Chapter XII | A King's Greed

Claude bolted down the layers, quick as he could, transforming the weather as he passed like a natural disaster, from rain to sun and back again in the spiral of his path. The wind whipped at him every inch of the way, a lash for every neglectful second he realized he’d left her. “Stay in Layer 1,” he should’ve demanded. “You’re Tristan’s lucky, aren’t you?”

He continued on and on until he reached the train station where they met, a place built along the ramp between Layer 3 and Layer 4. Each step he took to slow himself cracked the pavement below until he could finally stop. Just like on the day they met, it rained here like nowhere else, and he stood in the gap between the overhangs to feel the cold raindrops soak through his hair. The train should be here soon, he thought.

And almost as if to respond to those thoughts, a squad of JANITORs shuffled in right then. Ten greyhats and a prisoner, all armed to the teeth. They made small talk like old soldiers and walked on for a while before they even noticed Claude there in the rain. They dragged her along like a limp doll, her wrists cuffed together behind her back. Her face and throat were bruised all over, and it made his insides boil.

The squad all paused when they noticed him, and Lana’s eyes lit up at the sight of him, but that didn’t matter. He began to approach them with his knife already out, prepared to kill every last one of them if need be.

Then a single JANITOR stepped in front of the others in response, oddly confident as he unholstered his gun. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Claude?”

“I don’t know you.”

The JANITOR smirked as his face melted away into another. “How about now?”

In the moment of recognition, Claude’s blind rage disappeared with the rain, and his lips parted in complete and utter surprise. “... Alex?”

“You were always so good at telling us apart,” they said.

“That’s impossible. Morris said you two had—”

“Escaped overseas? To Midia? Or was it Conda?” Alex spun their gun around and around as if it were a toy, and paced the width of the platform while the other JANITORs watched in confusion. “Morris said we were invincible, but all it took was a little nerve gas and some prolonged hypnosis to make us theirs.”

Shock filled Claude to the point where he couldn’t think anymore, and all that remained was the smug Alex who stood in front of him, the dozen JANITORs he didn’t know, and Lana’s pleading expression. She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. It was the look in her eyes that returned his sanity to him, and he went into slowtime right away to think through every possible scenario that could emerge from this until he reached an impasse at a choice. “Do I save Alex? Or do I save Lana?” It was a simple choice between the two, but because he was Claude Morsylis, he chose something else.

He chose to laugh. A hearty, kingly laugh that, with the rain gone, echoed down the platform and stunned the JANITORs into stillness. “To think you two were so close all this time.” He stopped laughing, and he offered his hand out to him. “Alex. Return to my side and become my retainer once more. Refuse, and I’ll kill you all right now, wolf girl included.”

Alex smirked. “This is why you were always more the king than your brother, Claude. The moment you’re presented with a choice between two, you always choose both. A king’s greed. It’s why you prevailed over Alyn, and it’s why the Church will never accept you on their throne. And finally, it’s why the wolves you’ve aligned yourself with will turn their backs on you.”

As he completed the thought, gunfire spat at them from above. Both Claude and Alex entered slowtime, but the fired iron still reached them, making sparks as they scraped against their pale skin. Even in slowtime, bullets still moved quick of course, but nothing short of rootsteel could pierce either of their augmented skin.

Alex raised his gun up to Claude, and Claude sprinted full speed at Alex.

“There are many reasons for why you’ll fall here today, Claude, but the ones that matter now are these: whenever you go out, you never bring a gun. You never even bring your phone. And most importantly, you’ve gotten far too used to being immune to bullets.”

Alex waited until the very last moment to pull the trigger. “In slowtime, rain falls like honey and bullets fly like rain. Try as you might, you can’t avoid getting wet.”

Claude’s face was nearly pressed up against the muzzle when Alex pulled the trigger and let the raindrop fly. That was when the king disappeared.

Somehow. In one instant in slowtime and at point-blank, Claude disappeared from in front of him. The rare rootsteel bullet that he had stolen from Nico Calista himself flew off into the distance, entirely unburdened by brain matter. Then Alex felt his wrist go limp as his gun was thrown upwards. Only then did he see. Claude had dropped into a low squat and kicked up at him quicker than a bullet. It was inhuman. Even Alyn Morsylis wouldn’t have been able to do it.

And the rootsteel knife had disappeared from the king’s hands and was already dug into Alex’s chest before he even realized it.

Taking advantage of his shock, Claude swapped his weight from one leg to the other and slammed it as it swung into the knife’s hilt to shove it deeper. The force of it knocked Alex out of slowtime and sent him flying onto the tracks, which rumbled at the approach of the distant train.

A wolf in black swept down and grabbed Lana by the waist, dashing back away only to get shot in the head. His corpse fell over her and pinned her to the ground. Lana held her breath and heaved his body off, trying to not look at who it was as she backed away from the carnage, but the ground was slick with blood, and her vision spun and spun until she felt her stomach churn, and it emptied itself through her swollen throat in pale green across the pools of red.

Her face was a mess. Dripping with snot and tears and bile, she could scarcely see anymore, but in the distance, she could still make out the figures of her brothers in combat with Claude—Tucker and his so-called knights.

“Dumbasses!” she wanted to scream, but her voice wouldn’t come out. The JANITORs had kicked her throat in and roughed her up when they took her in, and now she felt helpless as the world exploded around her in gunfire, and the last of the bodies piled up around them. “Stop fighting! Please!”

Meanwhile, Alex clawed his way back up to the platform, clothes soaked in blood. While he had masqueraded as Ulysses, he made sure the wolves all knew that Claude was their enemy too. And Claude’s own announcement that he would kill everyone there, Lana included, was only the final nail in their collective coffin.

The lie born of the king’s greed bred naught but carnage in the hands of his enemies.

Alex smiled despite the blinding pain in his chest, as he watched Claude handle Tucker’s Knights best he could without killing them. That pain in his chest confirmed for him too something he used to always believe. “You really are a goddamn monster, Claude.” And with that thought in mind, he reached for a fallen pistol nearby and ejected its magazine. A single bullet, grade 2. A weapon not even capable of bruising the Kid King. But from his pocket, he pulled out a vial. Contained inside of it sat a solution of Rubin’s design. His hands shook violently as he uncapped the vial and dripped it over the magazine and the bullet that remained inside it.

Over the seconds that passed, Lana’s vision finally cleared, and she noticed Alex messing with something across the platform and realized it couldn’t be anything good. And between them sat her hammer, handle facing up to the sky to be claimed. Back when she had been captured, one of the JANITORs had taken it for himself as a prize of her arrest. That JANITOR was certainly dead now, and now the hammer simply sat there alone, waiting to be hers again. With what felt like the rest of her strength, she pulled herself back up to her feet and stumbled toward it.

The last of Tucker’s Knights fell in one moment, and one more before Tucker himself succumbed to a blow to his solar plexus. Claude exhaled when the job was done, and the blood ran off from his skin, hair, and clothes like they all wanted nothing to do with him. Then he looked out across the way, across the rows of bodies, and saw Alex and Lana. “One more time,” he thought.

Again, he entered slowtime, but this time it fizzled out as soon as it began.

“We are the Reborn & We are the Standing.” Tucker smiled, body prone, as he uttered the words of House March. The words of an old Luridia, one that existed long before House Morsylis had corrupted them with the fear of death. In his hand, he clutched the bracelet he’d just torn from Claude’s wrist. The clasp had snapped so easily. It only took a little yank with the last of his strength. And with that, the nanoelectric pulse device contained inside activated, thus disabling every augment within a 100-meter radius.

Then as the platform shuddered in anticipation at the next train’s arrival, the air cracked one last time with a final gunshot. Here, Claude should have been just as vulnerable as any other man. From a uniquely young age, he possessed augments that made him superhuman in every conceivable facet, and in the decade since, he’d forgotten what it was like to be a normal person. Now stripped of his superhuman prowess and brought back down to earth again as a normal man, he should’ve died a normal man’s death.

And yet still, he dodged the bullet.

“No way…” Alex muttered. His last-ditch effort smashed into a distant concrete pillar as Lana’s shadow emerged over him, and her hammer swung across and against his temple to knock him out cold.

The air became stagnant as their last enemy fell, and the king and carnation only stared at one another, hesitant to even approach the other. The train platform rumbled gently in their silence, and the blood of corpses dripped and flowed between them.

The sound of the train sliding into place in that silence was almost like a lullaby to them.

Finally, Claude stepped forward. And each step after that made an odd pain in his arm flare worse than the step before. The doors to the train were slow to open. Maybe the conductor saw the carnage and refused to let his passengers out until he knew what was happening. The pain got worse again, blindingly so until he finally looked at it and found a small cut there. No, a scratch really. Was it his blood? Or someone else’s. It was impossible to tell.

Lana’s eyes filled with a sudden fear when she saw her king nursing that scratch. She glanced down and found both her frozen carnation and a lab vial at her feet, by Alex’s unconscious body. Then she turned to the train, where she could see the window to the driver’s cab. Where she found the bride, Lilya Caecilius, lifting the conductor up by the collar, probably demanding to be let out. She turned back to Claude, whose eyes met hers for a moment like eternity before his arm erupted, turning itself inside out and into the black tendrils of a deepling.

Shocked, the king took his knife and sliced off his infected arm to prevent the spread, but the black veins had already crawled up throughout the rest of his body and gripped him like a vice. Then the superhuman regeneration that he didn’t even know he had kicked in, and the arm he’d just cut off grew back in bone and flesh from the point of amputation. A moment later, it was the only part of him that still looked human. The rest of him screamed in agony as his limbs tore apart and put itself back together again in tentacles and slime.

Lana fell to her knees and couldn’t breathe. The air choked out of her, worse than when her throat was kicked in, and worse than when she had been dying of thirst as a child after having been thrown to the streets to fend for herself in the Ends.

When the transformation was complete, a mass of deepling flesh sat silent on the train platform before bursting into screaming pain again, human parts emerging from deepling parts in a constant battle of unending agony. Claude could feel his insides flip inside out and back again. His regeneration turned him human, and the drug turned him deepling, over and over until nothing remained in his world but pain unlike anything anyone in the world had ever experienced before.

“Kill me!” he begged. An intact upper torso emerged from the flesh again, and those were the words he spoke. He repeated them until the flesh consumed him again, then repeated it again when his human parts returned enough to speak.

Lana felt surprisingly calm then. “This world of people is far crueler than any single person could ever imagine.” Her body suddenly felt light. She picked her frozen carnation up from by her feet and pinned it to her breast before heading toward the abomination, the head of her hammer dragging against the polished stone platform as she approached.

“In order to kill a deepling for certain,” she mumbled, “you must destroy it from its core.”

And as she raised the hammer above her head, she began to laugh. The weight when she brought it down again felt like the weight of everything inside her. All her guts and organs. All her blood and all her love.

Finally, the king’s pleas were heard, and he no longer screamed for someone to kill him. Then the train approaching from below and going up arrived at the station. Rumble and silence again, like a lullaby, and the doors of both trains on opposite sides opened at once.

Lilya dashed out to Claude right away, and Lana entered the train on the opposite side. She sat where she could still see through the open door. Where she could watch the bride weep over her groom’s corpse, half-human and half-monster. Surprisingly, his head was still intact, and his face was recognizable, but the ailia blossom that came with every deepling corpse sprouted from his neck.

“I’m tired,” she thought. And the doors closed again, and the train departed.