Chapter 244: Tour Opening (4)
<🎧 Song Recommendation: Blinding Lights by The Weeknd>
...
The arpeggio climbed alone in the dark for five full seconds before all of a sudden, somewhere out on the runway, a single point of white light appeared.
It hovered about five feet off the ground in stillness, before sliding six inches to the left.
As it moved, a thin line of white fire traced itself down through the darkness beneath it, following the exact path of the motion.
A shoulder, an arm, the line of a spine.
The light wasn’t hovering in the air; it was sitting on a man’s chest, and every time he moved, the movement drew itself in light. Von rolled his shoulder once, slowly, and the entire right side of a suit lit up along the seam.
He had gone into the dark in a white suit, but he was coming out of it in matte black suit with a cut on its the shoulders.
Running through it, along every seam and panel, were lines of light that answered his body.
He turned his head, and a collar of white bloomed and faded behind the motion. He flexed his hand, and the light ran down his forearm and died at the knuckles.
"Nicky," Sabrina breathed in awe. "Nicky, how is he doing that? This is beautiful."
Nicholas had no answer. He was a lot more interested on the beat that kept looping from the speakers.
Behind Von, four stories of blackness came alive with a road. It was a highway at night shot from a speeding car in cold blue and dirty orange, streetlights sweeping past overhead in a rhythm that locked precisely to the synth arpeggio.
The light washed over the bowl, placing twenty thousand people inside a car at three in the morning.
Then all of a sudden a the formerly looping arpeggio paused and a long smooth hum was heard before it cut. Then, Von lifted the mic.
🎹♪
I’ve been tryna call...
I’ve been on my own for long enough.
Maybe you can show me how to love... maybe.
I’m goin’ through withdrawals.
You don’t even have to do too much~
You can turn me on with just a touch... baby!
🎹♪
His voice came in low and smooth over the synth, cooler, thinner, and lonelier than before. He started walking down the runway, and every time his foot came down, a ring of light bloomed outward across the floor and faded. He was leaving footprints of fire.
As he sang, he hit the crossbeat and threw a sharp quarter-turn; every seam on his body flared white before dropping back to nothing.
He rolled into a body wave that started at his shoulder and traveled down through his hip, the light chasing it the entire way.
Behind him, thirty dancers rose out of the stage floor on invisible lifts, dressed in full-body matte black with no faces and no lights, moving like shadows and traffic.
They weren’t eren executing any choreography. Each of them were simply dancing out to their own unique styles. It was chaotic, and that was what made it special.
🎹♪
I look around and
Sin City’s cold and empty (oh)
No one’s around to judge me (oh)
I can’t see clearly when you’re go- uh, - on.
🎹♪
Von weaved through the gaps in their chaotic formation, hitting accents in the open half-spaces, ducking under swinging arms, and sliding through leg gates a quarter-second before they closed while singing.
He touched no one, appearing like a single spark thrown through a machine, bouncing off moving parts without ever getting caught.
The pre-chorus lifted. The highway on the screen tilted upward toward the sky, becoming a wall of light going straight up. Von stopped in the center of the runway, took four hard strides, and jumped.
Everyone gasped in susprise, because that wasn’t a humanly possible jump. Even more surprising, he kept going up.
He cleared eight feet, twelve, twenty feet as if there was zero gravity on the stage.
As he rose further, the lights in his suit got even more brighter. Everyone had stopped screaming at that point and were all awestruck to silence.
At thirty feet, the light went out.
Every seam on his suit died at once, the screen slammed shut into black, and Von dropped, tumbling out of the sky and hitting the runway hard on his side.
A very wild scream came from the crowd after seeing his smooth fall from the sky.
The synth was gone, the screen was gone, and a single hard white spotlight hit a man lying face down on a black walkway.
"Oh my god," Sabrina whispered, her voice trembling. "Nicholas, is that part of it?"
Von’s hand moved. His fingers dragged six inches across the floor, waking a faint line of light beneath them.
The crowd erupted.
He pushed himself up onto one knee, then to his feet, favoring his left side. As he stood, light climbed back into his suit from the floor up ankles, knees, chest, and the kick drum finally slammed in.
The chorus landed at that moment.
🎹♪
I said, "Ooh, I’m blinded by the lights
No, I can’t sleep until I feel your touch"
I said, "Ooh, I’m drowning in the night
Oh, when I’m like this, you’re the one I trust"
(Hey, hey, hey)
🎹♪
Two hundred lighting fixtures fired at once in a hard strobing wash. The shadows rose off the floor, and the stage began dancing chaotically with Von at the apex, dancing full out on a leg he had just fallen thirty feet onto.
Every accent lit his body: chest pop, white flash; foot stomp, ring of light. He dropped into a slide that carried him ten feet down the runway, leaving a glowing trail behind him.
The second verse brought the road back, but the highway was cracked, streetlights were dead, and the city on the horizon remained impossibly far away.
Von ran again for a second jump, ascending higher, forty, forty-five feet.
The crowd screamed, expecting him to soar, but his suit flickered. He clawed upward, reaching for a ledge in empty air, before something above him let go.
He came down fast, getting a shoulder under it at the last instant and taking the landing in a hard roll that spat him out flat on his back at the center of the circular stage.
The beat was still playing, and the background music was looping once again.
The four-story screen switched to a live close-up of his face. His eyes were open, his expression looked really tired and fearful, but at the same time determined, and a thin line of crimson blood ran from the corner of his mouth down toward his ear.
Sabrina covered her mouth with both hands, tears welling in her eyes. In the wings, even Emily and the rest of the crew were scared seeing him bleed. But they knew better not to interrupt Von.
Four stories high, Von turned his head slightly toward the lens.
And he smiled with blood on his face.
Lying flat on his back, he lifted the mic and sang the bridge.
🎹♪
I’m running out of time
’Cause I can see the sun light up the sky
So I hit the road in overdrive, baby, oh
The city’s cold and empty (oh)
No one’s around to judge me (oh)
I can’t see clearly when you’re gone
🎹♪
A single warm pin light centered on him while wind machines lifted thousands of red and white petals from the earlier flower drop, spinning them around his body like a storm.
As the bridge reached its final line, Conor Prince’s kick drum struck a heavy four-count. The light in Von’s chest reignited, spreading outward in a wave down his limbs. He rose to one knee, then to his feet, and as every fixture in the venue detonated white, he went straight up off the floor.
Forty feet, sixty feet, rising with arms outstretched, pouring light in every direction. He leveled out over the floor crowd and began to fly.
The arena came apart. He swept out over the barricade, banking into turns forty feet above thousands of reaching hands while singing the chorus live with flawless breath control.
"HE’S FLYING!" Sabrina screamed, slapping Nicholas’s chest in disbelief as she saw him pass over him. "NICKY, HE’S FLYING!"
As Von passed low over the runway while singing the chorus, Alex stepped up with a black electric guitar and hurled it into the air. Von turned mid-flight, timing the rotation, and caught the nine-pound instrument one-handed right as the spin resolved.
Everyone deemed it impossible to catch that weight while suspended in the air with such flawlessnes, but impossibility wasn’t in Von’s dictionary.
He strapped it on in mid-air and struck the opening bend of the guitar solo.
🎸🎼 🎼 🎸
The note tore through the stadium amps, bending upward until it cracked. Hanging over the floor, Von shredded through the hook while the ceiling truss strobed in rhythm with his playing.
The suit seams fired in sequence with every note, drawing a staircase of fire across his body from hip to shoulder.
He held the final bend for four full bars, then plunged into a controlled fall, landing on the circle stage right on the downbeat as pyrotechnic flame jets roared along the runway.
The final chorus erupted.
🎹♪
I said, "Ooh, I’m blinded by the lights
No, I can’t sleep until I feel your touch"
(Hey, hey, hey)
(Hey, hey, hey)
I said, "Ooh, I’m blinded by the lights
No, I can’t sleep until I feel your touch"
🎹♪
Thirty dancers hit the stage as the screen transformed into a burning gold-and-white city skyline. Twenty thousand people who had heard the song for the first time four minutes ago sang the chorus back at him in unison.
Von hit his final pose on the last beat, and every light cut out instantly.
There was total darkness for one second before the house lights slammed on, and a four-minute wall of sound engulfed the arena.
Sabrina stood on her chair in her aqua dolphin Exo boots, screaming with tears running down her cheeks. She jumped down, grabbed Nicholas’s face, and hugged him tightly.
"Happy anniversary," Nicholas was also left in disbelief to what he just witnessed but he returned the hug with as much favor.
On stage, Von waited for the screaming to die down while catching his breath, before he wiped his profusely bleeding mouth, set the guitar on its stand, and stepped to the front.
___
Author’s Note: I’m officially introducing bonus Chapter goals! :] This could help give the book a boost, keep me motivated, and get more Chapters out to you.
​From now on:
​100 Golden Tickets = 2 bonus Chapters
1 Magic Castle = 2 bonus Chapters
1 Spaceship / Gachapon = 5 bonus Chapters + 1 request to make or change anything in the novel!
​Bonus Chapters will be delivered over the weekend or within 5 days of reaching the goal. Sometimes, they might even drop as early as the next day.
​Thank you so much for your support, it already means the world to me! 😊🫂