The sunrays were lukewarm on Richie’s cool, clammy skin, sheeted with a sticky skim of his own blood. His back was propped up against the stone wall of the alleyway, and had a smear trail of blood running up past the fringes of his clotted, dark hair, where he had slid down like cheese across a grater. His broken body sat in a crooked criss cross style, legs tucked in, but their fractures and bruising were evident, as was the blood pouring from the back of his gashed ankle. All across his body were the lacerations Luchesi had lovingly carved into him, all painting his body red. His head lolled on a loose neck, muscles losing tone and practically shriveling. The air leaving his mouth in quick, weak breaths was practically icy mist.
Richie was beyond his limit, well past the point he should have died. Hopped up on adrenaline and righteous fury, he could delay that outcome for a while, but in the end, this was as far as his ruined body could carry him. It seemed that his close calls and the luck they rode on was at an end, and death was imminent. Even so, he couldn’t accept that, refused to accept that, not while Luchesi still roamed free.
I… have to get up… gotta… gotta stop him… Richie thought.
He pressed his palms against the stone, struggling to find purchase on the wall slicked with his blood. His body quivered and trembled as he tried to force broken feet under him and stand, wobbling woozily as his light head rocked to one side, then the next, his frame swaying and staggering like a man so drunk he couldn’t see straight. He took one pitiful step forward, and his useless feet, compounded by his slashed tendon, caused him to drop pitifully onto his face. He grunted, clutching his slashed stomach and chest, and spat up blood. The knife Luchesi had plunged into his belly punctured his bowels or stomach, and his body tried to clear the foreign contaminants spilling into his digestive system. He felt nauseated, his body racked with aches and pains as he lurched and retched, the effort of throwing up itself using up what energy he had left to give. His dragons were no longer conscious to narrate his blood loss, but Richie could tell from the spreading pool that he was out of wiggle room.
35%... 40%... he tried to force his heavy eyes to keep open.
Groaning, he flipped over onto his back, face turned up toward the morning sky, panting. His fingers twitched and flexed, fists opening and closing.
“Dammit… dammit… dammit… Dammit!” Richie swore and screamed, a primal, animalistic shout of rage and frustration at his own uselessness, up toward the sky.
It was the same sky Mason had been looking at, stupefied, as he saw the funnel of blue energy that had connected the unseen boy to the heavens he sought to climb.
“Have… have to… get up!” Richie craned his neck, trying to sit up. His stomach cramped, and the wound spurted blood. Richie gasped and fell back, going limp again. Blood poured from the punctures in his arms, joining the puddle forming beneath him as it spread.
In the darkness of his fading vision, he saw a ripple. Time slowed, and out of the darkness of encroaching death, he saw black rain fall and form a puddle across from him. Reaching spidery fingers out of the pool of darkness, a hunchbacked, spindly shade pulled itself out of the circle of black rain like one pulling themselves out of a hole in the ground. It regarded Richie, antenna twitching in sounds that could be mixed curiosity and pity. It tilted its head at him, chittering.
“Fucking… bottom feeder… not… man enough… for a fair fight?” Richie grunted, one eye falling closed, the other glaring contemptuously at the soulless creature looking down on him.
The thing held out its fingers, and drops of black rain seemed to gather at its fingertips, dislodging and falling to the ground, plinking. Richie recalled how O’Gravy had rebuilt and reforged his broken body into the towering behemoth that clobbered him and Cuppy, and how the manticore had tried to avert its fated death by drinking from the corrupted pond. The substance not only corrupted its users into demonic beasts, the false evolution it promised could salvage and rebuild their ruined bodies, a classical deal with the devil, a pact to spare their lives and grant them power, at the expense of their souls. Richie saw the drops drawn toward the blood beneath him, seeking it out, looking to bond with a new recipient and bestow its dark blessing.
“As… if!” Richie spat. “Get that shit… away from me… get lost!” he growled. “I’m human, got that? Down to the marrow of my bones! I fight as a human, and I’ll die as a human. Take your little offer and shove it!”
The shade chortled, but nonetheless retracted the drops, falling back up against gravity into its fingers. It sat, crouched on its haunches, and waited for the slab of veal to expire.
“I hope… you choke on my soul… you scum!” Richie coughed up more blood.
Not the most glamorous way to leave this mortal coil.
Above, more rain seemed to fall - actual rain, from unseen clouds. The drops were warm and pleasant on his forehead. Sensing them, the shade reared back, rippling as though a cat whose hair stood on end, and it hissed. It disliked the rain, and retreated, becoming just another shadow that glided up the stone wall and away. There was another ripple, this time of the very blood that had pooled beneath Richie’s body. His dragons stirred just a moment, glowing faintly, as they sensed he was in the presence of a wandering corridor, one that had the good grace to drift right beneath him.
He sank through his own blood, as if into a red pool, the circle of light above shrinking and fading away as he drifted deeper and deeper. He realized he didn’t need to breathe, whether in blood or in the water it shifted into. Red became blue, blue became cobalt, and cobalt became stygian black. Was he receding into the Abyss he had heard so much about?
His eyes closed, and he breathed what he assumed was his last breath.
…
He saw a halo of light. Blinking through the clearing murk, he realized he was floating on his back at the bottom of a pond. Confused as to why he seemingly wasn’t dead, Richie began kicking his way toward the surface, and groaned a bit underwater at the revelation of his still-ruined legs. Feeling the smooth stone wall of the flooded circle, he grabbed for handfuls of moss and scaled his way to the top, head breaking the surface and being hit with a warm, spring-like breeze, carrying the scent of many flowers. His hands gripped the ledge of stone, reminding him of flopping his belly onto the warm poolside after a swim in summer days. He lifted himself out of the water and looked over his body, seeing the cuts that covered it. The bleeding seemed to be slowing.
The sounds of the trickling and the flowing of water had become the ambient pelting of distant rain whose drops Richie could not see once again, and Richie slowly realized that he had been here before. He was within the outer rim of the circle of six concentric stone circles, all filled with sparkling cyan waters, all rippling, under the alternating shade and sunrays of interlocked trees. Around him were empty bird baths and the phantom sounds of chirping birds within them. All about were ivy-wrapped marble columns and tiles set into the overgrown, wild ground. In the distance, he saw grid-patterned olive green gates framing this aquatic garden, and further still, saw a white archway into a bright clearing. The water drops around him carried musical notes, and he realized he could see something like flares of blue fire in his mind’s eye when he pictured them, will o’ the wisps drifting in the aether and whispering to him.
He followed their call, skipping across the edges of each circle, one by one, till he came to the center. He wondered if he wasn’t already dead. He couldn’t feel pain at the moment, so it stood to reason. Then again, if he had died, that shade wouldn’t have just let his ghost float off. He looked over his hands again, seeming to see the lines glow like archaic glyphs encoded in some ancient language, as though he were suddenly a palm-reader or something. The air was soothing on his body, seemed to knit his wounds painlessly, even almost tickling. Still, he grimaced a moment that he had left blood in the water, drawing an unconscious association with alerting predators to a wounded easy meal.
The ground shook a little, and then, out of the innermost circle, a huge column of water erupted and broke. From the scattering spray, the slick, scaly body of the albino alligator emerged, spreading its saurian jaws wide and roaring, flashing hundreds of stake-like teeth and setting its fleshy throat vibrating.
“OH YOU ARE THE LAST THING I NEED!” Richie shrieked.
The gator lunged, jaws snapping - and Richie was suddenly as a stick jammed between rows of teeth, his hands pressed into the fangs above, his feet punctured by those below. The thing bellowed and hissed, trying to bite down and crush the boy desperately straining with every ounce of mind, body and soul to pry the literal jaws of death open. He began to buckle, his efforts useless against the bite force of the big reptilian ‘pea-brained hypercarnivorous fuck’, as he had so tastfully put it before.
A sigh seemed to catch the wind, fluttering loose leaves and the smell of coming rain. From above, a light drizzle descended, smelling of perfume and morning dew. The gator froze in place, trembling in distress as the drops poured down on it and Richie alike. Richie felt his strength begin to return, his cuts closing and fading. His slashed heel closed itself off, the tendon reconnecting and its fibers unfraying themselves. As Richie’s strength and spirit were renewed, the gator’s fell, body shivering as though the rain had drained it of its strength. With a final grunt of effort, Richie threw himself backward, out of the gator’s jaws, which fell shut with nothing to show for it. Richie landed on the edge of one of the rings, his legs splashing in the water, and he looked up at the gator as the beast crouched, tail swishing, eyes wild.
Then, there was the sound of rapids from behind, and a single rolling wave, like a self-propelled tsunami, glided across the rings, catching the sewer monster and washing it away. Richie, eyes wide, stood, and turned. A funnel of rain formed in front of him, and, as if a mirage forming out of mist, the profile of the figure he had seen only in reflection before took shape. She was a tall woman, an unreal eight feet or so, with odd vibrant yellow skin painted over with abstract, spiraling blue stripes. Purple hair fell past her waist, framing a pretty, kind face with gentle blue eyes. Pointed, elf-like ears poked diagonally out of her ever-slick, wet violet hair. Richie couldn’t tell if she was stark naked or wearing a form-fitting bodysuit the same color as her flesh. Had this been the real world, his typical reaction might have been the result, but he was in too much of an odd trance, guided again by the novel tug of this place, which he realized he had first seen at the end of the ivy tunnel.
“Welcome, Richie. I am Droplet of the Rain.” the nymph bowed her head, smiling warmly.
“I’m Richie, of the Gutter.” Richie shrugged.
The spirit covered her mouth as she giggled quietly. “Yes, I know. Walk with me.”
She began walking forward, stepping across the surface of the pond as though it were solid ground, ripples spreading under her feet as the only sign of her passage. Richie complied, keeping a few paces behind. The being looked back over her shoulder. “Don’t dawdle.” she chided.
They came to the threshold of the archway, and Droplet stood aside, gesturing within. Hesitantly, Richie stepped through and found himself in the heart of the garden he had only seen piecemeal until now.
Light filtering through the canopy cast a dreamy green glow on the irregular rises and falls of root-webbed soil and moss-eaten stone beneath the surveyor's feet. Before him lay what looked like an innately-carved well, long dried and in the process of being reabsorbed into the earth. Fanciful church-like archways stood freely for structures that stood no longer, or perhaps were some sort of indicator of a servant of faith stepping through the doorway into a realm of the ethereal at the end of their pilgrimage. A circle of marbled columns spiraled around the whole of the stone-laden clearing. A pond flanked by feathery railings stood pristine and clear after all this time, and someone had either transplanted koi continually, or else they had sustained their own population throughout the decades or centuries, surviving on fallen insects and such. Beside a platform-raised pure white gazebo branched a jutting rectangle of matching stone, whose immovable door was marked with some scrawl of runic dead language. At the center of the carved hieroglyphs was the sigil of a single staring eye, encircled by lines that must have represented beams of light, like the shining crown upon the sun that was the corona. Here, Richie stood amidst the breeze and the distant footfall of deer.
The underbrush and pressing trunks gave way to an open, trimmed path lined with rounded overhangs of twigs and branches, like a subway tunnel framed in forest. Rounded, decorative stepping stone platforms took Richie an indeterminable distance down the tunnel, till at last it opened into a hidden garden of lush broad leaves and dizzyingly fragrant petals. A tiered fountain took the centerpiece of a raised circle of steps, and forming a perimeter around the fountain were five marble statues - one of Cuppy, one of Freyja, one of Chikita, one of Holly… and one of himself.
He touched it curiously, poking the chest. “Why is it taller than me?” he grumbled.
“You’re still fledgling, you’ll grow.” Droplet said.
“So, this one of those circular time things?” Richie asked.
Droplet giggled again. “Something like that.”
“So, where am I?” he asked, examining and comparing his replica’s pecks with his own.
“The Garden of the Forged. It houses the living memory of a long lost legend. Or, perhaps it’s someone’s ongoing dream. It’s been here, waiting for you. Though, it was unclear what face you would take.” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“The shape of these idols is variable, or rather, it was. There are twelve vacancies at a time, and now, five have been filled, for now, at least. Look.” she swept around the circle, and Richie realized there were seven more statues forming a perimeter around the inner circle, their faces and forms blurry and indistinct. Within the circle of the inner five was some kind of angular shrine, and on its face was something like a sundial or a clock, with twelve emblems in place of numerals, set in an intricate, stained glass pattern that drew mental comparisons to a thousand different pentacles, tables of elements, runic circles, and occult or religious symbols, all at once.
“For time immemorial, the Garden has waited to be discovered. At last, the first in an eternity has found it, and my role is soon fulfilled.” Droplet smiled, eyes glittering. A raindrop-shaped pearl dangled and swayed from a black choker about her neck, making jingling noises.
She heard tinkling, blinked a bit, and turned around to see Richie taking a piss into the pond.
“I… um…” she bit her lip.
“Sorry, couldn’t hold it.” Richie said sheepishly as the golden arc continued flowing.
“That was sacred water, but… whatever.” Droplet blushed purple.
Richie pulled his pants back up. “That’s better. Alright, so, where are the pearly gates? Or, more likely, smoldering pit of sulfur?”
“No such luck, I’m afraid.” Droplet shook her head. “You aren’t dead. Furthermore, what you are can’t die. Not really. Faces change, but archetypes are eternal, as above and so below.”
“Archetypes?” Richie asked.
Droplet nodded, smiling fondly at the wheel of sigils.
“All things link together. The road maps in the hearts of children together form a path to places of power like this. You can consider this garden something like a layline, or a chakra of the world itself. Of them all. You are a microcosm of the macrocosm, a small part of something whole and omnipresent, as a single cell comes together with many to form an ultimate body. To touch a point of power is to feel the heartbeat of the entire organism, and remember what you are.” she said.
“We are One.” Richie repeated, the words feeling familiar on his lips.
…
Luchesi scoffed at Cuppy, the comedy mask face set in his chest morphing into a mocking frown. “You doubt my word? I assure you I wouldn’t lie on this matter, oh no. A rival Candidate’s life is a sizable accomplishment under my belt, I afford this murder in particular the utmost dignity. He and you both should be honored to be stepping stones under my feet.”
“Shut your mouth!” Cuppy barked. “There’s no way you could kill Richie! Never! Not in a million years!”
Luchesi scraped two of his finger blades together impatiently, kicking off sparks. “That’s not really something you should claim without any evidence, now is it? How are you so sure I didn’t put the mongrel down?”
“Because Richie will conquer the heavens!” Cuppy shouted, eyes resolute.
Luchesi’s bells jingled and his head lolled, shoulders sloping at a grotesque angle. He heaved, a rattling, phlegmy giggle choking his body and making it rattle like a hollow gourd.
“What an idiotic, meaningless claim. You know, idealistic drivel like that really drives me up a wall. Your idiotic hopes and dreams aren’t worth dirt!” he reared his head back and hurled another jet of acidic sludge from his mouth.
Cuppy threw his arms wide apart with a battle screech, and a grid of intersecting wires pulled themselves taut across the grounds between him and Luchesi. The sludge hit the gate and was forced through the intersecting metallic threads, cubing it into splashes that went in different directions, mostly to either side of Cuppy. Still, a spray of the stuff hit him in the left side of his face, splatting over his eye and forehead, matting a loose lock of blond hair. Sizzling steam began to rise off of his brow, and Cuppy’s pained grunt gathered strength and became a thundering cry of rage.
Luchesi tired of playing with them, Cuppy’s little outburst spoiling the mood. Flexing every claw on his body, the jester lunged, chopping through the garrote wire net, advancing on the band of plebians.
-
“This circle…” Richie examined the wheel of emblems, set in that stained glass frame, each sigil corresponding to a number on a clock face.
A strongman bending a barbell and twisting it into a pretzel.
A hand with trailing threads unraveling balls of yarn.
A glowing red mechanical eye.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
A yin yang symbol of intertwined wolves, one black, one white.
A red-tinted, shaggy beast in black.
A full blood moon.
A skeleton against a sallow sky, reaching toward a glowing green orb.
A shadow stretching its clawed arms across a purple backdrop.
A golden sundial with a crescent moon centerpiece.
A microscope slide of a blood sample mixed with rose petals.
A snowflake nestled in the bloom of a cherry blossom.
A crow perched in a craggy high tree, against a teal sky.
1-12, in all.
Richie traced the circle with his fingers, trying to see if he intuited anything from the touch, as Holly might. “These represent us too?”
“Potentially.” Droplet said. “Phantom pains aren’t all that linger. So too does transcendent will. Inherited will.”
“Inherited?” Richie asked, looking back at the blue-striped nymph.
“Yes. Like a fairytale book from ages past, some stories, concepts, myths, and ideas survive across vast gulfs of time, and you, the reader in the present, may find something within those pages that resonates with you. And so, you form a link, a bond, with the author, even long after they are interred into the grave, gathering dust. As with the bonds of romance, there may be a perfect soulmate for everyone out there, but, with a population of seven billion on your earth, it is unlikely the perfect match will ever meet each other. Still, the fleeting nature of these bonds and potential bonds also carries them onward, against the onslaught of time, like leaves in a breeze. Ideas wait. Promises wait, for one of a like minded soul to discover a will long buried, and exalt it. The martyr who dies in the comfort of his cause being immaterial, unable to be pinned down, leaves an inheritance, sometimes centuries or millennia later, for the next free spirit to take into themselves.” Droplet said.
“And my legacy? Whose fight am I being conscripted to finish?” Richie scratched his head.
“Legends take many forms. You are by no means obliged to become one in the new pantheon of the 12. However, you were only able to find this place because your heart, and that of a fallen kindred spirit’s, called out to each other. You are the favored next of kin to take up the mantle of Forged.” Droplet said.
“What’s this?” Richie traced the hidden outline of a great, green snake, in the ouroboros configuration, encircling the wheel of emblems. It had been buried and invisible beneath heavy dust.
“Leviathan.” Droplet said, tone somber and a hint superstitious. “Billions of years ago, in the primordial world beyond these, twelve Forged came together to slay a great Demon Lord of Envy, who, in its contempt for all other life, would have devoured the world.”
“These heroes. What happened to them?” Richie asked.
“It is lost to time. They destroyed the adversary, but drifted away soon thereafter, leaving behind only their legacies to be taken up, should the need ever arise, and should suitable inheritors come into being. He believed you were one of them.” Droplet said.
“He?” Richie raised an eyebrow.
“The boy who dreams this garden, whose soul was split in two to create it. The other half was eclipsed.” Droplet said.
“Eclipsed by what?” Richie asked.
“By the Void.” Droplet gestured beyond the circle of hero statues, and beneath the spiraling thorny grip of black briar vines, Richie saw a statue of the cobalt-cloaked Faceless Man.
…
Screaming ghosts with tortured faces swirled around the darkened arena, their howls like a tempest. Festive fireworks continually exploded overhead, raining neon embers on the chaotic battle below. Luchesi leapt and contorted through volleys of Cuppy's explosive pellets, and hung over him in midair, claws swept back, ready to swing. Cuppet intercepted him, blocking the blades with his own. Cuppy snapped his fingers, flinging a ball of twine behind the jester. It unraveled into sixteen strands of pointed metallic strings, which then descended, embedding themselves in Luchesi's back. The monster grunted as the impaling threads slunk into him.
He staggered back, long, scythe-like limbs swaying. Cuppet advanced, body spurting steam as he swapped to his so-called autopilot mode. Luchesi roared, ready to clash. But then, it felt as though a blender had begun bouncing all around inside his body, causing more black blood and slime to spurt from his wounds and orifices. Cuppy was still controlling the threads that had burrowed into the harlequin's body like serrated parasites, and they were running wild, lacerating, puncturing, and rupturing organs.
The jester fell to one knee, and Cuppet slashed out his throat. A flat spray of blood flew from the slit throat, and more black blood burgled in the back of Luchesi's throat as he began drowning in his own blood. Cuppy saw gouts of blood break away into strands of floating mist, which twisted into tortured faces before fading away. Bit by bit, they were depleting his extra lives, the shades he had merged taking the fatal hits.
Cuppy sprinted toward the jester. Luchesi in turn planted his claws in the ground and began lifting himself, the gaping wound in his neck trying to close itself. He was ready to strike back at the moppet.
Cuppy threw a final swap doll in front of him, and fired a dart string into it. Wasn't he out of spares? Luchesi read on Cuppy's face that this had been a lie, specifically to get his guard down.
Dai Funka felt a sting in the small of his back, and then a whoosh of air as he suddenly took the place of his squat effigy. He was in front of Luchesi.
Shit, this guy's attacks are dangerous, they hit me internally and wreck my body from the inside out. Luchesi remembered.
Dai Funka pressed his palms together.
Dodge. I've got to dodge! Luchesi thought.
Cuppy snapped his fingers again, and the threads he had left in Luchesi's body spun all around, snaring and slicing through everything in their path again.
The jester's chest face scrunched up in pain, spitting out blood and bits of shredded kidney. More dissolving shades were expunged from the plaster-like mouth as ghostly faces dyed black.
Dai Funka's twin palms struck the mask in Luchesi's chest. It cracked ever so slightly, and quiet seconds later, a shockwave spread outward from Luchesi's feet, as though he had been the epicenter of a big mushroom cloud. His torso visibly rippled in waves, and his head was thrown back, jaws coming apart. He shook, and a huge column of black blood erupted out of his mouth in the shape of a mushroom cloud.
Cuppy looked around and saw the dark contours of the black globe that encompassed them all begin to crack. He remembered his first venture into the yard, and how he had wrested control from El Cuco, reshaping the living fantasy in accordance with his wishes. At that the time, the thing that went blep in the night had dragged him into some shadowy pocket dimension between the facades of carefree, child-friendly safe zones, not unlike the shades themselves, spawning like fruiting fungus spores in a nexus between closet interiors and the spaces beneath beds. During the crux of that battle, Cuppy had visualized his exit from that nightmare space, manifesting a pair of doors which opened wide, as he flung himself through them and into freedom - dragging the boogeyman along with him, into the light of judgment.
"You can't hold me." Cuppy said.
Cuppy's parasite strings exploded out of Luchesi's mouth along with the fountain of blood like streamers, then fell to the ground, wriggling and twitching in the pool of blood like worms. Luchesi swayed on his long legs, eyes rolled back into his head.
Cuppy closed his eyes and thought happy thoughts.
-
Outside the frozen cocoon of spacetime at the center of the circus floor, Kasper saw the edges of the anomaly begin to crack like glass. A surge of spring-green light spread outward, shining through the cracks, and this aura carried the scent of rolling hills slicked with dew, and the brackish aroma of a wide and mighty river as well.
Another wave of green energy surged out, and the cocoon exploded outward in an expanding bubble of rainbow plasma, flashing different bands of neon seizure-inducing colors as the shards of shattered spacetime flew about like glass shrapnel.
Kasper shielded his eyes and flinched back, as though he were in a car crash and the windshield had blown in. As the light faded, Kasper looked again, seeing the roaring flames had been largely blown out by the massive wave of displaced air, leaving a few sparse fires crackling in random places. In the center of the arena, the Cuppy Bros, Leon, Sparta, and Dai Funka stood, surrounding the dazed, staggering Luchesi.
Luchesi’s mask fluttered its eyes as it faded in and out of consciousness.
Looks like he’s on the verge of losing it again. We’re overwhelming him faster than he can recover, in body and mind alike. We need to seal off his moves and put him in a corner. He won’t get another grasp on himself this time, we’ll trap him like game in a beartrap.
Cuppy swallowed. A cornered rat can bite hard.
Still, it was good to know that Cuppy was able to daydream himself out of the grasp of the Void. He was as the ether fog breaches had been described themselves, a burst of creative power filling out and displacing the reality - or in this case, the lack thereof - with itself. As if to confirm this thought, the very hole that had been blown apart beneath them by the bomb was gone. The escape from the shadows had removed a goddamn hole.
Leon darted forward, retrieving his whip. He flourished it, spinning his whip round and round like a green and pink cyclone. Cuppy felt his curls lifted and pulled forward by the wind. Leon thrust his arm, and the whip lashed forward in a spiral motion, looking like a slinky or a spring put on its side. It whirred like a drill, and struck Luchesi in the chest, hitting the plaster-like face embedded there. Already cracked from Dai Funka's palm strike, the mask was vulnerable. The 'drill' pierced through and shattered the mask to flecks.
"Maypole Twist!" Leon called out, and then retracted his whip.
Cuppy looked up. "Donuts?" he asked hopefully.
Luchesi fell backward, writhing, pelvis turned up toward the rafters, body cracking as he folded himself. He screamed and wailed as black rain spewed out of his mouth, and the tumult of souls and shades inside his being struggled with each other to take control. His torso became a cancerous swell of screaming, shrieking faces again, roiling and boiling like a kettle, rippling bubbles in his skin. His four arms, wrenched behind him, fully extended, lifting his loathsome fleshy body into the air. The limbs freaked and cracked, dislocating joints as their claws dug into the ground, as if to anchor and brace himself against the onslaught of pain.
Luchesi, still howling, began rapidly crabwalking toward them. Sparta leaped to take out the monster's exposed belly, but a hooking arm came up and swatted him out of his arc. Four deep cuts opened up in Sparta's side, above the ribs, and he was thrown into the stands, crushing seats under his weight.
"Sparta!" Leon cried out, rushing toward him.
Luchesi's noisome tongue unfurled from his filthy jaws, and stretched like a giant chameleon's, wrapping its slimy, tentacle-like length around Leon's ankle. It cinched tight, and Luchesi yanked hard as though with a lasso. A huge arc ensued, dragging Leon through the air at breakneck speeds and slammed him into the ground, back first. He coughed, spittle flecking into the air, and heard a few vertebrae crack. The monster began retracting his tongue, dragging Leon toward its jaws.
Cuppet ran forward, scissor blades joined, and snipped the tongue right off. Luchesi screeched as black blood and maggots spurted out of the open wound. The severed section of tongue wrapped around Leon's ankle twisted and twitched, hissing like a living thing.
Cuppet flew at the reeling beast, backed up by Dai Funka. Cuppy dashed to Leon's side to look him over.
"You ok?" Cuppy asked.
Leon hissed, trying to sit up. It felt like knives plunging into his back. He gasped sharply, and fell back.
Cuppy nodded, and turned to rejoin the frey. Leon's hand clutched the boy's ankle, and he turned back to see Leon forcing one eye open.
"Gimme the juice. I need you to put your anesthesia string in me. I can still fight." he said.
Cuppy knelt and took Leon's hand in his, cupping it gently. "A quick patchwork string isn't like the protein threads I sewed you guys together with earlier. It will hold you together for a bit, but it won't actually heal you. You could paralyze yourself from the strain."
"I don't care." Leon said, eyes watering. "All those poor boys and girls, slaughtered like animals!"
Cuppy swallowed, then nodded. “Alright then.”
He expelled a white string from each digit, and embedded them in Leon’s body. They slank between his ribs and wormed their way toward his back painlessly, wrapping and weaving fractured plateaus of discs back together. Leon’s burning nerves were soothed and numbed, and his body ceased its spasmic trembling. He propped himself up, reclaimed his whip, and pulled it taut in his grip.
“Let’s finish this.” he said.
-
"Moses said that it was time to give back to creation." Richie said.
"Yes." Droplet nodded. "His namesake parted the sea. It isn't happenstance that so too did the good doctor quest across Coral Road as the tides were low. He seeks the heart of the power called God, to free it from the chains of oppression. The sum body of all things is not everlasting in and of itself. As with shed skin cells being replaced over time, renewal is a requisite part of the cycle. That time has come again. Chosen ones are those who bear this burden. The heart of God calls to kindred spirits. Resonance is the means by which the chosen are selected."
Richie blinked, awestruck, and looked up toward the azure sky.
"I'm… like God?" Richie asked.
Droplet nodded. "Consider this garden Eden, where it all begins. Please. Save our beautiful world. You may have forgotten while in the depths of despair, but life is a precious thing. You never know when it can disappear."
Richie felt the winds blow through the trees, shaking loose leaves. He saw his glimmering reflection in the waters, saw his mending cuts fade to scars, the waters of life renewing his strength and spirit. Droplet's gift.
He turned to regard her again - and saw only the falling drops. Droplet had stood sentry to this garden, this Eden, for so long. Now, her purpose was fulfilled.
Richie felt a wistful melancholy in his heart.
"Droplet… thank you." he said.
-
As he stood, golden mane flowing, Leon found his mind drifting and was unsure why. He dwelt on how he and Dai Funka had first come to know each other. Beyond the trappings of wrestling arts, they shared another commonality that had intrigued the Lion Tamer. It was tradition for wrestlers to adopt pseudonyms, stage names to make them sound more impressive and stand out. Flashy, a persona to carry into the ring, like play actors upon a stage, embodying their assigned character. In sumo, this iconographic title was called Shikona. Dai Funka translated to Great Eruption. That name had grabbed Leon's attention, seemingly randomly. Now he wondered if there was such a thing as coincidence. The yokozuna had been there after all, on the island of the Dragon's Dominion tournament, albeit on different sides at the time. The shared hired muscle pool of Cultivator Corp and Red Lotus's joined forces had themselves been contracted by a cult to capture those bearing Richie's marks. Was that a coincidence as well? Why was it that the seeming lone survivor of that mass sacrifice had crossed paths with two veterans of the tournament? And Richie's marks themselves - eastern dragons.
He so reminds me of you, Shinsei. Leon thought.
Luchesi spun around and round, all four arms outstretched, claws flexed, splayed, and gleaming, like a ghostly pale tornado. Cuppet whirled his head around and round, winding up like a clockwork top, his arms outstretched, gripping a scissor blade in either hand as he had back in the forest. His body finished winding itself up, and then rapidly unspun, making the puppet a blurry whirlwind of chopping power, just like Luchesi was. The two edged tornadoes spun into each other, clashing, blades grinding against each other and creating a storm of sparks. It sounded like warring buzzsaws. Dai Funka tried to stand firm, shielding his eyes against the sparks. If this was the monster hunting Richie, he had to make sure it stayed dead. He didn't want to be responsible for that child being hounded by monsters anymore. He already shared blame for making him an orphan.
I must make amends. Dai Funka said, ashamed that Richie idolized him.
Cuppet held out admirably against Luchesi, but his vortex had only two blades, while Luchesi's had sixteen. A deciding clawstroke gashed and splintered Cuppet's torso, throwing him across the arena like a broken toy once again. His scissor blades were flung out of his hands, and one of them struck the wall beside Cuppy, missing his head by a foot.
Dai Funka thrust his palms outward against the jester, incurring defensive wounds as claws raked across them, splitting even his leather-like, hardened flesh. That gave Cuppy an idea too. He heard the pooling of blood over the bannister and under the seats, reminding him of the slumped corpses. His seeking strings snagged a belt from one of these poor things, seeing as they certainly wouldn't be needing it. The belt was swallowed down Cuppy's gullet, to be integrated into his string system.
Meanwhile, Leon hugged Luchesi around the waist, pinning his lower arms together. Undeterred, the wailing beast raised its upper arms, springing the blades from its elbows, and plunged these into Leon's shoulder blades. Leon grunted, knees nearly buckling, but he instead jetted the mutant jester by the midsection, shifted his grip to the beast's upper thighs, and began spinning, rotating around and round, swinging Luchesi faster and faster. The knives came out of the Lion Tamer's shoulders with gouts of blood, and Luchesi suddenly flew backward thirty feet and came to an abrupt stop, whiplashing with his body thrown out straight, ankles lashed together by the end of Leon's whip.
Giant Rope Swing.
Leon continued spinning like a centrifuge, gathering more and more centrifugal force with Luchesi flailing at the end of his whip.
Cuppy, sprouting a long leather bullwhip from each finger on his right hand, pitched in and lashed them about, flight paths of his whips and Leon's intersecting. At every repetition of that point in the spin cycle, Luchesi was lashed with angry leather whips, ripping through his flesh. Finally, with a yank on Leon's part, the tie at Luchesi's ankles came undone, and he was sailed, howling, into the stands, crashing through seats and cracking stairs.
Cuppy's fishing line sought the beast, sprawled on its back, and the hook dug into and snagged Luchesi's chest. Aided by his own internal strings manually undoing his limiters and reinforcing his body, Cuppy yanked, reeling in his catch. Luchesi came flying out of the stands, back to the arena, upper body and scythe-like arms flailing backward against the winds. Leon's fist, wrapped in his thorny whip, sank into the jester's face, the moment of impact perfectly lined up with the apex of Cuppy's reel. The monstrous visage split and sank in, its tainted blood splattering like ink drops upon the ground as the back of its head was slammed into the arena floor.
I think I'm finally starting to get how his body works. Cuppy thought. When he's in control of himself and his human sense of identity, he's in tune with his yard and able to control its creative power. But when he's pushed too far, he reverts, becoming animalistic and wild. In that state, he's constantly starving, trying to scavenge corpses to sustain himself. If there was no consequence for snacking on the bodies, he wouldn't have tried to restrain and compose himself though. When he was putting on haughty airs and playing with us, it was only after a pointed effort not to give in to his urge to eat. That means that he himself fears losing control, and knows he'll lose control when he feeds. When he was going berserk, the back of his soul begged for death, to be put out of his misery. Cuppy held his chin, watching black blood leak.
Luchesi, writhing and spasming on the ground, yanked Cuppy's barbed hooks out of himself and scrambled away, whimpering like a whipped dog. He, on all fours, climbed like a spider into the stands to have a bite.
"Don't stop him." Cuppy said, grabbing Leon with his strings. "Just watch and wait."
Luchesi crunched a dead man's head to a pulp in his jaws, sucking blood from the neck hole and shriveling the body like a juice pouch. As he did, he wretched and shook, irregular spine twisting side to side and making cracking noises. Cuppy saw shades, in the guise of leeches, squirming and quivering under Luchesi's skin, feeding through their host.
Luchesi's claw emerged out of the black rain pond earlier. It must have been connected to the greater supply underground. Freyja screamed "we're fucked" but couldn't say why. She must have sensed Luchesi's rebirth. Crocus soaked him in the black rain like a raisin in a rum barrel. Black rain is pure negativity, right? That means it reacts to negativity. It grows stronger, amplifies the negative traits or thoughts of its host, and creates a feedback loop, making the combined organism exponentially more exaggerated into a savage monster. The little guy became a big murderous bruiser, and the weird walrus's territorial killer instinct was steadily climbing through the roof. Luchesi is a cereal killer, his pathology begins and ends with gratifying his bloodlust. But he didn't start like that. Part of him is reluctant, ashamed and regretful of what he's become, or his body wouldn't be rejecting the black rain like this. When he eats a dead body, he's sending himself deeper into the downward spiral of insanity, and a perversion of his base nature. The black rain itself has set up shop inside his body, colonizing it like parasitic fungus digs its roots in an insect. When that parasitic body fruits, shades manifest within him, and feed on all that negative emotion he's been plumped up with. His instincts are hijacked toward feeding himself, but only the shades are nourished. The more flesh he consumes, the more his soul is consumed in turn. The shades will regenerate his body as long as they can, but if we just keep hitting him with everything we've got, one of two things will eventually happen. The shades will be beaten out of him first and leave him exposed to fatal damage, or he'll be eaten alive from the inside out, and we'll just have to kill the shades that come spilling out like fresh spores instead. Either way, his big scary transformation isn't a trump card. He's shown his hand, and already admitted that he's lost. "Kill me", he says. You've got it.
Luchesi tossed the wrung-out towel aside and crashed into the arena again, landing like a crouched, spindly crab-spider amalgamation. Cuppy saw the monster jester's sides heaving, body shuddering, breaths shuddering quickly. Luchesi's eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his breaths were clouds of cold mist.
He can't take much more. In the next minute or so, either shades will get cut off from their food supply, or they'll drain and discard the host. The pajamas jerk is on borrowed time.
"Surround him!" Cuppy called to Leon and Dai Funka.
They fell in line, and circled their mutual target.
-
“As above, so below.” Richie said, still gazing up at the sky. “If we are the universe experiencing itself, incarnations trying to heal the Abyss, to heal ‘God’... then what’s the thing calling itself God that the angels answer to, like Hraesvelgr? The thing that ordered Freyja’s life expunged from this earth?”
He tightened his fist. “Whatever you are, I’ll go up there and kick your ass. You and Crocus both, I’ll drag you down from your thrones, and end your meddling with the fates and free will of us lowly mortals. That’s a promise.”
The shrine of the Wheel of the Forged slid aside, making the sound of grate on grate, and exposed a stone staircase descending into a shallow cave. Richie hummed, decided this felt right, and descended the staircase.