A Harsh Life

They had no time to react. The seconds that they wasted, unknowingly on trying to get their new environment figured out, cost them everything in being able to escape what was coming. Yumi tried to use her speed to grab Yuki or Nerine, who would be the most likely to die, but the beam weapon smashed into the side of the station.

Given the size of the beam, it seemed like it hit directly on them, but it was only the light. However, it did blast through the hull a few levels below them. The floor shook under them as muffled explosions ripped through unknown chambers and halls. The impact was enough to knock them all on the floor sending them across the polished surface.

Saki and Nerine crashed into the wall of the hallway that ran along the perimeter of the station. The others managed to make it out by just sliding. However, the damage caused by the attack rippled through the station. Sounds of tearing metal and screams raced closer to them until the floor panels began to warp.

Yumi scrambled to get to her feet seeing Yuki was nearby where the flooring started to fail, but just as she did the plates snapped back throwing her across the hall nearly cracking her head open on the wall. With blurred vision and blood dripping down her ear and chin, she tried to reach Yuki. “Yuki!” It was all futile though as the final break occurred tearing through the outer hull of the station exposing them to the vacuum of space.

None of them were nearby to grab Yuki and when the pressure difference of the total vacuum hit them, they all desperately tried to grab on to whatever they could as they were being pulled out. Yumi lost sight of everyone as alarms drowned everything out and her heart pounded in her head. It felt like her fingers were being dug into the loose plate that she clung to in fear. Another minute and her fingers would become metal with the floor. Her grip started to fade with the thinning air weakening her body. ‘I don’t want to die right here! This isn’t even fair!’

Then she dropped to the floor with eternity no longer trying to drag her out into the blackness of space. Klaxons and emergency lights still filled the hall, but pressure began to return to normal along with the hiss of air entering back into the room. Yumi popped her fingers free of the floor plate seeing them raw and red with blood in cracks and splits. For her life, she was willing to pay that. “Yuki?!” she called out immediately searching around for him.

She looked around to her friends recovering to see that they were all still alive, but Yuki wasn’t present. Scrambling over turned up metal and exposed floors, she tried to get over to where Yuki had been before it all blew to hell. None of the floor he was on remained. Yumi looked out towards the stars seeing debris turning about moving further away with nothing to stop it.

Below her feet to the lower floor she couldn’t see much of anything but charred metal and walls from the explosion that ripped into their floor. Sparkles of an energy field that maintained the pressure masked a little bit of her vision as she tried to search for Yuki in space, as much as it pained her. She just wanted to know what happened to him, but he was nowhere in sight. “Yuki…”

A minute into the new world and she had lost the person that she loved.

Chapter 475 – A Harsh Life

Yumi dropped her back against the wall, processing it slowly. ‘He’s dead…’ She knew deep down that he wasn’t dead, as they saw with their friends revived after the completion of the world. But it was five years that she spent with only Yuki. She had no idea how long it would be that she would be in this world without him. Though that thought hadn’t hit her just yet.

While they recovered from the assault, around the station more explosions tore through the seemingly defenseless structure with it a foregone conclusion that their attackers would destroy them in time. Everything was in chaos and the situation had escalated so quickly that they could die at any moment.

Finally catching her breath, Yumi forced herself to focus, feeling the shaking of the station through her body. She looked over to everyone still in shock of what their new situation turned out to be. “We need to get inside to some place more secure.”

“But what about Yuki?” Seiji asked, still holding out on him. His eyes drifted over to the scene in space hoping to find him out there, even though it would be pointless if they did. They couldn’t get him back inside and even if they did he was dead already. Seiji seemed to understand that, but needed someone to tell him that he had to give up.

“I’m sorry, Seiji. We need to go. If we stay here we could end up in space next and I don’t want to lose any more friends today.” Saki walked over to Seiji helping him forward along with Nerine. He didn’t resist knowing that she was right.

They reached what seemed like the end of the hallway, but Yumi realized that it was just a locked bulkhead done during the decompression that happened with the explosion. She looked around for something to grab a hold of to force the door open with her strength, but couldn’t get her fingers into the seams. “It’s pretty tough if I can’t force my way in. Is there a panel or something to open it?”

“What about Nerine’s power?” suggested Seiji.

“Right, she can just make a hole for us.”

Nerine held silent for a moment looking around at everyone as they expected her to be able to get them out of their current predicament. However, it seemed that they hadn’t realized it fully yet. Seiji came over to her a little concerned for the way she looked at them. “I don’t have my powers,” she stated finally to make it clear.

“What?! How the hell can you not have your powers?!”

“Haven’t you noticed yourselves not feeling as strong or powerful?” It was something that she saw quickly how they weren’t reacting the way that she expected. In such a situation, they shouldn’t have had any trouble with the explosion or even being harmed by it. Saki would have saved Yuki without even trying.

It quickly flashed back to Yumi as she thought about what she had tried to do. In the moment, the explosions and wound on her head, she didn’t question it, but Nerine was correct. “You’re right. I feel normal…like before we got our powers from Yuki.”

Not completely believing them, Seiji did the only thing that he could trust and be certain about. He punched the wall as hard as he could, finding himself in a lot of pain and almost on the floor with possibly a broken hand. “Gah! Dammit, that hurts!”

“Idiot…”

“I just…needed to…be…sure…”

“You’ve got a broken hand, sure enough for you.”

“…y-yes…”

“So we’re going to have to get out of this situation using our heads,” Yumi concluded, taking command of the group. She ran her hand over the wall hoping that with the sci-fi setting that there might be something tactile to interact with. There was probably something also voice commanded, but she had her doubts about success with that given their unknown and foreign presence. It could be like their first arrival into Masa’s world. Given the lessons learned from that world, she planned to avoid making the same mistakes. Though she had no concept of how the world functioned or the rules that governed it. Being careful would only get her so far, as she could just as easily make a mistake not understanding taboos.

Eventually, her hand hit something that responded to her with lights turning on within the black panel that looked more like an architectural touch than something practical for interaction, but once again a different world, different rules. Fortunately, the text on the panel displayed in Japanese, kanji and hiragana with a healthy dose of katakana for some words that she had never heard of before.

The current display that took up the primary viewing space was the statement of the obvious, that the bulkhead was locked. She didn’t need to know why, that was easy enough to know, despite it continually reminding her of why. She navigated through menus of pointless things like schedules, lighting controls, personal calendars, and such strange things to find next to a doorway. Finding the controls for the bulkhead seemed oddly less intuitive than she guessed for the future.

When she had exhausted all of the options, because there was literally nothing labeled for controls or door on the menu, she rested her head against her hand on the panel. A bit of a frustrated beep, it seemed, sounded off beneath her hand. Yumi immediately popped back to see what changed.

A new message displayed replacing the lock, showing her a couple of options that seemed to reference the bulkhead, finally. “I think I got somewhere!” She leaned in trying to figure out which was the correct path to go. The first option listed itself as environmental settings and the second was for locking controls. Picking the second, she dove deeper into the menu only to find that she didn’t have administrator permission to override the locks. “Damnit!”

Upon the failure and lock out, it sent her back to the start. The rumbling of the station increased her anxiety as her mortality had become significantly cheaper in this world. But she retraced her steps and discovered that the lock message itself was interactive and that led to the options before.

Buried within the environmental settings was more controls for the door and emergencies. She, through a bit of luck and brute force, informed the computer or whatever governing the locking mechanism that there were still living humans on the wrong side, finally opening the door for them.

With the sharp close of the bulkhead behind the last of them, Seiji let out an audible sigh, “Finally!” He looked around the new hallway and rooms that led off with less of an idea of where to go than before. “What now? Find an escape pod or something?” Seiji borrowed what he could from movies for suggestions.

Yumi nodded, not really having a better plan at the moment. Escape from this doomed station definitely seemed like the best plan. However, such a plan came with its own risks that she weighed. “That’s definitely something that we should look out for and take if it makes sense. But we also don’t know what’s happening outside in space. We could end up destroyed by the attackers. I think gathering information on the situation is going to be the best strategy right now.”

“That’s probably for the best,” agreed Nerine, “We need to know everything we can about this strange world.” The Atlantean seemed the most unnerved by the situation than any of them. Despite their powers, science fiction wasn’t a common theme in their society and space was almost completely foreign, aside from them understanding as much as anyone else in the world did about it. She didn’t have the years of media acclimating her to space and the future to make it seem normal.

No one disagreed with the plan. So Yumi took point in their search for other life on the station. ‘Hopefully, it’s not a case of everyone is already killed. This is going to be like the past world, where I’m going to have to find my personality. So they’ve got to be on the station or if we escape, at our destination, wherever that is.’ If it played out like with Masa, she might have to play in this world for a long time before they make an appearance. Perhaps, if she had gotten lucky she might have found Masa, but that seemed completely impossible. She just wasn’t that lucky.

They passed through the hallway that looked like it was brand new. It had that pristine sci-fi look that was all too common among the genre, at least that was what Yumi figured Yuki would be saying if he was still with them. She clenched her hands together focusing herself forward into a chamber that opened up for them.

The space was massive for what they expected to find on a station. Though they had no real concept of the level of technology that existed in this world. It clearly wasn’t near future, but it could have been something super advanced or even impossible. They had no way to judge with what little they saw so far.

Stretching beyond their sights, the chamber rose up with a ceiling to another floor with a hole in the middle that let pathways climb up. Best guess seeing it not working, it looked like there was an elevator of sorts in the center while a ramp went up around it. Though the ramp was like nothing that they had seen elsewhere in the station so far. It was almost completely transparent, yet hard with an aurora like multi-colored hue passing through it. The longer that they stared the more it changed and transformed constantly recreating and maintaining itself as a walkable surface.

On the floor that they stood at, there was greenery surrounding all of the windows that displayed scenes likely of Earth or similar planet. The plants, which ranged from blue to deep red to pink, looked nothing like what existed on Earth. They twisted and climbed up the sides providing thick coverage over the ground and walls. One might initially call it a park with how it looked, but a best word choice would have been a botanical garden, though that seemed possibly a little too generous. It felt rogue and wild like a jungle of a forbidden planet rather than something controlled and deliberate, though being on a station it had to be.

However, before they could adjust and make a plan to figure out where they went another explosion ripped through the station throwing them all into the air as the artificial gravity failed for them. Secondary explosions tore into the chamber shooting out debris and metal beams destroying the peaceful serenity of the gardens.

Next to Yumi’s eye as she floated upside down was blood in small clusters of orbs circling and drifting. She desperately tried to turn herself around with nothing to actually give her motion. Her limbs just flailed about uselessly as she quickly drifted away from it all. ‘What’s going on? I need something to grab on to!’ Her body steadily made its way over to the plants allowing her to grab on to their weird latex like surface to turn. “Saki?! Seiji!” she cried out in shock.