The Bad Chapter

Jenn woke up early the next day. She groaned as she tossed in her bed. Something had snuck into her slumber and strangled the peace from it. A look at the windows told her all she needed to know. From the silk curtains bled the rays of early day sun, just a touch blue.

Jenn scratched her belly and yawned. Her tired eyes were lit in suspicion. The room was quiet, but it was not silent. Inside came the muted rumble of something. A rat? An intruder? The undead ghost of Rasputin who had come here to dance and seduce?

Jenn moved about, attempting to catch wind of whatever woke her. All of her being was driven by this one purpose. Tears of fatigue pricked her eyelids. She wanted to speak—to half-yell some words of insult, but no doubt, felt it might give her position.

Her eyebrow raised. From the wall came a glimpse of sound, a faint high-pitched… Moan?

Despite herself, Jenn mumbled. “Okay. Who the hell is masturbating in my walls?”

Her room was on the palace’s edge and had nothing bordering it. Meaning whatever noise it was came from out or within the walls. Jenn pressed her ear against the wall. It was high-pitched: static even, and seemed to repeat itself with the same intonation again and again.

She pulled back in fascination. Without hesitation, Jenn poked and prodded at the stone walls, feeling each square and corner. Her hands were not agile, and at times, they wandered over the same place again, missing evident points, and sliding with all the lubrication of a buttered bottom.

Annoyance creased her forehead. Jenn punched a hole through the wall. When she saw that it led to darkness, rather than a place outside, she stepped in.

—Second Reversion: Marked Object Return

The stones returned to their proper position, sealing her entryway in a blanket of deep darkness. She raised her right arm, lighting it in a reddish hue. It was good enough. Like a lightbulb.

Jenn climbed the narrow stone stairs. They wound and spiralled, wound and spiralled, turned and split left, right and down. The echo of steps met her as she came, and the echo too of the moaning thing, now forming coherent words, Jenn could understand.

“Tasukete, onii-chan…” Help me, onii-chan.

Around a minute in, Jenn found the object.

She activated her right arm, shuddering it in a reddish glow. She leaned down and examined it. “A onahole?”

Jenn was in a half-crouch, bustling in place, flaps of her tunic masking any low enough sounds. The assassin was perfectly silent and dashed forth with a knife in hand.

Jenn backhanded him as casually as one would a fly. “That's assassin 101, man. Leave the shiny thing that gave you away, and come from behind.”

She turned on her heel and approached him. A man in a black cloak and wooden mask lay on the ground. Jenn gripped his hand in hers and felt for an index finger.

“Let's see.” She angled her hand up.

The finger tensed. The finger broke.

There was a loud snap, and the cloaked figure reeled in pain. Even so, he was eerily silent and did not spill a word. Jenn noticed something strange—waited—then acted on her sudden impulse.

“Your bones break like a boy’s.” She felt for the mask and pulled it off. “Oh, you are a kid.” Her expression read more curious than hurt. “Shouldn't you be in elementary school or something? Now I feel kinda bad. Hurting your type isn't quite up my aesthetic alley…”

The boy acknowledged her, raising a brow in abject terror. He looked no older than twelve.

“Well, here's the deal. You tell me what's the big deal and I won't… beat you up. Disappear your tongue with my evil evil magic. Sorry for saying deal twice but my vocabulary is running short and so is my patience. I need my eight hours.”

He didn't reply. Jenn was growing impatient and turned to the pink, phallic object.

“Still no words?”

He was either quite brave, or quite stupid, or quite something else altogether.

“What’s something an assassin’s master would do to guarantee silence?” She smiled.

Jenn pried the boy’s mouth open with both her hands. His tongue was gone, a half-stub, cut and burned clean off. She seemed both impressed at the act and unnerved that it had come to it.

Her right arm grew red, flickers of red light dancing off it. She gripped his tongue. Her eyes furrowed in unusual concentration.

—Sixth Reversion—Philistine Regression

The tongue gradually reverted back to what it was, bit by bit, chunks manifesting in the mouth. Surprised, the boy gripped it, tugged, and played around with his newfound tongue.

“Who were you planning to kill?”

The boy shook his head. “I-I.”

“Take your time.” Jenn smiled, having gained an interest in the process. “I’ve got all morning.”

He took shorter than expected, going from syllables, to words, to sentences in all of a half-minute. “I don't know. I was just told how to get in—a-and the directions to find him.”

“And the onahole?”

“The p-pink thing?”

She nodded.

“I was told to flick a switch and and-i-it suddenly started moving. Like an eel! I didn't know how to shut it up.”

Told to flick a switch… What’d be the point in that? To make as much noise as possible? To hope someone would notice it enough, break through a wall, and see to the whole thing through?

“It is a pretty big liability,” she nodded again, in those quick little jolts. “What's it for?”

He shook his head. “I don't know, mi’lady.”

“I mean, what did your master tell you to do with it?”

“Leave it mi’lady. Leave it at the body when I'm done.”

Jenn turned her back to him. “Some kinda kink? Or maybe… Some kinda message. Like a calling card…”

The question silenced her. The onahole did seem rather modern for this world. Out of place. So that must have had something to do with it.

Jenn stood. “Retrace the steps, kid.”

“Pardon?”

“You wanna kill, go ahead and kill. Follow the directions you were told, and I'll be right behind you.”

“B-but why?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? But between this and dying, what would you pick?”

So he obediently did as told, taking Jenn through the inner workings of the castle, looking behind at times with a rather serious, hopeless crease of the forehead. Jenn remained interested throughout the long process. What left of her fatigue, betrayed through the chance yawn or two.

The boy crept alongside a wall, his face uneasy. “Here.”

The woman’s answer was not immediate. “Catch.” She threw the pink deformation back. “Do what you wanna do.”

Once he heard her, the boy pressed into the wall, feeling for a precise block of damp stone. Jenn studied his thorough process. As he finished, the wall opened with a dreadful slide, clearly unused to such motion. Long and slow, the thing went, trudging bit by bit to its inevitable fate.

“The Lord Regent?” Jenn said, abruptly, in a quiet, half-assed guess, unsure of why herself. “I mean, the long emo hair, the pale skin, maybe he’s some kinda vampire overlord who locked the King up?”

When it opened at last, it was to a room with neither light nor presence. Jenn stood a few safe metres away. Yet, unable to contain herself, she came closer and peeked in all the same. Now at last, she could hear something.

The raking of metal. Again and again. Chains against iron against chains against iron. There was nothing that could sway her now. This was the King’s room. Was the boy assassin’s target the ruler himself?

Jenn entered. Wherever the sound, it was deeper in. Her arm lit the scant outlines of a living room: chair, dressing table, and such. She had expected something more lavish for His Majesty, maybe a harem of women, or men… or both.

By the time she could hear the chains all too well, Jenn could hear something else. A low, muffled weeping. It was a lament of two, but braided in one uniform sorrow that made it hard to distinguish. The sound did not come alone either. There was a sluggish pull of liquid, like a loud piss in slow-motion, by a guy with so many kidney stones that it came out all clogged and gurgled.

Jenn steeled herself, pushing open the door with a sudden exhale.

In the room’s centre stood the King’s throne, and by his two sides, his attendants in kimonos. The answer came clear, displayed in the contraption before her. Tubes, over a dozen strong, were plugged into the King, and from each of these tubes came the familiar blue glow, the familiar blue liquid Jenn had seen time and time again.

The lights. The fires. The guns. The IV lines. The pots. The pans. The glasses. The weapons. The paper. The glue. The everything. The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything The everything.

Everything was the King and the King was everything. This nation was run not by the King but on him his proverbial life given liquid form.

The technicalities of it were beyond Jenn. But the implications weren’t. She felt across her body, sliding finger tips on veins, feeling where the big tubes of blue had once entered.

But why? What exactly was the plan of the supposed mastermind who had staged this event?

It was all very strange. Nothing added up.

The boy-assassin. The attendants.

Why would whoever sent the assassin ask him to come here? If the King was invincible, and the attendants were just that—servants with no power and jurisdiction, what worth was there in killing them?

A message sent?

She backed against the wall, unmoving, watching as the whole thing played itself out.

Perhaps it was a mere truimph of the will. Perhaps it was the sudden understanding that the time proved nigh, for all were in great thought, and would least expect this turn of heart. Perhaps it was just a decision and nothing more.

But the distance between the boy and the King’s attendants closed, and with a quiet exhort, he drew his knife and lunged. The attendant on the left raised her hand. She caught the blade between her fingers and grimaced.

Jenn watched as the blood poured from the wound, oozing in great sprays of crimson. With a hiss, the other attendant grabbed the boy’s throat and wrenched him back. His knife was twisted free. They both fell to the ground, and the wounded attendant, now with a weapon in her hand, plunged it into the boy’s heart.

All Jenn did was stand and look. But it was not the sudden scene of violence that had seized her. It was what she saw unfurled next to it.

A single black-eye. Heavy-lidded. Half-awake. But alive all the same. Filled with an emotion too close to home.

It lingered on the pool of red. It lingered on the knife. It lingered on all those present, delighting in the fact of their existence.

Jenn understood it all too well.

It was the love for an aesthetic she so adored. That which had sundered heaven and earth for time immemorial. The aesthetic and lethality of blood, gore, and everything that went with it, heroes, villains and all.

That was what had awoken the King. The supreme bliss to which he had lived, and always lived for.

“Magnificent.”