Cuppy flew backward from the force of Justin’s blow, gasping as the wind was knocked out of his body. His tiny heels dug tracks in the loose gravel as he slid and fell onto one knee. He clutched his stomach, face screwed up in a grimace and eyes watering. He heard the dramatic shotgun rack of the imposing bully flipping his bee bee gun into position. Sharp clicks preceded painful impacts on the forehead and shoulder as he rolled to the side to regain his footing, only to fall under the tread of Ryder, who raised a heavy foot to stomp down on him. Cuppy lashed a line to a tree behind him and retracted instantly, pulling himself to a slide away from the heat of the battle. Around him, he heard the others kicking up dust. The gas mask boy, Taka, had entered the battle to help even the odds, swinging a long hoe around in air-swishing, baton-like scythe twirls, taking out the ratty kid’s knee from behind.
Cuppy knew all their names by now, and that they were missing some of their number on Dares’s side. The boy who crumpled at Taka’s diminutive feet in time to eat a football kick to the face from Freydis was named Hibiki. The brown-haired girl dropping a flying sidekick onto Ryder from behind as the big lummox pursued Cuppy was Asuka, and the orange haired girl trying to lash Justin’s beebee gun out of his hands with her jump rope was Jun. Of them all, Dares and Shunpei were the most skilled fighters, with the latter being the strongest. But they were all woefully outmatched by bigger, older, stronger kids, sans the notable exception of Taka, who was a tag-along.
Justin wrenched forward, pulling Jun off her feet and backhanding her viciously to the ground. Dares growled and sprang another protracted series of staff swipes at Justin, but was toyed with and repelled one handed, eventually being taken off his feet with an offhand leg trip that sent him skidding to his knees. Before the gang’s ringleader could bring his club down on Dares’s back, however, Shunpei had intercepted him, blocking the club with his tonfa and pushing back belligerently. The unusually shredded fifteen year old boy sprang off the ground with legs that looked as powerful as a mule’s, pressing forward in a determined bid to push the tall sadist off balance.
Cuppy was distracted, but felt his strings lift in the direction of a vibration out of his peripheral, where he saw Asuka being thrown by her leg, courtesy of Ryder. Reflexively, Cuppy launched a cushioning web from his palm, affixing its ends between the trees to catch Asuka.
“You ok?” Cuppy asked despite himself, even knowing that the character in this sequence could be neither ok nor not ok - whoever she and the others had been, including Dares himself, their ultimate fates were neither represented nor shared in this recording. Of them all, only Dares’s status could be inferred whatsoever, on account of what that spider had said - that one whose identity had been taken away had left this remnant, a dent in reality in the shape of a lingering will. Where other phantom pains had been parasitic hollows spasming in the final moments of their long-departed true selves endlessly, floating on the wind like empty plastic bags with soulless eyes, this one had somehow become its own environment in full. Cuppy could see everything as its past life had seen them, and wondered if he might experience similar illusions if he could dive behind the ink dot eyes of other de-souled husks.
“Let me at him!” Asuka frothed at the mouth, and practically flew out of the net to fruitlessly dive into Ryder again.
Cuppy took a silent bee bee pellet to the temple, his guard dropped from his distraction, and he went down. The weight and impact of things here seemed markedly different from how they were in Station Bay. That made sense, when he thought about it. In Station Bay, Cuppy had grown accustomed to taking hits from things that ordinarily would have killed a boy his size several times over. But here, he inhabited the legacy of a physically ordinary, if fit, fourteen year old boy. The perceptions that colored this dream world imposed their own sense of logic and order, and the bullets from Justin’s dinky gun, and the blows from his baton, both were devastating.
Cuppy let his senses flow freely as he came to that dark place again, the one he was thinking of as the continue screen already. He didn’t know if video games existed where he had come from, but Richie had told him about the ones he’d grown up with, and he’d had the chance to look at his classmate’s handhelds from time to time. It seemed the closest proxy to what he was living through; here, preprogrammed characters acted out their scripted lines and attack patterns, and Cuppy used his surplus of extra lives to take crack after crack at the questline. This was a stage he felt he needed to conquer - if it was anything like the shifting dreamscapes of the Backyards that Richie meant to take back from the likes of Luchesi and other defiling presences, then this might be a realm where perception and projection of will could influence the terrain. The Backyards proper would be under the sway of sentient, living, breathing rivals who had already bent those territories to their wills, and who would need to be usurped by way of greater control.
If Cuppy was to help wrench such places of power away from those who would abuse them, he couldn’t afford to lose to empty puppets like these. The enemies he faced now weren’t even real, and had no wills of their own. This was not so different from an ordinary dream, in fact, and Cuppy took spirit in that revelation. After all, while Richie and Freyja had known no shortage of restless nights spent with one eye open, ravaged by nightmares more often than they’d like to admit - Cuppy had always known only levity and bounciness behind his own closed eyelids.
They called that lucid dreaming, right?
“Again.” Cuppy popped another non-existent quarter in the arcade machine.
As many times as it takes. As long as he kept trying again, he hadn’t lost. In homage to that Dares kid who must have once dreaded this towering Justin, yet never stayed on the ground, Cuppy would always stand back up again. Unbeknownst to him, while his disembodied soul rode the roller coaster twists and turns of the false Riverview, his wrecked body had lain in the street only five or ten seconds since his heart stopped beating, thrown out of whack by the huge surge of electricity Mason had pumped through him.
As Cuppy’s essence battled imaginary bullies, as Chikita was thrown like a rag doll beneath the city streets, and as Richie threw himself impulsively into the raging tracer to liberate a former predator, an as-yet unmet presence fought its own battle within Cuppy’s still heart. A dark, solemn wooden puppet cross that looked more like an execution crucifix than anything else, threaded its countless strings through and around Cuppy’s heart, and within the veins of his extremities. It squeezed and stimulated, siphoning blood from Cuppy’s outer body parts and internal organs to manually circulate through his core. The animate artifact that had promised to salvage Cuppy’s life to him within the Abyss labored tirelessly to slap together an improvised CPR technique. Electricity had ‘killed’ Cuppy, and electricity was what was required to revive him. However, defibrillation worked best on hearts that hadn’t ceased pumping altogether. The more time passed since the last beat, the weaker the chances of pulling off a restart were.
As its host had learned to do many times, Cruciform Striga was forced to rapidly multitask and think on its proverbial feet.
There’s only 120 milligrams worth of copper in the human body to make use of, this is going to be a stretch. Damn you, Cuppy, think before you act! If you die, so do I! Still, there’s no host more suited to carry me. I knew something like this would happen sooner or later. You’ll thank me for your stunted growth when you see the elements of the body I’ve stockpiled come in handy. Iron, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc - all the metals I can concentrate, storing them like savings in a bank over the years, among other components. You never know when you may have to redistribute the balance of one’s internal chemistry. If I’m precise enough, I can create just enough coated wires to encircle the heart. I’ll have to grab the erratic sputters of fading electric impulses all over the body. Redirecting power from the brain - all those poor neurons - but it’s not like he wasn’t daft to begin with. Please work!
-
Richie dashed forward in a mad rush, tackling the Wampus cat out of the tracer's direct line of sight, somersaulting off to its side as Freyja ambushed it with a stream of fire. The cat's PTSD of its recent ass-beating triggered it to attempt to flee Richie's arms, scratching and hissing as its dilated pupils ricocheted between Richie and the tracer, unsure who it was more displeased with.
"Oh shit!" Freyja screamed, the tracer's hazy red gaze beginning to lock onto her, sending a searing pain through the left side of her body. She imagined this must be what it feels like to be stuck in a microwave, an intense vibration mixed with terrible burning. She partially morphed, her wolfish hide offering some protection against the direct blast to her skin, which felt sunburned beneath her fur. "How the hell do we kill this thing?!" She roared, voice distorted into a growl.
Had Chikita been there, she could have confirmed what being microwaved felt like; it didn't feel so good, man.
Richie tried to hold the berserking cougar - thankfully of the literal variety this time - at bay as it bit and clawed at him in a wild, terrified frenzy. He was reluctant to fully armor himself in scales, worried on an instinctive level that giving himself over to Dragon Sign would open the floodgate of his Seiryu's influence into his being, and cause him to snap the dumb thing's cracked neck in a territorial predator response. As it was, the wampus cat was in danger of snapping its own neck if it didn't hold still. The thing made its grievances more plain as it wrapped its twin tails around Richie's neck, trying to return the perceived strangling.
"Preoccupied!" he shouted at Freyja before his throat could close off under the embrace of the tawny, furry pythons.
Freyja's breathing grew rapid and hoarse as the burning sensation eventually dug past her pelt, the scent of singed fur tingling her nose. Her eyes widened, rage boiling in her pupils as she stared down this stupid asshole of a machine. Her body churned as she screamed through her teeth in pain, the tracer coming close to a full lock and beginning the deconstruction process.
A crimson glow formed in her belly, shining through her pelt as she began to shift fully, rising up to her neck where the glow intensified. White hot liquid, like napalm, dripped from her nostrils. She let out a guttural, primal yell, spreading her jaws and unfurling an enormous wave of blinding magma all over the tracer, which sparked and sank below the weight of the deluge, the thick inky smoke it produced obscuring the tracer's scans and leaving it blind and paralyzed.
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As the hellish glow rose and fell, flickering as the commingled demonic and digital fires licked at their backs, Richie glared at the maddened feline.
"Would you... just... get out of your own damn way?!"
Richie chomped down on one of the tails, eliciting a yelp, and broke free of the stranglehold. He plunged his fingers into the thing's nostrils and hooked it toward him, locking eyes.
"Look here, you little shit!"
He had no way of remembering this, but this was the same type of glare that had given the corrupted sea god pause back in the forgotten realm of Tide Town.
The wampus cat stopped thrashing, eyes widening in intimidated awe.
Richie lowered his voice.
"I know you want to kill me, but I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anyone. You're going to die if your wounds escalate any more. See that thing cooking my friend?"
- Richie pointed to the agonized demon goth. The counter-fried tracer was acting erratically now, spinning around like a convulsing fire tornado, its targeting system askew and locking onto random twigs and rocks. Freyja was circling it on a limp, eyes following it as their yellow banded rings constricted around her irises.
"We might be in each other's food chain, but we aren't enemies." he said to the cat. "That monster? It is on my shitlist. So, sit here and let us take care of it with minimal bitching. Or-"
Richie ripped his collar down, exposing his jugular as he released the wampus cat and stretched out his neck. "-be a shortsighted dumbass and see where that gets you."
Looking more demonic than Richie'd ever seen her before, at least in a humanoid state, Freyja took advantage of the thing's confusion, wading through her own pool of magma and digging her clawed hands into the metallic frame of the tracer, knuckles white as her grip crushed it. Her whole body shook as she began to bend the thing in half, the internal chips and wiring audibly crunching. With a grunt, she frisbee threw the thing into a boulder, dropping to her knees in the cooling magma, breaths unsteady from the exertion.
-
Cuppy's fishing pole, its heavy float ball retracted like a point on the end of a sword, clashed against Justin's billy club. While Cuppy's weapon would realistically be heavier, he lacked the physical raw strength of his imposing, athletic opponent. He was thrown back, his guard broken, and his fingers broken next as the club crushed them against his own reel. He bit his tongue and lashed his fingers around his rod, changing the raw, primal strength and determination of the night he smashed Luchesi's pretty face against a tree trunk. His thoughts overlapped with those of Dares, whose phantom outline enveloped him. His fishing pole was swallowed by the mirage of Dares's long stick, and as their weapons clashed again, a faint line of sparks spurred from the contact between them. Cuppy pictured red hot iron at a forge, being struck by a blacksmith's hammer again and again. The metallic clang became a tribal drum beat that smelled of the rainforest. Flutters of Cuppy's green fabric trailed in the empowering breeze around him, and Justin's scowl twisted as though he were being deformed by a nightmare into a humanoid abomination with burning eyes.
The trappings of the children's street brawl around them had fallen away like a play's three walls, and now they were in the burning, blasted hellscape of the city in the aftermath of Garm's rampage. Twisted heaps of wrecked combat choppers wept thick, oily black smoke into a night sky whose twinkling stars had been branded as sinister red flames by the distorting filter of haze that floated like brimstone clouds.
Cuppy was grabbed by the face and thrown, as though a baseball being pitched, over a wall of lingering flames, landing in a crater of crushed concrete and rubble he realized moments later was a giant hellhound's footprint. He struck the back of his head and saw murky, concussed replays of his more valiant attempts to win this game. He had sprinted against Freydis, ducking under the punk girl as she lunged at him with a crackling stun gun held out like a dagger, arcs of blue electricity shining like Richie's dragon tattoos. He looped string around and under the slick, black-grip self defense weapon, wrenching it free of Freydis's control as he ducked under the jab. In the same motion, he had taken and redirected the stun gun into her gut. She went rigid as her abdominals contracted involuntarily, freezing her in frame long enough for Cuppy to slip behind her and throw the back of his head into hers. As she fell, he once again took swift retaliation from Ryder, despite his best efforts to duck, bob, and weave around his swift jabs and hooks. A turn punch nailed him in the sternum and threw him against a tree trunk.
However, Ryder never closed the distance. Cuppy tore a handful of nasty caltrops from his bag, his hands protected by wire, and tossed them at the charging brute's feet. Like an enraged bull charging a matador, Ryder fell into Cuppy's composed trap. He helped and stood on one foot, clutching at his punctured sole, and Cuppy took this chance to lash an elastic wire between Rider's standing ankle, and his opposite hand. They cinched together tight, compromising the huge boy's balance and setting him swaying like a jenga tower about to collapse. Cuppy helped the process along by taking his scissor blade in hand, flipping it so that he grabbed it by the blade, and swung into Ryder's face like a baseball slugger. Ryder went down hard.
"The bigger they are, etc." Cuppy smiled.
And then another beebee pellet had hit him right in the forehead, sending him reeling. Justin advanced like a proverbial slasher toward his target, all other players in the game sitting out the final round as of several plays ago.
Now, here within the urban inferno, Cuppy stood again, feeling the bump on his forehead for a second before sweeping a stray blond lock back among its fluffy brethren.
"Having fun?" the fanged, mutating Justin asked as he walked through the flames to menace Cuppy within this incidental arena.
"I'm having the time of my life." Cuppy nodded. "Or, sort of life? Not sure, jury's still out on if I'm pushing up daisies or not."
"You will be." the monster growled.
False memory brought to life or not, the empty shadow still did a convincing job of being a spiteful jerk turning gradually psychotic.
Cuppy whistled.
-
Cruciform Striga finished wrapping Cuppy's heart, artificially beating, with many strings all coated in infinitesimally spaced metallic coating.
Clear! it announced to no one in particular, and routed electricity from Cuppy's brain, muscles, and nervous system all at once in an abrupt, powerful shock.
-
Cuppy lurched as the coming clash with Justin was subverted by the feedback from his physical body. The billy club swung toward Cuppy's temple, but they somehow phased through each other. The surroundings had become gray and staticy as he felt a great force tug on his astral form, trying to sift him from the layers of abstraction crumbling around him. He was in Riverview again, standing on the water like a buoy in the prelude to a dark rainstorm. Ahead was a titanic lift bridge with tall watch towers that shone red searchlights on the black surface, scattering a bloody glow across the ripples. A figure was clinging to the safety rail, facing the Nocturne River.
Cuppy recognized him. This was Dares. The black cloak's hood blew back, revealing a preternaturally aged fourteen year old face gone stark white and lined, eyes circled with dark purple shadow and roadmapped with bloodshot highways of red. Even his spiky brown hair, once verging on dark blond, now seemed something closer to wispy white gauze. He was drained of life, and drained of will, surrounded on either side of the bridge by tall, writhing walls of shadowy tendrils with many glowing eyes and gnashing white teeth within them. A pale full moon held aloft, bathing the scene in an eerie glow.
This is the end. Cuppy heard Dares think, in utter detached resignation.
-
Again! Cruciform Striga shocked Cuppy's heart once more, making the body arch its back, as if yanked up by marionette strings hooked into his chest.
-
Cuppy felt another tug, and more visions sailed across his psyche like an arthouse collage. He saw through Dares's childhood eyes, staring down the ephemeral-lit throat of his bedroom closet, stretching far, far back into mirrored halls with a great staircase to nowhere at the end. He saw him find his favorite stick on the beach, and spar with his friends, and swim in the river shallows. He saw an unsupervised sleepover with Jun; saw it tragically crashed as the Faceless Man appeared, tall and imposing like the ultimate boogeyman within the apartment's carpeted space. He saw Jun clutched under the cloaked spook's arm, eyes entranced as she had fallen helplessly under his spell. The place was engulfed in raging flames, choking the living room with thick smoke and superheated air that made details wavy with distortion.
"Get away from her!" Dares had screamed, sprinting at the Faceless Man, long stick clutched like a two-handed greatsword.
The Dark Lord stretched a bony, pale finger toward the now ten-year-old boy. A fuzzy red dot appeared at his nail tip, like a laser pointer for cats, and then a crimson beam of energy shot out of it and pierced Dares through the chest. Blood splattered Jun's sleepwalker's face, and Dares fell down, stick tumbling at his side.
"You… bastard…" Dares had whispered through his burning throat, his life's blood pooling around him.
"Yes, that's right." the Faceless Man said. "Remember me. Despise me. Hold a murderous grudge against me for making you powerless and stealing everything you care about. I will exist forever within your burning hatred."
Then he and his kidnapping victim swept out of the apartment, and the ceiling collapsed, burying the mortally-wounded Dares in flaming debris. The rest of the place collapsed, engulfing Cuppy as well, and then he was back on the water, watching a teenage Dares who had abandoned his quest for revenge, or else been drained of his will to endure any longer.
This isn't over. Cuppy heard. I won't die. Even if this body and soul are lost, new ones will rise to take my place. You are the one damned to failure, not me. With this, I'm taking you straight to Hell with me. You hear me, Crocus?!? They will come for you. The determination to spit back into the Void will never be snuffed out! Dreams will NEVER die!
And then the boy jumped into the river to drown beneath the churning swells. As the bubbles trickled to a stop, Cuppy saw the mirage of the Faceless Man raising his arms over the Nocturne River.
"Your soul is mine." the hooded wraith declared. "No escape."
-
Another shock to Cuppy's heart.
-
Cuppy plunged through the Nocturne.
This is the same sea of knowledge I passed through as my consciousness slipped away, out of my body. The Abyss…
…
Cuppy was standing amidst a great field of sloping grassy hills, scarred with countless goliath steel windmills. It was twilight, a low orange glow saturating darkened clouds hugging the horizon. A cobalt-cloaked figure swept across the grass and sat itself against a small, angular church with a great white cross rising from its acute roof's apex. The Faceless Man rested against the wall, the slope the church was on covered in vibrant crocus flowers.
"So this is where you live, you pajamas jerk!" Cuppy said to himself. He began rifling through his bag of goodies.