A Child's Disgust (2)

The flickering lamplight of the Dark Alleys did little to illuminate what followed.

Shimmer didn't speak again.

She moved.

The zweihander that floated lazily behind her—like a beast on a chain—snapped into her hand the instant her fingers flexed. It didn't fall, it didn't clatter, it materialized into her grip, drawn by the bloodthirst that exhaled from her soul like breath in cold air.

She didn't give them a chance to scream.

With a flick of her wrist, she became motion itself. In one moment she was standing still, and in the next, she was everywhere. One man turned to blink and found his throat missing. Another reached for his blade only to realize both his arms had been sliced off at the shoulders before he had even screamed.

Twelve lives gone in the space between seconds.

The zweihander shimmered with an obsidian gleam as it danced through the space, carving arcs of violence into the night air. Shimmer wielded it like an artist with a brush dipped in crimson, each stroke leaving bodies collapsing behind her, jaws twitching, eyes wide, not knowing they were already dead.

One had time to stagger, clutching at the gaping hole where his chest used to be. Another reached out to a friend, only to find the friend had already been halved.

And then silence.

The six remaining robbers trembled.

Blood soaked the cobblestone like a black soup. It pooled beneath their boots. They turned to flee—anything, anywhere, away from this child that moved like a nightmare carved from memory.

Shimmer didn't chase.

She raised her hand slowly, palm toward the heavens. Her face expressionless, bored even.

Then, she snapped her finger. The sound wasn't loud.

But what followed was.

A shockwave of condensed sound burst outward from her hand in a perfect sphere, distorting the air with a violent ripple. It hit the six men like a god's wrath. Their bodies ruptured, not from the outside, but from within. Flesh tore as eardrums exploded. Eyes popped. Skin flayed open as their bodies were shredded by the invisible force of raw sound weaponized by Tether.

They fell—shattered, twitching, corpses painted in grotesque silence.

The alley fell still again.

The zweihander gently floated beside her now, gleaming in the aftermath. Shimmer lowered her arm and walked calmly toward one of the nearest bodies. She reached down and grabbed a handful of the man's torn tunic. She wiped the blood off the blade's edge with slow, practiced swipes.

Arletta—Chainless—stood several feet away. She hadn't moved through any of it. Not out of shock. Not out of fear. But because she knew.

She knew what Shimmer could do.

Her expression was unreadable but her eyes followed the girl with quiet scrutiny. She had seen warriors kill before. She had watched trained assassins end lives in seconds. But Shimmer... had killed in a way that mocked effort. There was no joy in her, no bloodlust. Just detachment.

As Shimmer straightened, she flicked a last bit of blood from the tip of the zweihander. The floating weapon slowly vanished again, slipping into the fabric of her essence like it had never been real.

She looked down at her boots, now stained at the edges, and sighed.

"Some living beings…" she muttered with a slow, measured tone, "are just disgusting."

She turned to Arletta, brushing a lock of silver-blonde hair away from her face. Her golden eyes were dimmer now, a little colder.

"And the worst part is… they're still part of my kind."

Chainless tilted her head slightly. There was no visible reaction. But in the quiet between them, something passed.

An understanding.

Chainless walked beside her now, and they both stepped over the corpses without a glance. The red line on Arletta's arm pulsed faintly again—still guiding them deeper into the city's underbelly.

Still pointing toward Veyn.

Their pace didn't quicken. It didn't need to.

Shimmer had said what needed to be said, and Arletta had heard all she needed to hear.

-------

The sewers of the Fallen Bridge were unlike the sewage paths of any other city in Spheraphase. There was no filth, no foul stench of rot or decay, no rats scurrying between bricks. Instead, the tunnel breathed with an eerie, sterile stillness, as if the walls themselves held their breath in perpetual anticipation. Moisture clung to the stone, but it was too clean, too pristine. It was almost as if the tunnels themselves were grown. Carved not by engineers, but by the will of the strange reality inside the Fallen Bridge.

Shimmer walked at a leisurely pace ahead, boots tapping softly against the polished stone. The red line pulsed across Arletta's arm like the heartbeat of a god, guiding them forward through the half-lit depths. Every once in a while, her zweihander floated behind her again like a wolf following its master, but it did not growl. It simply waited.

It was in that quiet, underneath the city where no ears could hear and no eyes could see, that Shimmer began to speak.

"…You know I'm a Sentient Krepsuna, right? Born from a Phantasm. The one my mother wept into... before they crushed her."

Arletta turned her head, but didn't reply. She couldn't. Her silence was the purest kind of listening.

"But I keep wondering... how did we even get here? Krepsunas. I mean, I know Dimensium is where they come from originally. I've read the lore. They say it's a world with more depth than sense. Where time gets eaten, and space screams. A world that births monsters... and dreams."

She ran her hand along the wall, fingers brushing over glyphs etched into the sewer stone—worn symbols long ago dulled by time.

"And yet... somehow, here I am. In Spheraphase. Alive. Thinking. Talking. Feeling. Sentient."

Her voice dropped lower.

"But why do they call us that? Infected Krepsunas… and Sentient Krepsunas? Who named that? Was it someone from Spheraphase or… someone who followed us out?"

Arletta's steps slowed slightly behind her. Her eyes were narrowed. She was wondering the same thing.

Shimmer turned a corner, the red line flickering, pointing them deeper into the belly of the world.

"The Infected ones... those are the Krepsunas still warped. The ones who didn't wake up, right? The ones who never escaped the madness of Dimensium. But the Sentients…we think. We choose. And that makes us dangerous."

There was silence for a moment, until Shimmer broke it again. Her words were more like thoughts slipping from her mouth now, musing aloud with the slow unraveling of a child seeking truth in a myth.

"When my mother died… she bled across the sky and sea. They say her body became the Erna Isles. A god made flesh, torn apart by the Supreme Entities. I remember how the stories go… but the Erna Isles are still here. Still thriving. And then there's the Fallen Bridge."

Her eyes narrowed. The ceiling arched higher here. Cold air rolled down the tunnels like breath through a throat. The red line curved downward again.

"Primofrost made this place. But inside it... it's not the same as what it looks like outside. From the isles, it looks like a tall icy wall covering the whole island. But inside it's not just a wall—it's a dimension. A frozen tundra with five whole civilizations inside it. It's like… another world crammed inside a barrier."

Arletta nodded slightly.

"If my mother escaped Dimensium… how did the Sentient Krepsunas get here? Did she bring them with her? Did they follow in her footsteps? Or… did they fall here, like raindrops in a storm, scattered across reality when she broke the rules and ran?"

She slowed to a stop, hand on the hilt of her zweihander again.

"Or maybe… they escaped on their own? Maybe one of them opened a rift. Maybe they found the cracks in Dimensium's skin and clawed their way out. Maybe the Krepsunas in Fallen Bridge were never meant to be here at all but they made themselves belong."

Arletta looked ahead. The tunnel twisted again, downward into another spiral.

"And if the Fallen Bridge is built from frozen realms and lies just outside of where my mother died… does that mean she made it? Or was it? Could Primofrost have sculpted it from her final breath? Or is it something older than her? Something she just awakened?"

The silence of the tunnel was broken only by their footfalls and the dripping of moisture from unseen cracks above.

"Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions," Shimmer said as she placed her hand to her chest. "Maybe the better question is… who wants us here? Because someone's keeping the Fallen Bridge intact. Someone's letting us build cities and raise flags and claim names."

They reached a circular chamber where the red line flickered and ended at a solid stone wall.

A dead end.

Shimmer walked forward and placed her hand against the wall, feeling for anything unusual; any air shift, vibration, glyph, or hidden lever. Nothing. The wall was as lifeless as stone could be.

Arletta raised a brow and tilted her head. Her eyes met Shimmer's with a question unspoken.

Shimmer leaned back and sighed, rubbing her temple.

"Great. Now what? I was hoping for, you know… a glowing passage, maybe a magical gate. But no. A wall."

She turned and sat down on a broken step at the edge of the chamber. The zweihander floated lazily beside her, spinning once in lazy circles.

"I just wanted answers, Arletta. I wanted to know where I came from. Where we came from. But the more I talk, the more it feels like I'm drowning in questions. Dimensium, my mother, the Krepsunas, the Fallen Bridge, Erna Isles, Primofrost…"

Her golden eyes slowly looked up toward the ceiling, where frost crept along the curved surface like veins of frozen time.

"…I'm just a ten-year-old with a sword that kills gods. But I don't know who the real monsters are."

Arletta stepped beside her, crouching down next to her. She reached into her cloak and took out a small metal token shaped like a crescent moon. She pressed it into Shimmer's hand gently.

Shimmer looked at it, then looked up at her.

Arletta gave a simple nod. A sign that meant: We'll find out.

The two girls sat in silence, the red light of the rune gone now, fading into the ether, as they stared at the dead wall of a world too complicated for truth.

And beyond that wall, somewhere in the shadows of the frozen dimension… Veyn waited.