Chapter 37-
The iron spear-tip flashed through the air, driving itself through one of the many bats which filled the space above Sonsee’s head.
She brought her spear down quickly to confirm her catch. To her surprise, the bat did not endure a gory death, but instead turned to a pale gray color, stiffening up like a statue; there wasn’t a speck of blood anywhere.
For a moment, she pondered what this meant. If they were in Melty’s Garden, and she was able to extract concepts from dreams, were these animals really just the idea of bats given form?
Sonsee quickly snapped out of her thoughts, remembering the urgency of the game they were playing.
She plucked the body from her spear and threw it into a pouch at her side, casting her gaze upward. She stood atop a rock fixture no more than four feet tall, the cave itself was not bigger than a concert hall, but the walls appeared to slope down and into small tunnels that led elsewhere. There were about fifty bats swarming the air; they appeared to have spirits, but they were small and tricky to pin down with her Vocation.
“I’m rusty,” she noted to herself, not having hunted in almost a year. Without a second thought, Sonsee leapt off the fixture, her feet pounding against the grassy field.
The next vantage point she found was a nearby plant, the same strange kind of tall, curling stocks that littered the cave floor. This one was especially tall, yet its walls were fairly soft. Her fingers dug into the plant, upwards at a steady pace until she found herself perched atop the spiral, her weight pushing it down ever so slightly.
Years of experience hunting game in the cruel wilderness lay dormant in Sonsee’s muscles and behind her eyes. Before her, seven feet away, a bat flapped aimlessly around. Breathlessly, those years came flowing back, and before she even knew it, she was airborne.
Another flash of iron, a short, sharp squeak, and not a speck of blood.
Machine-like, she removed the bat and pocketed it while taking quick stock of her surroundings.
A sensation behind her, far off, brushed against her consciousness. Instinctively turning to investigate, her eyes met Susarion’s only fifteen feet away. He held a stick in his right hand, and carried a bat’s body in his other, two more tied neatly around his belt.
“He’s that far ahead of me?” What ran through her mind was not panic, but simply an acknowledgement of the difference between them. It wasn’t a problem, it didn’t mean failure.
“As long as I’m still here, I haven’t lost!”
Between the two of them was a small valley of impenetrable brush, thick flora rising several feet into the air; above it, a colony of bats hovered, darting around from point to point.
The opportunity was too good not to take advantage of; at the same time, they each knew that they shared this thought. Sonsee dug her foot into the ground, primed to rush forward, but waiting patiently. Susarion also braced himself, but didn’t assume the same pose. Instead, he stretched his palm outward.
Sonsee’s eyes flickered for a split second; she took in a sharp breath.
“Of course…”
“[CHANGING SEASONS]!!”
In the vast chamber of the cave, the sound of the shockwave was thunderous, like a deep bass that tore through the air and collided with the bats. The incredible resonance killed almost all of them on the spot, sending them into a tailspin towards the overgrown brush.
Sonsee sprung into motion: now was the time.
Her feet surpassed the lip of the valley, her black hair whipped in the air. Her left arm launched forward, snatching a bat from the air. With her other arm, she slung her spear behind her, using the weight to spin right around and tag another with the head of the weapon.
What was, at such a height, a waving sea of green and gold, became a field of overgrown brush and grass while she plummeted to the ground. The wind picked up as she fell, obscuring the sound of her landing.
With haste, she placed her spoils into the pouch.
“That’s four.”
The last thing she saw before descending into the mess of brush was Susarion, likewise holding his own fourth bat. She stood still in the grass for a split-second, tactics rushing through her mind.
“The next thing to do is find my last point…
But am I fast enough? I can tell by his eyes, he’s honest enough to hold to his conditions, but if he wins before I do, there’s nothing to say he couldn’t attack me on the spot with justification.”
She took in a breath as sharply and quietly as possible.
“Was this a trap?”
---
“C comes before A?”
Bleech kept his breathing shallow, lying flat on the ground against a tree stump. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead as all of his concentration went towards maintaining a cover of roots and grass above himself.
The sound of Gallow’s voice brought a pang of fear to his heart.
“What are you talking about?”
He could tell that his friend was confused, anxious. Dion projected an air of superiority, as if he was in perfect control of the situation now, and the fact that neither of them understood the true nature of his ability made that a real possibility.
Gallow silently took in the situation, and quickly gave thanks that Bleech couldn’t see Dion’s Vocation in action.
“The way he’s moving around so instantly, the way he speaks,” Gallow realized. “It reminds me of…”
No. He couldn’t let his mind wander in that direction. What mattered now was protecting Bleech.
“[NAVIGATOR]!!”
A flurry of punches erupted from Gallow’s spirit body. Dion’s eyes lit up for a moment with excitement. Deftly, he parried each and every blow with his bare hands.
“That’s impossible!”
Navigator, not bound by any physical limitations, could throw at least twenty punches in a second, but he watched Dion counter every one as if he were hanging up laundry. There was a disparity between how fast Gallow knew himself to be attacking and how much time it took his opponent to respond.
Dion, hands still meeting every attack, was now behind Gallow. In the interim, he took a step forward and walked around him.
Gallow had barely enough time to look backwards.
“I can’t-!”
Dion threw his arm into a blow directly across Gallow’s back.
The world flashed red for a moment and Gallow lost consciousness. The sensation of his face crashing into the cool grass at his feet shocked him back to the present.
The air was knocked from his body. He felt, in that terrifying moment, that he was even incapable of breathing.
Dion stood above him, leg raised in position to crush his skull.
With Navigator, he was just able to roll out of the way by a few feet. Before he knew it, Dion was descending upon him again, his arm moving at such a breakneck pace that it was a blur.
“[NAVIGATOR]!!”
The only thing left to do was make a last-ditch effort. The space between them had shrunk to a few inches, and with it the options available to both of them.
His spirit burst from his form with full force. This was not the time to defend, he needed desperately to retaliate.
Navigator’s fists flew at near supersonic speeds; the instant they collided with his attacker, they began to break apart under the sheer strength of Dion’s power.
“I can’t miss a beat!”
Gallow’s instinct told him that he couldn’t falter for a moment, if his focus lapsed for even a heartbeat, Dion’s assault would crush his own.
In that moment, it wasn’t necessary to contemplate why he was doing this; why he was living or fighting or moving. It was all in service to his friends. If he was able to protect what he held dear to his heart, he might have given up his life.
“That wasn’t necessary,” he knew.
Because he could win.
---
“I can win!”
The thought rang through Sonsee’s mind as clearly as church bells, and with those bells came the stillness and center of survival.
Her legs moved before she could consider it. In the dense, impregnable brush, the small body of a bat would be nearly imperceptible. Any hunter would have to spend at least a few minutes combing through the area for the drops.
There was not a moment of hesitation. In this fog of wilderness, she was practically blind, but she didn’t need her eyes here.
Her body weaved through the growth like a needle through thread; her movements precise and graceful.
“To the right…”
This was real seeing, not with her eyes, but her spirit. She sensed at least one soul slowly seeping out of a nearby bat.
Twigs snapped, branches cracked, leaves and tall grass rustled; the noise would have revealed her position had she not been advancing so aggressively.
Sonsee stopped abruptly.
“There!”
A Y-shaped set of branches was a foot from her; nestled peacefully in its grasp was a bat, its wings scraped, its body stiffening and losing color.
She’d won the game.
“As it will be.”
Sonsee grabbed her spear, just below the tip, and swung around, the shaft whirling through the air, crashing straight through overgrown branches and into Susarion’s chest.
The older man would have fallen to the earth had he not caught onto a stray branch. He looked back at her with eyes full of resolve. Blood began to trickle from his cheek; it had been cut open on a stray needle as he recoiled from the blow. For three steady seconds, he caught his breath, the wind having been knocked from his chest.
Sonsee knew that even if she found her last point, he was skilled enough to do so at the same time, if not before her. As there was no way to know who had gotten theirs first, it had unfolded in the way she’d predicted; Susarion had used the dense brush to trap her.
It would have worked, too, had she not felt him approach from behind. A part of her realized that she had used spirit sight to sense him, but she recognized it as what the Atamape called “Hotzit”: the bird of prey’s heart.
Long had stories been told of hunters and fishermen who, in the dead of night, the deep of the sea, the most impossible of circumstances, had entered into a state of flow and calmness, a preternatural awareness. It was believed that the bird of prey, who saw everything, and swept in gracefully to kill, had come over them.
“Impressive ears,” Susarion clutched the branch and steadied himself. “I’m surprised you didn’t just track me down and kill me.”
A steely expression dominated Sonsee’s face, before she softened and opened up.
“I just wanted to prove that I could win.”
Susarion returned her smirk.
“Of course.”
The air hung between them. Not a single creature stirred in the brush; silence filled the space.
Sonsee felt the adrenaline catch up to her, kickstarting her heart and forcing her to take in deep, long breaths. After a moment, it calmed down, and she found that both her spiritual and physical awareness had been heightened.
Susarion’s soul welled up with determination; it billowed from his eyes and broke the silence.
“[CHANGING SEASONS]”
His voice was rough, pointed.
For the first time, Sonsee saw his Vocation spring forth from his hand, proliferating the branch with spirit-rebar. Her eyes tracked the branch.
It arched over to a tree that was mere inches from her.
“He’s-!”
She leapt to the side and covered her face as the body of the tree was overwhelmed by Changing Seasons.
A earth-shattering CRASH boomed as the tree exploded into millions of splinters. Her exposed calves were bombarded by debris, covering them in small wounds.
The twigs had hardly snapped beneath her feet when Susarion rushed at her with blinding speeds, a thick branch in hand.
“It’s fortified!”
He swung it at her head, but Sonsee’s reaction was faster; she flung her spear up, catching the stick with the shaft, and redirected the attack harmlessly above her head. With her free arm, she threw a punch straight into his solar plexus, sending him back in recoil.
It was obvious that if he knew how to fight, he was letting his emotions get the better of himself. Susarion had a rage building up inside since he’d heard the news of Fars’ death, and it had finally been unleashed in a ferocious display.
Sonsee needed to take advantage of the sudden space between them, and plunged her spear forward, twisting it in such a way that its sections became uncoiled and it reached farther.
Susarion’s eyes flashed intently. The spear was racing for his throat, set to kill.
His hand reached up and grabbed the segment just behind the tip. Sonsee’s heart dropped as she saw Changing Seasons fill the length of her spear.
“If he destroys it-!”
His face broke into a maniacal rage. He declared his victory.
“I’ve-!”
Before he was able to get a word out, time froze.
“W-what?”
…
………
Nothing moved around them, not even their hearts, but still, they were acutely aware of what was happening.
Fear bubbled up in Susarion’s stomach.
“What’s happening…? I haven’t… I haven’t…?”
The world around them was filled with green light; the sound of shrieking air, like a jet engine, was the only thing they could hear. The thick underbrush gave way to a black void that sped by them at light-speeds. Neither of them could tell if it was a second or a year that they were in this state, but it was all over before they knew it.
---
Gallow became aware of where he was in a moment or two. No longer pinned beneath Dion’s onslaught, he was looking at the meadow outside Melty’s cabin. The wind was blowing the flowers gently; it was a serene view.
At his side was Sonsee battered and terribly scratched up.
“She did it,” she said in a soft, relieved voice.
Janna was laying in the grass next to Melty, beaming with pride twenty feet away. Next to her, Bleech stood, panting and confused.
“What happened?” Gallow asked, lost.
Sonsee looked, relaxed, at the girl.
“I distracted the old man while she contacted Melty.” She explained. “I figured that, if it was her Garden, she existed somewhere inside of it, and even if she was lost, Janna would be able to feel her out.”
“Old man?” he questioned. “So there were two of them, after all…”
He took a deep breath.
“Woman.”
The voice came from behind.
They spun around to see who it was.
Susarion looked tired, but it was beyond a regular exhaustion. Something behind his eyes told them that this was his breaking point, that this episode was just the culmination of a sorrow that had been building for years.
“Please,” he requested. “Just give me one chance… to kill you…”
“... I can’t do that.” She seemed almost apologetic to defend her own life.
“I understand,” Susarion reasoned. “I just need… to try… to understand why it happened…”
She said nothing. Gallow recognized that this was not his fight, and stepped away. From the trees, Dion watched, waiting for Susarion to distract the two of them fully.
Sonsee threw down her spear.
“Let’s just finish this,” she declared.
He planted his foot in the ground.
“Just give me the word, no tricks.”
Janna got up and ran a few paces closer, to see what was happening with bated breath, Bleech followed suit.
“...”
“...”
It was wordless.
They took off, running straight into each other.
Susarion threw a punch.
Sonsee stepped out of it.
Her fist crashed into his nose.
He hit the ground, crushing the flowers at their feet.
Silence.
He got to his feet.
“Useless, useless, useless…” he muttered to himself.
“I’m sorry…” she whispered, “that it had to be like this.”
“Of course…” he didn’t look at her. “It had to be like this.”
He put a hand to his heart and gazed up at her. She knew instantly what he was going to do.
“No!” she shrieked.
“There’s nothing else for me to do,” he stated promptly. “I’ll never understand it…”
“You don’t have to do this!” She was cautious to approach, scared that it would provoke him. “I don’t know what you want, but I know that you’re a good person!” Tears began to fill her eyes. “I know that you love your companions, or else you wouldn’t feel like this! There’s so much worth to your life; whatever you want to learn, you can do it!” She almost broke down.
“There’s a tomorrow, Susarion!”
He chuckled, taking her aback.
“For people like us, there is no tomorrow…” his expression was calm, peaceful. “That’s why we follow The Tiger… Because he’s stronger than all of us… The man who lives in that absent tomorrow…”
Her heart broke.
“[CHANGING SEASONS]!!”
Dion looked wildly at the old man.
“WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING?!!”
Susarion’s Vocation filled through his heart, reinforcing it to its limit.
Painlessly, his heart exploded, and he fell back to the springtime flowers once more.
It was a quick descent, but it seemed to last for ages illuminated under the bright sunshine. What passed through his mind in the last moment of his life was not, however, rage or sadness.
“I wonder… If those young men will ever find happiness… If they can find what I couldn’t understand…”
His body hit the ground, cushioned by the meadow.
Everyone stood still, petrified. It was an unknowable action, something that could never be understood, the climax of a private life.
From up in the trees, Sonsee and Gallow heard laughter.
Their attention snapped to Dion, who was cradling his face in his hand, guffawing hysterically.
When he saw that they’d noticed him, he smiled down at them.
“Well,” he chuckled. “It looks like now, there’s no one to hide from!”
Gallow whipped his pistol out and squeezed a shot in his direction. Dion was now hanging in the air, still laughing wildly. He spun around and immediately was feet away from them. His knee came down and collided with Gallow’s chest, blowing him backwards. Before she could respond, Sonsee, who had no clue of his ability, felt the back of his hand smack into her face.
“That gets them out of my hair for a minute,” he thought, turning his sights to the children. “But what I really want right now is to make someone cry.”
Melty dashed forward as Dion closed the distance between them.
Bleech felt his stomach fill up with the same black dread that he knew so well.
“It’s happening again!” his mind screamed. “Everything’s falling apart!” The way Dion seemed to float effortlessly, his demeanor, it was all too reminiscent of Warren Roseraid.
Melty’s staff glowed with her green light.
“[SIAMESE DREAM]!”
Her Dominion manifested dreams of violence along the staff, and a scythe blade sprouted from the top, made of a strange, slimy-looking reflective metal, like mercury with the rainbow discoloration of oil.
Melty slashed at Dion, creating a mountainous release of energy along the arc of the swing. He was behind her before even moving. She reacted instantly, spinning around and aiming the blade at his heart.
It was inches from him before he appeared at her side. Melty had no time to alter the course of her attack, and his hand pierced straight into her side. She gasped as the ribs of her physical body were shattered and she fell to the ground.
“It’s just like this!” Bleech wanted to vomit. “Someone tries to protect me, they try and fail!! Melty, and Malvado, and--”
He nearly collapsed with grief.
He remembered now; when Warren had burned down his town, his mother had thrown herself on top of him in an attempt to protect him from their collapsing home. It was the first time he’d ever felt a connection so strong to her, and it was the last time he would feel that ever again.
Dion turned himself to the children.
“The girl first,” he thought. “If she was really important enough to bring us back here; the boy is useless.”
His boot broke from the ground, he rocketed towards Janna with blistering speed. She had no idea what to do; Dion was unbeatable.
Something stirred deep inside Bleech. Not anger, not strength, nor willpower.
Dion stopped just short of the girl, taking in her terrified eyes and relishing in his own power. His right arm stretched across his chest; he’d cut through her with one stroke.
Janna didn’t even have the time to scream.
Dion’s arm sliced through the air.
A thin line formed across Janna’s waist before tearing in two through her whole body.
“Ah!” he peaked. It was an incredible feeling to take a life again. There was nothing in the world but him and this girl, surrounded by the afternoon light.
The light dissipated in less than a second, and Janna’s form was revealed to be Bleech, whose body was now the one being bisected.
“What-??”
Bleech felt the first second of agony as he was split in two.
“No matter what happens, I need to hold on to this feeling-!
Even if there’s nothing but darkness, I need to hold on to hope, I need to hold on to this light!
Even if it’s just a speck, even it it’s just from nothing but a false-”
“[PAPER MOON]!!!”
Dion’s eyes were wild, not with madness, but confusion.
A golden sphere formed around the two of them; all of the blood that had burst from Bleech’s body returned to him, the two halves of his body sealed up, as if time itself was rewinding.
“What- What are you doing-?!” Dion shrieked.
Bleech’s face betrayed no fear or sadness. It was an expression of victory.
“Which one of us was cut in half?” he asked calmly.
“I killed you-” Dion managed to get only that far before his waist was torn in two.
The fiery-haired young man let out one last wretched, awful howl as his body fell in pieces to the ground. The bubble popped, leaving behind sparkling traces of light, glittering in the air around them.
Standing a few feet away, Janna looked on in awe. Melty peered up at him with the most intense curiosity.
There he was: Victorious.