TokyoPewPew — Roleplayer Guild

The luckiest were a mile inland, filming the lanterns and the comets and the sunrise from their third-story tenement windows; beyond earshot of the gunfire, the screams of the devoured inaudible. They learned of the disaster through the blaring of a radio, or the impersonal, flat-cadenced droning of a TV reporter standing in front of an emergency broadcast, scanlines striped like neon seersucker; any live feeds too shaky, too frantic to convey the gruesome details. They went back to bed, or back to making their morning chai who didn't traipse over to a neighbor's shed, or a cellar, or whatever door of whose locks and hinges they were so assured. They waited for the prank-drill-false-alarm to be over so they could return to their rubbery eggs and their weekend morning reruns, blithely oblivious to the devastation wrought mere streets away.

Next in fortune were those standing the food lines; and waiting to use the bathrooms and taking photographs at the shrines and souvenir stalls. Though they, themselves, had heard the screaming, seen the gushering of the water as heaven's fires struck the harbor, Etroi had seen fit to spare them the sight of bodies washing ashore, chewed and broken. Pink scum buoyant atop frothing, blood-thick tides. Tasting the panic of the throngs, the hired guns were quick to take positions along the dunes, forming the first meat-wall between hunter and prey; the horde and its panicked, bleating food. And the Regalia, already mobbed by their camera crews and their gormless, adoring lickspittles—to them the stragglers flocked all the fiercer, trampling and crushing each other to have their guarded place at a god-chosen's side. Yes. Comfort and consolation abound for those who just minutes ago had been stuffing their mouths with deep-fried sugar, and their brains with carnival games. The assurance that they were important, and precious, and cared for—the perverse pleasure of watching others die to save them—for some these flowed bountifully. But only some.

What comforts, then, to those treading the harbor, clamoring the beach?—with no clean distance whereby to observe the horrors as bystanders, and no sweet words from a do-nothing Dominant cooed into their ears, no healing residues pumped into their capillaries—and still worse, no way to reach these things except over the piles of the writhing dead, and through the knee-high, brackish blood-water, and over the no-man's-land of the horror-scuttled sands—what had they done to deserve such disownment where others had been claimed, why abandon them when so many others were rescued? Gaia's chosen burgeoning a green sanctuary up from beneath the asphalt, and stroking the fur of so many of her huddled children; and before her, the cool composure of the gunmen; but before them the featureless sand, utterly devoid of shelter, a hundred feet which may just as well have been a league......No avenue existed for these forsaken souls but to run regardless of the futility. And run they did, hunted and swarmed, dragged down by two, then four, then ten of those scuttling horrors snipping their hamstrings and Achilles heels first, then their carotids.

What solace to the fleeing, the terrified, the chased, the felled, the eaten-alive?—that one or two wayward Regalia dashed for the waterline to have the glorious moment they'd thirsted for?—that the meteors had to stop falling, that eventually the heavens would run dry of torments to cast down on them and the pitiable earth?—or that a lone woman stood the sands, her sword floating from her scabbard, her resolve silent, furious, and unquenchable?

Her skin a-clad up to the elbows in liquid metal, the stuff condensated to her hands like a quicksilver dew, she continued to pray. To invoke. A human wick dipped in molten steel, every moment it solidified thicker, further up her extremities. It reached up to her hips then, and the sockets of her arms, clasping, clenching, biting her flesh in its austere embrace.

From the urgency in her eyes and the trembling in her uplifted hands the fleeing masses knew her for an ally. No one would have had reason for such fear who had played a hand in this—whose thousands of ravenous allies slithered up the beach. They fled and they knew not to stray too near, lest the imminent residue slowed their escape, or the radius of some devastating attack expanded beyond her control; still, they fled past her, behind her, wanting her between them and the sea. Some drew near enough in their flight to see her painted face in detail. Her tears resembled the hellish waters from which they had managed to trudge: salt diluted with blood.

And still that massive sword hummed in the air, wielded by a hand immaterial, or perhaps by naught; and any moment then she should have reached to pluck it from the air, or it should have returned, terrier-like, to her expecting hand, that she-knight who by then was almost entirely metal, with but a face emerged from between the two hinged jaws of her helm and gorget, and a naked breastbone around which the ethereal armor continued to close—spreading across her like a mildew. But then it happened. The slender blade, that curved sliver of shadesteel, a god's toenail clipping given hilt, yawed in the air. It aimed true. And thrust forth by some unseen power, it impaled itself through the Regalia's spine, through her heart, out the other side of her shattered sternum. She stumbled forward a step, blinking at the protrusion in her chest which dripped and glistened with her life-stuffs, gasping for air which leaked out of her ere it could quench the burning in her lungs. Her last breath creaked out of her like the snapping of a dry branch over one's knee; and her final strength, failing in her legs, sent her plummeting to the sands.

Usually Beth died in callous silence, but this time—this time as the darkness swallowed in around her she was sure she heard screaming. The screams of those who, if but for a single moment, had placed their faith in her. It was oddly comforting.

Witnesses knew not what to believe. Had a Regalia just taken her own life, devoured by her own despair? Had she had her own powers sabotaged, subverted, turned against her? Or more frightening still: had she just lost an unseen battle against a hidden foe, invisible hands knotted and wresting for control over the vicious weapon? Either way, writhing and sputtering her last was the woman in the eerie corpsepaint, her defiance brief and futile, her little body draining upon the blade like a tuna bled for market. Those few who had believed in her fully abandoned her then, kicking sand into her face in their mad, desperate scramble up the dunes, even stampeded over her, anything, everything to escape before those beaks had scraped her clean, and those glassy eyes had scanned the trees, and those chitinous legs had clicked forth in pursuit of their next course in a voracious, neverending feast.

They had reached the body before long, washing over her like a ruptured seawall, like bursted riverbanks. Few people spared her any thought by then, enraptured by their terror, frenzied and bestial. But those who did, in a final gesture of mercy, now wished her dead; as the carapaces mounted her body, and the mandibles set to work, rasping, ripping.

But something was not yet dead beneath that mound of claws and teeth and stomachs.

Two, three, six concussive blasts launched the insectoids skyward, and skidding across the sands, and in all directions, their bodies shredded into a strange, fine dust, their legs curled up dead against their ruptured thoraxes. And in the same spot as where the girl had fallen rose something else, like a black flame reborn from her pale ashes. Something immense and hulking. Something unwhole.

Still sloughing pieces of her from its many orifices—bits of hair and lip and half an ear leaking from its helm, skin shedding placenta-like between the joints of its vambraces, the girl entirely parasitized by this demon dwelt within her—the entity stumbled to its feet, sprawled, stretched, a newborn foal testing its legs, a freshly-laid insect testing its wings. One of arm and one of eye—already maimed and chewed by those creatures despite its thick, gleaming cladding? Or was this a mutilated god, a crippled one they now witnessed? Regardless, of the girl it coughed and vomited the last, its voice like the gnawing of beaks against wind-stripped bone, its limbs groaning like the chains of hell. Its gorget glistened with her liquefied insides, but in its helmet shone an impenetrable darkness, a darkness which allowed only that single eye to pierce it. An eye like the spark flown from a baleful fire. An eye bright with cruelty.

All along the tips of the dunes, breaths were held; reticles were trained, unsure of this monster's allegiances. Until, hilt still jutting from its back, and wet, red tip from its bosom, the infant god turned toward the sea.
TokyoPewPew Member

Status

Recent Statuses

Bio

Most Recent Posts
