Chapter 49-
“Who the hell let you near me?!” Eroh shrieked.
Gallow stepped back cautiously as the two guards accompanying them advanced between him and the cell. He and Gideon were standing in the high-security wing of the Hilltop police station, located on the surface. It was one of two that were necessary to manage the crime levels of the huge metropolis. Eroh’s cell was dingy, with a simple bed and toilet. A small barred window just below the ceiling was the only aperture to the outside.
Eroh reached through the bars of the cell, grasping wildly in Gallow’s direction. One of the guards swiftly produced a baton and jabbed it through the bars, nailing Eroh’s collarbone.
“Egh!” he staggered back, tripping and falling to the floor against the back wall.
The guard barked, “Hey, if I need to get serious with you, you’re going to solitary!”
“Eh…” Eroh sighed, laying his arm over his eyes. “Do it, why don’t you?”
The guard turned to Gideon.
“You get five minutes, Captain,” he tipped his cap to him. “We’ll be waiting outside.”
With that, he motioned the other guard to follow him out of a small door at the end of the hall. The instant the door closed, Eroh got to his feet and leaned against the back wall, so that he couldn’t be touched by the light that poured through the bars.
“So,” he moaned. “Why do I have to look at you?”
Gideon stepped forward staring stalwartly into Eroh’s eyes.
“What’s your connection to the Fange Team?”
Eroh looked at him like he’d asked a stupid question.
“My connection?”
“Answer the question.”
Eroh kicked the ground weakly.
“I don’t care too much about any of them, to be honest. If you wanted me to sell them out, you’re out of luck, though.”
Gideon tilted his head.
“And why would that be?”
“Because I want them to succeed…”
“Succeed at what?”
Gideon’s interest piqued. He was getting nearer to the information he wanted, but he was still only stabbing around it.
Eroh didn’t look at him while he spoke, and didn’t really respond to his question.
“Well, it’s really more that I’m interested in what’ll happen afterwards, I’m interested in the Tiger’s mission.”
Gallow’s eyes widened and he stepped forward now.
“The Tiger?” He knew the name, and was hungry to know more about this elusive character.
“You already know his name by now, don’t you?” Eroh mumbled. “So it isn’t a big deal for me to say that. Besides, you couldn’t beat him, he’s the only thing keeping my lips sealed right now.”
Gideon cut in.
“What’s so special about him?”
Eroh smiled for the first time.
“He’s probably the strongest person in the world right now, at least that I know of.”
“What makes him so strong?” Gideon was getting impatient with dancing around the issue. “Who is he, what’s his capability?”
Eroh finally looked up at the two of them with sullen eyes.
“The Tiger’s Vocation is called Spaceboy.”
Gallow and Gideon both felt pangs of tension strike their hearts. Eroh continued.
“It’s the ability to spite an aspect of reality. He can dismiss any fact, or event, or law, or level of strength. If you shoot him, you won’t have shot him. If you poison him, he won’t have drank it, if you throw him down a cliff, he won’t have fallen by the time he reaches the bottom. Do you get it?” Eroh turned around, concrete particles crackling beneath his feet as he looked to the window above. “He’s unbeatable. That’s why I follow him. In this world, it’s feast or famine for someone like me.”
Gideon and Gallow stood in stunned silence. Was this true? Was he bluffing?
“I’m sure most of the others follow him for the same reason,” Eroh went on. “But they’d say something like ‘Oh, I respect him too much.’ People are like that, no one’s as honest as me with why they do what they do.”
“It’s because you’re afraid of him?” Gallow confronted Eroh. The prisoner turned back around suddenly.
“Afraid?” he mocked. “No, me? Afraid? You don’t know me at all.”
“You said-” Gallow couldn’t finish his sentence.
“I said I followed him because he’s strong. There’s no fear in it. I know where I am, and I’m comfortable there.”
“You like being here?” Gallow scoffed at the meager living space.
“Imprisonment is a temporary illness,” Eroh’s eyes pierced through Gallow.
“So if you weren’t here, what would you be doing?” Gideon interjected, trying to steady the interrogation.
“Probably snuffing someone out.”
Gideon felt disgusted at Eroh’s callousness.
“And what would the team be doing?”
Eroh crossed his arm over his stomach and squinted at Gideon.
“You aren’t a very good interrogator,” he spat.
“I’m not interrogating you,” Gideon replied. “I just want to know a bit about you.”
Eroh’s face darkened and he leaned back against the wall.
“There isn’t enough to me to figure anything out.”
Gallow crossed his arms.
“When you tried to kill us, did you hate us at all?”
Eroh laughed.
“Of course I hate you! And that little woodcutter, I hate all of you…”
“Are you afraid of him too?” Gallow continued to press. “Because he took your arm?”
“Do you ever know when to shut up?” Eroh’s face took on an intense, bothered expression.
“Answer it,” Gallow insisted, taking a step forward.
Eroh was quiet for a moment.
“You know,” he began. “If I wanted to, I could kill one of you, maybe both of you, right now.”
“Oh yeah?” Gallow practically challenged him. Gideon watched his ally with caution.
“Yeah,” Eroh assured him, smirking. “I’ve just been nice to you up until now; the second the guards left, you were trapped in here with me.”
A thin smirk curled at one end of Gallow’s mouth; Eroh’s tough display was almost paper-thin.
“Go for it,” Gallow remarked.
“Gallow-?!” Gideon’s voice was tense and wrought with concern.
Eroh lifted his hand and curled all of his fingers back save his index.
“In about a second, I can shoot a stream of acid through your heart,” he sneered. “I’ll be able to look straight through you.”
“Like I said,” Gallow reminded him, turning his head ever so slightly to gaze at Eroh closer with his right eye. “Whenever you see fit.”
Eroh’s smirk burst into a maniacal, ear-to-ear smile. Gallow felt time slow down so that he could hear each grain of sand fall to the bottom of the hourglass. Corrosive acid bubbled up beneath Eroh’s fingernail, bringing its characteristic tingling sensation right before the release.
“Die!!!!”
From Gideon’s perspective, all that happened was the release of a massive crackling sound, and a rush of air within the cell. Gallow, however, watched Navigator reform from the dormant state he’d placed it in within the cell, and barrel its fist directly into Eroh’s stomach.
“Hwegh!!” Eroh’s eyes bulged as his spirit body was knocked clean from his form. He staggered and fell over.
“I don’t know what the hell you did,” Gideon commented, peering down at Eroh’s spacy, unconscious body. “But you better not use that on me.”
“Don’t worry,” Gallow assured him. “As long as you don’t give me reason to.”
Gideon’s brow furrowed.
“Of course…” He turned back and proceeded to the door. “Well, let’s let him in then.”
He reached for the door’s cold iron handle, twisting it; with a creaking sound, he swung it open and poked his head through.
“Yeah, you can come in.”
Gideon opened the door further and allowed Angelique in. The professor strutted through with a certain nervousness in his step-- prisons, much less their high-security wings, were not his area of comfort.
Gideon closed the door and watched Angelique proceed to the cell. “Do you think you can do anything about it-”
“Oh, my…”
Gideon and Gallow raised their eyebrows and the captain returned to Angelique’s side.
“Yeah, he’ll be out cold for a minute,” Gallow explained.
“No, that’s not it…” Angelique mumbled.
“Whaddya’ mean?” Gallow looked closer at Eroh and squinted.
“Do neither of you… see that?” Angelique pointed to the thin air above Eroh. His eyes weren’t fixated on the man, but rather the massive white tree that sprung from his body. It reached high up into the ceiling and beyond it; its dimensions didn’t make logical sense when he peered at it. It was eminently there, yet it was also disconnected from the physical world. How could he see it stretch past the ceiling?
“Angelique,” Gideon’s own eyes scanned the same area, seeing nothing. “What are you talking about? What do you see?”
“There’s- there’s a big… tree!”
“W-what?”
Gallow observed Angelique with spirit sight; the professor’s form was rather typical, save for a small aura that was visible around his eyes.
“Professor,” he began. “Is there something you see that we can’t?”
From out of Eroh’s dislodged soul, the tree of his consciousness sprung out, it reached high up into the depths of some other space, and each inch of bark glowed white, each branch seemed to pulse with light. Angelique reached out and was somehow able to grasp its form through the bars. Unbeknownst to him, his physical body was not the one making contact, it was his spirit. In the midst of this out-of-body experience, the instant his fingertips touched the bark, he recoiled in shock. At once, many hundreds of memories cascaded through his mind, like a broken dam.
Angelique sputtered and stammered, pulling his shoulders back as he stepped away.
“Professor?” Gallow.
“Hang on,” Angelique sputtered. He rubbed his eyes and refocused on the tree.
“I can’t touch it,” he thought. “It’s too much information to take in at once, and most of it isn’t very useful… But what if I could index it somehow? I could flip through his consciousness like a dictionary, if there was just some kind of organization to it… Is there?”
A thought struck him.
“Have I used… my ability?”
Reaching his hand out, he whispered: “[CHEMICALS]...”
As his finger met the trunk, for a brief instant, there was no noise. All of the information was neat, orderly; like the first time one understands the pattern of a musical scale, it all made sense to him. Within a second, however, it returned to a discordant noise that blew him back once more.
“Angelique…?!” Gideon touched his friend’s shoulder.
“Hang on,” Angelique brushed Gideon off. “I’m experimenting.”
Angelique was familiar now with what science was. It was not a bank of knowledge to draw from, it was a process of steady trial and error. His father was the first man to discover a vaccine for smallpox, and Angelique had witnessed firsthand that it was not done through magic. It was conceived by that steady trial and error, and the inherited struggle of every scientist who had come before him. Indeed, his father did not learn how to make the vaccine from a textbook, he wrote the textbook. And now, in this brave frontier of the soul, Angelique would write the first entry in his own.
“October 14th.”
Gallow and Gideon looked back and forth from Eroh to Angelique in surprise and confusion.
“S-sorry?” Gideon stammered.
Angelique broke his gaze from Eroh and turned to him with a smile.
“October 14th is the date I got from him,” he explained. “On the list of important dates in his mental calendar, that’s the nearest one.”
“But…” Gideon felt his pulse gradually quicken. “That’s the date of the President’s speech…” He and Gallow shot glances at each other, faces pale.
“That’s in three days.”
Gallow considered what was going on, and the gravity of what he’d stumbled into.
“But… Why…?” he muttered quietly, staring into the cell at Eroh’s collapsed form.
“Why?” Gideon repeated. “I’d like to know why too, but I don’t know how much it matters…”
“No,” Gallow shook his head. “Why was I important? Why were any of us important?”
“You mean-” Gideon was cut off.
“I mean, why were we such a huge priority for these people? What did it matter?” Gallow paced around. “I just wish…” He didn’t say anything more; what he was really thinking was “I just wish nobody cared about me.”
“I could look, if you feel so inclined,” Angelique offered.
Gallow looked up at him with an honest expression.
“Would it be a hassle?”
“Not at all,” Angelique replied, turning back to Eroh.
“Angelique,” Gideon spoke up.
“Hm?”
Gideon looked closely at Eroh, his hand cupping his chin.
“I want you to find the names and abilities of every member of the Fang Team from his memories.”
“Oh,” Angelique laughed. “Yeah, good idea.”
He stepped back towards the cell and took a deep breath.
“[CHEMIC-]”
Before he could activate his Vocation, Eroh stirred on the hard concrete floor of the prison. At once, the tree vanished, sucked back into his body as his spiritual and physical forms realigned.
“Muh…” he grumbled, turning his head. “Whadda…?” He let out a sigh and rolled over onto his back. Slowly, his vision cleared up, and he was able to look into the dim light of the cell. With a start, he sat up, spinning around frantically and jumping to his feet.
“You-!” Eroh pointed at them before abruptly losing his balance. His world spun around him as blood rushed to his head, and he nearly tripped over himself in his stupor. He brought his hand to his head and leaned against the wall, getting his bearings straight once more. As his mind cleared, he looked at his arm. For a moment, a look of confusion came down over his face, before he glanced at the stump of his missing limb, though the confusion quickly turned to wide-eyed, panic-stricken anxiety.
“W-when did I-?!” he begged through chattering teeth. “My arm!” he cried. “My arm is gone! What- what the hell?!”
The three on the other side of the cell bars looked at him with a mix of curiosity and concern. Had Eroh really forgotten how he’d lost his arm? Within moments, he had calmed down and was breathing more steadily.
“Woah,” he muttered. “Woah, how did that happen? How did I forget about that…?” He spoke to himself in a distressed, low voice.
All of a sudden, there was a knock at the door.
“Captain!” the guard called, his voice muffled through the steel barrier. “Your five minutes are up!”
Gideon and Angelique glanced at each other.
“Do you think you can get anything out of him?” Gideon asked in a hushed tone.
Angelique whispered back, “It’s gone, now that he’s conscious, unless you want to knock him out again.”
Gideon blinked from Eroh to Angelique.
“Do you want us to?”
Angelique’s face suddenly became very uneasy.
“No, please don’t.”
Gideon’s eyebrows lifted.
“Alright…” he straightened out his posture. “Then I suppose we have nothing left to do here.”
They opened the heavy door at the end of the hallway, and left the prison without so much as a word. “Satisfied?” the guard had asked Gideon. “Yes,” he’d responded, and that was about it.
As he stepped foot outside, Angelique couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt strike his heart.
“Mr…?” he looked at Gallow as they walked.
“Just call me Gallow,” he replied with a kind of hop in his voice, drawing his arms behind his head.
“Do you know what caused him to lose his memories for a second back there?”
Angelique’s face was noticeably apprehensive; he looked straight at Gallow as he spoke, not bothering to watch his step.
“Well…” Gallow reran the event in his mind. “Not really, no. Why do you ask?”
“I just… Wanted to know…” Angelique struggled to find the words. “Because he was affected by both of our abilities, wasn’t he?”
“Just like we thought,” Gallow replied.
“So, what do you think triggered the memory loss?”
“I have no clue, I’ve not used it too much on people, and not with that much control. It does prove your hypotenuse though…”
“Hypo-?” Angelique looked befuddled. “Oh!” he perked up. “You mean my hypothesis!”
“If you say so,” Gallow mumbled, leaning back as he walked.
Before they’d embarked for the prison, Angelique had made sure to question Gallow about his Vocation in excruciating detail. What had emerged was a curious hypothesis, and a desire to experiment. Once he was done taking notes on him, Angelique had asked about Sonsee and Janna.
“Just-” Gallow sighed, slumping over in his chair in the professor’s office. “Just let them rest for right now…” The questioning had taken the better part of an hour, and was so thorough Gallow began to think that Angelique would know more about Navigator than he did.
What Angelique did not reveal, as they left the prison, was the deep concern he had over what had happened. The thought that his own ability could be responsible for the deep distress Eroh had experienced; even if he was a heartless killer, it didn’t sit well with him…
Within the cold confines of Eroh’s cell, he sat, perched on the ground, holding his knees.
“Hey, 235!” the guard called out Eroh’s number. “If we have any problems, this is going straight into your head!” he waved his baton in the direction of the cell. Eroh simply peered at him from his place on the ground, his characteristic assuredness replaced by fear.
Once the guard realized that he wasn’t getting any reaction from him, he grunted and left the hall, slamming the door behind himself. Eroh just sat there, alone.
There were a total of six cells in the hall; none were occupied but his. For the first time, he felt quite isolated.
“Did I… Forget my name…?”
Suddenly, he heard something from the cell window. The bird had landed on the windowsill, poking its head through the bars.
“Y-you?”
This bird, a gift from Mello’s connection on the Antiquated Continent, was always quite intelligent. As far as Eroh knew, it was some kind of unique breed which could be taught many different signals and commands, almost like a trained dog.
Now, the bird hopped up and down a few times, looking down at him from the world outside. For a moment, he felt some kind of solidarity with the animal; in its beady, black eyes he could see now that it shared the same loneliness that he felt in that moment.
Eroh’s face had softened somewhat before turning to confusion as the bird pecked at the window bars.
“What are you-” he stopped as the memory came rushing back to him. Eroh listened closely to the pecking, the sound that echoed throughout his cell.
“That rhythm…”
The one Mello had shown them.
His mouth curled into a casual smirk, and he finally felt relaxed.
“Thanks,” he called. “For bringing me back…” He looked to the ground between his legs and closed his eyes, breathing slowly.
Eroh watched the bird take off, flapping its wings powerfully through the air. After a moment, the sun broke through the clouds and shone down on him.
“So…” he mumbled to himself, feeling the warm light on his cheek. “It’s really going down then…”
The bird soared through the city, swooping downwards into the ravine. It descended two full layers of underground before an updraft lifted it once again to Level 2. A boy looked up from a streetside bench and watched the bird zoom overhead, its single gold feather like a tag that streaked through the air.
Gruse laid along the broken windowsill of their temporary hideout, reading her novel. Suddenly, the sun broke out through the ravine, prompting her to look up from the pages and out across the chasm. Behind her, Noire looked up from the darkness he was sitting in. Suddenly, her eye caught sight of the bird, and she stretched her hand out for it to land.
Quickly hopping off of her finger, it pecked the floor in a specific rhythm, one that stirred emotion in both Gruse and Noire.
As the bird flew away, Gruse looked back to her partner with an odd look on her face. They both understood what it was: a message from Mello; the operation would continue.
Wrapped in sunlight like golden shawl, she smiled uncontrollably.
“You know,” she mentioned. “This book?”
Noire nodded, wearing the mask of Taylor Holmes.
“Advent got this for me.”
Even beneath the layers of mud, Noire felt his jaw tremble.
“Well,” he sputtered out weakly. “Isn’t this just a beautiful day, then?”
Janna opened the window of the small dorm she’d been offered by Angelique, letting the light in. She took a deep breath of the sea air, something she’d never known before. Turning back to Sonsee, who was arranging some furniture behind her, she expressed her jubilee.
“The sea’s so big!” she laughed. “It’s a beautiful day!”