Chapter 59: White Flowers
I see, you’re not leaving me a choice.
"Infinite Arsenal," I murmured.
Water burst up around me and froze into a dozen suspended lances, motionless in the air, their points turned toward the hall. The first one left before I’d even finished raising my hand, straight into the path of the bolt bearing down on me.
BOOM.
The lightning struck the water and the water exploded, the electricity tearing itself apart inside the liquid mass in a web of white threads, and all of it flashed to vapor at once. A sheet of scalding steam poured through the hall, swallowing the columns, swallowing the floor, swallowing everything, while crackling ran through it like living things.
I scattered the rest of my lances into the cloud, here and there, letting some of them sink to the floor where they spread into puddles.
Then I moved.
I could see her perfectly. In the middle of that mist that hid everything, she glowed, the arcs running over her tracing her silhouette in blue through the vapor.
"Alice! Get a hold of your—"
A bolt shot past my face.
Worldflow moved me before my head had understood, my body sliding aside on a step I hadn’t decided to take, and I felt the heat of it pass against my cheek.
"Don’t make me fight you, Alice!"
Another beam, wider this time. Impossible to dodge.
A lance went out to meet it.
BOOM.
Except her discharge was stronger than the first, and the shockwave caught me full on, driving me back across the smooth stone. Laia left her sheath on reflex and I drove her into the floor, the blade biting rock to slow my slide.
The screech rang through the whole hall.
Damn it.
The next bolt wasn’t a bolt.
It was a bird.
It formed in the mist above her, immense, a phoenix of pure lightning whose every feather was a moving arc, and it came down at me tearing the vapor apart with a white shriek.
It struck empty air.
Because I was already gone, swallowed by the puddle at my feet, sliding through Worldflow’s in-between — and I came out behind her, where another puddle was waiting, the water closing over my back.
The phoenix wheeled and went back to its mistress.
I charged.
Everything I had, my lances released together and both sabers in front of me, a shield of water raised at my flank, the entire arsenal converging on her from every angle at once.
She didn’t even turn around.
She discharged.
A wave of pure electricity exploded from her body in every direction, pulverizing my lances, tearing up stone, gutting the steam, blowing the flagstones loose across the width of the hall with a crash that should have reduced me to ash.
Perfect.
I was already in the water.
I’d dropped into the puddle a heartbeat before impact, and while the room detonated above me, while the vapor and the debris hid absolutely everything, I’d scattered water all around her. Tiny puddles, under the rubble, in the cracks, against the columns, a whole network laid down while she believed she’d vaporized me.
What followed was the fastest sequence I’d ever run.
I surfaced on her left and threw a strike that wasn’t one, just enough for her to turn her head and discharge on that side — and I was already gone, already back out on her right, another feint, another bolt wasted on nothing.
Front. She struck the front.
Behind, a cut grazing her shoulder without ever truly reaching it.
Above. She raised both hands and the lightning went up.
I reappeared crouched at her back and left again before her hair had finished falling.
It became a rhythm, a cadence nobody else could have held, and I watched her start losing the thread, her discharges landing a breath after where I’d been, her phoenix wheeling and screaming without ever finding a place to land. Every bolt she threw into empty air was mana she didn’t have anymore, and that was all I wanted — not to hurt her, not to beat her, only to drain her until she had no choice but to stop and listen to me.
A little more, hold on, she’ll run out before I do.
I dove into the next puddle.
And she was waiting for me there.
She hadn’t aimed at where I was. She’d aimed at where I was going to be, and her lightning hit the water exactly as I came out of it.
The world went white.
It went through me end to end, climbing my legs, seizing every muscle at once, my teeth clacking together, my fingers closing on grips I could no longer feel. My skull heated. Something gave behind my eyes, and I felt blood running from my nose, then from the corners of my eyelids.
I didn’t fall.
Apotheosis held me up the way it always had, refusing to let me collapse, refusing to let me feel what should have stopped me, and I stayed there, staggering, my legs weaving under me, my face covered in blood.
And somewhere far back in my head, a door opened.
The mist came down.
I didn’t call for it. It came on its own, that cold thing that had already taken me twice, and the world narrowed all at once — no more hall, no more tower, no more reasons or words or Alice-who-needs-calming.
Only a target that moved.
The water on the floor drew back in a single motion and vanished, absorbed, erased, and I drew Naia alongside Laia.
We looked at each other.
Her, with her eyes full of white light and those tears evaporating before they reached her chin. Me, with blood running from my eyes and drawing two lines down my cheeks.
Then I disappeared.
I came out at her back and struck.
She turned barely in time, the electricity closing into a wall where my blade arrived, and I was already at her right. A cut. Her left. Another. She discharged in every direction and I went under it, came back over the top, slid between two arcs crossing a hair from my shoulder.
Worldflow wasn’t showing me trajectories anymore. It was showing me lines.
Every bolt had a path, every discharge had an edge, and between those edges there was always a gap, always a thread of space where a body could fit, and my body went there without my needing to think about it. I danced through her storm the way you walk between raindrops.
The phoenix charged.
It came at me head-on, wings spread wide, a mass of screaming lightning that should have reduced me to nothing — and I saw the line.
It ran through the bird down the middle, beak to tail, a flaw as fine as a hair in the structure of the thing.
I went into it spinning, both blades wide, and split it lengthwise in two.
The halves passed on either side of me and died out at my back.
I didn’t stop. I was already dropping onto her again, and there were no more words, no more shouts, no more names — only the crackling, the steel, the stone bursting apart, two silhouettes crossing and missing and crossing again in a hall collapsing around them.
Then a garden appeared under my feet.
White flowers. Everywhere. Pushing up through the cracked flagstones, opening across the rubble, covering the ruined floor with a pale sheet that rose to my ankles.
And the mist withdrew.
I came back to myself all at once, the way you break the surface of water, and the hall hit me in the face — the broken columns, the blackened walls, the ceiling caved in over an entire wing, the dust still falling.
Alice was standing in front of me.
My first thought was that she looked tired.
That’s the worst part, thinking back on it. No cry, no horror, nothing. Just my brain pointing out that she looked tired and that the two of us should probably get some rest after all this.
Then my eyes went down.
Naia and Laia were buried in her stomach.
Driven in to the guard, side by side, the white light of the electricity still covering her sliding along the steel. And around the blades her dress opened onto a black hole of blood running in a sheet down her thighs, falling between the flowers, spreading across the white petals at her feet.
My hands were still closed around the grips.
No.
I let go as if the metal burned, and I stepped back, and my heels skidded on something, and I nearly went over backward.
No, no, this isn’t—
She swayed slightly when my hands left her, and that small movement, that tiny loss of balance in a body that was standing because someone had been holding it, sent a cold through everything in me.
It’s me.
I did this.
I looked at my palms. There was blood on them. Not mine — mine was running from my nose and my eyes and I had it all over my face, but this was on my hands, thick, warm, and it was the color it should never have been.
Alice.
Alice, who I love.
The woman I love, the one who matters more than everything else put together, the one without whom none of this means anything at all — and I’ve just put my blades through her stomach.
Because I had doubts.
Doubts.
Doubts?!
And so what? So what, what does that change, what could it possibly change, what have I done, what did I just—
It’s Alice. It’s Alice, damn it.
My legs were still holding. I don’t know how, but they were still holding.
I walked forward.
One step, then another, across that carpet of white flowers turning red as I went, and the electricity still saturating the air hit me the moment I entered her range. It went through me, it burned me, it started again — and the garden healed me at once, closing what opened, putting me back on my feet each time so I could keep walking forward and be electrocuted again.
Her garden. Her flowers. She had a hole in her stomach and her spell was still repairing me.
I didn’t even notice.
"Alice," my voice broke somewhere in the middle of her name. "I’m sorry... I’m so sorry, Alice, I didn’t mean to, I swear I didn’t mean to..."
She looked at me.
And she winked.
That was what finished me. Not the blades, not the blood, not the hole in her stomach — that wink, that ridiculous little gesture she made when she was teasing me at the table, which she pulled out now with my sabers buried in her and her face covered in tears.
I spat blood and kept walking, until I was right in front of her, close enough to see her lashes tremble, close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin.
"You’re not in too much pain, I hope..."
What a stupid question, what a damned stupid question.
"I am, Kuro." Her voice was soft, so soft, exactly as it always was. "I’m suffering... I’m suffering so much, you have no idea how much."
She raised a hand and laid it on my chest.
Her fingers opened against me, warm through the fabric, and I felt her thumb move a little, like a caress.
Then the other hand came to rest beside it.
And—
CLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII—
I flew.
The whine devoured everything, the world tipped over, I bounced off the stone and rolled I don’t know how far before the far wall stopped me dead.
I stayed there, on my side, unable to gather my limbs.
Through the film blurring my eyes, I watched her close her hands around the grips of my sabers and pull them out of her stomach, one after the other, without a sound, without a flinch, the way you draw two knives out of a board. She threw them in my direction and they rang against the flagstones beside me.
The hole in her abdomen closed as I watched, the flesh knitting itself back in an instant, only her dress keeping any trace of what had happened.
She was crying.
She was looking at me and crying, and on her face there was no rage left, no lightning, nothing of the thing that had destroyed this hall — only an immense, terrible disappointment, the kind belonging to someone who has waited a very long time for something and has just understood they won’t be getting it.
I’d have preferred hatred. Hatred I would have known what to do with.
Then she turned away.
She walked to the staircase, and she began to climb.
No, wait, Alice, don’t go up, not like this, not believing that—
My arm came up.
My fingers stretched toward her, toward her back receding into the steps, and my mouth opened without any sound coming out. There wasn’t enough air left in my lungs to carry her name. There wasn’t anything left at all.
The arm dropped.
And Apotheosis let me go.
That skill which had kept me standing against a high demon, which had kept me from feeling exhaustion and panic and everything that should have broken me, that skill which had never once failed me since this world handed it over — it let me go there, on that floor covered in white flowers and blood, because it only held up those who still wanted to fight.
And I didn’t want anything at all anymore.
My mind went out.
There was carpet under my feet.
A closed-up smell, a low ceiling, a bare bulb hanging from a wire and still swaying, very slightly, as if someone had just knocked into it.
I knew where I was the moment I looked up.
Alice’s old apartment. The one she’d lived in before, with its worn carpet and its window that never shut properly, the place she’d left years ago and that I’d never seen again since.
That much I recognized.
The rest made no sense at all.
There was a shard of porcelain in my hand. The rest of the vase lay scattered at the foot of the wall, thirty-odd white pieces spread across the carpet, with the water that had spilled out all around and the flowers lying in it, white as well, their stems broken in places where stems don’t break on their own.
I was gripping what was left of it without having decided to, and blood was running between my fingers and dripping onto the carpet where it joined the rest — because there was more of it elsewhere, on the floor, against the wall, in long streaks and in spatters, in quantities that didn’t match anything a cut hand could produce.
Alice was on the floor in front of me.
She was crying. She was lifting her head toward me, her mouth wide open, and she was screaming something — something long, something that wouldn’t end, her throat straining and her face completely undone.
I couldn’t hear anything.
There was no sound at all in that apartment. Not her voice, not my breathing, not the traffic in the street below. Nothing but a thick silence and that open mouth going on screaming into the void.
Her hands were stretched toward me.
Not to protect herself. Stretched toward me, fingers spread, the way you reach for someone you want to hold on to and who is moving away.
And I didn’t move. I stood there and watched her without moving, and I couldn’t tell whether that was because I’d chosen not to or because whatever this was wouldn’t let me.
I tried to think back.
That apartment, I remembered. The wallpaper, the smell, the light switch that stuck, all the times I’d come by and sat on that carpet — every bit of it was there, exactly where it was supposed to be.
But not this.
This wasn’t in my head anywhere. There was no evening that ended like this, no vase, no blood on the carpet, no Alice screaming on the floor with her hands out toward me. I ran back through those years and found nothing, not a trace, not the faintest edge of it.
And yet I was standing in the middle of it.
The blood was slowly gaining ground across the carpet, working its way between the pieces of porcelain, and it reached the flowers.
And the white petals began to drink.
It climbed the broken stems, spread through the blooms, turned the white to red flower after flower, until there wasn’t a single one left the color it should have been.
"But—" My voice came out of me at last, cracked and thin. "What is this? What the hell is this, what am I even looking at?"
Nobody answered.
And the scene started over from the beginning.