Cataclysm, Pt 13

You watch as the shadow creature comes into view amidst the insectoid corpses. It moves preternaturally through the mounds of dead bugs, as though the corpses aren't even there at all. No matter what obstacle is in front of it, it's hardly affected or slowed. The corpses blacken and dissipate just as it finishes passing through them.

And it's clear that it's headed towards all of you. Or at the very least, through you.

Your mouth goes dry as you attempt to say something, but nothing except a long croaking sound comes out. The shadow creature terrifies you - its very presence seems to drain whatever courage you have within yourself.

And you're not the only one. Even the soldiers seem too stunned or cowed to act under the shadow creature's ever-growing presence.

It advances steadily towards the stadium entrance unhindered and unmolested. But it oddly stops right at the T-intersection, and dissolves the largest pile of dead insectoid bodies around it. Its vaguely humanoid form reaches out with a shadowy arm, as though it's attempting to reach out to you.

The hovering blade between you twitches as it attempts to take control of it, then yanks it away violently with powerful Telekinetic energy.

"Oh fuck that!" Kaja shouts.

She quickly reaches out in alarm, takes firm hold of the blade with her Telekinesis, and stops it from moving any further. You can see her strain visibly as she keeps the blade from falling under the shadow creature's full control. Both her hands are outstretched as she grimaces and groans, almost as though she's at her absolute maximum.

The officer quickly notices as well, and immediately orders his soldiers to open fire on the shadow creature. Though it takes a second for it to compute, the soldiers quickly bear their arms against the creature and squeeze their triggers. Countless bursts fire from their weapons and tear into the shadow creature.

To their shock, nothing happens.

Their rounds pass harmlessly through its black formless body and purple translucent armor. It dawns on you that you've seen something like this before - another group had fired at it with their guns. Though they had used pistols rather than rifles. And they too had been useless against it.

"Those won't work!" you yell out. "We've gotta get the fuck outta here!"

"We can't do that," the officer says, sternly. "This stadium's the best place for us to hole up."

"We don't exactly have a choice - we can't fight that thing!"

"And go where, exactly?! The hospital's in shambles, city hall's overrun, nearest actual base is days away. There's nowhere else to run!"

"We're not gonna defend against that thing - it's gonna kill us in ways that… that… you don't wanna know."

"The hell you mean by that?!" asked a frenzied solider.

"I don't remember the last people it killed," Kaja replies, her voice strained. "I just remember that it killed someone. Someone I talked to. Someone I stood right next to. Now I don't remember a thing about them."

"Well we can't run, no matter what!" said the officer. "We've got wounded, we've got families! We can't force them out to that heat! It'll kill them!"

"Don't worry, lemme take care of it," Kaja says.

"How?!" you exclaim. "We barely pushed it away last time!"

"Dunno, but I'll figure it out. Gotta concentrate."

You feel Kaja turn all of her thoughts towards the shadow creature. Or, more specifically at its jagged, semi-translucent blade. You peer ever so slightly at it with your Third Eye, and watch as both their Telekinetic energies flow out from each of them.

Their energies crash and break and flow and turn against the blade and against each other, as though wrestling for domination. As far as you can tell, they're just about even, at least in terms of strength. It's Kaja's stamina that you're worried about. The fight looks chaotic and devastating, even if no-one else can see or sense it.

Kaja then lets go of the blade, which unbalances the shadow creature's grip. And instead of pulling against it, she pushes it with everything she's got all in that moment.

Her trick works exceedingly well, and cuts through the shadow creature with its own blade. His shadowy form separates right at the waist - assuming that's its waist. Both halves of its wispy body flickers and writhes as though it's in pain.

Although the soldiers around you cheer at Kaja's victory, you get a sense that it's not feeling pain at all. Not in the slightest.

You peek with your Third Eye, and see that its shadowy aura has been halved. But it's still significantly overwhelming absolutely everything around it. You shut it off quickly, just as a sharp pang cuts through your temple.

"Keep going!" you shout out. "It's not dead yet!"

Kaja nods her head, then reaches out for the blade, only to find that the blade itself has been partially consumed. Just as it had sliced into the shadow creature, the creature chewed into it as well. The entire middle section of the blade has been completely gouged out, and only the two tips remain - roughly half a meter each.

But Kaja's undeterred. She takes hold of both of them, swirls them around quickly like a growing tornado, then flings one of them straight into the shadow creature's chest. It sinks in and vanishes completely on contact, but leaves a gaping wound in its wake.

The cut spreads open wider as the creature's shadowy body seems to recede into itself.

Kaja then takes the last bit of blade, then slices it right through the shadow creature's neck. Or what she perceives as its neck. Doing so consumes the blade in its entirety, but also completely severs the head from the body as well.

Though it doesn't make a sound, you feel a kind of mental energy sweep through you. Almost as though it's screaming, psychically. Perhaps it's more like screeching.

You once again peek with your Third Eye to confirm how much damage it has taken.

But are immediately taken aback by what you see. Shadows seem to be pouring out from the wounded neck, and coating everything above you. Perhaps flooding is a better term. The sight frightens you so completely that you almost miss what's actually happening.

It's rebuilding itself.

The dark shadowy core within that massive cloud is clearly pulling that cloud into itself.

When you shut your Third Eye, you can see the shadow creature actually filling back up physically. The wound on its chest closes as tendrils of dark smoke reach out and reconnect its lower body to its upper body. As well as its head back onto its neck.

You feel an overwhelming amount of fear sweep through your body, though most of it is from everyone else around you. It causes the hairs on your arms to raise up.

All manner of emotions wash out of of Kaja, powerfully. That of surprise and anger and fear and sadness. Then, a stark determination.

"Stand back," says Kaja. "I'm gonna beat it."

You feel her heart thumping madly, along with the absolute fear that's wrapped around her. She visibly steels herself, then walks out into the street.

"The fuck are you doing?!" you shout out. "Get back in here!"

"I gotta beat it," she says without turning around. "Can't let it get inside."

"How?!"

"I know what to do. And if I screw this up, well… You'd all better consider running."

Kaja then walks over towards the shadow creature, seemingly unafraid. But you can feel her heart tremble in her chest. She stops about a meter right in front of it, then grasps outward with both her hands on both sides.

You've no clue what she's doing, or what she's attempting. Some part of you knows that it's taking everything she's got to do it.

And at the same time, the shadow creature closes up its wounds faster and faster. Almost as though it's racing against Kaja, to reform before she completes her attack. You realize that you have to do something, otherwise the creature could swipe at her, and stop her.

You lash out with your Telepathy in an attempt to disturb its thoughts and emotions, and maybe do something to it. Anything. Unfortunately the moment you do so, the pain surrounding your head flares up to the point of blurring your vision.

It takes you a great deal of your own energy just to affect it.

You hang on for dear life as you push through the shadowy muck to get at its emotional center, if it even has one. The pain begins to ring in your ears as it pulses in time with your heartbeat. Of course, you persevere as best you can.

What you make of its emotions is simple yet complex. It seems completely devoid of most emotion, love or fear or sadness or anger. Instead, all it seems to have is a deep, unyielding desire. A desire for something intangible - maybe to simply keep doing what it is doing. To destroy and kill and… do whatever it had done to those people you had forgotten.

You tune that dial and attempt to read its thoughts as well. Unlike the insects, its mind is both unreadable and yet completely transparent to you. Simply, you can't make out any real, tangible thoughts coming from it. But you feel as though you're reading it accurately.

Instead, all you seem to perceive is a kind of note. There's a single tone emanating from it, as though it's humming ceaselessly. A bit like white noise cutting through Telepathic airwaves.

As you probe its mind, the pain around your head tightens further and further. It gets to a point that you topple down to your hands and knees, panting heavily and breathing hard. It's as though you're draining yourself simply to keep going.

Perhaps that's exactly what you're doing, you just don't know how you're doing it.

As you struggle against your pain, you watch as Kaja goes through her own struggle as well. Both her outstretched hands grasp something. She draws them in, as though she's pulling that something inward. And she's doing so with such intensity that you can see her arms shake violently as a result.

That's when you see it - parts of the asphalt crumble and crack under her, even as the very corners of the buildings opposite your street start to do the same. Bits of dead insects rise up slowly, along with strands of their bloody innards. Even the razor wire coils furthest from your position scratches the concrete as they're slowly pulled towards the center of the intersection.

A spherical space around Kaja seems to warp and bend, as though she's pulling it all towards her. But it flickers and flutters and wavers randomly. It occurs to you that the shadow creature is pushing outward with its own Telekinesis. All of its shadowy appendages are extended outward, pushing against whatever Kaja's doing. Slowly but steadily undoing her assault.

You try to assault the shadow creature again with your Telepathy, but it results in pain and an audible groan.

Stop! Kaja's surface thoughts tell you. You're hurting yourself! Let me take care of this!

I can handle it, you project straight towards her in response.

Of course, she isn't Telepathic, and doesn't receive what you try to project to her. All you can do is sense her utter worry for you, over and over, even as she fights against the shadow creature. Her split concentration is clearly taking a toll on her.

The same with you, of course. The more you read her, the more your own concentration is split. And the more your head hurts. You feel your consciousness waver, as though your mental and physical energies are nearing their limit.

You need to act before the both of you break.

And so you do the only thing you know how to do - inject the shadow creature with your own emotion. Seeing as it's devoid of them, you instinctively pour everything you've ever felt into it. Every bit of sadness and longing and loneliness and also togetherness and fulfillment and happiness.

Like Kaja's memories of you, many of yours are about her.

It's her existence that makes you feel… well, everything. Overbearing or supportive. Smothering or loving. Demanding or protective. She's all those things and more, to you. All those emotions based on old memories fall down around you, like rain.

You feel your heart shatter when you realize that you've been pushing her away all this time, when you should have been pulling her closer. You should have been braver with your emotions, and not given in to your fears and insecurities.

There's nothing you can do about that now. Well, except give them to the shadow creature, wholesale. You take all of those contradictory truths about you, about Kaja, about your feelings, and throw it into the depths.

It stops frozen for a moment as your assault completely shatters its sense of being, as it's filled with all manner of raw, chaotic emotions. You sense it attempting to process exactly what you've given it, to make sense of it, to parse it, but it can't.

It's helpless against you.

A sense of victory sweeps over you, even as the pain in your head almost completely engulfs you. Your vision darkens as you draw your Telepathy back. At the same time, your physical body slumps forward on the ground, face first.

If you're eating dirt, you can barely taste it. The soldiers around you shout and scream, but it's all muffled to you, distant. One of them picks you up - an act you can barely feel.

Your mind and body are completely numb - that's how much you've wiped yourself out. That's how much you poured yourself into that bottomless darkness. All that's left of you is a seeming sliver.

Then you feel yourself getting dragged away, which you desperately fight against. But all you can do is weakly and limply wave your hand forward in protest. There might be a whimper, too. Not that you hear it.

All of the soldiers frantically retreat backward into the stadium with you in tow. Because back at the T-intersection, Kaja is furiously pulling everything all around her. Large chunks of asphalt are torn out of the ground beneath her and the shadow creature, and sucked towards a fine point right in between the two.

Same with the building corners at the end of the T-intersection, along with every car and vehicle and light post and trash can and insect corpse. Even the large Hesco barriers are drawn in, as though they're filled with foam rather than sand. Everything is sucked in towards that point, where it seems to be crushed into oblivion.

You reach out one last time with your Telepathy, to try to tell Kaja to stop, to run away instead. But it doesn't matter what you say - she can't read you. Instead, another sharp pain pierces you as her own emotions about you engulf your mind.

Then, just as your body gives up the fight, and as your mind flattens from complete exhaustion, you watch as Kaja pulls herself inward one final time. Absolutely everything around her in a perfect sphere completely collapses into that same fine point, herself and that shadow creature included.

There's a flash of light as matter condenses into itself, into that tiny point, as though a star is forming in front of you. The light is so blinding that you can't see anything else, if only for a moment.

When you can't take any more, darkness takes you.

~~~

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