566. Beyond good & evil, 6
That sport. That intensity when life is at stakes... A rush. Things I have to admit I enjoy, and that I altogether hate about myself...
I dropped the sword that melted against the beast now lying dead on the sand.
I’m catching my breath back. Blume’s bigger body dragged the egg back to the shore now that it was over.
B - Rose feels more alive when she has a reason to fight for, or just something ominous and unreasonable to destroy.
N - That makes her worthy of her title.
R - I hate that nickname even more than my moral and emotional paradoxes...
They grin.
The landscape has turned into a wasteland of a sort, burnt and destroyed, even unearthing ruins, revealing parts of a buried city below us.
I can’t stand up. It hurts too much. Bodies humans or not lie everywhere around, but we at least survived.
And the sunrise over the ocean becomes a beautiful sight not long after...
~
As I day-dream there, exhausted, an unusual music gradually appears inside my ears.
It very slowly grows, over the song of the waves. When I realise I’m hearing something real, Night does as well.
R - What is that sound?
It’s nothing we’re accustomed to hear. It’s like the fastest of heartbeat, deep and distant.
Getting closer but still very far away inside the jungle.
Until the helicopter appears in the distance, and circles slightly toward the ocean while remaining at good distance.
It’s a fast machine I can tell. It sure flies faster than some birds. And this heavy thing can also stand and hover like gravity is nullified. It’s an impressive show.
By the time it takes us to realise what’s happening and how to react, it’s already too late.
In the midst of a fight, when the light shines inside of my blood and adrenaline, I can dodge bullets I see shot at me.
Cold and tired as I was, I couldn’t even realise what was going out there and from that bigger distance.
Something seemed to burst around the helicopter. Smoke appeared.
The instant later, I saw Night obscuring my sight abruptly, and the next moment, an explosion blew her and me away.
As I regained my deaf senses, I saw blood mixed to the sand, and Nightmare’s leftovers coughing some more.
She didn’t have more time than I to react.
A deafening rain of bullets put the ovoid shape of Blume to the ground aside us. They both bled.
The egg was losing its water and my sister her life.
I couldn’t quite think, still shocked.
But the terror Nightmare had felt at the moment she jumped, and now her agony, I saw them.
I felt them.
The helicopter was landing in the distance. I was trying to stand up, my legs trembling bad.
They were still far.
I managed to stand. I prayed to Blume.
Her weakened body dragged Night’s shocked and unconscious remains. Night’s eyes probably didn’t really see me anymore as pain and blood loss invaded her.
I’m... emotional.
I’m trembling. But more from sorrow than hatred.
Blume begins her crawl to escape, whispering me something I can’t really hear. She’s emotional too, and afraid.
I make an uneasy step ahead.
I have to protect them.
I have no choice to make my body move, but to waste it a little further.
The men approaching are armed. I’m not. But I can’t let them get to my sister and my lover.
My wounds burn. I open the gates of light inside my flesh with a yell of pain.
Licht and Ogre carry me ahead on the following steps, and darkness bleeds at each of them.
They shoot, I dodge, feeling my bones break and my muscles rip, but light and darkness take over what’s left of me.
I reach them faster, I jump on them like an animal.
My hands rip through their flesh, garments and tools like molten clay. It all burns, me, my body and my abandoned mind. I’m still deaf and shocked from the explosion.
I don’t want to admit what just happened to Night and her child.
I refuse to think about it.
At the glimpses of doing so, I feel the hatred of Ogre guiding my hands toward them and their flesh instead.
~
I do my nightmarish waltz to protect the ones I love, but I also step further into my own darkness as I plough through them. I jump like a demon away from the next explosion. They’ve stepped back and regrouped.
I hate you.
My hands dripping from their blood replace my words to reach them.
And then, as I began to recognise some of the faces of the men still standing, I heard her.
Blume just screamed for help, loudly, and I turned around on the spot. I panicked.
As I was focused on the men, the beastly demon resurrected.
The giant corpse was still lukewarm this morning, but dead.
However my wrath focused on stepping away from it opened an opportunity.
And Blume just saw a miasma coming to life, and preying now on her and the bleeding egg filled with food.
The shapeless monster was contaminating them, resurrecting itself from its own corpse, absorbing their soft flesh and fluids.
As I began running back toward Blume again, a shot pierced my abdomen cleanly. I felt it and my strength suddenly vanishing.
I would now be dying from this deadly wound to the heart, if I were still only human.
It still feels as a similar painful shock as if I were.
I abandon hope and step further into light and darkness, abandoning more of my dying flesh. I continued to run.
~
I lit a blaze to disinfect Blume hastily. The miasma recedes, and the creature that begun to resurrect its own corpse begins to moves it instead. But meanwhile, the humans got closer, to shoot all of us.
I return to the fight against the men with powerful rifles, and the demon soon emerges behind me.
I’m stuck in the middle...
The shape of the daiûa charges at me in a deaf roar.
The humans attack me in concern.
They don’t attack each other anymore.
Only me...
~
I let the true black colour of a daiûa covering me. I lit all the powers Blume and Night granted me, and I face the two enemies at once, leaving humanity as a memory.
I dodge bullets and claws. I burn an arm of a demon off, jump behind it and slash a jacket along with the torso it protected. I turn into a colourless shape, pushing all of them back and burning them together bit by bit.
A sword of brambles grew out of me, ablaze with toxic light and painful memories.
I throw fire that can dissolve a daiûa at it.
I summon drones from the boiling blood my enemies spilled around, from some indescribable thoughts and instincts I have from Nightmare. I actually see myself, from a distance, order the flesh and blood of a dead to restructure hastily itself into primitive drones, small monsters not meant for anything but attack and annoy the others.
I bleed spores of roses that blossom as they fall behind me, making the show a little eerie around the violence I throw. They’re small, very small flowers, the size of coins maybe. But it’s no longer blood that keeps me alive I think.
I fight back. I yell, I scream, I slaughter them all.
I want to live...
I want the ones I love to live...
Even though today, the cost is greater than ever.
The fight will soon reach its end.
I impale and raise a man above ground on my kind of a sword, the fire spreading on him as he empties himself on the sand at my feet.
Last to stand in the end, the demon follows the same fate by my glowing hands. Gutted and burnt, until nothing else but me is left to stand.
I stop running. I don’t see anything else.
I feel myself breathing back, and I can finally pass out and fall.
~
