Sever 2.4
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sever 2.4
Thursday, April 14, 2011
I ran forward.
Again and again and again, endlessly, ceaselessly, I ran forward. Never making any progress, never reaching that point I was trying so desperately to get to.
I had no sense of time. No idea of how long it had been. No concept of anything.
It… reminded me of something. Like déjà vu, a memory at the back of my mind I couldn't reach, but was still important.
(Falling. Not 「life」. Not 「death」. No time. No space. Endless. Boundless. It had 「everything」. But it was still 「empty」. So, so 「empty」)
In the end, I couldn't remember, and I moved on to other things.
My mind raced furiously, echoing my body's movements, but unlike my body, my mind was never stopped, never forced backwards. So I at least had that benefit.
Eventually the denial kicked in.
Because this couldn't be happening. I wouldn't go out like this. I wouldn't live my life, spend eternity, captured in some freakish bubble. There was no chance I would give up this easily.
I had come here with a goal: kill Bakuda, get the twins. Instead, I had fallen into a trap like a fucking idiot, doing exactly what the insane bitch had wanted.
And I did not like that. I refused to give her what she wanted. To give her the satisfaction of watching me break like the other victims of Gray Boy did. To allow her to go unanswered for what she had done so far, both to my friends and to Brockton Bay.
Because if I did, it would mean I had given up.
I hadn't given up when my mother had died. I hadn't given up when Emma had abandoned me. I hadn't given up when my life had become daily torture. I hadn't given up in the locker. I hadn't given up on my friends when they needed me. I hadn't given up on Amy and Lisa, people I'd met just recently and had barely even gotten a chance to know. I hadn't given up on my dad or the people I'd grown to love like family.
And I sure as fuck wouldn't start giving up now.
My eyes let me see death, let me see the end of everything, the inevitable destruction and decay. The entropy that nobody, nothing, could ever escape.
I'd hated it. It had made my insides squirm, my very self recoil at the intensity and overwhelming feelings and knowledge.
But now. Now, I needed it.
Now, I wanted it.
I was Taylor Hebert. And I saw 「death」.
I accepted it. It would always be a part of me (so 「empty」), and there was no reason to reject it. So instead I brought it towards me, grabbed the unnatural feeling I'd always pushed away and pulled it closer. I embraced it.
And it felt right.
My soul sang, resonating with the otherworldy sense.
This was right.
Around me, things began to shift. I saw the air itself unfold, wrinkles and furrows twisting through space that I never would have been able to see normally. And at those folds, my lines appeared.
I watched them split and fall apart, ripping seams in the very fabric of reality. I studied them, cataloged every possibility, every potential destruction, every ending to the prison I was locked in.
And then I pulled them towards me, manipulating the sight so that I could see lines around my knife that was ever moving forward, slicing through the air as I ran. And finally, one appeared directly in my blade's path, twisting and shifting until the tip of the blade sunk into the end.
There was no resistance. There was never any resistance. Even when I was cutting through a barrier of time and space itself, there was no resistance.
My blade reached the end of the line.
And I was free.
There was no shift between the grayness and color. No moment, no time. At once, it simply wasand then it simply was not, like it had never been.
I skidded to a stop in the enveloping darkness, letting the lines go out of focus until I called for them again.
Now. Time to find Bakuda. If I was an insane bomber woman, where would I be?
Sheathing my knife, I walked over to the table in the center of the room and picked up the tablet I had looked at before that Bakuda had left behind. It was the only clue I had. Maybe there was something on it that would help me figure that out.
Bakuda was a Tinker, so she probably wasn't stupid enough to do this, but I also doubted she ever thought I'd get a chance to look, so the possibility wasn't zero.
I'd take everything I could get.
Unlocking the tablet, I searched around it and eventually found the maps application. Furrowing my brow, I looked for some sort of menu, eventually finding it slightly hidden. And wouldn't you know it, there was a thing that said "timeline" right there.
Even if she'd wiped it completely –and it looked like she had–, I'd learned just the day before yesterday from getting my own cellphone that phones and tablets defaulted to a) always having WiFi and/or GPS on and b) recording and reporting location information and history at regular intervals.
And Bakuda had either been thoughtless enough, or too fucking arrogant to bother changing the settings from their default. Personally, I was more inclined to believe it was the latter. She was going to seriously come to regret that if it ended up leading me right to her.
I wonder how she'd feel about seeing me again? She'd been pretty shaken just from me breaking through her force-field. Think I can make her die of a heart attack when she sees that she utterly failed at getting rid of me?
I was certainly going to try.
I stood on the roof of a building, looking at the horizon that still glowed at points with untamed fires. The tablet said it was still early Thursday morning, 1 AM, so I'd actually only been in the bubble for an hour or two.
It had felt like a lot longer.
I'd looked over the device a bit more in the warehouse, pinpointing at least three places I'd need to try since it looked they were more important than the others. The tablet's records said it had been at them multiple times, so there had to be something there. If she wasn't at those places, I'd try the other spots that it had only been at once.
From appearances, she'd been moving around a lot. The tablet only had records for the last seven hours, which was when I assumed she'd wiped the thing.
God. I just couldn't fucking believe how stupid or arrogant she'd have to be not to think this could be used to track her. Bakuda had literally given me a goddamn map of where she could be, and this time I didn't have to be worried about traps. …Unless these places were traps, but I highly doubted that.
Maybe she meant to come back for it, and I sure as hell believed she'd never even considered the possibility of me getting out of that bubble.
But still. Really? Really? This was like Villain 101: never leave loose ends around. Even I could figure that out.
And this was a loose end that would turn out to unravel the entire fucking tapestry.
Whatever. It just made finding her easier, which meant I'd get to kill her sooner rather than later.
Once I'd gotten out of the warehouse, I'd looked around for and climbed the first fire escape I could find. I'd have to be traveling pretty far distances between these three places, so it would be better if I could run as fast I could without worrying about being seen by the mooks.
Checking the tablet one last time to verify where I was going, I put it away inside my jacket and took off.
I ran completely silent despite wearing combat boots, which is a bit hilarious in retrospect. Jumping between buildings was easy, being only eight or ten feet on average, though there were a couple larger gaps.
It took about fifteen minutes straight of running over and jumping between buildings before I reached the first place, which looked like a pretty standard three-story apartment building. Of course, if Bakuda had been here then it was probably anything but normal.
Unlike the warehouse, which'd had progressively less ABB guys as I got closer, this actually had a few loitering around, at least seven or eight, undoubtedly with more inside.
Hm. How to go about this…
I could either deal with the ones outside first, or go inside and deal with the others first, which had a higher chance of me encountering Bakuda.
Drawing my knife and tapping the flat against my chin, I debated the benefits of both. Well, either way it'd end in everyone that I needed to deal with being incapacitated.
I should… probably not go for any lethal attacks against the mooks. Maiming would be okay, if they really tried to fight me, but I'd try and keep it clean and just knock everyone out. I was a bit upset at the ABB collectively because of everything they'd done lately, but I also realized Bakuda was completely delusional and insane, so I couldn't hold them completely accountable.
Deciding to go with the inside route, I swung off the side of the apartment building and dropped the thirteen feet to the first fire escape platform. Landing quietly in a crouch, I looked at the window in front of me. It looked a bit… unmaintained. I tried to open it, but wasn't surprised when the thing didn't budge an inch
Fuck it.
Pulling the lines forward, I eyed the edges of the window and started tracing a line on each side. Once I finished, I kept my knife wedged in the gap of the last one I'd cut (the top) and started trying to lever the entire frame towards me. That actually took longer than cutting through it did, but after a minute of working on it, the pane plus four wooden sides fell into my ready arms.
Setting it to the side on the fire escape, I stuck my head in the entrance I'd made and looked around. I'd already known it was a dark, closed room from what I'd been able to see through the window, and I couldn't feel anyone around, but it always payed to double-check.
Especially after I'd fallen for such a stupid, idiotic, obvious trap once already tonight.
There was nobody, so I stepped through the window and headed to the door. Now I could feel people. They were at the end of the hallway that the door opened into, but I had no way of knowing if they were facing away from me or not.
Well, nothing for it.
I took a breath, preparing myself, and then opened the door and sprinted towards where the men were.
They were facing away from me, just standing there talking to each other, and hadn't even heard me come up behind them.
The first one went down from the hilt of my knife to the base of his skull.
The second one was starting to turn around, surprised at the sudden collapse of his buddy, but I whacked him over the head and he fell just as easily as the first.
The sound of them going down had been quiet, but not quiet enough that I would put it past someone to have noticed. Stepping over the prone bodies, I continued down the hallway, and not finding anyone else I had to take out, eventually reached the end. A set of cement stairs went down, so looking back at the two men I'd knocked out and deciding that they were okay just lying there for the moment, I went down the stairs.
I really wished I had some zipties or something, but I hadn't exactly planned on needing to do this. And I was strangely a bit disappointed that it had been so easy.
Reaching the second floor, I tried to feel if there were any people in the hallway, but I couldn't, so I poked my head around quickly and then pulled it back.
There hadn't been anybody, so best just to go down the hallway and search for people.
I kept to the wall on my right. A couple of doors were open or ajar but none of them held anybody. At least, not until the sixth one on my side of the hall.
I heard voices inside the room, and tried looking through the crack between the door and the jamb to see who was talking, but all I saw was a white wall six or so feet away. I thought there were three or so, but I wasn't sure.
Okay, then.
Flipping my knife back around so I was holding it normally, I burst into the room, instantly taking in the positions of all six people, two on a couch, one in a chair smoking a cigarette, a guy counting out money at this short table, and then two guys standing up gesturing at each other.
As soon as the door had opened they'd looked towards it. But it was too late, because I was already three-quarters of the way across the room. I got the one in the chair first, hitting him in the head and causing him to slump down. With him out of the game, I vaulted over the back of the chair, landing on the arm and immediately pushing off in the direction of the men on the couch
It wasn't like I knew martial arts or anything, so I was mostly going with my gut and instinct. Which, in the end, basically boiled down to "hit them as hard as you can".
I personally thought it was a great tactic.
I got the one on the right in the jaw and felt something crunch as he fell over from the force of my blow. The left one was starting to stand up, but I punched him right below his ribcage and he folded, wheezing hard.
…Solar plexus. That hurts. Got hit by a soccer ball once there in a game. Not fun. And I definitely hit him way harder than that ball had hit me.
I turned around –deeming him a non-threat since that'd probably put him out of commission for at least five minutes– and checked on the other people in the room.
The one who'd been counting money was standing up and taking out a knife while the two guys behind him were starting to pull out what looked to be guns.
Using the grip my boots gave me on the floor I was by the first one in a half-second, his switchblade having only just extended.
I cut through the blade and kept going, punching him in the sternum so hard he fell down and hit his head on the floor, instantly out like a light.
…That one was probably a concussion.
The two guns were pulled out and almost pointing in my direction, so I sped up, reaching the one on the left first and cutting through the entire firearm.
I ended up taking a few fingers off as well.
Oh well. Losing fingers wasn't all that bad in the long run. I could have taken his entire arm off just like Lung. At least this way there was no chance of him bleeding out.
Once my hand had passed by his head I pulled it back towards me, hitting him with the hilt of my knife right on the back of his skull. He crumpled forward to the floor, face-down.
Wasting no time, I whipped around and cut off the barrel of the other man's gun.
And then I stopped.
In total? I'm pretty sure it had been under fifteen seconds.
The man in front of me raised his gun in front of his face, staring dumbly at the obliquely-sliced stub of a barrel before he looked at me in fear. "Èmó"
The other man on the couch was still trying to catch his breath and groaning.
I held my knife out towards the Asian guy in front of me. He had to be only twenty seven at most. "You're going to tell me what I need to know," I stated.
He swallowed, looking between me and the blade.
"And you're not going to lie to me, or you're going to end up a lot worse than they did," I told him, and he looked around the room at the unconscious men, the severed fingers, and the lone weakly groaning guy before turning back to me. "You understand? No fucking heroics or trying to trick me. I've already dealt with that shit tonight so if I do find out you lied, I'm going to come back just to kill you."
I don't know if I was serious or not. I was pissed off enough by that trio that had directed me towards the warehouse, and I was still debating what I would do if I ever came across them again. I was seriously considering cutting their dicks off like I'd threatened.
The guy's face blanched, and he nodded.
I pulled the tablet out of my jacket and struggled momentarily to unlock it with only one hand. I managed though, and held it out to him. He stared at it.
"Where is Bakuda?"
His eyes flicked back to me. "I… I do not know." The guy's voice was heavily accented, but I still understood it.
"Well then where do you think she is?" I questioned.
He looked trapped, and once again his eyes flicked between my face and the knife in my hand. His gaze returned to the tablet, and he raised a shaky hand.
"Here. I think she is here," he spoke, pointing to one of the western points, the one I'd been planning on visiting third. Looked like I was going there next instead.
"You swear?" I asked
"I swear! I think she is there!" he said, panic starting to seep into his voice.
I searched his face for any hint of lying, but couldn't see anything.
"You will kill her?" he suddenly asked.
I blinked. "…That's the plan," I confirmed. It wouldn't matter if he knew or not. Bakuda knew I wanted to kill her already, and she was the only one who mattered.
His eyes hardened. "Good."
What? What the hell? "Why?" I blurted.
"She is bad. Evil. You, you èmó, but she is worse. Much worse," he said strongly. "Kill my brother. No reason. Just kill. 'Test' she says."
Okay, if I didn't think she was insane before now, now I definitely would have. Killing her own subordinates as test subjects? Just, what the fuck!?
Well, I definitely believed that he wasn't trying to lie… if all of that was true. And it certainly sounded real.
I put the tablet away back in my jacket. "Well… thanks. I'm going to knock you out now, no hard feelings, okay?"
Without giving him a chance to respond, I hit him with a right cross and he fell down, dead to the world.
Hm. Probably best to get out of here as fast as possible before anyone wakes up and has a chance to let Bakuda know I was coming for her.
I looked over at the guy on the couch I'd gotten in the solar plexus and found he'd actually passed out, the whites of his eyes showing.
Huh.
Well, that was a thing.
I made my way across the room and out the door, closing it behind me. I went back in the direction I'd come from as quickly as possible, following the path I'd taken before in reverse, back to the fire escape. The two men I'd knocked out in the hall were still there. That was a good sign. Maybe they'd be out for a while longer.
Once I was outside, my knife went back in its sheathe. I clambered up the brick wall of the building and flipped myself over the edge of the roof into a roll, standing up when I was level. Alright. So north-westward then. More roof running.
There were a couple places I had to work around in the trip because of the number of floors, but it was largely as the crow flies, taking thirteen minutes to get from where I was to where I needed to be.
By the time I was there, the tension I'd felt when I'd started this whole thing tonight was back, even more. I was practically shivering, shaking with the anticipation.
Taking a deep breath, I let the air out of my lungs slowly, staring at the building in front of me. Four stories. No fire escapes. No obvious entry points.
And I'd bet you anything she had it rigged to blow at a moment's notice.
Okay. I tried to think about all the possible types of triggers she could have used: pressure, heat, light, proximity, motion, sound…
You know, I probably should have thought about this at the last building, too.
The question was, could I avoid and/or survive whatever they triggered?
I'd gotten through that force-field and the Gray Boy bubble, but I had no doubt she'd have much more conventional bombs (or at least conventional in the sense they exploded and caused pain) at someplace like this.
God. Assaulting a Tinker in their own base, especially when they did bombs, was not the smartest idea, was it?
But I couldn't think of any way to draw her out, and I wanted to maintain the element of surprise I had since she thought I was no longer part of the equation.
Which meant doing exactly that. Assaulting a Tinker in their own base.
Fuck.
Deep breath. If I were a sadistic, insane bitch of a bomb tinker, where would I put the bombs?
Roof, for one. Um… in the walls… Definitely where I was working.
Oh God this is so sketchy.
I was going to have to go fast. Really fast. It felt like I'd never really gotten to my limit, either that or it'd gone up, but this was going to make me push that as hard as I could.
So. Enter through a window, which would probably trigger a bomb in that room, and then down whatever hallways I needed to, also triggering bombs along the way in order to find her.
This was not going to be subtle.
Then again, sometimes subtlety was overrated.
There were going to be cameras for sure, but as long as I got to her fast enough that she didn't truly have time to prepare, I'd have achieved what I was going for.
Aaaaand I also had to consider the possibility that Oni Lee was here.
Prioritize, my mom would have said. Though I doubt she'd have thought I would be applying it to single-handly attempting to destroy a gang.
Okay. So, Bakuda first, Oni Lee if I got a chance or there was an opening, otherwise he came second. I nodded to myself, still looking at the building from behind an A/C unit.
The best path looked like… through one of the third story windows. Which meant I'd have to jump and then run a couple steps until I could grab the ledge.
Ready?
Never.
I still ran forwards from where I'd been hiding, pushing myself to full speed and pacing my steps so that when my right foot landed on the very lip of the roof, I launched myself across the gap. My left boot grabbed the brick wall first, and then my right and my left again, before I pushed myself off the wall at an angle and grabbed the windowsill.
Using the momentum of that final step, I flipped over the edge and crashed through the window, rolling and immediately sprinting as fast as fucking possible for the door.
There was a bang behind me, but I was already in the hall. Instead of trying to slow down to turn the corner, I simply shifted my weight upwards and ran on the wall for a few steps before gravity brought me back down to the floor again.
Bootprints on walls were going to be the last thing Bakuda would have to worry about tonight if I had anything to say about it.
There was another explosion behind where I was, and as I neared a cross between hallways, I made a split-second decision to go left, running at the far right corner and then launching off of it in the new direction I wanted to go.
My heart was hammering, adrenaline running through my veins, and I could honestly say that I'd never felt more alive than right then, a grin on my face despite knowing exactly what I was trying to do and what would happen if I made a single mistake.
Right!
I bounced off of another corner and turned right, and the entire hallway I'd been running through exploded in a burst of flame.
Behind me was a strange sound like a bubble popping, and I didn't even think as I tilted my head to the left, a glob of… something flying right by me and landing on the floor. It immediately ate its way through the surface like the strongest acid to ever exist.
Hot damn.
At the edge of my perception, I got the feeling of a person, but it was like they were… down. Second floor, then. Need to find a stairwell.
Or…
I saw a window at the end of the hallway I was running through and another building's wall seven or eight feet beyond it.
My grin widening, I accelerated, speeding up as much as I could. When I reached the end of the hallway I jumped through the window head-first, doing a forward flip and twisting in the air so I was facing the ground when my feet hit the other wall.
Absorbing the kinetic energy through my legs, I seemed to hang there for a heartbeat, just squatting on the side of the wall like it was nothing unusual. And then I pushed off as hard as I could, rocketing forward and crashing through the window that was below the one I'd come through, rolling forward to disperse some of the force and then running forward like I'd never stopped.
I heard both of the windows detonate with… something, changing directions to the left at another cross just as some huge projectile went rocketing past me and exploded when it hit a wall.
Man, Bakuda didn't do things half-way, did she?
Laughing, I wondered for a moment if I wasn't insane.
Nahhhhh.
Feeling around at the edge of my perception for that familiar person I'd sensed before, I located them after a moment, to the right.
Right it was.
Twenty feet away I followed the feeling at a turn, sensing that I was getting closer, almost on top of it. I pulled my knife out of my sheathe as I ran, searching for the best way to get there.
And suddenly, in the wall, there was a very generic door, just like all of the other doors I'd run past. But this door…
This door had somebody behind it.
I didn't hesitate to cut through it, not even trying to open it as I had no idea what would happen. Jumping over the pieces of what looked like steel that had fallen away, I entered the room.
What I found inside was a mad scientist's wet dream.
Wires ran everywhere, some coiled, some laying flat. Beakers and vats of something bubbled, a few Bunsen burners heating Pyrex glass. Something that looked like a distillation setup sat in the back corner, condensation running through small tubes and spiral-shaped glass channels to collect in flasks.
There were parts and pieces of various electronics all over the place, with a few computers and screens sitting on a couple of the tables at the edges of the room.
A red light was flashing, which I guessed was some sort of alarm that told her I'd gotten in. On four large screens set on the far wall of the room, there were images of the hallways I'd just run through, now smoking and atomized and melting and half a dozen other things.
And in the center of the chaos, facing me, was a woman with black hair and a gas mask.
I grinned. "Hello."
"Wha-what the fuck are you!?" she yelled, edging on a scream. Her voice was taut, frayed, with a hint of desperation and fear. "How the fuck did you get out of there!? You, you can't do that; it's imposs–"
"I killed it."
My voice interrupted her frantic speech and she froze.
I stepped further into the room.
"What does that even fucking mean!?"
"Everything has a lifespan, an ending and beginning. Time and space aren't any different, apparently. I was just naïve enough to believe I could avoid it. Live without having to see the death and destruction of anything and everything. Live without knowing how to kill it all." I smiled at her.
"You and that bubble forced me to accept that that's impossible. Thank you for that, by the way," I told her sincerely. "It's the best present someone's ever given me."
She seemed visibly unnerved by the repetition of the sentence she'd said only hours ago.
"And Bakuda… I can see your death. It's going to be really soon."
I flipped my knife around in my hand, from forward to reverse grip.
The woman suddenly threw one of the things in her arms at me, but she wasn't even that good of a shot. There was a small red light blinking on the side of the object, and I calmly stepped forward to intercept it, cutting it in half without pause.
The two pieces fell to the floor with a thump, and Bakuda just stared dumbly at the bisected shape.
"It's useless. I can see so much more now," I told her.
Not just the lines running across her, the one going from left shoulder to mid right bicep, the slash of red across her middle, and a small line just above her left breast that I knew would kill her instantly. I could see others, others I'd never even considered.
I'd been so limited before, thinking I could only kill things that could be seen.
No, I could kill that which defied common sense. The invisible. The abstract.
I could kill each of the connections I saw coming from her chest, running away from her like spokes in a wheel. The lines running from her right foot to the bundles in her arms.
"And it's all because of you."
"Lee!!!!" Bakuda screamed, looking over my shoulder.
I ducked, just in time for a knife to whistle over my head. Without looking behind me, I stabbed my blade backwards, thrusting it into where I could feel one of the lines.
The man appeared a couple feet in front of me and to the right, with a black bodysuit and a bunch of knives and grenades on a bandoleer. He wore a distinctive red demon (Oni, the twins had said, which made sense given his name) mask that had a wide grin and visible fangs.
As soon as my knife had finished sinking into the line embedded in the clone (because it had to be one of his clones based on his powers), I felt it dissolve, the ash blowing across my back.
The man reeled as if he'd been physically struck with a crowbar, holding his head in his hands.
I took advantage of the opening, stepping forward and catching a line that ran across both his forearms.
They separated cleanly from his body, falling to the ground with the sound of wet meat slapping on cement, blood splattering all over floor.
Without hesitating, I flipped the knife in my hand back around to a forward grip and reversed my arm's upward motion. This time I aimed for a line that was nearly vertical, from next to his neck on his right side to his left hip, right through his heart. It took less than a second.
Less than a second.
Less than a second to trace the line.
Less than a second to kill a man.
The two halves of his body slid apart almost comically, the way you see in the special effects of those TV shows and movies with blades so sharp they left only a hairline cut.
For me, that was exactly how it worked.
His torso fell to the right, organs falling out of his abdominal cavity. Liver. Spleen. Stomach. Liquid, not just blood –though there was a lot of blood–, but bile and other fluids from his small intestine spilled out. The smell of shit rose in the air from where I'd cut through his large intestine.
Killing a man is messy business.
His lower half plus the right side of his chest and arm fell backwards. Blood flew everywhere, the leftover momentum of it traveling through his body forcing it out his vena cava and then being propelled by the centrifugal force of the body falling. I saw more than a few droplets splatter across Bakuda's front.
She just stood there, her mask facing the two halves of the body as she took in the gory image. I'm sure she'd killed other people before, just as messily too. But I doubt she'd expected Oni Lee to be dealt with so quickly.
I took a step forward, uncaring of the blood that would track on the bottom of my boots.
Bakuda must have noticed my movement, because her head snapped up, and she fumbled for one of the other objects in her arms, desperately lobbing it at me.
It exploded feet in front of me, a black dot that grew into a small sphere. It was pure black. Jet. A void in the center of the world that all light was sucked into and never escaped. A hole in reality.
If it hadn't been intended to hurt me, I might honestly have been curious about it.
Air was sucked towards the innocuous-looking circle. Small pieces and devices littered around us were also being caught up and drawn to it, crushed into nothing. The blood on the floor wasn't exempt either.
I felt my body being dragged forward, but I didn't fight it, letting myself be drawn further into its sphere of influence. Once I was within arms' length, I raised my right hand and allowed it to be pulled forcibly towards the warped point of space-time, cutting right through the singularity just as easily as everything else.
With a slight 'pop' to my eardrums, the air pressure reasserted itself, the distortion no longer present.
I could almost hear Bakuda swallow.
"It's useless, you know."
I took another step forward. And a second.
Bakuda took a step back, but I don't even think she noticed.
"D-don't come any closer!!" she screamed. "I'll kill them! I'll kill them all! Everyone! All of the bombs in the city. A-and if you kill me, I have a dead man's switch! So you, you can't do that either!" She laughed hysterically.
I frowned, staring at all of the lines spreading away from her.
Following my instincts, I raised my blade, catching one of them. It flexed like a thread, but after a second the sharp edge of my knife sliced through it. And another. And another.
"H-hey!! What the fuck are you doing!? I told you I'd–"
"Shut up."
She fell quiet immediately, her voice cutting off.
Like a skein of thread, I pulled all of the strands together into one solid, thick rope, holding them together in my hand. It felt strange. Like I could feel them, but not with my skin. They were present, but ethereal.
And then I killed them.
Sliced through, they all snapped back to Bakuda, the half I held dissolving in my grasp.
"W-what did you just do!!?"
"No more."
She scrambled backwards as I strode towards her.
"No more threats. No more innocent deaths. No more kidnapping. No more hurting the people I love."
Bakuda tossed yet another bomb at me, but I quickly stepped around it while continuing to move forward. I heard a wet-sounding explosion behind me and knew that it was something like the acid I'd seen in the hallway.
"W-wait! We can talk about this! You, you don't have to do this!" She dropped all of the things in her arms and suddenly ripped off her mask, revealing a young, early-twenties Asian-American face that reminded me slightly of the twins. "You'll regret it!"
It changed nothing.
I was soon within two feet of her, towering over her, five-foot-nine to five-foot-two, staring into her eyes.
"Yes, I do. And no. I really, really won't."
My arm shot forward, and my knife was embedded up to the hilt in the small line above her left breast before she'd even had a chance to blink. Her brown eyes widened, realization gracing her features as she registered what had just happened.
I pulled the blade out of her chest and a small trail of blood dripped from the wound. As droplets fell from the tip of my knife to the floor, the light in her eyes slowly faded. Her legs folded beneath her, and she crumpled bonelessly on the ground, like a puppet with its strings cut, her arms splaying out to the sides.
And it was finally over.
Bakuda was dead.
A/N: 50,000 words, and she's finally accepted that her eyes are there to stay. About freaking time, girl.
Ever wonder why I gave Ryougi such a high mover rating? This is partly why. Don't believe me? Go watch Future Gospel. What's required to keep up with Servants is absurd.
Channeling your inner Shiki there much, Taylor?
So, this is the way theworld Bakuda ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. I bet she hates that.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
I ran forward.
Again and again and again, endlessly, ceaselessly, I ran forward. Never making any progress, never reaching that point I was trying so desperately to get to.
I had no sense of time. No idea of how long it had been. No concept of anything.
It… reminded me of something. Like déjà vu, a memory at the back of my mind I couldn't reach, but was still important.
(Falling. Not 「life」. Not 「death」. No time. No space. Endless. Boundless. It had 「everything」. But it was still 「empty」. So, so 「empty」)
In the end, I couldn't remember, and I moved on to other things.
My mind raced furiously, echoing my body's movements, but unlike my body, my mind was never stopped, never forced backwards. So I at least had that benefit.
Eventually the denial kicked in.
Because this couldn't be happening. I wouldn't go out like this. I wouldn't live my life, spend eternity, captured in some freakish bubble. There was no chance I would give up this easily.
I had come here with a goal: kill Bakuda, get the twins. Instead, I had fallen into a trap like a fucking idiot, doing exactly what the insane bitch had wanted.
And I did not like that. I refused to give her what she wanted. To give her the satisfaction of watching me break like the other victims of Gray Boy did. To allow her to go unanswered for what she had done so far, both to my friends and to Brockton Bay.
Because if I did, it would mean I had given up.
I hadn't given up when my mother had died. I hadn't given up when Emma had abandoned me. I hadn't given up when my life had become daily torture. I hadn't given up in the locker. I hadn't given up on my friends when they needed me. I hadn't given up on Amy and Lisa, people I'd met just recently and had barely even gotten a chance to know. I hadn't given up on my dad or the people I'd grown to love like family.
And I sure as fuck wouldn't start giving up now.
My eyes let me see death, let me see the end of everything, the inevitable destruction and decay. The entropy that nobody, nothing, could ever escape.
I'd hated it. It had made my insides squirm, my very self recoil at the intensity and overwhelming feelings and knowledge.
But now. Now, I needed it.
Now, I wanted it.
I was Taylor Hebert. And I saw 「death」.
I accepted it. It would always be a part of me (so 「empty」), and there was no reason to reject it. So instead I brought it towards me, grabbed the unnatural feeling I'd always pushed away and pulled it closer. I embraced it.
And it felt right.
My soul sang, resonating with the otherworldy sense.
This was right.
Around me, things began to shift. I saw the air itself unfold, wrinkles and furrows twisting through space that I never would have been able to see normally. And at those folds, my lines appeared.
I watched them split and fall apart, ripping seams in the very fabric of reality. I studied them, cataloged every possibility, every potential destruction, every ending to the prison I was locked in.
And then I pulled them towards me, manipulating the sight so that I could see lines around my knife that was ever moving forward, slicing through the air as I ran. And finally, one appeared directly in my blade's path, twisting and shifting until the tip of the blade sunk into the end.
There was no resistance. There was never any resistance. Even when I was cutting through a barrier of time and space itself, there was no resistance.
My blade reached the end of the line.
And I was free.
There was no shift between the grayness and color. No moment, no time. At once, it simply wasand then it simply was not, like it had never been.
I skidded to a stop in the enveloping darkness, letting the lines go out of focus until I called for them again.
Now. Time to find Bakuda. If I was an insane bomber woman, where would I be?
Sheathing my knife, I walked over to the table in the center of the room and picked up the tablet I had looked at before that Bakuda had left behind. It was the only clue I had. Maybe there was something on it that would help me figure that out.
Bakuda was a Tinker, so she probably wasn't stupid enough to do this, but I also doubted she ever thought I'd get a chance to look, so the possibility wasn't zero.
I'd take everything I could get.
Unlocking the tablet, I searched around it and eventually found the maps application. Furrowing my brow, I looked for some sort of menu, eventually finding it slightly hidden. And wouldn't you know it, there was a thing that said "timeline" right there.
Even if she'd wiped it completely –and it looked like she had–, I'd learned just the day before yesterday from getting my own cellphone that phones and tablets defaulted to a) always having WiFi and/or GPS on and b) recording and reporting location information and history at regular intervals.
And Bakuda had either been thoughtless enough, or too fucking arrogant to bother changing the settings from their default. Personally, I was more inclined to believe it was the latter. She was going to seriously come to regret that if it ended up leading me right to her.
I wonder how she'd feel about seeing me again? She'd been pretty shaken just from me breaking through her force-field. Think I can make her die of a heart attack when she sees that she utterly failed at getting rid of me?
I was certainly going to try.
I stood on the roof of a building, looking at the horizon that still glowed at points with untamed fires. The tablet said it was still early Thursday morning, 1 AM, so I'd actually only been in the bubble for an hour or two.
It had felt like a lot longer.
I'd looked over the device a bit more in the warehouse, pinpointing at least three places I'd need to try since it looked they were more important than the others. The tablet's records said it had been at them multiple times, so there had to be something there. If she wasn't at those places, I'd try the other spots that it had only been at once.
From appearances, she'd been moving around a lot. The tablet only had records for the last seven hours, which was when I assumed she'd wiped the thing.
God. I just couldn't fucking believe how stupid or arrogant she'd have to be not to think this could be used to track her. Bakuda had literally given me a goddamn map of where she could be, and this time I didn't have to be worried about traps. …Unless these places were traps, but I highly doubted that.
Maybe she meant to come back for it, and I sure as hell believed she'd never even considered the possibility of me getting out of that bubble.
But still. Really? Really? This was like Villain 101: never leave loose ends around. Even I could figure that out.
And this was a loose end that would turn out to unravel the entire fucking tapestry.
Whatever. It just made finding her easier, which meant I'd get to kill her sooner rather than later.
Once I'd gotten out of the warehouse, I'd looked around for and climbed the first fire escape I could find. I'd have to be traveling pretty far distances between these three places, so it would be better if I could run as fast I could without worrying about being seen by the mooks.
Checking the tablet one last time to verify where I was going, I put it away inside my jacket and took off.
I ran completely silent despite wearing combat boots, which is a bit hilarious in retrospect. Jumping between buildings was easy, being only eight or ten feet on average, though there were a couple larger gaps.
It took about fifteen minutes straight of running over and jumping between buildings before I reached the first place, which looked like a pretty standard three-story apartment building. Of course, if Bakuda had been here then it was probably anything but normal.
Unlike the warehouse, which'd had progressively less ABB guys as I got closer, this actually had a few loitering around, at least seven or eight, undoubtedly with more inside.
Hm. How to go about this…
I could either deal with the ones outside first, or go inside and deal with the others first, which had a higher chance of me encountering Bakuda.
Drawing my knife and tapping the flat against my chin, I debated the benefits of both. Well, either way it'd end in everyone that I needed to deal with being incapacitated.
I should… probably not go for any lethal attacks against the mooks. Maiming would be okay, if they really tried to fight me, but I'd try and keep it clean and just knock everyone out. I was a bit upset at the ABB collectively because of everything they'd done lately, but I also realized Bakuda was completely delusional and insane, so I couldn't hold them completely accountable.
Deciding to go with the inside route, I swung off the side of the apartment building and dropped the thirteen feet to the first fire escape platform. Landing quietly in a crouch, I looked at the window in front of me. It looked a bit… unmaintained. I tried to open it, but wasn't surprised when the thing didn't budge an inch
Fuck it.
Pulling the lines forward, I eyed the edges of the window and started tracing a line on each side. Once I finished, I kept my knife wedged in the gap of the last one I'd cut (the top) and started trying to lever the entire frame towards me. That actually took longer than cutting through it did, but after a minute of working on it, the pane plus four wooden sides fell into my ready arms.
Setting it to the side on the fire escape, I stuck my head in the entrance I'd made and looked around. I'd already known it was a dark, closed room from what I'd been able to see through the window, and I couldn't feel anyone around, but it always payed to double-check.
Especially after I'd fallen for such a stupid, idiotic, obvious trap once already tonight.
There was nobody, so I stepped through the window and headed to the door. Now I could feel people. They were at the end of the hallway that the door opened into, but I had no way of knowing if they were facing away from me or not.
Well, nothing for it.
I took a breath, preparing myself, and then opened the door and sprinted towards where the men were.
They were facing away from me, just standing there talking to each other, and hadn't even heard me come up behind them.
The first one went down from the hilt of my knife to the base of his skull.
The second one was starting to turn around, surprised at the sudden collapse of his buddy, but I whacked him over the head and he fell just as easily as the first.
The sound of them going down had been quiet, but not quiet enough that I would put it past someone to have noticed. Stepping over the prone bodies, I continued down the hallway, and not finding anyone else I had to take out, eventually reached the end. A set of cement stairs went down, so looking back at the two men I'd knocked out and deciding that they were okay just lying there for the moment, I went down the stairs.
I really wished I had some zipties or something, but I hadn't exactly planned on needing to do this. And I was strangely a bit disappointed that it had been so easy.
Reaching the second floor, I tried to feel if there were any people in the hallway, but I couldn't, so I poked my head around quickly and then pulled it back.
There hadn't been anybody, so best just to go down the hallway and search for people.
I kept to the wall on my right. A couple of doors were open or ajar but none of them held anybody. At least, not until the sixth one on my side of the hall.
I heard voices inside the room, and tried looking through the crack between the door and the jamb to see who was talking, but all I saw was a white wall six or so feet away. I thought there were three or so, but I wasn't sure.
Okay, then.
Flipping my knife back around so I was holding it normally, I burst into the room, instantly taking in the positions of all six people, two on a couch, one in a chair smoking a cigarette, a guy counting out money at this short table, and then two guys standing up gesturing at each other.
As soon as the door had opened they'd looked towards it. But it was too late, because I was already three-quarters of the way across the room. I got the one in the chair first, hitting him in the head and causing him to slump down. With him out of the game, I vaulted over the back of the chair, landing on the arm and immediately pushing off in the direction of the men on the couch
It wasn't like I knew martial arts or anything, so I was mostly going with my gut and instinct. Which, in the end, basically boiled down to "hit them as hard as you can".
I personally thought it was a great tactic.
I got the one on the right in the jaw and felt something crunch as he fell over from the force of my blow. The left one was starting to stand up, but I punched him right below his ribcage and he folded, wheezing hard.
…Solar plexus. That hurts. Got hit by a soccer ball once there in a game. Not fun. And I definitely hit him way harder than that ball had hit me.
I turned around –deeming him a non-threat since that'd probably put him out of commission for at least five minutes– and checked on the other people in the room.
The one who'd been counting money was standing up and taking out a knife while the two guys behind him were starting to pull out what looked to be guns.
Using the grip my boots gave me on the floor I was by the first one in a half-second, his switchblade having only just extended.
I cut through the blade and kept going, punching him in the sternum so hard he fell down and hit his head on the floor, instantly out like a light.
…That one was probably a concussion.
The two guns were pulled out and almost pointing in my direction, so I sped up, reaching the one on the left first and cutting through the entire firearm.
I ended up taking a few fingers off as well.
Oh well. Losing fingers wasn't all that bad in the long run. I could have taken his entire arm off just like Lung. At least this way there was no chance of him bleeding out.
Once my hand had passed by his head I pulled it back towards me, hitting him with the hilt of my knife right on the back of his skull. He crumpled forward to the floor, face-down.
Wasting no time, I whipped around and cut off the barrel of the other man's gun.
And then I stopped.
In total? I'm pretty sure it had been under fifteen seconds.
The man in front of me raised his gun in front of his face, staring dumbly at the obliquely-sliced stub of a barrel before he looked at me in fear. "Èmó"
The other man on the couch was still trying to catch his breath and groaning.
I held my knife out towards the Asian guy in front of me. He had to be only twenty seven at most. "You're going to tell me what I need to know," I stated.
He swallowed, looking between me and the blade.
"And you're not going to lie to me, or you're going to end up a lot worse than they did," I told him, and he looked around the room at the unconscious men, the severed fingers, and the lone weakly groaning guy before turning back to me. "You understand? No fucking heroics or trying to trick me. I've already dealt with that shit tonight so if I do find out you lied, I'm going to come back just to kill you."
I don't know if I was serious or not. I was pissed off enough by that trio that had directed me towards the warehouse, and I was still debating what I would do if I ever came across them again. I was seriously considering cutting their dicks off like I'd threatened.
The guy's face blanched, and he nodded.
I pulled the tablet out of my jacket and struggled momentarily to unlock it with only one hand. I managed though, and held it out to him. He stared at it.
"Where is Bakuda?"
His eyes flicked back to me. "I… I do not know." The guy's voice was heavily accented, but I still understood it.
"Well then where do you think she is?" I questioned.
He looked trapped, and once again his eyes flicked between my face and the knife in my hand. His gaze returned to the tablet, and he raised a shaky hand.
"Here. I think she is here," he spoke, pointing to one of the western points, the one I'd been planning on visiting third. Looked like I was going there next instead.
"You swear?" I asked
"I swear! I think she is there!" he said, panic starting to seep into his voice.
I searched his face for any hint of lying, but couldn't see anything.
"You will kill her?" he suddenly asked.
I blinked. "…That's the plan," I confirmed. It wouldn't matter if he knew or not. Bakuda knew I wanted to kill her already, and she was the only one who mattered.
His eyes hardened. "Good."
What? What the hell? "Why?" I blurted.
"She is bad. Evil. You, you èmó, but she is worse. Much worse," he said strongly. "Kill my brother. No reason. Just kill. 'Test' she says."
Okay, if I didn't think she was insane before now, now I definitely would have. Killing her own subordinates as test subjects? Just, what the fuck!?
Well, I definitely believed that he wasn't trying to lie… if all of that was true. And it certainly sounded real.
I put the tablet away back in my jacket. "Well… thanks. I'm going to knock you out now, no hard feelings, okay?"
Without giving him a chance to respond, I hit him with a right cross and he fell down, dead to the world.
Hm. Probably best to get out of here as fast as possible before anyone wakes up and has a chance to let Bakuda know I was coming for her.
I looked over at the guy on the couch I'd gotten in the solar plexus and found he'd actually passed out, the whites of his eyes showing.
Huh.
Well, that was a thing.
I made my way across the room and out the door, closing it behind me. I went back in the direction I'd come from as quickly as possible, following the path I'd taken before in reverse, back to the fire escape. The two men I'd knocked out in the hall were still there. That was a good sign. Maybe they'd be out for a while longer.
Once I was outside, my knife went back in its sheathe. I clambered up the brick wall of the building and flipped myself over the edge of the roof into a roll, standing up when I was level. Alright. So north-westward then. More roof running.
There were a couple places I had to work around in the trip because of the number of floors, but it was largely as the crow flies, taking thirteen minutes to get from where I was to where I needed to be.
By the time I was there, the tension I'd felt when I'd started this whole thing tonight was back, even more. I was practically shivering, shaking with the anticipation.
Taking a deep breath, I let the air out of my lungs slowly, staring at the building in front of me. Four stories. No fire escapes. No obvious entry points.
And I'd bet you anything she had it rigged to blow at a moment's notice.
Okay. I tried to think about all the possible types of triggers she could have used: pressure, heat, light, proximity, motion, sound…
You know, I probably should have thought about this at the last building, too.
The question was, could I avoid and/or survive whatever they triggered?
I'd gotten through that force-field and the Gray Boy bubble, but I had no doubt she'd have much more conventional bombs (or at least conventional in the sense they exploded and caused pain) at someplace like this.
God. Assaulting a Tinker in their own base, especially when they did bombs, was not the smartest idea, was it?
But I couldn't think of any way to draw her out, and I wanted to maintain the element of surprise I had since she thought I was no longer part of the equation.
Which meant doing exactly that. Assaulting a Tinker in their own base.
Fuck.
Deep breath. If I were a sadistic, insane bitch of a bomb tinker, where would I put the bombs?
Roof, for one. Um… in the walls… Definitely where I was working.
Oh God this is so sketchy.
I was going to have to go fast. Really fast. It felt like I'd never really gotten to my limit, either that or it'd gone up, but this was going to make me push that as hard as I could.
So. Enter through a window, which would probably trigger a bomb in that room, and then down whatever hallways I needed to, also triggering bombs along the way in order to find her.
This was not going to be subtle.
Then again, sometimes subtlety was overrated.
There were going to be cameras for sure, but as long as I got to her fast enough that she didn't truly have time to prepare, I'd have achieved what I was going for.
Aaaaand I also had to consider the possibility that Oni Lee was here.
Prioritize, my mom would have said. Though I doubt she'd have thought I would be applying it to single-handly attempting to destroy a gang.
Okay. So, Bakuda first, Oni Lee if I got a chance or there was an opening, otherwise he came second. I nodded to myself, still looking at the building from behind an A/C unit.
The best path looked like… through one of the third story windows. Which meant I'd have to jump and then run a couple steps until I could grab the ledge.
Ready?
Never.
I still ran forwards from where I'd been hiding, pushing myself to full speed and pacing my steps so that when my right foot landed on the very lip of the roof, I launched myself across the gap. My left boot grabbed the brick wall first, and then my right and my left again, before I pushed myself off the wall at an angle and grabbed the windowsill.
Using the momentum of that final step, I flipped over the edge and crashed through the window, rolling and immediately sprinting as fast as fucking possible for the door.
There was a bang behind me, but I was already in the hall. Instead of trying to slow down to turn the corner, I simply shifted my weight upwards and ran on the wall for a few steps before gravity brought me back down to the floor again.
Bootprints on walls were going to be the last thing Bakuda would have to worry about tonight if I had anything to say about it.
There was another explosion behind where I was, and as I neared a cross between hallways, I made a split-second decision to go left, running at the far right corner and then launching off of it in the new direction I wanted to go.
My heart was hammering, adrenaline running through my veins, and I could honestly say that I'd never felt more alive than right then, a grin on my face despite knowing exactly what I was trying to do and what would happen if I made a single mistake.
Right!
I bounced off of another corner and turned right, and the entire hallway I'd been running through exploded in a burst of flame.
Behind me was a strange sound like a bubble popping, and I didn't even think as I tilted my head to the left, a glob of… something flying right by me and landing on the floor. It immediately ate its way through the surface like the strongest acid to ever exist.
Hot damn.
At the edge of my perception, I got the feeling of a person, but it was like they were… down. Second floor, then. Need to find a stairwell.
Or…
I saw a window at the end of the hallway I was running through and another building's wall seven or eight feet beyond it.
My grin widening, I accelerated, speeding up as much as I could. When I reached the end of the hallway I jumped through the window head-first, doing a forward flip and twisting in the air so I was facing the ground when my feet hit the other wall.
Absorbing the kinetic energy through my legs, I seemed to hang there for a heartbeat, just squatting on the side of the wall like it was nothing unusual. And then I pushed off as hard as I could, rocketing forward and crashing through the window that was below the one I'd come through, rolling forward to disperse some of the force and then running forward like I'd never stopped.
I heard both of the windows detonate with… something, changing directions to the left at another cross just as some huge projectile went rocketing past me and exploded when it hit a wall.
Man, Bakuda didn't do things half-way, did she?
Laughing, I wondered for a moment if I wasn't insane.
Nahhhhh.
Feeling around at the edge of my perception for that familiar person I'd sensed before, I located them after a moment, to the right.
Right it was.
Twenty feet away I followed the feeling at a turn, sensing that I was getting closer, almost on top of it. I pulled my knife out of my sheathe as I ran, searching for the best way to get there.
And suddenly, in the wall, there was a very generic door, just like all of the other doors I'd run past. But this door…
This door had somebody behind it.
I didn't hesitate to cut through it, not even trying to open it as I had no idea what would happen. Jumping over the pieces of what looked like steel that had fallen away, I entered the room.
What I found inside was a mad scientist's wet dream.
Wires ran everywhere, some coiled, some laying flat. Beakers and vats of something bubbled, a few Bunsen burners heating Pyrex glass. Something that looked like a distillation setup sat in the back corner, condensation running through small tubes and spiral-shaped glass channels to collect in flasks.
There were parts and pieces of various electronics all over the place, with a few computers and screens sitting on a couple of the tables at the edges of the room.
A red light was flashing, which I guessed was some sort of alarm that told her I'd gotten in. On four large screens set on the far wall of the room, there were images of the hallways I'd just run through, now smoking and atomized and melting and half a dozen other things.
And in the center of the chaos, facing me, was a woman with black hair and a gas mask.
I grinned. "Hello."
"Wha-what the fuck are you!?" she yelled, edging on a scream. Her voice was taut, frayed, with a hint of desperation and fear. "How the fuck did you get out of there!? You, you can't do that; it's imposs–"
"I killed it."
My voice interrupted her frantic speech and she froze.
I stepped further into the room.
"What does that even fucking mean!?"
"Everything has a lifespan, an ending and beginning. Time and space aren't any different, apparently. I was just naïve enough to believe I could avoid it. Live without having to see the death and destruction of anything and everything. Live without knowing how to kill it all." I smiled at her.
"You and that bubble forced me to accept that that's impossible. Thank you for that, by the way," I told her sincerely. "It's the best present someone's ever given me."
She seemed visibly unnerved by the repetition of the sentence she'd said only hours ago.
"And Bakuda… I can see your death. It's going to be really soon."
I flipped my knife around in my hand, from forward to reverse grip.
The woman suddenly threw one of the things in her arms at me, but she wasn't even that good of a shot. There was a small red light blinking on the side of the object, and I calmly stepped forward to intercept it, cutting it in half without pause.
The two pieces fell to the floor with a thump, and Bakuda just stared dumbly at the bisected shape.
"It's useless. I can see so much more now," I told her.
Not just the lines running across her, the one going from left shoulder to mid right bicep, the slash of red across her middle, and a small line just above her left breast that I knew would kill her instantly. I could see others, others I'd never even considered.
I'd been so limited before, thinking I could only kill things that could be seen.
No, I could kill that which defied common sense. The invisible. The abstract.
I could kill each of the connections I saw coming from her chest, running away from her like spokes in a wheel. The lines running from her right foot to the bundles in her arms.
"And it's all because of you."
"Lee!!!!" Bakuda screamed, looking over my shoulder.
I ducked, just in time for a knife to whistle over my head. Without looking behind me, I stabbed my blade backwards, thrusting it into where I could feel one of the lines.
The man appeared a couple feet in front of me and to the right, with a black bodysuit and a bunch of knives and grenades on a bandoleer. He wore a distinctive red demon (Oni, the twins had said, which made sense given his name) mask that had a wide grin and visible fangs.
As soon as my knife had finished sinking into the line embedded in the clone (because it had to be one of his clones based on his powers), I felt it dissolve, the ash blowing across my back.
The man reeled as if he'd been physically struck with a crowbar, holding his head in his hands.
I took advantage of the opening, stepping forward and catching a line that ran across both his forearms.
They separated cleanly from his body, falling to the ground with the sound of wet meat slapping on cement, blood splattering all over floor.
Without hesitating, I flipped the knife in my hand back around to a forward grip and reversed my arm's upward motion. This time I aimed for a line that was nearly vertical, from next to his neck on his right side to his left hip, right through his heart. It took less than a second.
Less than a second.
Less than a second to trace the line.
Less than a second to kill a man.
The two halves of his body slid apart almost comically, the way you see in the special effects of those TV shows and movies with blades so sharp they left only a hairline cut.
For me, that was exactly how it worked.
His torso fell to the right, organs falling out of his abdominal cavity. Liver. Spleen. Stomach. Liquid, not just blood –though there was a lot of blood–, but bile and other fluids from his small intestine spilled out. The smell of shit rose in the air from where I'd cut through his large intestine.
Killing a man is messy business.
His lower half plus the right side of his chest and arm fell backwards. Blood flew everywhere, the leftover momentum of it traveling through his body forcing it out his vena cava and then being propelled by the centrifugal force of the body falling. I saw more than a few droplets splatter across Bakuda's front.
She just stood there, her mask facing the two halves of the body as she took in the gory image. I'm sure she'd killed other people before, just as messily too. But I doubt she'd expected Oni Lee to be dealt with so quickly.
I took a step forward, uncaring of the blood that would track on the bottom of my boots.
Bakuda must have noticed my movement, because her head snapped up, and she fumbled for one of the other objects in her arms, desperately lobbing it at me.
It exploded feet in front of me, a black dot that grew into a small sphere. It was pure black. Jet. A void in the center of the world that all light was sucked into and never escaped. A hole in reality.
If it hadn't been intended to hurt me, I might honestly have been curious about it.
Air was sucked towards the innocuous-looking circle. Small pieces and devices littered around us were also being caught up and drawn to it, crushed into nothing. The blood on the floor wasn't exempt either.
I felt my body being dragged forward, but I didn't fight it, letting myself be drawn further into its sphere of influence. Once I was within arms' length, I raised my right hand and allowed it to be pulled forcibly towards the warped point of space-time, cutting right through the singularity just as easily as everything else.
With a slight 'pop' to my eardrums, the air pressure reasserted itself, the distortion no longer present.
I could almost hear Bakuda swallow.
"It's useless, you know."
I took another step forward. And a second.
Bakuda took a step back, but I don't even think she noticed.
"D-don't come any closer!!" she screamed. "I'll kill them! I'll kill them all! Everyone! All of the bombs in the city. A-and if you kill me, I have a dead man's switch! So you, you can't do that either!" She laughed hysterically.
I frowned, staring at all of the lines spreading away from her.
Following my instincts, I raised my blade, catching one of them. It flexed like a thread, but after a second the sharp edge of my knife sliced through it. And another. And another.
"H-hey!! What the fuck are you doing!? I told you I'd–"
"Shut up."
She fell quiet immediately, her voice cutting off.
Like a skein of thread, I pulled all of the strands together into one solid, thick rope, holding them together in my hand. It felt strange. Like I could feel them, but not with my skin. They were present, but ethereal.
And then I killed them.
Sliced through, they all snapped back to Bakuda, the half I held dissolving in my grasp.
"W-what did you just do!!?"
"No more."
She scrambled backwards as I strode towards her.
"No more threats. No more innocent deaths. No more kidnapping. No more hurting the people I love."
Bakuda tossed yet another bomb at me, but I quickly stepped around it while continuing to move forward. I heard a wet-sounding explosion behind me and knew that it was something like the acid I'd seen in the hallway.
"W-wait! We can talk about this! You, you don't have to do this!" She dropped all of the things in her arms and suddenly ripped off her mask, revealing a young, early-twenties Asian-American face that reminded me slightly of the twins. "You'll regret it!"
It changed nothing.
I was soon within two feet of her, towering over her, five-foot-nine to five-foot-two, staring into her eyes.
"Yes, I do. And no. I really, really won't."
My arm shot forward, and my knife was embedded up to the hilt in the small line above her left breast before she'd even had a chance to blink. Her brown eyes widened, realization gracing her features as she registered what had just happened.
I pulled the blade out of her chest and a small trail of blood dripped from the wound. As droplets fell from the tip of my knife to the floor, the light in her eyes slowly faded. Her legs folded beneath her, and she crumpled bonelessly on the ground, like a puppet with its strings cut, her arms splaying out to the sides.
And it was finally over.
Bakuda was dead.
A/N: 50,000 words, and she's finally accepted that her eyes are there to stay. About freaking time, girl.
Ever wonder why I gave Ryougi such a high mover rating? This is partly why. Don't believe me? Go watch Future Gospel. What's required to keep up with Servants is absurd.
Channeling your inner Shiki there much, Taylor?
So, this is the way the
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