peace-sign with his fingers before lowering his hand.

And then he remembered. He remembered the person that voice belonged to. He knew this man in front of him. But he didn’t know him as Raphael. No, he knew him by another name. A name that’d caused him many sleepless nights over the last decade. He knew him as:

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