Chương 69: CHAPTER 68 – Roars in the Darkness

The screech of metal, the crackle of flames and steam, and the rumble of gears mixed in that hall. Fragments of rock and charred wood slid across the ground, trampled immediately beneath the swift steps of the three of them.

"GOOD! GIVE ME MORE!" Jeanne's sword shattered against David's forearm, collapsing the floor beneath him with immense force. The girl ground her teeth, gripping the hilt with such force it split the skin on her hands. Immediately, a flash of flame sent David flying into the sky. He turned his head sharply toward the ceiling, smiling with every tooth bared.

"Vergehen, Harpune!" A blade of black lightning pierced his arm, hooking into him and dragging the boy, wrapped in white bolts, through the air. His muscles snapped, bringing the mass of iron and gears down against his forehead. A series of rock shards scattered around them as their eyes met in a gaze split between hatred and joy. With a cry loud enough to scrape his throat raw, Lance shattered the rock into countless blocks, while below a white ribbon bound itself around the man's ankle.

The harpoon of black light was yanked away as the pale cord pulled David toward the ground." The girl's blood can be used like this, huh?" His hand was torn away entirely, leaving a trail of blood in the air. His body slammed hard against the floor, fracturing it. Another tug of the cord pulled him upright again, just as he watched Jeanne's chestnut hair rushing toward his face." Grijs!" A gleaming film of iron formed from the blood and sweat gathered on her arm, making the impact all the more terrifying.

Her fist drove full into David's chest, sending blood spraying from his lips." Her strength is amazing!" David's body flew across the ground as his mind tried to adjust to the pain of fractured ribs and the fluid beginning to gather among his organs.

"His versatility and Frequency exceed even Malcolm's, but he is not untouchable…" Lance materialised before him, gripping the iron blade with both hands. In an instant he swung the blade. The floor and the railing were torn open in a sea of sparks.

"Perhaps you thought…" A hand seized Lance's shoulder, and he immediately tried to turn, before a sharp sensation crossed his ankle. A block of ice had completely anchored his body to the ground, while the man resumed speaking between one sigh and the next.

"That being able to stand near me was enough to secure victory?" A bluish mist emerged from his throat as his new hand formed itself from the rock at his wrist." Can he really do this?!" With force, he shattered the ice, but by now David was already at the full height of his faculties. With violence he drove his boot into the boy's face, hurling him against the wall. A golden, burning flash carved a furrow into the ground, right before his own feet. The smell of smoke reached his nostrils.

"I like you, young lady! You have fire in your eyes and in your chest!" He smiled, letting his hat clash against the flame-wrapped scythe. A new series of fiery bolts fell to the ground as the two continued exchanging slashes, one after another.

"Faster! FASTER!!" The blade in his hat broke, falling away into the abyss of machinery. Jeanne rotated her hips, aiming the scythe directly at his throat, when a sharp pain lanced through her shoulder. Immediately, Jeanne felt the cold making its way through her flesh as the shard of blood took on a greyish liquid tint.

"Come now… With that, you ought to be able to do more than mere fire." Jeanne seized him with her free hand as a bluish gleam flashed intermittently through the liquid on her body. David seized her by the throat, bringing his lips closer to her forehead.

"You are lovelier up close, you know?" In that moment, a bluish gleam engulfed them both. Lance sprang upright immediately, launching himself toward the ever-expanding globe of lightning. A violent discharge of bolts scorched the ground, writhing furiously through the air.

"YES! YES! THIS IS MAGNIFICENT!" David smiled, emerging with his face entirely burned by the electricity. Jeanne clawed at his face again, driving her nails into the scorched flesh.

"You h-have to die." With force, she struck him full in the face with her forehead, snapping his head backward. It was in that moment that David registered the weapon levelled at him from the side. A sinister light emerged from the barrel of the revolver in the boy's hands, appearing along with a cloud of dense smoke. A hole now sat where his hip had once been. David hung anchored to the wall, blood and organs plastered against it, and yet not a single grimace of pain crossed his ashen face.

"Yes… This is the perfect evening to paint." Slabs of rock, ice, and blades of grass began growing across his mutilated flesh. Slowly he managed to steady himself on his leg, rising back to his feet.

"Recover. I will keep him occupied." Lance gripped Supplicium in his hand, sheathing his blade and launching himself at David. His steps sank into the ground, devouring the distance between the two of them within a few seconds." Einbrand!" The wall behind David shattered completely, raining fragments down over their heads. Another impact tore open his chest, widening the fractures across the wall.

With every impact, Lance grew steadily more invigorated, increasing in speed and intensity, and yet David kept smiling, his eyes hollow.

"How much more Frequency does he have?! With every blow, he seems to be growing stronger…" Suddenly, his arms stopped, trapped in a tight vice. A pillar of rock lifted him high into the air as David laughed.

"I am enraptured! I could not have asked for more!" A tear slid down his face, covered in grass and earth. Beneath that mask, the flesh had already reconstructed itself, recharged with vitality. Lance broke his manacles of rock, breaking through the pillar with a stomp. The column shattered as Lance clung to one of its falling fragments. At the sight of the reborn David, wrapped in a glacial mist, his body compelled him to flee." Eichwald."

Lance seized Jeanne, pulling her upward alongside himself with a thread of Frequency. In a single instant, a distorted and cruel landscape transformed the hall. Burned oaks, covered in algae, their roots trapped in a thick slab of ice. Jeanne lowered her gaze, catching sight of Lance's leg being devoured by the cold.

"Your leg..."

"I will regenerate it the moment we are far enough away…" He murmured, clinging to the wall with his blade. David laughed, holding his stomach with both hands as the ice and the skeletons of wood extended further still.

"Is that the Einflussbereich?" The scenery awakened a memory inside his head, one that he couldn't believe to see so soon.

"A zone of influence? Is that what Monica called it? If that is truly what this is, retreat would be your only option." Lucas smiled, handing Lance a cup of hot tea. The boy studied his own reflection in the liquid, scratching his temple.

"I do not think I fully understood what you were talking about…" He answered, raising his hand like a schoolboy. The scientist laughed heartily, sitting down beside him.

"You are right! Too many complicated words. Let me give you a more practical explanation." He took a sheet of paper and a pen, resting them on his knees.

"Metas are not quite human. They retain, in part, the instincts of creatures from the Hel. This is true both for physical instincts like reproduction and appetite, and for everything else. But nothing is more dangerous than a Meta backed against a wall, especially one with 'particular' tendencies." He took the pen and, with a delicate stroke, began sketching a rather stylised figure. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Lance, just as even the most wretched of beasts will hiss and growl when cornered, even the sturdiest mask can shatter and let the true madness of someone like us surface." From the figure, Lucas began branching out several lines, enclosing them in a rather stylised ellipse. Lance watched with a thrill down his spine.

"When threatened by something that cracks the psyche, a Meta's Frequency becomes more unstable and begins reacting in peculiar ways with the body and the surrounding environment. The manifestation of the Core and specific overloads is one example, but in rare cases, the environment itself can become corrupted by the Frequency escaping from a Meta." Lucas closed the ellipse for good, naming it the Einflussbereich.

"From your report, the one about your final confrontation with Malcolm at the Demiurge site. That dome you described is a voluntary zone of influence. An amazing feat, really." Lucas answered, sketching further figures inside the ellipse.

"So it is possible to learn to create one, then?" Lance asked, lowering his head the moment he saw Lucas shake his own.

"An artificial Zone of Influence cannot be compared to one generated by the pure instinct to survive or to kill. Very few types of Meta can even develop one, to be honest. Typically, a Stärken, who has low affinity for external Frequency, could not even conceive of generating one, whereas an Änderung like Dirac managed to generate one the moment he felt threatened." Lucas set down the pen, but Lance stared at him in confusion.

"That dome he used was not the only one during our confrontation…" Lucas nodded, pointing to one of the sketched figures.

"You are quite observant! However, even Maliard noticed that with each use, the technique's capabilities were diminishing. Remarkably, he managed it at all, but the true destructive peak of that technique proved itself when it opened during the period of maximum crisis. After an event like that, it becomes easier to replicate, but it will always remain conditioned by the emotional variable." Lucas pointed the tip of his finger at the figure at the centre, circling it.

"A Zone of Influence is like finding oneself inside the brain of the Meta in question. The Frequency that composes the landscape changes and begins to take on the shape of that person's own. In simple terms, one is drastically disadvantaged, since your body will weaken while your opponent's is perpetually flooded with fresh material." Lucas erased both of the smaller figures, leaving only the stylised man at the centre.

"Have you ever seen one in person?" Lucas paused for a second, fixing his gaze out the window of his laboratory. In silence, he set the pen and paper aside.

"August Noir was one of the first to achieve one, but he could not control his own emotions and became 'sick.' Zones of Influence can shatter the psyche if they grow too vast and dense. I know this from experience. August's was comparable to an entire island." Lucas rose, keeping his trembling hand still.

"If you are curious about the one exception. There exists only a single creature in all of history capable of generating a zone of influence of that magnitude in complete autonomy…" Lucas turned toward the boy, the moon's reflection imprinted on the glass of his mask. A single cloud blocked that light, leaving it dull.

"The Unnamed." In that moment, Lance's memories stopped, returning him to the troublesome present. David stopped laughing, gripping one of the bare, rotting oak trees.

"Magnificent! This truly is a masterpiece!" With a gesture of his hand, the tree's wood began to distort into that strange greyish haze, stretching and lengthening in the air as though it were a lance. Lance pulled Jeanne even tighter into his grip, loading all his weight onto his legs.

"I truly thank you, Lance…" The ice and the trees were hurled toward him, tearing open the wall behind him. Lance felt the blood flowing out of his body, from the wound left on his leg.

"The air here is different, but my Frequency is not being corrupted. Could it be thanks to Lachesi?" He cast a glance at his own arm before feeling Jeanne thrashing against him.

"Let go of me and let's leave… We cannot win without you using that thing." The boy nodded, sheathing his weapons without ever taking his eye off the figure before him. His robe, wherever it had been torn, had been mended with algae and leaves. David's eyes flashed brighter and brighter, and his smile showed no sign of cracking.

"This masterpiece is thanks to you, and yet I do not want you as my muse…" The light in the room went out, leaving Jeanne and Lance wrapped in a sea of darkness. Before them, no longer David, but only a young man in a shirt.

"Master David has informed me that the preparations are complete. Now you must come with me, Lance Klint." A noose of shadow tightened around his neck, dragging him upward. As the air abandoned his lungs, Jeanne's figure vanished further and further into the darkness. He saw several things stirring within the shadows: strange flashes of yellowish light, walls collapsing beneath the blows of some improbable colossus, a sweet song coming to a stop, a man wrapped in an almost liquid fire.

For an instant Maliard appeared before him, gripping his own shoulder. Lance thrashed his arms to try to reach him, and yet the vision had now changed drastically. He heard David's laughter and the sound of gears clicking shut, and in a brief instant he saw Jeanne's figure gripping her scythe, taking a step forward.

"JEANNE!" With the last breath left to him, he cried out her name. He reached his arm out, trying to seize her within that haze, but found himself instead with his face turned toward glass. The panorama was wrapped in flames, and the flashes of weapons flickered through the dense, dark smoke.

"I imagine everything gets expelled the moment it touches the sky. This is a separate space, after all." A faint, weak, wretched voice spoke behind him.

"Angel Meris…" The boy gave a faint bow, wiping the tears from his eyes in silence. He tucked the handkerchief back into his shirt's breast pocket and straightened his shoulders once more.

"What do you think you are doing?!" Lance sprang upright with fury, pressing his foot hard against the floor. Sheets of paper and chairs fell to the ground, and even the lights on the ceiling flickered.

"Is your agitation on account of the massacre outside, or the one within the facility? I imagine both, knowing your character…" He answered in a mortified tone, almost moved. Lance clenched his fists with such fury he split his own nails, but Vergehen did not afford him the luxury of minor wounds.

"Mr. David believes your companion, Jeanne Goghette, is the perfect inspiring muse for this evening. He has asked me to keep you occupied until you collapse." On that young, blond-haired face, not a trace of joy, only sorrow.

"And the rest? Why are you all here? Why are you killing these people?!" Lance took a step, kicking one of the fallen chairs to the side. The piece of furniture shattered along with the window, plummeting to the base of the tower they had found themselves inside.

"In my case, I have been ordered to, though I imagine it is a decision meant to bring you to my Lady in as little time as possible." Angel answered, slowly dissolving his fingers into a substance resembling tar.

"The sooner you are out of combat, the sooner the massacre will most likely come to an end." He concluded, as his shadow began to dance and flicker, expanding wherever the light did not disturb it. Lance stopped, tucking his weapons into the opposite pockets of his jacket.

"Unfortunately, as you can see, many have already died, and others will as well, but if you were to cooperate, you would make things easier for all of us." His tone did not change in the slightest, not even in a mild attempt at persuasion. Lance cast another glance at the flames devouring the hedges of the garden. Suddenly he saw a man plummeting from the sky, wrapped in flames.

"Well, this certainly is quite the sentence to bear." He slid his fingers across the glass, pushing himself to turn just as one of the distant towers collapsed.

"So if I stop you here and now, I can go back to helping my companions, isn't that another way to put it?" At those words, Angel nodded, never once taking those glassy, hollow eyes off his opponent.

"Very well…" A white flash and a black one branched through the room, cracking the glass and setting the papers on the floor alight. The ash and the burning sheets began to flutter in the wind carried through the open window.

"Then I will see to leaving you only one way to answer, then…" Amid the swarm of moth-like paper and ash, a golden gleam emerged from beyond the dancing flames. On the boy's face, a leer of pure satisfaction met the eyes of his sorrowful target.