Lair of the White Worm, III. The New Prometheus
Before I get into my thoughts on this chapter, I'd just like to remind all the readers of this post of Omicron's:
Yeah but if I update with 15k words of pure fight I will induce massive reader fatigue so at some point there is limited screentime for combat
@EarthScorpion you can't just make everything a tolkien reference
"Nell, run!" Chichimaru shouted. His hand fell to his sword, but before he could draw Szayel was upon him with the detonation of a flash-step. Up close the stench of stale sweat was overpowering. Szayel's smile spread still wider and he reached out with too-thin fingers, the skin of his arm bulging unseemly-
His hand slammed into a golden shield. He blinked, tilting his head as he slowly withdrew his hand. On the other side of the barrier, Chichimaru looked no less shocked.
It's interesting because I think this got lost in the kerfuffle that was the next thirteen or fourteen thousand words, but Chichimaru/Findorr despite being essentially the story's first antagonist is... well, he's the hero of another story and I feel like his first instinct here is... telling. Not only is his first instinct to protect Nell, there's a lot of information compressed here essentially saying that he expects to
die here. Combined with what comes up later, you wonder if he's well, a knight looking to die in service, so to speak.
"Hardened body," she said with a sneer, "huge speed, great strength, and absolutely no technique whatsoever. What a pushover."
fighting skill is important and omicron is greatly upset at bleach having an oversized kitchen cleaver be the pinnacle of swordsmanship
"Yes!" the man said breathlessly, his words falling over themselves as they crawled around a bloated, bitten tongue. "Perfect! Release the cloned Fraccions, force them fight for a few minutes, collect and study the data, yes, countermeasures, mimicking these powers in the next models, yes, I-" He paused, blinking rapidly again. His head tilted further on his neck, bending like a hanged man's. "Right. No lab anymore. No clones left. No measuring equipment. Shame. Shame-shame-shame."
One wonders if this is Aaroniero having gotten to him and driven him further to the edge, or if Szayel's artificial Ascendente process has
consequences.
"But I don't need any of that, do I?," Szayel said with a wide grin. "I can do it all myself. I used to be a fool who believed he had achieved 'perfection.' That he no longer needed to grow and advance. I was wrong. I was so wrong. Perfection… is a process. It is an endless pursuit, and its goal is never reached. It is only a lodestar that guides us on the endless path. It is about the journey, not the destination."
This is actually fascinating because this is like... it's a really common refrain in fictional works - that perfection is something that cannot be reached, only pursued and it's an endless journey that you can't ever reach the end of. By putting it in the hands of someone like Szayel, it's rather keenly presented over the course of this chapter that it's a
destructive path. That it's not something to be pursued and something that only the mad would do. It rather neatly contrasts with Nemo, whose endgame here is really that... everyday life, for lack of a better word. While Szayel - and Aizen too, honestly - seek perfection as this ever-hungering beast, Nemo, Cirucci and to an extent even Luppi - they just want to be
content.
It's a bit of a take-that to certain aspects of the SV questerbase, that's for sure
That was the first thought that filled the girls' hearts, their guts, unbidden: that whatever was happening before their eyes should not be. The surge of reiatsu that pulsed out of the man's body was colorless but it smelled of carrion and felt like maggots writhing under their skin. It grabbed the stomach and twisted it into a knot, it dried the throat and make the body itch.
I said this to you before, but this was a
great line that didn't really need any editing.
The worms had burrowed into the skin. She could feel them, feel each little cold tooth as it bit down; swallowed; moved on to bite again. Three pockmarks dotted Tatsuki's arm now, ashen-grey. Black veins spread out from them under her horrified eyes. She couldn't feel anything apart from the pain anymore. Her fingers weren't responding. Then her hand began to move of its own volition, fingers clenched into a claw and raising towards her throat. Something bulged under the skin of her index finger.
@EarthScorpion this is horrifying I hope you're happy
Going to skip over most of the fight scene because while it's cool I don't really have much to actually say.
"Is it… is it his final form?" Ururu said hesitantly. "He has a face in this one - if we kill him will he stay…"
Tatsuki wanted to say 'probably.'
One of the things Urahara had taught her was to listen to the brightness inside her. Because it knew how to counter tricks, how to make any fight fair, it could see what she could not. If she had enough focus, if she listened to her Heart, it would tell her what games her foes played without her having to throw herself at their cheats first. And she wanted to say 'probably.'
"No," Tatsuki said with absolute certainty. "He doesn't have a final shape. If he dies, he'll become even worse."
I'll make an exception here. The thing about horrifying things is that they lose a certain amount of their horror if you can
define them, and in some way
limit them. Szayel's Resurreccion explicitly defies this - it won't stop, not ever. It's not something that you can draw analogies to something more harmless with in your mind to blunt the impact it has. Tatsuki desperately
wants this to be true, that there is some kind of limitation, some sort of way to define the problem so that it can be solved but-
There's not a solution to every problem.
A hand rested on her shoulder. She looked up, and had to blink tears out of her eyes, so blinding was the glow of the angel above her. Her red hair trailed in the wind of her aura, her body shrouded in light, and her face was full of pained love, of kindness and distress. In one arm she held Ururu, the girl curled up against her, her armor seeming to weigh nothing in that moment. She was stained red, but her wounds glowed with soothing light, they mended before Tatsuki's eyes.
"Hime..?" Tatsuki whispered.
"I'm sorry," the angel said. Her wings were an oval of light, wrapped around herself. "I should have been stronger. I couldn't see my heart."
The air shuddered and whimpered and ripped, a jagged wound in reality bleeding shadows as another form birthed itself out of nothing. It moved like a swaying field, ripples going through its limbs as they sought ground and dragged their fractal mass into the world. The thing had no face now, though it had a thousand mouths and a thousand eyes; it had outgrown its core, such that it was now three winding branches connected to one axis, each one splitting into three more, and three more again, creating a hydra with a thousand arms suited to all that had ever killed it, a threefold symmetry that could be torn apart and keep moving as three bodies, as nine, as twenty-seven.
Orihime held Ururu tighter, her hand on Tatsuki's shoulder grew warmer, her eyes filled with sorrow and resolve.
"Why?" she asked. "Why did you do this to yourself?"
The thing looked upon her, any human expression lost to its new flesh.
"Is this power not answer enough?" answered a hundred mouths speaking in unison.
"But you die," she said. "You die again and again. How can it be worth it? The pain. The hurt. All to just be stronger? All so you can kill better?"
"It is evolution," the thing said sagely. "Endless iteration towards greater fitness, with no end goal, no finishing line, only the endless pursuit. Perfection as a dream, never achieved. I wouldn't have thought of this once. Back when I was a fool."
"Who made you like this? Who hurt you so badly that you would just… crave more hurting?"
He chuckled. "Only one person could manage this. I did it to myself."
Orihime looked down with sadness. She let go of Tatsuki's shoulder. Tatsuki reached on instinct, voiceless, wanting the angel to stay, but Orihime lifted her hand, her palm towards the horror.
"Then I can't fix that. But I can fix all that we did to you. I can take it all back. I never wanted... to kill anything. Not even you."
"But death is the gift that I want from you," the chorus whispered, "for as long as you can give it."
"Then no longer," Orihime said. "Santen Kesshun."
Three darts of light flew out of her golden aura, spreading a great luminescent veil between them; they spinned dizzyingly around the room, a great dome of light encasing the thing. Its eyes looked on curiously.
"This barrier will not hold me," it said.
"It is not meant to. Soten Kisshun..."
Two more lights flew away, and the aura that sustained her dimmed; she looked no more than an angel, but only like a girl, almost falling to her knees as the pain of her wounds flared anew. But she gritted her teeth and held her hand steady as the two lights formed an eye-shaped lens before her.
"Koten Zanshun," she said hoarsely, and her last light drifted towards the lens.
The shield was already cracking, the fractal hydra straining against it with casual strength, sending web-cracks throughout the dome. Orihime closed her eyes.
"I reject."
A blast of heavenly light streamed from the one light, through the lens that widened it, into the dome where it refracted a thousand times. A torrent of soothing, peaceful power engulfed the crossways and the whole of the hydra, whose eyes all turned to Orihime in confusion.
And then, it understood. As the six points of light began to spin and reshape the dome and stream into a great sphere of blinding gold, its mouths screamed outrage.
It was too late. Tatsuki shielded her eyes from the blinding light, even as the mere waves of it, the aftershocks of the great mercy it worked inside the sphere, soothed her aching body and warmed her skin and gave her the strength to stand again.
The light faded. She lowered her arms.
This is just great. I love every bit about this - I mean I think you could have been a bit less blunt about it but-
The way to defeat the monster isn't with force, it's not with strength, it's not by subjugating it to your will, but it's with compassion and empathy and understanding. Which really, sums up a lot of Number None. Also a key note is that while baby bi Tatsuki draws comparisons to an angel, this is then followed up with, well this bit here:
Orihime wiped a tear from her face, her eyes circled with deep, dark circles, her cheeks bloodless, her whole body shuddering. She had to lay down Ururu as gently as she could. She barely had the strength to stand. As Ururu's feet touched the ground the girl blinked her eyes open and looked up, and Orihime smiled.
On the ground before them was a worm in the shape of a man: its flesh soft and ridged, barely holding itself into a figure with four limbs, a torso, and a blank face. Its head swayed from side to side, as if it could not see the girls but could smell them, and its boneless fingers clutched at thin air, trying to grasp something that had abandoned him.
Then it lunged at them, frantic, fury visible even its featureless face, and Orihime simply waved her hand to call forth the simplest shield, a triangle of light against which its limp fists beat again and again, to no avail. Even tired as she was, she could hold it. Perhaps she could even have done it with her bare arms. It struck blindly, madly, fruitlessly, until at last it laid its tired hands on the barrier, and slid down to its knees.
"That's his one weakness, isn't it?" Orihime said sadly, shivering. "It doesn't matter how many worms he has buried in the world, or how much power he has left. He was so convinced the world would always try to hurt him, that if you simply choose not to, he can do nothing."
She took a deep breath.
"The only way to win… was not to play. His endless cycle of violence. Of pain. Of suffering. Of victimisation." A tear rolled down her face. "I reject it."
It wasn't inhuman strength or a divine power that defeated Szayel, really. It was just a scared girl who despite everything, tried to understand him. Give Orihime's powers to anyone else there, and Szayel would have won.
"You're wrong, you know?" he said, his eyes finding Ilforte in the small crowd and staring feverishly at him. "I changed. That was the whole point. I changed! I finally learned to see beyond my own grasp. I saw someone, and recognized in her a kindred spirit. I found someone I could value as a person. Someone I could respect. A… a friend."
"Who are you talking about?" Ilforte asked, looking earnestly confused.
Somewhere at one end of the compass, past the dim corridor, and another, and more, stone walls began to groan and strain. There was a beating down here. A beating in the deeps. Like a heartbeat. Like footsteps.
"All of you…" Szayel said, "all of you are alive because of that. Because I was waiting for her! Because I thought she'd come when the wall would start breaking, when I would be fighting for my life! Because I hoped she could be there to see it! To witness our work! Our creation!"
"Oh," Ilforte said, realization dawning on his face. "Oh, God, you poor fool. You're talking about Nemo."
Pebbles and dust fell from the rafters above. The walls pulsed. Orihime clutched Tatsuki's arm, and Tatsuki stepped back, looking every which way.
"She deserved to see what we achieved together. And you've robbed her of that…"
Ilforte said nothing. His expression was strange; half sadness, half wonder that he would even be sad.
"Szayel," Shawlong said evenly, "Nemo and Cirucci started this rebellion. They recruited everyone. They planned for you to die today."
Szayel smiled silently for a few seconds, as if the words had not registered. Then that smile froze, and slowly faded, his face sinking, his eyes wide with dawning shock.
"...what?"
"I never thought I'd say this," Ilforte said, one hand resting on his sheathed sword, "but I am sorry, brother."
This cuts
deep. In one moment, Nemo just hurt Szayel more than anyone else ever could, or ever
has. And - it's not really presented as a
victory on her part, but rather a crime. Nemo won't be
happy to hear about this, and how she caused Szayel's suicide. But that's the price of war, isn't it? We saw it with Tesla earlier, and we see it with Szayel here - the true tragedy of this war isn't Aizen's omnipotent power or Ulquiorra's sky-darkening strength, but it's how everyone on either side is in some way
human.
Don't really have much to say on the ending that I haven't already, thanks for coming to my word vomit TED talk everyone.
Although...
Apparently I was so angry that I misread/mis-remembered who actually said it. I'll edit it to Shawlong later. But I'm still so pissed that they caused us to lose the exception to the fucking nuke S just unleashed.
Because Nemo is naturally someone to take advantage of things like that and not put herself in the firing line to protect her friends and allies, right? Right.
