Chapter 7: Inside the Fourth Dimension

(P.s, I do not know Japanese that much. For any errors, please blame Chatgpt. Sincerely, Janny hehe)

Twenty-seven hours before…

Just when he thought he would perish due to the lack of oxygen, the other end of the vortex opened and he fell into darkness, landing hard on a rocky surface. Hiroko squirmed in pain clutching his gut before the blue vortex vanished, leaving him drenched and in pain.

No sooner had he come to his senses that he realized he was all alone. He shot straight to his feet and instantly came toppling back down.

"Argh! cough cough!"

He had been propelled and torpedoed through an insane tunnel of light. His stomach contents were mixed up, and his balance was way off. Before he knew it, he was puking his guts out and crying out in agony. His voice echoed once and was swallowed by the abyss around him.

Where on Earth was he?

He raised his throbbing head, and his eyes shrunk to the sight of bone remains scattered around him. He scrambled back in a panic and felt something crushing under him.

Bones, bones, bones!

Immediately, a purple light filled the dark sky, accentuating the clouds and revealing a barren, desolate boneyard made of obsidian rock that stretched for kilometers and kilometers beyond the horizon.

Hiroko's voice lodged in his throat because of the sight around him. A sinking feeling came over him as he roved his eyes over the terrain. By all that was human, was he in hell?

A small tarpit blew a bubble to his right and to his left a geothermal geyser exploded, scaring and spraying him with it's ghastly steam. He fell to his side, instantly learning why the place smelled like dirty pits and started to soldier-crawl away, gasping and coughing. He was actually suffocating because of the smell.

Death's breath.

He pinched his nose as the smell ate up his oxygen and invaded his body, his heart thumping wildly in his chest. But then again, there wasn't any oxygen around, to begin with. It was air, but not the air he was used to. The air he could take a bite out of, poisonous air.

He began to feel his lungs smoking, organs shutting down, the strong metallic taste of blood filling his mouth and nose. His head filled with a ringing sound, clouds, and the blood on his face boiled, making him want to scratch himself to death. His legs numbed and throat blocked.

This was the most excruciating pain he had ever felt in his life. Even more than learning his family's martial arts as a child. His insides were melting.

Kicking the bucket already?

"Nanide..?" His thoughts quietly whispered.

While listening to his heart struggling – lying on his backside he couldn't feel – Hiroko saw earlier visions of a war between gray-skinned people with horns and huge monsters. He turned his blurring eyes to the bones lying next to him.

Its skull had horns…

…The clouds above vanished from sight.

"It's so quiet..." And he fell into a deep slumber.

* * * *

He was not sure whether that was real or just a dream.

A girl was whimpering in the kitchen. He barged in and grabbed her hand before a blue light exploded.

"Hiroko, let go!"

His eyes shot open, and he took in a torturous gasp for air.

"April!"

Hiroko sat upright and dashed his head around.

Unfortunately, she was not there, it was a dream, and he had just woken up from a long slumber since he had previously passed out from poisonous air. He looked around; he was still surrounded by bones, and it still smelled like dirty underarms. He was still in the bone graveyard, but it had been hours since he arrived and lost consciousness.

"April!" he shouted and paused in his voice.

Stomped, he repeated:

"A-April?"

The process continued for a couple of seconds before he fully understood what was wrong. Then he covered his mouth and fell into a laughing stupor.

"This is a joke, right?"

But instead of his words coming out of his mouth, they were voiced audibly by his head, echoing through the terrain. He tried using his mouth to speak but it was as if he was on mute. Bedazzled, he burst into more laughter again – again, out of his head – and eventually stood himself up, shaking his head and dusting his clothes off.

"Yeah. I'm totally dead. Ore mo koitsura to onaji kurai shinderu darou na."

He waded across the terrain of bones, eyeing each horned skull with disinterested curiosity.

"This is not real. You're not real~!"

All sorts of fear had left his body and he now felt like a walking corpse among the skeletons.

"Kimitachi ittai dō shita no?"

All of them looked scorched by the cruel hands of time, gray and almost ancient. Some had long twisted horns while others had short erect ones. They were not human.

"Tōzen daro," his thoughts exploded, stunning him for a second before he remembered he was mute on the outside.

He watched a tarpit bubble and pop on the ground. A geyser rumbled and hissed out gushing steam. These were the same stuff that killed him, leading him to be tormented by what looked like a dream where he fell into a white void and giant tentacles drove him into a black sea filled with creepy sea cats…

The earth beneath his slippers was coal black and hard as iron. Little purple bulbs grew out of cracks and thick purple clouds blanketed the sky, bright sunbeams shining scattered and shining down. There was not even a gust present, and all the boy could think was he was on another planet.

"Yoku yatta, NASA! Kimitachi no keikaku wa umaku itta me!"

He thrust his hand forward and as if summoned, a longsword appeared in his palm and immediately burst into purple flames. He instinctively dropped the blade to the ground, jumping back a few.

He froze, gawking at it for a moment before something else – bigger and bluer – caught his eyes.

Up in the purple sky, a similar vortex opened and hurled out a mass of bodies on the ground. The funny thing was that they had not even reached the ground when they instantly vanished – like it was one of those visions he experienced when he failed to rescue April from the vortex. The sword, however, was real, a purple and enchanting flame burning brightly on its blade.

Hiroko forced his eyes closed and opened them again to confirm his suspicion and it was still there.

"Watashi, seiyō no tabemono wo tabesugiteru..?"

"On your feet, soldiers!" A brash man's voice thundered out of nowhere.

Hiroko swerved to look, instinctively grabbing the sword again and holding it in a defensive manner. What in the – he was all alone.

"Oi, nani?"

So where could that voice have come from? A vision? But he heard it loud and clear. Someone was definitely around.

"Get up, get up. Before the portal closes."

The boy raised his head to the sky and saw the same envisioned quagmire warp and instantaneously disappear. When he brought his bewildered eyes back down, he found himself in the middle of a horde of those gray-skinned and horned people.

One thing was for sure, they were not people.

"Curse those blasted Elves!"

And the atmosphere was filled with outraged cries of an inhuman kind…

So, there he stood frozen in shock in the middle of an army of…

"Orcs!" The biggest and therefore scariest gray man bellowed up on a rock formation to Hiroko's right.

"My army of vicious murderous orcs… we have been betrayed,"

A restless and indignant grumble waved across the creatures.

"But we have not been defeated!"

While the supposed orc leader boomed on the platform, Hiroko eyed the ones on the ground with sheer apprehension.

Were they real, and if they were, why could none of them see him? Not that he wanted them to! They hardly looked friendly enough.

He cautiously extended the flaming sword at one orc standing next to him and in the blink of an eye, the blade went right through the orc. The creature was distorted and immediately vanished, with it the whole army too, and Hiroko was left gawking in horror.

"Nani kore?!"

He looked around. He was alone again. Before:

"Trust me when I tell you we will not be stuck here forever. Not while I'm still alive!"

The army was back again, and again they could not see Hiroko. It was as if they were holograms of past events… Illusions. They were the exact creatures he had seen in his visions, fighting those other huge creatures. But by the looks of them, they had not yet fought them. So, it was a battle yet to come? This was a memory he was seeing. Whose memory was it though?

The wastelands?

"This is… a memory?"

"General Tekirous," an orc, younger than the bulky one on the platform, spoke up, stepping up to him.

"I would like to ask a question before you continue filling the army with hope."

Tekirous turned to the young but equally ugly orc and gave him a sharp nod.

The young orc took his place next to General Tekirous and stood tall facing him.

"The Third Battalion was asking where exactly the Elves have sent us."

"Son,"

And he turned to the rest of the army.

"The treacherous Elves have banished us to Modest."

"The Fourth Dimension?!" someone exclaimed out of the crowd.

"Yes! And they have used their magical sorcery and vicious nick-nacks to make sure they win the war unjustly! They call themselves Elves, but I call them Elvallas. Beautiful Devils! They came to us seeking our help to win their petty strife. They were desperate for our help, I tell you. I, your vicious general, even wanted to refuse, because just like with the humans, Elves and Orcs had been at war for centuries. But for your sake, I decided to help them because afterward, we were to enjoy the spoils of war!"

An agreeing murmur ran across the army.

Tekirous continued.

"When the war was over, the treacherous elves turned on us and started killing us off."

Hiroko shuddered at the sudden snarls of the army as they responded to the general's words. Besides horns, those orcs had tusks protruding out of their mouths.

"So, I retaliated and killed the greatest elf himself! And I took his head!"

He thrust an oval-shaped thing up for his army to see. Hiroko did not have to squint for he then saw a decapitated, blonde-haired, and pointy-eared head of a man dangling from the claws of the orc. Its neck – which looked as if it was sawed off the person's shoulders – bled purple blood.

Petrified, Hiroko slouched over and vomited.

"What the hell?!"

"They attacked us, and they drove us out of The Dark lands, our home! Then they came begging for our help. But I should have known they would pull some dirty Elf trick on us. Those soft-skinned, silky-haired sweet-talkers are two-faced demons!"

He tossed the Elven head down into the crowd and it rolled all the way to Hiroko's feet.

There was a golden wreath around it.

Unable to bear the look of its swollen eyelids, shriveled-up ears, and dried-up lips on a pale face that would have been handsome when alive, Hiroko turned aside before he fell to his knees and threw up again.

"Ah. Senpai, yasuraka ni onemuri kudasai..."

When he raised his head, the army was gone again.

He stood up slowly, wiping his mouth and taking in sharp, short breaths.

He was all alone.

Again, surrounded by the fear-struck skull faces of the long-dead orcs on the terrain, he had seen flashes of how they arrived, and if he had to guess, it was the same way he got here, too.

It was obviously was the same way!

Was he going to stay and end up the same way as them?

How horrible!

But the thought that took over his mind was:

"April… What have you done?"

And it was like the geysers and tar pits had swallowed his voice while in the upper distance, he looked like a purple spec.

He glanced aside and saw a bright sunbeam protruding from the purple clouds. It was heading in his direction, lighting up the obsidian ground like a spotlight from the heavens. He stepped aside casually and watched as it incinerated a skeleton.

"Mother!" Hiroko froze in shock.