Chapter 233: Emotion, End — VII
And
1
The skyscraper came down in a column of brown-grey dust that swallowed the street whole.
The sound of it arrived a second late and when it did I felt it in my back teeth and my sternum and somewhere deep in my chest.
The shockwave pushed a wall of dust outward in every direction and I pressed my arm across my face and turned my head and rode it out.
Then silence.
Relative silence. The kind that followed enormous sounds.
The dust was everywhere— everything brown, everything obscured, the whole city transformed into a fog of pulverized concrete and debris that reduced visibility to about three meters in any direction.
I went down into it, holding my jacket across my nose, and moved toward where the building had been.
Something moved in the shadow.
The giant, or what was left of it. On its side, partially buried, one enormous tusk driven into the pavement by the impact.
And through the exposed section of its neck— right where the fungal cluster was densest, the core of the whole system— a section of steel beam from the collapsed building had come down at an angle and gone through it.
Pinning it.
Clean through the fungal mass, the thing that was actually running all of this, the actual brain of the operation.
Not dead.
Still moving. Still twitching. The roots writhing around the intrusion.
But pinned.
I [Pulse Stepped] to its side— one more, adding to whatever count my brain was running— crouched at the exposed core, and looked at it directly.
It flinched.
One instant. The core opened, some reflexive response to being seen.
Knife.
Straight in.
The movement stopped.
I walked back.
Haha... yep, weak glare has its TRAITS... wait... I actually have a lot of bizarre skills...
I shrugged that off.
And walked toward the camp limping, dodging the zombies around, the dusk saving me here and there.
And reached.
The dust had reached the camp. Everything was brown— the courtyard, the buildings, the walls still standing and the ones that weren’t. Brown everywhere, floating thick enough that breathing through my mouth tasted like concrete.
I moved through it with my jacket sleeve against my face and looked for living things.
Found mostly the other kind.
The zombies that had made it inside during the chaos were still there— dozens of them, moving through the haze, slower now without the giant’s momentum pushing everything but still there, still present, still a problem.
I dealt with them as I found them, the knife, the hands, the skills burning lower and lower in whatever reserve they ran on.
Wait... How many times have I used Pulse Step and M.D.M...? I thought, punching something that had been reaching for me and moving on.
Sixty? Eighty? I stopped counting somewhere around the skyscraper.
My nose was bleeding.
I noticed because I felt it on my upper lip, tasted it, wiped it with the back of my hand and kept moving. Fine. That was fine. People bled from their nose sometimes. That was a normal thing.
Then I heard her voice.
"Ha—" Jisoo. Somewhere to my left, muffled by the dust. "Agh—" Coughing.
I moved toward it and found her in under 30seconds— on the ground, one shoulder against the base of a concrete barrier, pinned from the knee down by a section of fallen debris that had come down during the chaos.
Her shoulder. Something had gotten her shoulder.
The bite was obvious. Recent. The skin around it already beginning the slow change that went one direction.
She looked up at me. Then at her own shoulder. Then back at me.
"Well," she said. "Haha. Fuck. I should have put more into Strength and less into Mana. ಠᴥಠ"
I sat down next to her because my legs had apparently finished asking nicely and moved on to demanding. "Do we regress?"
"Yep." She exhaled. "We do."
Then she looked at her shoulder again and her whole body slowly turned dark— nails going first, color draining out of them, the edges turning.
Her eyes reddened at the corners. She watched it happen with a calm face, actually... it looks like she doesn’t even give a FUCK.
"We should probably go soon," she said, carefully.
"Yeah." I looked at my hands. Looked at the knife. Looked at the dust still floating everywhere around us. "Wait. Mio."
"What?"
"I told her I’d come back."
Jisoo looked at me. "...She’s in the garage."
"I know."
"Si Hon."
"I promised her."
A pause. Then Jisoo sighed, the length and quality of which suggested she was having feelings she hadn’t asked for. "Fine. Go. I’ll wait."
I stood up.
My legs immediately filed a formal complaint.
I took a step and the world tilted and I caught myself on the concrete barrier next to Jisoo, breathing through the dizziness, and did a very quick internal assessment of the situation.
My brain felt like it was running at about 30% of what it was supposed to be running at.
Every skill used cost something, and I had used them approximately 200x probably in the last 30minutes, and the bill had apparently arrived....
Blood from my nose again.
I went to one knee.
"FUCK—" Jisoo, sharp. "Si Hon, at least go somewhere! Move! I’m turning into a zombie over here, dumbass, MOVE—"
"Your legs are pinned by a massive debris, shut your mouth," I pointed out, from one knee, with what I felt was commendable calm. "You’re not going anywhere."
"I— that’s—" A pause. "Fuck you."
"I know."
A laugh came out of me that I hadn’t planned.
Then, in the brown dust around us, a shadow appeared.
Small. Moving carefully. One hand holding something against its chest— the long stitched ear of a bunny, visible even through the haze.
The shadow moved toward us and became a shape and the shape became Mio, dust-covered, tear-tracked, shivering slightly, looking around with both eyes wide and red-rimmed and finding us there at the base of the barrier.
She ran.
Not to me. To Jisoo first, dropping to her knees next to her in the debris and the dust, and she cried. "N-noona! what happened?? what happened to your... why is your—*"
"Hey." Jisoo’s voice came out different. Softer. "Hey, Mio. Look at me."
Mio looked at her.
"I’m okay," Jisoo said, which was not technically accurate but was what Mio needed to hear, and Jisoo had calculated that in about 2seconds. "I’m okay."
Mio looked at her shoulder. Then back at Jisoo’s face. Then she reached for the debris pinning her legs and started pulling, both hands, putting everything she had into it, which was impressive for her size and completely insufficient for the weight.
"Stop," Jisoo said.
"I can get it—"
"Mio. Stop."
Something in the way she said it made Mio stop. She sat back, looking at Jisoo’s face, and I watched her read it— all of it, the shoulder, the color of Jisoo’s nails, the red at the corners of her eyes— and I watched the understanding arrive.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. She climbed onto the debris instead, carefully, finding footholds, and put both arms around Jisoo from above and held on.
Jisoo went still.
"...Am I your favorite?" she said, after a moment. Her voice had gone somewhere quieter. "Out of the two of us? You’re allowed to be honest."