Hope

Hope was standing atop a pile of unconscious guards on the roof when the power went out. Her visor concealed a face dripping in disappointment. The former hero had spent three and a half hours thinking of the perfect catchphrase to use on the snipers. After going through umpteen variations of “you’ve been dismissed” and “you’re off duty”, she had finally settled on what she considered her magnum opus: “sniper no sniping”.

Bu,t of course, luck had no intention of acting like it was on her side. After a daring swing and climb through a last-minute thunderstorm, disguised only by Trent’s experimental cloaking tech, she finally leaped onto the roof, and yelled, “Sniper no sniping!” In return, she was met with a confused silence. It was only then that she realized that these people did not speak English. She had spent three and a half miserable hours beating herself over trying to come up with an enchanting performance for a crowd that could not even appreciate her.

She decked them extra hard to let out some of the frustration. It was all Ren’s fault. Since he spoke English, she had assumed the rest of them would as well.

“If that bastard dies on me, I’m gonna kill him,” she said out loud to no one in particular.

Hope tried to pry open the entrance to the building but the door seemed to be in a mood of its own. Or more likely, it was an electronic lock, and thanks to her genius planning, the power had already died. She was never supposed to enter the building. That was Trent’s entire plan: cut open a path for the other two and leave. That way, the bastard could make up any number of excuses. “They were captured by the guards.” “They tried escaping but ran into complications.” “We had to leave them behind.”

Just the thought of him made her blood boil.

With a few kind words and half a kilo of dynamite, the door opened itself up to her. Her first instinct was to jump in guns blazing but Ren had warned her otherwise.

“Wait at least five minutes before you enter,” he’d told her. “Your weapons are more effective when you have a lot of room to move around. If they spot you right away, it will make things difficult.”

And so, she sat and waited… and waited… and waited.

God, this is boring.

She looked around at the debris where she’d thrown her dynamite and wondered how many roofs she’d broken throughout her career. It had to be in the triple digits, the goons of Haven City had been getting lazy as of late. Apart from the once-in-a-blue-moon mafia families, being a vigilante wasn’t fun anymore. There was no challenge, no thrill. Even if she were to be cleared of all charges, what were the odds that people would just accept her? Labels stick. Hope knew that better than most.

She shook her head. This was not the time to mope. Her friends needed her. That was the only thing that mattered. She leaned over the opening she’d left in the roof. Even with her flashlight and thermal scanner, she couldn’t see a soul. One would think that a gaping hole on the top floor would be high on the priority list. There was nothing except the trickle of raindrops onto the blackened floor below. She gulped and jumped in.

The fourth-floor hallway looked like the inside of a sci-fi horror movie set. Hope walked cautiously, darting her flashlight all around. Bullet holes punctured every inch of the ceiling which was slathered in disgusting black goo. She noticed claw swipes all over the place. Hope estimated that they were thrice the size of bear claws, but no bear she knew could rip through solid metal. And then, there was the blood. The visor held back a good amount of the smell but it was still bad enough to make her nostrils flair up in distress. The place looked as though it had seen a war.

When Hope stepped forward, a ceiling light came crashing behind her. Startled, she fired an explosive round at the ceiling. Her flashlight revealed nothing but the scorch marks left by her own gun.

Come on, get it together.

Hope tightened her grip on the holster and kept moving. Ren and Aliyah were supposed to meet her on the fourth floor. She had to run into them soon.

“It’s okay. They’re good. They’ve survived this far. They can last a few minutes longer,” she told herself.

But then, she thought of the claw marks and what they could do to a human face. That encouraged her to pick up the pace. Five steps later, she discovered her first corpse. It wasn’t anyone she knew. She felt relieved. Then, she felt bad for feeling relieved.

Hope forced herself to crouch down and inspect the body. She’d performed countless autopsies as Vega but it never got easier. Every time she thought she’d gotten used to seeing dead bodies, the smell would bring her back to reality. She held the flashlight at its face for a close inspection. The man was decked out in full-body ballistic armor and had pale beige skin, like Ren. But it wasn’t him. She exhaled sharply and continued her analysis. Balding green hair, average build, eyes and mouth still forced open in rigor mortis.

“He died from shock. Almost instantly.” She sighed. At least he didn’t suffer.

That was the clean part. There were three deep cuts on his abdomen spilling his guts all over the floor in a pool of blood. The cuts resembled the claw marks in the hallway. Whatever had killed this man could cut through solid metal and armor designed to withstand ballistic rounds. Hope’s own armor was half as thin. She felt a little sick.

“There’s no time.” She shook her head. For all she knew, that creature, whatever it was, was still loose in the building. “They realized they couldn’t take it down and abandoned the castle. Smart,” she guessed, knowing that she couldn’t have been too far off.

She left the body and kept moving. Her friends were still trapped inside the castle. And last she checked, they were not wearing bulletproof armor.

She tried reassuring herself with her own words from the night before. “It can’t be worse than a dragon, right? There’s no way it can be worse than fighting a dragon.”

A deep guttural scream echoed from the far end of the hallway. Hope bounded toward it without even pausing to think. She readied her pistols with explosive rounds. Her hands were shaking, her heart was in her mouth but even a second’s delay meant losing a life.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

By the time she got there, the soldier was already dead. Hope fell to her knees, panting and cursing herself. It was too late. The victim displayed the same modus operandi: shocked face, three cuts to the abdomen, and spilling guts.

But the smell was recent. The creature couldn’t have gotten far. Every minute she wasted, that monster got one step closer to killing her friends. And she had no way of contacting them.

Perfect.

She thought of Sebastian. If she hadn’t asked him to run away, he could’ve done something. But it was his fault. Why the jealousy? Was he upset because she was finally happy with someone? She wasn’t rushing into anything. She liked Aliyah. She didn’t know why, but she did. She really liked her. That’s why she’d helped look for her sister. Because she wanted Aliyah to like her too. And now, she did. End of story. No problems whatsoever. She knew it well. Then, what was this nagging feeling inside her heart?

A soft hissing sound emanated from the ceiling behind her. Hope was frozen in place. It started as a cold wind blowing in her face. Before she knew it, she had a deep cut over her right thigh. She fell to the floor, screaming and gripping it in agony.

“Deep breaths,” she told herself. “Panicking won’t help.”

She used her uninjured leg to limp over to a nearby wall. The Whiplash pistol was already in her hand. “Deep breaths.”

She pointed her flashlight all over the hallway but found nothing. “Show yourself, coward! I’m not scared.”

A serpentine voice answered back from the darkness. “That tassste… So delectable…”

“So, you can talk!” Hope aimed her gun where the voice had come from. She ran a thermal scan over the area. It came up empty. She was quivering.

“That sssweet sssweet sssmell... That sssweet sssweet fear... We mussst have it all…”

Hope wondered if she was hallucinating. The creature had cut her. Perhaps, it was some sort of neurotoxin? That’s why the soldiers had those shocked expressions. Whatever the case, she knew one thing for sure, the creature was sentient. If she were to take it down, she had to force it into showing itself.

“Too afraid to look me in the eye, huh?” she said loudly.

“We sssee you... What you ssshow... What you hide... We sssee everything…”

“Oh y-yeah? That’s coolio. You can’t threaten me with my search history. Everyone knows I’m a sucker for big butts. Now, show your ugly face so we can finish this man-to-man. Or woman to monster thingy.” Hope winced at the pain from her thigh wound. It was burning like hell.

“Deflection… Classsic Hope.”

She fired an explosive round into the darkness. It hit nothing. “How do you know my name?”

“We sssee your truth... We sssee your craving… Your desssperation... Embrace it…”

“Back off, buddy! That’s the only warning you’re getting.”

“We sssee your pain… Your uglinesss… Embrace it… Join usss. You will no longer hurt…”

“Oh, fuck off! You know nothing about me! You hear me, ugly? You know nothing!” Hope retorted with a sudden power in her voice.

“You know you are worthlesss... That isss why… You need othersss to tell you… You are not…”

“T-that’s complete bullshit!” Hope barked back, her voice cracking as she did. Her fingers tightened around her gun.

“You need their approval… Without it… You are… nothing… Embrace it… Embrace your uglinesss…”

“I’ve had enough of this. You’re going down, fucker!”

Hope’s blood pressure skyrocketed. Overcome with emotion, she tossed away her flashlight and threw herself into the darkness. She jumped and danced with her pistols, firing round after round. They all missed their mark but she was past caring. She hadn’t been this angry since Trent had called her a terrorist. She fired explosive shells. When she ran out of those, she switched to incendiary grenades and failing that, ice bombs. The air was singed with all the elements. It burned and froze and glowed with vibrant colors and rang with her screams of rage.

By the time she ran out of ammo, Hope was more exhausted than she had ever been in her life. The air was choked full of dust and smoke. Despite her best efforts, she’d only destroyed about a quarter of the fourth floor. Kazanagi was built to withstand wars and Hope used mostly non-lethal shells.

“Got… you…” she said in between gasps for breath and collapsed.

She was immediately grabbed by a pair of tentacles.

∆∆∆

Opening her eyes, Hope found herself in a void. An endless sea of darkness stretched out in all directions. There was no ground beneath her feet and yet she didn’t fall. There was no source of light and yet she felt a comforting warmth, like the soft heat of a newly lit candle. “W-where am I?” she asked.

“Home,” a reptilian voice answered.

She looked around to find where it came from but to no avail. “Home? B-but there’s nothing here! Where the hell am I? Answer me! Who are you?”

The endless void gave way to a brilliant light. Countless shapes of different colors and sizes danced around her in a cascading pattern. Hope was half-certain she had gone mad. She tried to justify it as another hallucination but knew no venom on Earth could do this.

She watched helplessly as the shapes assembled around her. One by one, they all took form. With a striking dance, they gave rise to gargantuan mountains covered in grass and dirt, and valleys flowing with crystal clear waters. Then, they drew closer and assembled into asphalt-covered lanes and concrete buildings. The trees that peppered the landscape all but disappeared to make room for cities.

And in one of those cities, stood a small, wooden house with broken windows. The shrubs in the front yard had all but withered away. The outer fence was chipped in several places with a voracious rot eating away at what remained. As Hope stood outside that house, the reptilian voice croaked in her ear once more, “Home.”

Hope recognized a man’s voice coming from the house. She wished she didn’t. She gulped and leaned against the broken window to look inside. A middle-aged man with a beer belly stood towering over a little girl. She had bony limbs, messy blond hair, and held a teddy bear to her chest as the man bombarded her with curses.

“Why did you sneak into my room, you little shit?” He spat at her.

“I’m sorry!” She whimpered.

Hope stepped away from the window. She tried running but found her feet glued to the ground. Her body was no longer under her control.

“I didn’t ask for a damn apology. Answer me. Plain and simple. Why did you do it?”

“I-I thought that’s where you kept pictures of Mommy. You hadn’t come home since last night a-and I was scared… I missed her.”

“No!” The man raged. “You don’t get to miss her, you worthless brat. You’re the reason she left us in the first place.”

The girl tried running but the man grabbed her arm and threw her against the sofa. She was choking with tears and shivering uncontrollably. “Daddy, please! I’m scared.”

“You think she could love someone like you? You ruined her life.”

“I wanted her to like me. I really tried. I’m sorry,” she said weakly.

Hope felt as though she was being pulled into a sludge of liquid magma. Every second she spent inside that world, every moment she spent looking inside that house was a living nightmare. But she could not look away. No matter how she struggled or tugged or pulled, the creature wouldn’t let her. She begged it to let her go. It did not answer. She cried in helpless agony.

“No. You don’t get to feel sorry. You’re a fucking parasite. I could’ve had a good life if it wasn’t for you. Why did you have to be born?”

“Please, don’t hurt me. I’ll make you happy. I promise I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?” said the man, unzipping his pants.

The creature made Hope watch all of it. When tears clouded her eyes, it wiped them clean so she would have a clear view. She wanted to die. She tried biting her tongue but her mouth was frozen too. She would rather drown, hang, behead, or shoot herself dead than watch a second longer. The creature did not even let her blink. All she could do was watch and shiver as her younger self orally pleasured her father.

“Fascinating…” It whispered into her ear. “Thisss wasss the start… of your obssesssion… Your crusssade…”

Hope mumbled, unable to even speak.

“To get their love… No matter the cossst… But it wasss never enough… wasss it? It will never be enough… Never make you complete… Embrace it… Embrace your ugliness…”

As the cold, cold abyss encircled her flesh, Hope closed her eyes and accepted her fate.