2.4 - Twin Dreams, Twin Nightmares
Erien
God's Weakest Soldier
- Location
- Georgia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] [Of a Weeping Woman]
[X] [Of a Girl Saving Humanity]
Thanks to @Armoury for the beta!
—
You scream into the woman's hand, your voice muffled and producing no understandable sounds. She glances down at you, moving the hand away for a moment. Then chants… something before you have a time to scream out your spell…
Then things go rather dark.
—
Then things are… rather less dark, instead, your world is lit by an orange flickering that casts a schizophrenic light on everything. You blink, your eyes adjusting, and you find yourself no longer in the air, no longer being held, in fact, you find yourself standing… somewhere that was definitely not Fuyuki. You stood upon a beach, not the one of your hometown, and not the one of Circe's land either. But it was… familiar, the scraggly plants, the deep blue waters turned nearly black by the night, and the snow capped gray mountains in the distance were all vaguely familiar by now as being European. Or, at least, vaguely Grecian.
Your mind however, was not able to focus on that scenery for incredibly long, as your ears perked up at the sound of a sobbing woman. You turn left, away from the crashing waters, to see the source of that orange flickering light. A-
A town was burning, flames pillaring into the sky as screams echo in the distance. For one, brief moment, you had nothing but the sound of crying and that of water. And then, seemingly just by acknowledging it, a terrible moment came to pass. A village, not a large one, built in a similar style to what Circe lived in was aflame. Crashing timbers and yells of fright filled the air as trees lit, crops burned, and animals ran. You could see figures distantly sprinting, fighting the flames, running out of buildings alight. It was chaos, a familiar… sickening chaos.
Then you hear the sobbing again, and you tear your gaze away despite yourself. Looking far closer to see… Medea. She stands on the sands, staring out into the distant horizon, ignoring the flames and screams behind her. Her eyes are vacant, with heavy tears running down them to drip onto clothes. Her hair was matted with… blood, it appeared, streaks of it dripping down onto her face and onto the sand, painting the white a dull brown all around her. In her hand was… some form of knife, jagged and misshapen like a lightning bolt.
The blood upon her wasn't near all of it, bodies laid around her, decorating the sand. Men, women, children. A good half in all, none moving, but each had deep wounds decorating their bodies. Most, at a panicked glance, had the same shade of hair as her, with some blonde mixed in as well.
Drip drip.
The knife dripped blood onto the sand, held in a grip so tight her fingers were bleeding. She didn't notice.
"Caster?" you say softly.
You take a step forward, or, make an attempt to. Only to find your feet rooted on the spot, the sand you were standing in holding tight to your feet.
"I want to go home…" Caster's voice speaks up, so quiet you almost think it was an illusion. "Why can't… I go home?"
"Caster!" you shout. Struggling, the sand was like a living thing, crawling up your leg and crushing it.
You collapse forward, something snapping in your legs as the sand grows fingers to dig into your flesh. Then it tugs, yanking you back in the sand. Your fingers slam into the beach, tearing rivets in the ground as you are pulled back into the Earth. "Medea!"
Then, only then does Caster look up towards you, only for her hands to jerk to her chest, grabbing onto a blade now protruding from it. Appearing like a wraith or spirit, a man with blonde hair now stands behind her, a blank expression on his face as he wrenches the blade back, slicing Caster's hands to ribbons in the process.
The woman pitches forward onto the sand, and you try and crawl forward, wrench your legs free. Do anything, but the last thing you see if the man standing over her before you are yanked fully into the ground
—
You cough, sputtering, puking out wads of sand that aren't there as you kneel over the… asphalt. Your body ached, your legs throbbed, your throat felt raw, and your fingers were bleeding. But you were… fine. Then you looked up to see if Caster was there, and you were far, far less than fine. Your eyes stung immediately from the smoke that surrounded you, but you hardless noticed. As in front of you was…
Homurahara academy.
Or, at least, it used to be. Your heart chilled despite the heat around you, a sickening feeling spreading throughout your entire body. As, what was just earlier today a building you were working in, was now in ruins. Chunks were missing from the walls, from the ground, entire sides of the building were just gone. Through the windows and across the grounds were raging fires that engulfed the building. Just ahead of you, no more than three or four feet away from the edge of the street. Were your classmates,
Were.
They were petrified, frozen in a moment of time, shock and horror etched onto their now forms made of… stone? This… couldn't be happening. Not again, not in Fuyuki, again. Your mind flashed with scenes from that night, and you scrambled to your feet, your fingers scraping against the asphalt and concrete as you forced yourself upwards towards the first student. They were… you couldn't tell. Where their head had been was now just a bloody stump of a wound that ran down onto the gray like a macabre waterfall. Something had ripped it off, or broken it, but whoever the student was, they were far from alive.
Bile filled your mouth, then erupted unbidden, your hand clamping over your mouth as you puked out what little lunch you had eaten earlier in the day onto the ground. You found yourself there, on the ground. A puddle of blood was on the ground from where the student had been decapitated, and your manic, wide-eyed expression was staring back at you.
As was a skeleton, illuminated by the flame reflecting off of its bones.
You jerk to the side, rolling through the blood as sparks fly off the ground. In the skeleton's grip was a wicked looking, jagged black blade that just narrowly missed you. The skeleton turns its head to look at you, your eyes meeting the empty sockets of its skull. A growl made of chattering bones sounds out from its unhinged jaw. Then it lunges again.
You scoot back, your feet digging into the ground as you try to slide across the rough asphalt road you had landed on. The skeleton raises its blade to slam down, and you jerk your own hand up. "Αερο!" the spell comes out of your throat, less the careful conjuration of a magus, and more the desperate scream of a teenager trying not to be killed in the burning remains of his hometown.
But your circuits come to life nevertheless. A blast of wind slams into the torso of the skeleton, causing it to bend backwards until with several snaps of breaking bones the torso is violently ejected backwards away from the rest of the body, causing the rest to fall to the ground with a clatter a moment later.
You'd catch your breath, or even just take a moment to process that. But what you saw ahead of you was…
There was a small horde of the things, climbing over crashed cars and ruined streets. Pouring out of the buildings that surrounded the school to get to you. But that wasn't what you were focused on. It wasn't the bodies. It wasn't the scent of blood. It was the smoke and flame, it was all you could see for miles into the distance as Fuyuki burned, again. It was a memory you had held all of your life, it was your earliest memory. Now it had returned with a horrible clarity. Only before… only part of Fuyuki was ablaze, the screams, the shouts of agony. The people dancing within the fires, the heat peeling away at their flesh around you. Now? Now there was nothing but silence and a dead city. The only noise being that of the clattering skeletons running to end you.
Had they done this? Or was it something else.
Did it matter? Soon they would be on you, and nothing you had been taught could even deal with that many. Was there even anyone here to help? Would anyone even be here to help you? No. You couldn't think about that at the moment, pressing your hands down against the asphalt you pushed yourself back up onto your feet. Then you ran, sprinting through the streets as more and more of the skeletons crawled out of the buildings. Your feet skidded across the asphalt, slipping in the gas, oil, and… worse things as you leapt over rifts in the asphalt from where it has been torn open.
The world around you becomes a blur as you sprint through the west-end of Fuyuki, trying to find someone, something, anything.
And then you hear it, distant, like a bell. But it becomes more and more pronounced the farther you run.
Clang.
The sound of clanging metal and shouts of effort. You pump your legs faster, ignoring the flames and skeletons around you. Trying to get to something that resembled a sign of life in this hell you had wandered into. You leap past a skeleton reaching out to you, its body covered in viscera. Then land just in front of the bay, you jerk back around to blast it. Only to find… it, and the rest just standing there. Staring at you. They all stopped as one, their jaws clicking and their bodies swaying from side to side, but they weren't moving forward any longer.
Clang.
You looked ahead to see… two girls and a monster. The two girls were closest to you, one with pink hair and one with a bright orange not dissimilar to your own. The pink one was swinging a gigantic shield around, while the other was standing just behind her, watching the ongoing fight.
What they were fighting was… another woman, but impossibly tall. A good ten feet or higher, with long purple hair and a black dress. In her hands was a long, wicked looking scythe that was swinging with abandon in front of her to slam against the shield. The girl with pink hair was being pushed back repeatedly, but she held it up regardless.
You started to run again. You had no idea what was going on in Fuyuki, you had no idea if this even really was Fuyuki. But someone was in danger. That was reason enough. The woman with the scythe swings it around again, knocking the girl with the shield off balance and to the side. Then, with a wicked laugh she charges forward, bringing it to bear onto the orange haired woman. You dive, tackling her out of the way and onto the pavement.
The scythe screams overhead, narrowly missing you. And you find yourself staring down at the girl, she herself looking up at you in abject confusion. "A… who?"
"Master, a survivor!" a voice calls out from behind you. It was then quickly followed up by a shout.
You turn your head to look back, only to suddenly feel rather weightless all of a sudden. You blink, then look down as you are raised off of the ground by a scythe jutting out the front of your chest. It was… surreal, and strangely, without pain. You looked back down to see the orange-haired girl looking at you in complete horror.
Then you are flung.
You don't feel much of anything after that.
—
You feel… warm, a comfortable warm. Not the warmth caused by flame, the warmth caused by… thick blankets on a Winter's morning. It was joined in addition by the scent of… pancakes? How lovely, Taiga must have cooked a breakfast for you.
Wait.
No.
That didn't make sense.
You snap your eyes open to see-
—
Yes this has consequences.
[] [A Purple haired woman]
[] [A… maid]
[] [A young girl with snow-white hair]
[X] [Of a Girl Saving Humanity]
Thanks to @Armoury for the beta!
—
You scream into the woman's hand, your voice muffled and producing no understandable sounds. She glances down at you, moving the hand away for a moment. Then chants… something before you have a time to scream out your spell…
Then things go rather dark.
—
Then things are… rather less dark, instead, your world is lit by an orange flickering that casts a schizophrenic light on everything. You blink, your eyes adjusting, and you find yourself no longer in the air, no longer being held, in fact, you find yourself standing… somewhere that was definitely not Fuyuki. You stood upon a beach, not the one of your hometown, and not the one of Circe's land either. But it was… familiar, the scraggly plants, the deep blue waters turned nearly black by the night, and the snow capped gray mountains in the distance were all vaguely familiar by now as being European. Or, at least, vaguely Grecian.
Your mind however, was not able to focus on that scenery for incredibly long, as your ears perked up at the sound of a sobbing woman. You turn left, away from the crashing waters, to see the source of that orange flickering light. A-
A town was burning, flames pillaring into the sky as screams echo in the distance. For one, brief moment, you had nothing but the sound of crying and that of water. And then, seemingly just by acknowledging it, a terrible moment came to pass. A village, not a large one, built in a similar style to what Circe lived in was aflame. Crashing timbers and yells of fright filled the air as trees lit, crops burned, and animals ran. You could see figures distantly sprinting, fighting the flames, running out of buildings alight. It was chaos, a familiar… sickening chaos.
Then you hear the sobbing again, and you tear your gaze away despite yourself. Looking far closer to see… Medea. She stands on the sands, staring out into the distant horizon, ignoring the flames and screams behind her. Her eyes are vacant, with heavy tears running down them to drip onto clothes. Her hair was matted with… blood, it appeared, streaks of it dripping down onto her face and onto the sand, painting the white a dull brown all around her. In her hand was… some form of knife, jagged and misshapen like a lightning bolt.
The blood upon her wasn't near all of it, bodies laid around her, decorating the sand. Men, women, children. A good half in all, none moving, but each had deep wounds decorating their bodies. Most, at a panicked glance, had the same shade of hair as her, with some blonde mixed in as well.
Drip drip.
The knife dripped blood onto the sand, held in a grip so tight her fingers were bleeding. She didn't notice.
"Caster?" you say softly.
You take a step forward, or, make an attempt to. Only to find your feet rooted on the spot, the sand you were standing in holding tight to your feet.
"I want to go home…" Caster's voice speaks up, so quiet you almost think it was an illusion. "Why can't… I go home?"
"Caster!" you shout. Struggling, the sand was like a living thing, crawling up your leg and crushing it.
You collapse forward, something snapping in your legs as the sand grows fingers to dig into your flesh. Then it tugs, yanking you back in the sand. Your fingers slam into the beach, tearing rivets in the ground as you are pulled back into the Earth. "Medea!"
Then, only then does Caster look up towards you, only for her hands to jerk to her chest, grabbing onto a blade now protruding from it. Appearing like a wraith or spirit, a man with blonde hair now stands behind her, a blank expression on his face as he wrenches the blade back, slicing Caster's hands to ribbons in the process.
The woman pitches forward onto the sand, and you try and crawl forward, wrench your legs free. Do anything, but the last thing you see if the man standing over her before you are yanked fully into the ground
—
You cough, sputtering, puking out wads of sand that aren't there as you kneel over the… asphalt. Your body ached, your legs throbbed, your throat felt raw, and your fingers were bleeding. But you were… fine. Then you looked up to see if Caster was there, and you were far, far less than fine. Your eyes stung immediately from the smoke that surrounded you, but you hardless noticed. As in front of you was…
Homurahara academy.
Or, at least, it used to be. Your heart chilled despite the heat around you, a sickening feeling spreading throughout your entire body. As, what was just earlier today a building you were working in, was now in ruins. Chunks were missing from the walls, from the ground, entire sides of the building were just gone. Through the windows and across the grounds were raging fires that engulfed the building. Just ahead of you, no more than three or four feet away from the edge of the street. Were your classmates,
Were.
They were petrified, frozen in a moment of time, shock and horror etched onto their now forms made of… stone? This… couldn't be happening. Not again, not in Fuyuki, again. Your mind flashed with scenes from that night, and you scrambled to your feet, your fingers scraping against the asphalt and concrete as you forced yourself upwards towards the first student. They were… you couldn't tell. Where their head had been was now just a bloody stump of a wound that ran down onto the gray like a macabre waterfall. Something had ripped it off, or broken it, but whoever the student was, they were far from alive.
Bile filled your mouth, then erupted unbidden, your hand clamping over your mouth as you puked out what little lunch you had eaten earlier in the day onto the ground. You found yourself there, on the ground. A puddle of blood was on the ground from where the student had been decapitated, and your manic, wide-eyed expression was staring back at you.
As was a skeleton, illuminated by the flame reflecting off of its bones.
You jerk to the side, rolling through the blood as sparks fly off the ground. In the skeleton's grip was a wicked looking, jagged black blade that just narrowly missed you. The skeleton turns its head to look at you, your eyes meeting the empty sockets of its skull. A growl made of chattering bones sounds out from its unhinged jaw. Then it lunges again.
You scoot back, your feet digging into the ground as you try to slide across the rough asphalt road you had landed on. The skeleton raises its blade to slam down, and you jerk your own hand up. "Αερο!" the spell comes out of your throat, less the careful conjuration of a magus, and more the desperate scream of a teenager trying not to be killed in the burning remains of his hometown.
But your circuits come to life nevertheless. A blast of wind slams into the torso of the skeleton, causing it to bend backwards until with several snaps of breaking bones the torso is violently ejected backwards away from the rest of the body, causing the rest to fall to the ground with a clatter a moment later.
You'd catch your breath, or even just take a moment to process that. But what you saw ahead of you was…
There was a small horde of the things, climbing over crashed cars and ruined streets. Pouring out of the buildings that surrounded the school to get to you. But that wasn't what you were focused on. It wasn't the bodies. It wasn't the scent of blood. It was the smoke and flame, it was all you could see for miles into the distance as Fuyuki burned, again. It was a memory you had held all of your life, it was your earliest memory. Now it had returned with a horrible clarity. Only before… only part of Fuyuki was ablaze, the screams, the shouts of agony. The people dancing within the fires, the heat peeling away at their flesh around you. Now? Now there was nothing but silence and a dead city. The only noise being that of the clattering skeletons running to end you.
Had they done this? Or was it something else.
Did it matter? Soon they would be on you, and nothing you had been taught could even deal with that many. Was there even anyone here to help? Would anyone even be here to help you? No. You couldn't think about that at the moment, pressing your hands down against the asphalt you pushed yourself back up onto your feet. Then you ran, sprinting through the streets as more and more of the skeletons crawled out of the buildings. Your feet skidded across the asphalt, slipping in the gas, oil, and… worse things as you leapt over rifts in the asphalt from where it has been torn open.
The world around you becomes a blur as you sprint through the west-end of Fuyuki, trying to find someone, something, anything.
And then you hear it, distant, like a bell. But it becomes more and more pronounced the farther you run.
Clang.
The sound of clanging metal and shouts of effort. You pump your legs faster, ignoring the flames and skeletons around you. Trying to get to something that resembled a sign of life in this hell you had wandered into. You leap past a skeleton reaching out to you, its body covered in viscera. Then land just in front of the bay, you jerk back around to blast it. Only to find… it, and the rest just standing there. Staring at you. They all stopped as one, their jaws clicking and their bodies swaying from side to side, but they weren't moving forward any longer.
Clang.
You looked ahead to see… two girls and a monster. The two girls were closest to you, one with pink hair and one with a bright orange not dissimilar to your own. The pink one was swinging a gigantic shield around, while the other was standing just behind her, watching the ongoing fight.
What they were fighting was… another woman, but impossibly tall. A good ten feet or higher, with long purple hair and a black dress. In her hands was a long, wicked looking scythe that was swinging with abandon in front of her to slam against the shield. The girl with pink hair was being pushed back repeatedly, but she held it up regardless.
You started to run again. You had no idea what was going on in Fuyuki, you had no idea if this even really was Fuyuki. But someone was in danger. That was reason enough. The woman with the scythe swings it around again, knocking the girl with the shield off balance and to the side. Then, with a wicked laugh she charges forward, bringing it to bear onto the orange haired woman. You dive, tackling her out of the way and onto the pavement.
The scythe screams overhead, narrowly missing you. And you find yourself staring down at the girl, she herself looking up at you in abject confusion. "A… who?"
"Master, a survivor!" a voice calls out from behind you. It was then quickly followed up by a shout.
You turn your head to look back, only to suddenly feel rather weightless all of a sudden. You blink, then look down as you are raised off of the ground by a scythe jutting out the front of your chest. It was… surreal, and strangely, without pain. You looked back down to see the orange-haired girl looking at you in complete horror.
Then you are flung.
You don't feel much of anything after that.
—
You feel… warm, a comfortable warm. Not the warmth caused by flame, the warmth caused by… thick blankets on a Winter's morning. It was joined in addition by the scent of… pancakes? How lovely, Taiga must have cooked a breakfast for you.
Wait.
No.
That didn't make sense.
You snap your eyes open to see-
—
Yes this has consequences.
[] [A Purple haired woman]
[] [A… maid]
[] [A young girl with snow-white hair]
