The Wyrms of &alon

159.3 - The World Ends With You


Suisei's lips were too numb to form the words.

And he was far from alone.

The waves of power emanating from the holy artifact made the air throb like an inflamed wound.

The cloth must have been warded.

Far too many people took pataphysics for granted. They learned enough to do the basics—telepathy, backscratching, lifting stains off rugs—but no further. Any more specialized knowledge they might have picked up in their education got stuffed into the attics of their minds, in between the Ideal Gas Law and the box labeled Trigonometric identities, and—in Mu—the metrical scheme of The Third Resplendence of Naina Kourasai. But Suisei had always kept himself up to speed, even before he chose a career that required it. Unfortunately, every once in a while, he wished he'd let himself lapse a little bit.

With all the practice he had in seeing the unseeable, the power thrumming in the Sword of the Angel made Suisei's senses ring, as if a hurricane had filled the room. Nothing else could be said; he didn't have the words to describe them.

"Let's see what it can do…" Zaina said. He stood up on his tip-toes and grabbed the Sword by the hilt.

Blasphemy!

There were things men were not meant to meddle with.

Suisei lost his breath, and for a moment, he didn't know where to find it. Slowly, his legs remembered that they could move.

Zaina brandished the Sword almost effortlessly. "It's so… light!" The CEO staggered in surprise.

"What's it feel like?" someone asked.

Zaina tilted his head toward the ceiling and closed his eyes as he tapped into the Sword's power. Threads of light whirled around him, leaping like lightning.

Suisei screamed at the top of his lungs. "No!"

And he ran straight for the blasphemer. People looked and stared, but Suisei didn't pay them any heed, nor could he.

Time seemed to slow.

The scene before him blurred, starting at the edges. The room filled with sound and smell that defied description; the air around the Sword cracked like glass. Wisps of iridescent color seeped through the cracks, widening the breaks as they passed. And wherever the prismatic colors touched, flesh flowed like water in zero gravity.

Then time reimbursed Suisei for the momentum it had borrowed. He crashed into a wall, and everything went dark.

— — —

I was glued to the edge of my seat. I didn't dare pause the memory again, though I did summon another bucket of chocolate-coated caramel corn for the two of us to share.

The pain started at Suisei's sternum, where he'd taken the brunt of the impact, and spread out from there in a stinging spiderweb. The recoil was as much mental as it was physical. He stumbled back, dazed and confused. unsure of where he was.

It took a moment to realize he'd dropped his hilt-shaped patabattery. He looked around for the light, and then dove to his knees and picked it up off the floor as soon as he found it. The energy blade made a soft sound—like fingernails gently scratching stone—as it slowly dug a furrow into the polished granite floor.

Suisei grasped the hilt tightly, trying to stop his hands from shaking. Even with the blade's glow to light the way, irregular splotches of color flickered on and off across his vision as his eyes adjusted. A moment ago, everything had been lit; now, everything was in shadow.

He held out his energy sword as he looked around, shining its light. Immediately, a cluster of bright lights struck his face, making him wince and shut his eyes. A step to the side moved him out of the way and revealed the cause: there were fragments of a shattered mirror on the floor, across the hall, and they had reflected his blade's light back at him.

Suisei made the Bond-sign.

He was in a hallway, somewhere in Zaina's penthouse. The place was wrecked, just like he'd found it.

A typhoon wouldn't have caused as much of a mess, nor could it. There was broken furniture everywhere, even in the air. Upturned chairs, pieces of broken cabinets, bonsais, masks, dining ware and more hovered midair without explanation. Pits studded the floor, walls, and ceiling, bottomless. One of the holes was in the middle of the big window in front of the balcony. At its edges, he could see through the window to the outside, but in the hole, there was nothing but darkness.

Suisei used a gentle force wave on one of the floating bonsais. The floating potted plant didn't budge in the slightest, and Suisei was smart enough not to try again or otherwise push it further.

Right now, his first and only goal was getting out of this place alive.

There were more bodies on the floor, twisted and mutilated. As distressing as that was, Suisei was more worried about where the other bodies had gone.

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Even counting the ones he'd seen earlier, he hadn't seen enough bodies to account for all the party's attendees.

Suisei watched his steps as he made his way past the nearest floor-pit. A piece of dark porcelain evaded his notice until his boots knocked it across the floor and into the pit.

He froze in place and counted in his head, stopping once he got to half a minute without hearing any sound.

An object falling for thirty seconds would travel a little less than 4500 meters, more than ten times the height of the average skyscraper.

It was yet another reason to get the hell out of here.

With cautious steps, he moved down the hall. The gelid temperature seemed to drop even further. Then, he noticed a phantom glow on the floor that hadn't been there before.

The light must have drowned it out.

He followed the luminous shadow with his eyes, until he was looking once more at the shattered mirror

And in the mirror…—

—Suisei inhaled sharply; tightness clutched his chest. His breath might as well have been a geyser as it rushed through his sinuses .

The largest of the mirror fragments leaned against the wall at angle, giving him a glimpse through the flesh-splattered opening joining the hallway to the living room.

The Sword was there, shining as bright as midday, even though it lay on the floor like just another piece of debris. A deep cut in the air hovered beside it. Occasionally, dark fractals crackled along the cut's edge. As Suisei watched it, he heard his own voice whisper in his head. He couldn't make out the words, assuming they even were words, but he was certain of one thing: whatever it was, it was coming from him.

And he saw a creature. It was only for a moment, a brief glimpse as it passed over the Sword and lumbered into view with a wet squish. Wood furnishings, dish-ware, glass, and sharded porcelain crunched beneath its bell-bottomed footsteps.

Whatever chances Suisei thought he'd had of getting out of this alive had been wildly optimistic. Though, on the bright side, at least he didn't have to worry about where the other bodies had gone. They were right there, woven into the vile thing's body.

The monster was a composite, a watercolor bulb of flesh, clothes, eyes, limbs blurred together by a mad artist's hand. Prismatic colors wreathed its bulb-head in mangy flames. It pawed at the floor with its bloated, half-melted hands.

Suisei pressed himself firmly against the wall behind him. He turned his head up and away; he closed his eyes, not wanting to look.

What was happening? Was this even real? He wondered if he'd been exposed to some kind of hallucinogen.

No, that couldn't be. The slowly fading pain in his chest was very much real.

A tear ran down his cheek. Suisei had to bite his lip to stifle a laugh.

If his life hadn't been in danger, he'd have gotten down onto his knees and sang and prayed.

The holiest artifact in all Lassedicy was right there, in the next room over, as real as he always knew it would be. Even if it had been lost, he knew it couldn't have been destroyed. And now, knowing it was real, seeing it for himself, in the flesh, that filled Suisei with the kind of joy only song could vent.

If only he could have enjoyed it.

Suddenly, the creature stirred. It moved as if sniffing the air, and then turned.

Toward Suisei.

It growled.

Panicking, Suisei looked down to see the light in his energy blade flicker and sputtered, as if to match his flighty heartbeat.

The pataphysics was unraveling.

Suisei shook the hilt, first with his hands, then with his thoughts, but he couldn't stabilize it. The weave constantly threatened to drift apart like a dandelion in the wind.

The creature approached, its steps quickening.

The energy blade flickered faster.

In an act of desperation, Suisei flung the patabattery into a pit on the other side of the entrance to the room with the creature. The monster's headless apex seemed to follow the energy blade as it arced through the air and disappeared into the blackness. The field lines collapsed like dying fireflies as the tool fell. The light sputtered out, as did the energy blade and gentle breeze continuously wafting off it.

The creature stood in place for a moment, within arm reach of Suisei. The thing was nearly silent. The only sounds coming from it were the scrapes of its feet against the floor.

Suisei held his breath.

Suisei kept picturing the fascia of his neck being peeled away by the monster, plucking at picking at his sternocleidomastoid muscles or his carotid artery as it slowly toyed his head off his shoulders, one twist at a time.

Yet it didn't come.

With trembling eyes, Suisei watched the thing trudge back over to the Sword and the rip in the air and begin to pace around them one more.

Maybe it was just the adrenaline talking, but Suisei could have sworn the creature was drawn to the pataphysics. If true, it was a nice thing to know, and would have been even nicer if he could have used it to his advantage. Unfortunately, with the monster stalking over the Sword like a dragon over its hoard, any chance of that was nil, at best.

Hesitantly, with shivering limbs, Suisei got onto his hands and knees and crawled across the floor, trying to avoid detection. He squeezed his patabattery so tightly that his hands tingled.

He needed to get away; he needed to get someplace safe, to think. He kept craning his neck back to glance at the fallen mirror and check if he still had more than five seconds left to live. It made his neck ache. The momentary pauses between his every wiggle were little eternities. He hardly even noticed the sticky sensations when his hands pressed down on pools of half-dried blood.

The blood ran down a hole, never to appear again.

After getting far enough down the hall, Suisei couldn't take it anymore, and he got up and ran for it, pulse drumming in his head as he darted around the corner.

It was almost pitch black up ahead. The only light came from a distant window beyond a door kept ajar by the masked corpse of a waiter that had fallen to the ground. Sections of the wall had come loose, floating a couple inches away from their neighbors, turned at odd angles.

"Are y-you… real?"

Suisei froze. The hoarse, whispering voice—a man's voice—had come from the darkness.

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