If Neon had a word to name what drove him and Teitai through the jungle, he guessed it’d be… Urgency. Not the sterile kind he’d experienced so far, delivered through system warnings or countdown timers, but a frenzied, asphyxiating panic that took everything from him that wasn’t moving forward.
His sneakers pounded soil in rhythm with his hammering pulse, barely even slowing whenever he stumbled. Branches whipped his arms and face, leaving stinging scratches he’d bother registering later. Way later. Maybe never.
There wasn’t any time for hypotheticals. No time for what ifs or whys. Only the mindless sprint punctuated by ragged gasps and the sounds of Teitai following behind him. Neon outpaced her with ease —likely due to her wound— but she stayed close enough that he could hear the desperation in every footfall.
Of course he had already tried contacting Nomine. Still was, even now, screaming down their mental link like shouting down an empty well. He asked what was happening, who was he fighting… If he was okay. No answer.
Making sense of the silence took some effort, but he managed. If Nomine was engaged in combat talking back wasn’t exactly an option. Communication demanded focus that survival couldn’t spare. All Neon could do now was limit himself to send a couple stray messages into the void and hope they landed somewhere. To hold on, that he was on his way back.
The space where they’d emerged earlier offered them no Door with a Smile, only torn earth where a tunnel had once been. Wasn’t a reason to stop. Nomine’s dot remained on his minimap, guiding him forward through a darkness his eyes wouldn’t be able to navigate alone. Light Infection marks flickered as they crossed, pulsing briefly in his peripheral vision.
Right, Light Infection! Even if Teitai had never marked Plaza’s hideout —something Neon found hard to believe, considering her cautious nature— she for sure still had plenty of sigils all over Nomine’s body.
Surely… Surely, she could see what was happening through those.
But the idea of asking died the instant he glanced back.
Teitai’s face had completely drained of color. Her glowing eyes, usually so sharp and calculating, now transmitted an entire lifetime’s worth of devastation compressed into a single, minute point. Grief couldn’t quite capture it. This was something stronger, the expression of someone watching everything they’d built turn to ashes in one blink.
So he didn’t ask. Couldn’t. Speaking would only slow them down anyway. Words were luxuries the dead couldn’t afford to grant, and it was better to see with his own eyes rather than rely on secondhand surveillance.
Not that anything could ever prepare him for what waited ahead.
Orange painted the moonlit sky into a brighter shade of disaster, growing closer the more he approached. Fire. Climbing upwards like ravenous fingers, consuming leaves and branches to replace them with thick columns of smoke. It had to be CC, fighting off whatever calamity found them in this place. Right?
Neon’s steps faltered as he broke through some of the final stretches of undergrowth, where it looked like the earth had vomited its guts across the scorched jungle soil —everything that had once made a little burrow feel like home, disinterred and desecrated.
Clay vessels reduced to shattered shrapnel. Wooden furniture serving as little more than kindling. Flowers trampled into mud. Drawings charring at their edges where embers had caught them.
He didn't have to search long to find their creator.
Plaza lay half-buried in displaced soil like the aftermath of a sloppy grave robbery, recognizable mainly thanks to her heavy winter clothes. Neon’s throat closed, making it difficult to breathe right. His legs wanted to carry him towards her, to check for a pulse, any sign that the system’s notification had been premature or mistaken.
But for what reason? The only truth needed was the blood pooling out from the spot where her head had been severed.
The thought of letting go was overwhelming. Gravity called to him, to let his trembling legs fold, to sink down and stop pretending he could deal with any of this. He was unsteady. Disoriented. His world had tilted on an axis he couldn’t identify, and only fragments of rational thought kept him from spiraling out entirely. Focus. Think.
Plaza’s augments seemed to have unraveled along her last breath, dragging everything and everyone back to the surface. Whoever reached her knew exactly who to target first. Had prioritized the vulnerable kid in their group with premeditated malice.
Whisper’s corpse was close by, positioned like he had tried to step back and run from something. A slashing wound extended from the base of his torso and exploded through his left shoulder, so obscene and ruthless that the outlines of his broken ribs could be seen through the hanging, separated flesh.
Neon couldn’t look up and see what expression he held. The compulsion to puke was simply too strong. And yet he forced himself to keep moving, a foot in front of the other. More steps. Just take more steps. Stopping meant putting one and one together. Stopping meant deducing what kind of weapon or augment could have carved through Hushhouse like this. Stopping meant acknowledging who had been in prime position to strike.
Better to tell himself there were countless explanations, countless possibilities in a world he barely even understood yet. But he could only scatter the puzzle pieces so much before the full picture screamed itself into focus.
A new clearing opened before him like a mouth. Flames provided light to render the scene in stark, merciless detail. He only needed to push past a final tangle of greenery, and then there was…
Nomine, pinning CC against a tree trunk. Black Metal pierced clean through her chest with enough force to split the bark behind her and emerge from the other side. Neon arrived in time to witness her final spasms, more like the desperate reflexes in a body that hadn’t yet accepted what the brain already knew.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Thoughts flatlined. Vision blurred at the edges, reducing the world only to Nomine’s eyes as they turned towards him. Not with surprise. Not satisfaction, nor regret, nor anything remotely… Human. His expression held nothing. Emptiness wearing a man’s face.
Gushing blood painted those unmoving features in red as he withdrew the blade from CC’s flesh. Unflinching, unblinking, Nomine just stood there as the redhead crumpled down, already gone.
The lights from the raging flames danced bewitchingly across bloodstained skin, but never thawed the ice beneath Nomine’s eyes as they turned to Neon. They held no passion, as if violence was nothing more than a natural occurrence in this, his world.
Yet even now, with three corpses lying in his wake, with evidence piling so high it eclipsed the moon… Neon wanted to believe. Needed to.
Perhaps there was someone manipulating Nomine. His own trait prevented mind control, so that kind of augment had to exist, somewhere. Maybe Whisper, Plaza and CC had ambushed him while he was gone. Self-defense, taken too far. Maybe Teitai had separated them deliberately, planning this strike once they were divided and severely underestimated the veteran.
Neon already knew it was in vain. All of it, just a desperate fantasy. Reality didn’t traffic in convenient explanations or last-minute plot twists. It was simpler, factoring for a brutality that needed no elaborate justifications.
And so the foreign sting of tears began to trail down Neon’s face, though his heart was so broken he couldn’t name what they were for. Disappointment? Grief for the friends he’d lost? For all the wonderful threads of life so ruthlessly severed?
Or was it worse than that? Was he mourning the person he, unbidden, had convinced himself existed beneath all that frost?
Behind him, someone else acted while he could not.
Teitai carried herself past Neon while he remained frozen. She uttered no words nor showed any hesitation, her hand raising in pure purpose compressed into motion, calling forth the music notes of violence she’d written hours ago.
Every Light Infection mark scattered across Nomine’s body ignited in a chain reaction, flaring from their dormant state into an incandescent brilliance. Neon’s mind reeled. He should’ve moved. Shout. Do something. His partner —the sole person whose blade he didn’t fear would ever turn his way— stood at the gates of devastation, and yet… Did he want to stop it?
The stutter lasted a heartbeat. Perhaps less. But it was enough for the ignition to answer before his conscience managed.
First to reach him was the painful puncture of blinding lights, making him lurch even in the safety of distance. Sound came next, like a crack of displaced pressure that sent him to cover his face instinctively as wind and displaced soil flew by. Through the gaps in his fingers, the only thing he could see were flames twisting inwards from the blast, forcing the smoke to billow in curtains that choked visibility across a newly carved crater where Nomine had once been.
Was this how it ended? Nomine, ever so competent, so untouchable and so infuriatingly efficient… Even he couldn’t have survived that.
Except…
Parting with deceptive gentleness, the smoke was drawn away by currents of air replacing what the explosion had consumed. Neon’s flash-burnt vision struggled to parse shapes, then slowly recognized a silhouette. He braced himself for mutilated remains, but his eyes reported something different.
Nomine stood in the exact same place.
Not entirely unharmed. His posture had clearly taken a hit, breaking his usual imperviousness into a defiant strain, punctuated by his hair falling freely now, making him look almost animalistic. The outer layer of his clothes had been reduced to shreds, hanging to his frame in charred tatters.
But beneath? Both him and the undersuit remained, without any tear or wound. The only evidence that six simultaneous explosions had just tried to unmake him were faint scorch marks on otherwise pristine skin. His silver eyes rose to find Teitai, and with them, Neon felt the temperature plummet in spite of the expanding inferno.
A stare that communicated a world of terror, a fury beyond what Neon thought humanly possible. The rage of a predator reminded why mercy could never be afforded. Why hesitation was extinction wearing a coward’s mask.
“You have to be… No! That’s not right!” Teitai’s hands trembled, her expression of anguished disbelief shattering the composure she’d been tempering through power and control. "Light Infection can bring down a tree! You can't…"
He could. He had.
Realization made Neon feel nauseous. Nomine knew. All the way back to the clearing, to the walk through the tunnel, to him sleeping in the burrow, he had known. His resignation, his acceptance, his advice… They had been nothing but… Patience. Not a surrender. Never a surrender.
Did that mean Nomine had been accounting for this outcome from the very start, pretending to be checkmated? And if the deception ran that deep, then…
The time for internal diatribes had long since expired. Nomine began walking as soon as his posture finished correcting. His steps were measured at first, menacing like the slow approach of a predator, with Black Metal extended wide to his side, angled away from his body in less of a martial stance and more in the ominous certainty of a grim reaper closing in for the harvest.
Teitai could barely raise her hands before he accelerated, her preparations meaningless after her weapons had already proven insufficient. But it wasn’t the same for Neon. He had seen this terrifying speed in action before.
And he had already decided he was done playing the spectator.
[Copied Skill: Black Metal Lvl 1]
Black is the code for tonight.
<>
He couldn’t afford the luxury to accustom himself to the katana’s weight, which was so light it bordered on flimsy. Equally, his legs bolted on projection rather than any genuine reaction.
Steel crashed against steel with an impact that traveled through his bones like electricity seeking ground. Pain shot up to his shoulders, making his stance —improvised, desperate and wrong— buckle under the force. His knees wavered, threatening to collapse at any moment.
But somehow, they didn’t. Somehow, Neon did it. He predicted Nomine’s trajectory, intercepted his slash. And now here he was. Level one versus level four. Rookie versus veteran. Someone who’d never swung a sword in his life versus someone who moved like carnage was his primary language.
For one impossible beat, their blades locked, edges grinding together while the full weight of Nomine’s gaze bore down upon him. No longer detached or dismissive. The undeniable look of being recognized as an obstacle.
His arms were already shaking. Nomine’s strength pressed down like a judgment he had no business trying to overturn. It didn’t matter. The choice had already been made.
“No more.” Neon heard himself say, though his voice sounded braver than he actually felt. But it made sense. To cry and whimper and beg wasn’t in his nature, and so he wouldn’t. “Im not gonna let you.”
This was his conviction, even if it brought about his damnation. Neon no longer saw a partner in Nomine. Only a killer. And he would first break than bend.