Richie found himself in a place that had the look of a storm in the making. The floor was open space, arbitrarily solid where his feet trod, and all around were dark clouds, floating by as if under the sway of high winds. Beyond were glittering stars, wafting nebula trails, and the remnants of galactic spiral arms. A few comets darted across the expanse of space.
“This place…” Richie thought, eyes wide with wonder.
Without being told, he knew that a chosen few throughout history had been here, prophets, mystics, even gods among men. This cave was a lynchpin of the connected human heart, woven together from great tracts of spacetime. He felt the flow of the earth’s energy running through him, their hearts beating in sync, as they had with Freyja and the unseen other ten, back during their first meeting. It felt so long ago now.
Richie heard the raindrops and ripples, as he had when in the presence of Droplet. What was rippling here? He couldn’t see it. He felt his mother’s warm hand in his, smelled her scent, and looked inward, closing his eyes. He saw a single drop in a vista of blackness, touch some tranquil body and plink, sending its ripple. He could see, as if in a network of echolocation, the cosmic panorama around him colored in black and gray. There were ripples emanating from the planets and stars. Richie thought back to his vision within the Backyards after he had eaten his fill of surprise shrooms, of his tangle with hostile living memories of his assailants, and of their shattering under the bloom of his tapped spirit.
“Intent becomes strength.” Richie said.
He remembered how he had blown apart that illusion of the cultist he owed the ruination of his life till now to. The yard had drawn on his memories and incarnated them, as it had his fleeting fear of a sewer gator.
He still lacked something. He knew it, dredged up the memory of his difficulty falling the tree, marked with so many bloodied knuckle prints before he at last surged his will through the trunk and brought it down. What was that force? Could it have been like the ripples he heard and felt all around him now? We are One.
Images of prospective opponents flashed through his mind in quick succession. Before him, he saw Cuppy, Freyja, Holly, Chikita, Snaggles, Leon, Dai Funka, Moses - they cycled through each other like a rapid slideshow, reminding him of the slot machines back at Carnival Top. Right, that’s where he should be right now, isn’t it?
No. Focus. You’re no good to anyone if you can’t control your yard. I can’t create a pathway to the Abyss if I can’t even master a single yard. This place is my sanctuary. MY point of power. Droplet entrusted it to me. She waited who knows how long for someone to inherit the will of the Forged, I’m not going to fuck that up!
Stern blue eyes stared back at him, and he opened his own. He locked gazes with the image of John Thratta, anchor strapped across his broad shoulders, red beret pulled down over his cropped blond hair. He was as jacked in this fantasy as he had been in the fight pit.
“Thratta? Why you?” Richie asked, his tone not carrying the flavor of accusation he would have expected.
‘Thratta’ put his fists in a guard position. “Put ‘em up.” he advised Richie.
Richie obliged, entering a stance. They swung on each other, and Richie found himself eating blow after blow again like he had back then. Thratta was as swift and strong as ever, countering every move and hitting like a truck in turn. Richie was rocked back and forth, thrown tumbling across the floor painted in the glittering stars and inky blackness of the infinite. He couldn’t seem to exile the image of his little boxing session on the unlucky tree from his mind. He supposed this whole place was his mind, come to think of it. Something like a shared dream of the Abyss, reflecting his thoughts and feelings while he became the eye through which it saw itself. He was the viewpoint avatar of existence, basking in the glory of its boundless imagination.
He had to admit - it felt pretty good. Good enough to brush off the fists, roll with the punches, and keep getting back up. Slowly, Thratta evolved from being a dead end brick wall, to being another falls to scale. Luchesi was wrong, his climb wasn’t over, not by a long shot. So he’d taken a spill. The carp who became dragons were those who endured and never stayed down.
Neanderthal had all the possible physical advantages over their cousins, the race who would go on to become modern man. Why was it that the stronger, fitter species had failed to expand and thrive in the wider world? Perhaps it was because they lacked that spark, that whim that flies in the face of logic. Homo sapien, possessed by what godforsaken curiosity who knew, decided to string together some logs and vines, call it a raft, and sail out onto boundless seas with a horizon challenging them. Just to see what was there. They could have stayed in one place and perfected the routine of survival as had the neanderthal, but they didn’t. And, that illogical drive carried their seed, like those released from dandelions, far and wide across the globe, settling into different pockets and niches, which would in turn become the different tribes, civilizations, and then countries and creeds of mankind. Adventure was baked into man, down to their very essence.
The carp in the legend of the dragon must have shared this trait, this inner spark. What did the lowly fish think, wonder, and dream as it looked up Longman Falls?
Maybe Richie had more in common with Cuppy than he thought. He was no mere thug, that was merely the shape circumstances had forced him into. Thieving was something he did, not what he was, not the sum total of what he was meant for. As with his occupation, so too was his mentality a passing thing, a transient current trapped in an eddie that would soon free itself and continue on.
Richie was not a cynic. He was a romantic.
Are his attacks getting slower? Richie wondered, seeing Thratta’s knuckles approach in slow motion. He turned his head out of the way, dodging the fist, even as he felt the displaced wind it generated blow around him. Thratta’s eyes turned to lock with his, and there was a connection in that moment.
Richie continued to bob and weave around the Seal’s advance.
Those shockwaves felt familiar.
Richie closed his eyes again and pictured the falling rain. Again, he saw those ripples expanding from the celestial bodies all around him. The liquid sounds converted, as if by the magic of mushrooms, into the image and knowledge of musical notes. Richie tracked them as if reading a piece of sheet music, telling his fingers which keys to press upon a grand piano. He hit a sour key, and took a blow to the face.
Wrong. he told himself.
When he had transfigured that old aluminum baseball bat into Excalibur, he had felt an inner strength, the surge of his beating heart unifying with that of the wilderness around him. The beats, and the ripples, they shared a substance in common. They were rhythm.
Water has its own rhythm. As do trees. Soil has rhythm. The cosmos around me has its own music, vacuum or no vacuum. Richie felt the strength of the world gathering into him. When I split the tree, was that me synchronizing my rhythm in time with the tree? Did I read between the lines of its music, and did it tell me when, where, and how to strike? Could that be the secret behind Dai Funka’s shockwave thrusts? Is it the same as the power to read the flow of battle, and of everything?
He saw foreshocks of Thratta’s coming strikes, like an animation onion skin or a peak ahead of some script, and was easily keeping pace, and then well outpacing the soldier, dancing in between his arms and legs.
You could see it too, couldn’t you? The flow of things. Is that how you kept pace with me and struck me out of mach speed? I wonder if mom could see it…
“Listen to me, Richie.” she had said once. “To have power is not to be strong. Anyone with enough hours at the gym or a blunt implement can break things, including other people. It’s easier to destroy things than it is to create them, or to protect them. Strength must distinguish when to create, and when to destroy. The ultimate power is one which can change that which one wishes to change, and to protect what one wishes to protect.”
Ella had snatched a butterfly out of the air in her clenched fist, only to reveal it unharmed, not missing so much as a speck of powder from its wing, as she gently opened her fingers. With her other hand, she chopped outward, sending a gale of wind blowing across the lawn and ripping tufts of grass away into the air. She released the insect onto the gust, and watched it fly away. “Someone who only has themselves to look out for can’t know what it truly is to be strong. They don’t know the burden of carrying others with them, on their backs and in their hearts. With the lives of someone you treasure on the line, your limbs feel much heavier in combat.”
He understood what she had meant now, and how she had felt when she gave all of her strength to buy him the time he needed to escape. He knew that weight. There were people he didn’t want to lose. No, people he couldn’t live without. Never had his fight felt so grim.
Why did he see Thratta? Why not Luchesi, or Crocus?
But he already knew the answer.
I was arrogant. I climbed a tower and plowed through a few guys, and I thought I was ready to challenge the heavens. I let myself forget what it is to be helpless, for my best to not be enough. You reminded me. You humbled me. Richie realized.
He jumped over Thratta’s sweeping leg.
It isn’t enough to have power. To be akin to God isn’t just to be an arbiter of fate, able to smite anything you like with a snap of your fingers. It is to know, experience, feel, and be all, like within this place. To know what it is to lose as well as to gain. As with empathy. I could never sympathize with others when only my neck was on the line, and every day was its own endurance test. The others showed me what it was to connect, and filled the part of my heart that had been empty. They showed me what it is I value, the sanctity of life and the boundless freedom it should embody. There are those who would staunch that freedom, and dam the flow. So long as evil bastards hold power, countless innocents, children, no less innocent than I was, will have their lives decided not by their own will and dreams, but by the cruel gears of an imprisoning fate. I must break those gears, and return fate to the hands of its rightful owners. I won’t stand for the corruption of hope. Everyone has the same right to challenge the falls.
Richie stepped back, and Thratta’s fist stopped in midair, the soldier looking at him questioningly.
Thank you, Thratta, for reminding me. I would have let my own power go to my head, if you hadn’t beaten some sense into me. I must know my enemy, inside and out. The powers that be, behind the angels and the shades alike, run unchecked, like cruel gods. They must be dethroned.
“How do you know you won’t just become the next oppressor, once you’ve conquered the heavens?” Thratta asked.
Cuppy and the others will be with me. They won’t let me lose my way. I trust that. Richie thought.
He felt all ripples align and combine into one.
A man who stands above all is one who keeps an innocent child alive in their hearts. Such a man sees the whole world then.
We are all children of the world. Richie clutched his chest, feeling the warm beat of his heart, and smiled.
…
Wolfgang looked up at the Sapphire in Silk and allowed himself a childlike smile.
…
A thunderfall of feet struck Luchesi, all three assailants stomping him into the ground. He cried out and sprang up, lashing out mindlessly, and the trio jumped back, circling him. Luchesi leaned out of the way of a whiplash, only to expose his neck and take a karate chop from Dai Funka that shattered his collar bone. Cuppy's 40 pound float ball struck him in the side of the head, driving him into a thorny uppercut from Leon that broke fangs and tumbled him onto his back. The jester kicked up wildly, like an upended, angry spider, and flipped over, jumping up into the stands. Cuppy's hook snagged the back of his neck, netting a screech, and yanked him back into the arena, landing on his head. The three of them pressed in again, pummeling the panicked monster.
You're not getting away again, this ends NOW! Cuppy thought.
Swelling pustules of black rain burst and sprayed across Luchesi's body, and his bones cracked as if trying to reconfigure themselves, as had the shapeshifting shades Richie encountered in Tide Town.
Luchesi's thighs engorged, and he sprang out of the circle of pain, but didn't get ten feet before a napalm pellet struck the small of his back and engulfed him in flame. His body went up like a raging inferno, and Cuppy could see the twisting faces of tortured souls forming out of the oily black smoke that rolled off of the burning clown. A snare caught Luchesi's ankles, spilling him to the ground again, and rolled back and forth, trying desperately to blanket the flames. Dai Funka stepped on Luchesi's back, pressing down and crushing, holding the writhing, burning creature there, face frozen in a resolute poker face against the searing pain of the flames scorching his leg. Leon felt a passing twinge of pity and disgust. Though he had brought it on himself, the twisted freak was going out in quite the agonizing fashion. It was like watching a wild animal thrashing in a woodchipper. Leon staunched the visceral gut punch and unfurled his whip, repeatedly lashing the exposed section of Luchesi's back. Cuppy sewed the creature by the limbs and face to the ground, and Dai Funka raised his burnt foot, stomping again and again on Luchesi's back and the back of his neck. Black blood sprayed out with each strike, like a regenerating water balloon being popped over and over again.
A body that could recover from fatal damage over and over again was only useful when you didn't need to use it. If you were outgunned by an angry mob determined to stomp your shit in, then your so-called invincibility was nothing more than a curse, prolonging your torment. The restless spirits of the Checkered Slasher's many previous victims were surely feeling cold triumph in their graves.
The flames began to die down, and the trio stepped back a bit, surveying the charred, broken body. It was still twitching, and a few fires were still petering on bits of his scorched back, which was bright scarlet with exposed muscle and angry raw nerves. Breaking the stitching that bound him, Luchesi sprung up once more, using the fire to his favor. A last party favor from his depleted magician's bag of tricks, Luchesi fanned the flames and raised a curtain of fire between him and Dai Funka. The sumo stumbled back, blocking his eyes, and felt red hot claws tear through his belly from love handle to love handle, in a single swift stroke, Luchesi's blades punching through the wall of fire with a vengeance. The heavy grappled went down with a great thud, his exposed, slashed slabs of fatty tissue making sick pancake mix noises as he struck the ground, and began pooling blood.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Moving quickly despite his broken legs, Luchesi threaded the needle between Cuppy's volley of string darts. The moppet, having missed, gripped his fishing pole in either hand like a boss staff, waiting on guard. Luchesi twirled under the boy's guard and planted his elbow in Cuppy's side, sinking the expelled blade into his kidney. Cuppy drew in a sharp breath as a remnant of Luchesi's ego spoke to him out the side of the abomination's fangled maw.
"Don't worry, I brought the kiddie--sized knives this time." he jeered, retracted his elbow blade, and watched Cuppy topple over. The boy could just wait his turn on the floor while Luchesi took care of business. The demented beast bade Cuppy be patient so he could give the pest his full undivided attention.
As with the puppeteer's darts, Luchesi glided around the desperate rippling strokes of Leon's whip, his ears drinking in the sweet musical notes of the acrobat's cries of outrage. A claw stroke came up, and four beautiful cuts birthed themselves up the pretty boy's torso with a splash of blood. The drops hung, fluttering in the air like rose petals, and the Polish man went down onto his back, face twisted in agony. A trembling hand reached for his fallen whip handle, and the wrist was pinned under Luchesi's stomping foot. The other foot in turn stomped down on Leon's gashed torso, and he screamed again. The parasitic shades undulating inside Luchesi's body squealed in glee as they both drank in the pain and misery at their heels. Luchesi raised both claws, pointed downward, ready to skewer the Lion Tamer's pretty face.
He had mixed feelings. The tortured part of his being, sunken deep into the dark pit he had become, felt bitter disappointment that there was no end to his curse in sight. Yet, always there was that exhilaration of another person cut down, of his strongly-worded letter against the cruel injustice of the world written in blood. Really, it wasn't much different now than how his killing spree had always been. One long misadventure in redirected despair, suicide of the soul. It was never enough. As his stomach was never full however many corpses he devoured, his broken heart couldn't be filled with destruction however copious. And, at this point, he knew it. But, that was the definition of insanity, wasn't it? Forever going through the same motions as if expecting a different outcome one day?
"Die." he said joylessly. To his surprise, victory carried no satisfaction, not even on the heels of the awful beating he had taken. He was just tired.
So very, very tired.
The back of his skull exploded into pain as he was driven into the ground hard enough to smash his face. Behind Luchesi, Dai Funka, manwashi turning dark with blood running into it from the four parallel slashes going across his belly, stood in a crouch, the 700 pound strongman's mallet in his grip, the head soaked with black blood.
The heavyset fighter breathed heavily, then spoke, sweat pouring down his face in sheets, his topknot limp and soaked.
"The health silver linings of being my size are few and far between, but in this instance, my fat did prevent your claws from reaching any vital organs." he spat off to the side. "A piece of advice - in a battle to the death, never turn your back on an opponent until you know they're down for good."
Luchesi, trembling, the back of his skull caved in like a rotted pumpkin and revealing a pale, sickly pulsing brain, tried to prop himself up.
"Take… your own advice!" he screeched, whirling on Dai Funka.
"We are." Leon whispered into his ear from behind. Luchesi went rigid, feeling very cold, and realized he was terrified. Then Leon's whip wrapped around his body and yanked tight, hogtying him. Cuppy was up too, the stab wound in his side stitched closed, eyes open and focused, fishing pole ready to cast.
Finally at his limit, Luchesi resorted to his last ditch escape attempt, and unleashed his wave of killing intent, as he had before when he matched his radiating bloodlust against Chikita's own.
The enemies didn't take a single step back.
They aren’t even a single bit afraid of me?!? he realized in abject horror.
“Why should we fear the last bark of a toothless dog?” Dai Funka said in cold contempt.
Cuppy cast his line over a high rafter, and it descended, the hook snagging the loops of Leon’s lasso’d whip. Cuppy yanked hard, reeling, and lifted the bound Luchesi high into the air, all the way to the open top of the ruined circus tent. Leon tossed one of the grandstanding boxes over to Dai Funka, and leaped onto it as the sumo wrestler crouched and chambered his palm.
“This is really it, this time.” Leon glowered up at the wriggling worm on the hook. He crouched himself, preparing for the incredible g force.
Grunting, Dai Funka tossed the box above his head, and threw his open palm into the underside of the box upon its descent. The shockwave sent the box, and Leon atop it, flying into the air, to the top of the tent alongside his intended victim. Gracefully leaning back off of the flying box at the apex of its flight, Leon hugged his arms around Luchesi’s waist, snagging him off of the hook, and gracefully swan-dove back to the circus floor, spinning in the izuna drop to end all izuna drops.
“Big Top Drop!” Leon announced, plummeting to the ground with the whip-bound Luchesi held securely, head and upper body sticking out five feet farther than Leon’s own, to cushion Leon’s massive impact. Luchesi screamed, his stomach practically in his throat as every instinct screamed at him to do something, and found his body unable to act on it.
This was going to fucking suck.
A sickening crunch rang through the stadium, and Leon saw in slow motion several yellowed chunks of fragmented bone shrapnel fly past his face. Blinking as they passed, he gazed down to the source. Luchesi’s elongated neck had shat out a disturbing length of his spine, right out the side like some jagged piece of airframe on a wrecked plane, its splintered end looking like it’d been dipped in hot tar and rolled in broken eggshells. Skull fragments, Leon wagered. Time resumed, and Leon somersaulted backward off the mutant to distribute the momentum across his whole body. Luchesi’s nine foot frame flopped to the ground, still and lifeless. His ejected spine made for an unnaturally flat neck, oozing a puddle of black blood that smoldered and hissed as the shade energy within began to expire. Shallow breaths, drawn through an esophagus that’d been well-crushed by the impact on his neck, wheezed an unmistakable death rattle.
Cuppy nodded emphatically. “And stay down.”
Leon, sprawled on his back, arched and hissed.
“Sounds like my threads came loose.” the moppet ambled over to the fallen Lion Tamer. “Probably shouldn’t have dropped 200+ feet, cushion or no cushion.”
Leon grumbled, unable to feel his legs. “That’s an odd way to say ‘thanks, oh mighty Leon, for saving the day’.”
Dai Funka clutched his bleeding stomach, dropping onto his knees, and allowed himself to rest. “Anyone hungry?” he cracked.
Leon laughed, hissed in pain, swore at Dai Funka for making him laugh, and then hissed in more pain, beginning a vicious spiral.
Cuppy felt like he was forgetting something. “I should make sure Richie’s ok, but first I gotta find Freyja. What’s happening out there?” he asked, listening to the sounds of chaos beyond the flapping, slashed tent.
-
Brock weaved his way through the ranks of his soldiers that had set up a defensive line along the edge of Carnival top, eventually getting a good look at what was going on. Beyond a deadman’s land of about thirty feet, several men in suits and ties were grouped up, alongside guys in full tactical gear, all and all probably 70 men total, to Brock’s 51. Unmarked black SUVs and pickups seemed to have been their means of egress, and were being used by much of the group as cover. Brock surveyed them for a moment. “To whom do I owe the pleasure?” He spoke finally. A blonde man in dark shades stepped out partially from behind one of the SUV’s. “You first.” The man called out. Brock rolled his eyes. “Better question, what do you want?” Brock shouted. “We’re trying to contain the anomalies that are causing chaos and infrastructure damage here.” The man in glasses replied, starting to cross the no man’s land, making some of his men tense up, though none dared to try and stop him. Brock did the same, not getting so much as a twitch from his team. Obedience versus trust.
“Then we’ve got a common goal. The fighters in the arena are duking it out with some nine foot ghoul, but it was looking pretty well hosed the last I saw it. As for the wispy shadow things, there was a whole nest of them right beneath the big top tent, but they’ve cleared out already in one way or another.” Brock detailed, folding his arms.
The man in dark shades nodded slowly. “An entire network of anomalies, right beneath our most popular tourist destination…What about the explosions that were reported, were those your bombs?”
“No. They’re what I came here to defuse, actually. My team was able to collect information about a potential terror attack here, intended to stir chaos to feed the…anomalies, as you call them. We were too late to intervene before they could detonate though.” Brock said.
The spectacled man’s brows lowered. “Feed on chaos?” He turned away from Brock slightly, thinking the idea over in his mind for a few seconds before turning back. “If we’ve got a common goal, let’s move in. Director Mason.” The man introduced himself, extending his hand.
“Commander Brock.” He replied, shaking it. “Make way gents, let’s clear out that nest.” Brock shouted, and his ranks parted aside, clearing a broad path for Mason’s vehicles to pull through. As the soldiers filed off towards the big top, Mason walked beside Brock, removing his shades and squinting in the brightness. The bags under his eyes told Brock this was a man who’d seen many sleepless nights, maybe even weeks. He looked terrible.
“I think it’s safe to say neither of us can explicitly divulge who we work for.” Mason says.
Brock nods. “Yep.” “Can I ask how you found out about the bombing, and who was behind it?” Mason inquires.
“Red Lotus. Mercenaries, essentially. Who hired them, I’m not sure, but they were both aware that a mass casualty event would result in enough death and misery to supercharge that clusterfuck underground.” Brock said, glancing at Mason to gauge his reaction.
The director was puzzled, but trying to hide it. “What exactly was in that…nest?”
“Some dark shit. Black ichor inhabited by these shapeless, floaty shadow entities. All bad news.” Brock replied.
“Civilians, did they make it out?” Mason asked. “Most of them. I’ve taken care of that part. Damage control on the other hand, I suspect that’s your job.”
Mason nodded. “It is. I’ve got my work cut out for me.” The two of them arrived at the edge of the big top tent, both flanked by their respective private army. Brock lifted the tent flap, and Mason strode in.
Cuppy’s owl eyes widened. He noticed Mason before Mason noticed him, and he took advantage of this to load a Cuppy Surprise Pellet, Spicy Edition, in his slingshot. Sticking his tongue out and closing an eye, he let the napalm explosive fly at the Director without a single fuck to give, immediately.
The pellet splattered right on Mason’s forehead, and an off-green poof of dust clouded his vision temporarily. Cuppy’s brows arced in confusion, and he glanced at his pocket, pulling out the handful of pellets he had left. “Oh.” he said simply. “Nettles.”
Mason’s face was red, the compulsion to scratch at his face took every bit of his undercaffeinated will to resist. Even still, fat tears rolled out from beneath his glasses as he squirmed uncomfortably.
Dai Funka, quickly putting together two and two, realized that this was the ‘sunglasses jerk’ Cuppy had a bone to pick with. A tide of things struggled to come out of his mouth, and none of them managed. What he wanted to say was some variant of “Why would you do that. Why the fuck would you blatantly and openly open fire on an intelligence worker with a license to kill in the middle of a crime scene, with his entire crew at his back, and more importantly, why would you drag us into it?!?”
Instead, he simply bellyflopped onto the moppet, hiding him under his slashed flab (and suffocating him, but details details), and played the wounded card, hoping no one looked too closely. When all else fails, deny knowledge.
Mason pulled on his collar a little, desperately trying to alleviate the burning itch. He scanned, trying to see what the hell that was and where it came from, but saw only a very fat Japanese man laying on the ground like bleeding pudding, and a similarly wrecked male supermodel-type lying on his back.
Dai Funka felt Cuppy’s foot twitching under him as things started going dark.
Just endure it for a bit. the yokozuna thought. I didn’t escape this kind of shit just to get lynched by spooks in suits.
“Something wrong, sir?” Folson cracked a small grin, not in much of a hurry to help, considering his evident ‘expendable’ status, judging by that last retrieval gig with the scary ice dominatrix.
“I’m… fine…” Mason said, stifling his sniffles, feeling very glad for his sunglasses blocking the sight of his moist, reddened eyes looking like those of one enraptured in the emotional climax of a chick flick.
Leon took a different approach, and decided to play things cool. “About time the feds showed up. You’re a bit too little too late, but you can bag the body since you're here.”
“What body?” Mason looked at him, pushing his glasses up. He saw only a black puddle, Leon’s whip lying in it.
“The hell do you mean what body, it’s right - oh mother-”
…
Luchesi folded himself through the grates of his withered, industrial backyard, the mindscape twisted and reflecting his degeneracy, the jester finding it harder and harder to conjure up the comforting scent of dew-kissed grass and wildflowers. Part of that probably had to do with being in a state best compared to a very tall bag of broken pretzels steeped in syrup.
“Pain. Everything is in pain.” he mewled, claws twitching.
The shades were likely in agreement, and had their fill of his misery before squirming out and making themselves scarce. It seemed their host wasn’t long for this world, and they were as rats fleeing a sinking ship. Luchesi got the memo, and started literally pulling himself back together. He grunted as he tried to blow his caved-in skull back out into proper shape, and twist his shattered limbs and ligaments back into place. It was a lot like trying to put a dislocated shoulder back in, times a thousand and spread over every part of his body.
While bathing in liquid nitrogen.
The already drab color of the darkly empathic environment around him grew fainter and drearier as he drew on the Backyard’s power to mend what was left of his body. He grunted with the strain. He hadn’t been so sure of it back when he got riddled with bullets the first time, back at the SBPD, but it seemed to be getting harder and harder to recover from lethal injuries. The tab was getting larger, and it was time to pay it soon.
“Didn’t go well?” Crocus asked conversationally, suddenly there by Luchesi’s squishy side, in all his imposing, enigmatic glory.
“What does it look like?” Luchesi asked, coughing up a piece of his ribs.
“You’re running out of second chances, I’m afraid. The loan I gave you will be rearing its head to claim interest soon. I suggest you find someone else to foot the bill if you want to keep your hold on your yard. At this point, you’re as an addict dependent on their fix. As one who goes too long without opium’s kiss may fall into deadly seizures, well, you get the idea. Best of luck.” Crocus murmured, sweeping his cloak behind him and vanishing.
Luchesi grunted and finished cracking his pulverized spine back into place, willing it solid again. His stomach rumbled, and he coughed up a remaining shade leech, which wriggled on the ground, squealing. Absurdly, he felt an empathetic connection with the lowly thing for just a moment. Perhaps, incarnations of emptiness were the only thing he could relate to now.
He was in a conundrum. He was reliant on the black rain coursing through his body to carry the slack now that he was running out of the Backyards’ good graces, but that very same substance was killing him. To foot the bill, as Crocus had euphemistically put it, he needed to remind the yard who was in control. What insights were there left to offer up as keys, what new show of resolve? He had come unwound steadily over time to a place of nihilistic misanthropy, and there was nothing new to learn about himself - he was exposed and ugly, turned inside out for all to see. He could have used the lost souls he carved up to suffer karmic rip in his place, as had the hapless spirits of the police he slaughtered, if he didn’t spend them all feeding the shade parasites that had commandeered and puppetted his body. Even if he were to start fresh now, like one who has starved until their belly distended, the exertion of ‘eating’ might very well kill him. The effort to manipulate the yards, connect to a wandering corridor, ambush an unwitting victim, and drag them back into his little funhouse might spend the last points he had. One soul wouldn’t be enough to cover this. A hundred wouldn’t be enough to cover this.
He heard Freyja humming in the distance.
But a Candidate’s soul…
“There’s the ticket.” Luchesi licked his lips. “Two birds with one stone, I’ve missed my dear little hellfire bitch.”