Chapter VII

Crunch.

Fallen leaves receive further torment from the girl's galloping sandals, mindlessly rushing through a forest from a threat that never met her line of sight. What was that? To her, it was a mere jump-scare in the world of terror. She has already been to hell and back, what will the scent of death do to her?

Pant, crunch, pant, crunch.

Panting and crunching, the only noises heard in this empty life-hub. The trees here are nothing to admire, pure oak with leaves as brown as the trunks that merged with the dirt. Cool breezes have not yet painted the forest floor with a pastel of red, orange, and yellow; the colours are merely shifting in the rooftops. Why choose this route? What benefit did it bring? It is no scenic route to flavour the mind, but a dulling of the eyes. By now the Girl has been running for half of an hour, her malnourished legs prepare to snap like twigs. Where is he? Once entering the forest, the Girl and Sao were separated across a river of brown by a danger land-bound; her protector gone, her legs bring themselves to a halt. Her body rests on a nearby tree, unable to move on. Her mind is adamant, run, just run; years of chained movement takes its toll.

Crunch.

Mind and body conflict, the engine wins.

Crunch.

Her mind turns to run, her body stays.

Crunch.

One promise broke, mind forgets will.

Crunch.

In defeat, she lies still.

Crunch.

Her end calls.

Crunch.

'There you are.' the voice whispers. 'Don't worry, I don't think it's following me.'

Rushing to her aid, Sao lifts her from the dirtying floor; her eyes a blurry pink as if her iris had spilt into her sclera. Usually, her hair covers her eyes, but this time, as her hair is dragged down the trunk of the tree by gravity, her face is in full display. Her skin is of the same complexion as her hair: white. Masked in paleness, her lips don't attempt anything to distinguish themselves from the rest of her face, appearing as if makeup had been plastered over her face. Slumped on Sao's shoulders, her mind shuts its blinds. She relinquishes herself to exhaustion.

Taking over her labour, Sao hurries towards the other side of the forest; his legs flail out of desperation, danger still looms in his past location. Dim light can be seen in the shrinking distance; rising darkness fills in the growing distance behind him. Sao returns to the sun.

A narrow clearing snakes through the two masses of wood. The view is amplified by oncoming trucks, each carrying human cargo. Sao lies the girl behind him, taking his sword by his side. He grips it tightly with both hands, taking a stand in front of the oncoming stampede of steel and oil; the blade points towards the road behind him, his prey's escape. Sao's stance is like an Olympic sprinter, his head down and his right leg bent for propulsion. The trucks push further, Sao stays still; a little more, still; further they push into Sao's asserted territory. As the vehicles come within Sao's range, he pounces. An upward swing of his sword cuts the front of the truck in two. The engine scatters, the oil spills, and the driver is thrown from his seat. This disruption brings the convoy to a halt; the guards exit their vehicles and take a defensive position, behind shielding doors. Like a winding river, only a faint afterimage of Sao paints the battlefield as he dispatches each guard, one by one, swing by swing, torso by torso. Sao approaches the cages left on the trucks. The plasma of guards' drip from his body. His war-marked face causes the blood of the imprisoned to freeze as he removes the locks from their cages, chain by chain.

Sao turns back to face the Girl, now awakening from her rest, and tends to her marks. In her state, a single cut from a fray atom of iron – or the sting of a bee – getting infected would lead to death. When stripped from nature for so long, it is simple to understand that her body can no longer keep up with the mind's preferred environment. The Free surround them, creating a sea of petals around the two; they all wear black sandbags over their torsos to their thighs, each coming with a pair of dusty arms, and dusty calves. One steps out, emerging from the crowd: a burly man with enough height to reach the floor from a chair, his long beard of brown is tinted with grey around the edges, caterpillar eyebrows metamorphosising over his hazelnut eyes.

'Excuse me, O'Samaritan,' the Man says, his hands, with fault lines dicing each joint, and knees on the ground; kneecaps merging into dirt. 'I beg of thee. Lead us to salvation.'

His voice argues with his posture. It is of a low tone and a gravelly pitch, interspersed with minor leaps to squeaks that he squeezes through his narrow larynx.

A shadow blocks Sao's eyes as he looks at the floor littered with the crowd of freed exports kneeling over the blood and corpses of guards, guards he killed for them.

'Do you have no dignity?!' Sao's fists clench with more force than when he swings his blade. 'How dare you place your dirty hands on spilt blood, RISE!' The Free stagger to their feet, dividing themselves to not touch the blood. 'Now that you have learnt common decency, I did not free your short, futile lives so you can throw away what left you have to someone as hopeless as yourselves! Why don't you lead your own lives for once?!' The crowd freezes. A new fear creeps onto them, one more potent than when they were in cages with permanent lasers pointed at their chests. 'Use your brains and think of a plan; use your eyes and see the path ahead; use your legs to walk down your own path and stay well clear of my own! YOU GOT THAT!'

'Ye-ye-e-yes, sir,' in incohesive unison.

Facing over the girl's shoulder, Sao remarks through his stride, 'Let's go.'

'Ok.'

Mid-leave, a bold voice reaches to them.

'Hey. Saviour man…'

'What is it? I'm busy.'

Behind him, a boy no older than a teenager, rebellious to the laws of this universe – a revolutionary you could say – stands next to an elderly woman. His short coal hair and dark mud eyes gleam with awe. A stubby nose and pulled back ears accompany them.

'I want to come with you.'

'I don't have time for this. Why can't you help yourselves…?'

Sao storms off, the girl takes his place talking to the boy. She places a hand on his left shoulder and in a soft tone, asks:

'What about your parents? They would be terrified if you were to disappear.'

The boy stays quiet, the elderly woman speaking for him.

'His parents vanished a few years ago. Sadly, he hasn't found his way back into our community since.'

Two tears fall. One from the boy's right eye and one from the girl's left.

'So, we carry a similar cross, how tragic… forget about him. If he won't let you walk down his path… I'll let you walk down mine.'

In a mix of sympathy and self-pity, the two console each other in a warm hug. Both stand together and race to catch up with Sao.

Sao watches from a distance: he smirks. He contradicts his previous statement for what? A push in the right direction. Maybe, this is what he wanted; the smirk returns to parity. His mouth seems to invert. What was once a smile becomes a gasp. He runs, back, towards the boy and girl, then past them.

"Just keep walking. Do not turn around. Go back to the house. I will catch up," he repeats the already too familiar words.

A massacre. 'It' had caught up. Past the boy and girl, every single villager was killed; organs spilling out of mashed corpses, their insides turned into a mushy orange paste. Alone stood 'it', the entity Sao ran from at the swordsmith. Getting a closer look would have revealed its features, that is if it had any. It is a pure black, no light reflecting from its body. It is the perfect absorber.

Sao prepared his stance with hesitance. His posture was the same as usual, yet his stillness was disrupted continuously by erratic shudders. Before Sao even made his strike, 'it' stood next to him, perpendicular to his head. Within the next second Sao is sent soaring back into the forest, colliding through tree after tree as they are unable to slow his velocity, the air stream in pursuit blowing away shrapnel wood. He emerges from a meteor-like crater by the slums. He rises beaten physically, but his eyes remain unhurt.

'It's fast… and it's a heavy hitter. This is going to-'

Again 'it' appears beside him. 'It' readies a second blow, identical to the previous. Sao ducks swiftly, swinging upwards with his sword; and upwards it continues as if hitting nothing. 'It' launches another punch, tunnelling Sao six feet underground. The crater grows, engulfing the entirety of the slums with it. The forest is no more, the slum is no more, the swordsmith is no more, all the people connoted by the land are no more; the cavity slaughters everything, the massacre spreads. Sao rises, once again, from the hole. His body bruised, battered, pummelled; a streak of his blood gushes from a gash on his head, pouring over his left eye, temporarily blinding in red. His right elbow is inversed, bending away from his chest. The bone juts out like a road spike, posing as a secondary blade.

The blast wave of the second blow sends the Girl and Boy tumbling down the road, grazing and removing layers of skin with the friction. Once shaking off the shock, the Girl sits the Boy behind a large rock, one unmoved by the shock wave, anchored to the road.

'Wait here for me.'

She rips a long stick from a fallen tree and sharpens its tip with a nearby stone. She charges into the crater.

Barely being able to carry his weight, Sao stumbles towards the entity. Using his left hand to hold his sword, he cuts a flap of skin off from his leg. He then places it over the gash in his head to stop the bleeding. A third blow is thrown by the entity, Sao dodging it by the width of a string. The strike may not have made contact, but the shockwave breaks Sao's nose; his breathing now hampered, the nose bone blocking the nasal passage. Blood now builds up inside his nose, trickling out like a slowly bursting pipe. Sao's life is currently on a timer, and it is about to go off.

'Am I being too predictable? Or am I just not strong enough?'

Sao's fire dwindles; his eyes begin their close. He falls to his knees. His left arm keeps his face from colliding into the floor as his right arm slumps. 'It' mocks Sao's inferiority with its blank expression; its walk bland, 'it' moves towards him. Even when readying the finishing blow 'it' moves its fist slowly, forcing Sao to witness his undoing. 'The Girl, what happens if I leave. Sure, it isn't a permanent arrangement, but, if I die here, she will die not long after. I will be fine, but, another, I will cause another to die due to my own weakness. But I can't go on, I have to reset, but, she does not have the same options as I. I cannot go on, so I wonder, what happens if I leave, Girl.'

It is then that the finishing blow is dealt. A make-shift spear through the entity's chest. The Girl made it. This time contact was made, the spear slowed as it passed through its torso. As 'it' writhes on the floor of the crater it created, the girl tends to Sao. Ripping a piece of cloth from the cloak she wears; she wraps it around his right elbow to keep it straight. The second piece of fabric is cut and wrapped around Sao's leg, then a third for the wound on his head. She lifts him, managing to support his limp body with her frail frame. They watch as the entity experiences vicious spasms on the dirt, 'its' legs rotate in a full circle – twice at the knees and three times at the ankles; 'its' arms follow suit, rotating three-hundred and sixty degrees at the shoulder; twice at the elbow and three times at the wrist; blood spurts out of its sweat glands, glazing it in a crimson coating, a shower of crimson geysers out of where its optical lobes should be. A red puddle floods until its body runs dry. The black retreats. It leaves the mangled body of an unidentifiable woman, shrivelled and a pure white. The Girl belts out in a dark scream.

'There was someone in there? Why does something like that even exist?'

'I don't know, but I'm going to find out, no matter what. And then, I'll never let it happen again. I swear my life to that, both of them.'

The pair exit the crater, the walking mostly done by the girl.

'The Boy is behind there.' Says the Girl pointing towards the rock, unmoved.

The Boy runs out from behind the rock. He was smiling at first with tears dripping from his eyes. The smile went, the tears stayed.

'What happened?' The Boy whimpers.

'Don't worry about me, I'll be fine after a night's rest. I guess you're coming with us then, it's not like you have anywhere else to go, I still have a heart. Who knows, maybe you'll be able to take…'

The Boy wraps his arms around the two, as far as they could go. He looks up to them both, his face filled with more tears them anyone.

'Thank you… hero.'