We Were Already Dead

“Toyo!”

She gasped, her eyes torn open as blood dripped from her palms. The world around her was now a mere muffle, her mind split from the reality before her.

“Akari,” Toyo wept, “why am I not able to able to wake up?”

Akari’s face was despondent, coated in dirt and blood. Her entire body aching in pain. Fear constricting her chest. Yet she couldn’t feel a thing.

She cupped Toyo’s hands into hers, firmly holding them steady trying to stop the trembling. As she looked Toyo in the eyes, it was as if Toyo was looking back, not at her, but through her. Like staring into a glass jar. “We have to go,” Akari pleaded, but Toyo wouldn’t move, too reluctant to let the truth sink in.

A streak of blood stretched off into the distance where a mangled body lay. To think that mere moments ago, he had stood tall on his own two feet, a smile etched across his face as he stared death in the eye... only to now be reduced to nothing. What remained of him bore no resemblance to life, a hollow echo of the person he once was.

Though he had traded his life to save them, the sacrifice may have bought them nothing more than a fleeting moment.

Akari’s eyes swept across her surroundings, landing on one of the attackers sprawled lifeless on the floor, now but a headless husk. But the other was closing in, with eyes bloodied with murderous rampage.

There was no one left to save them, no one to take a bullet for their sake. Just two lost souls trapped in a foreign world. Neither with the means to fight back.

Toyo knew that their next breath could be their last. Their lives ending in an instant. She pulled Akari in tight, clutching her within her arms.

“We were already dead weren’t we?” her voice wavered.

A shadow casted over them, with Akari feeling the hatred filled aura peering from behind her. An emerald glow began to envelop them, its ethereal light weaving into intricate markings as the energy surged. Rising with a deceptively graceful intensity. Glistening off the bloodied ground and taunting their deaths.

Toyo clenched her eyes shut, unwilling to watch her own demise.

Akari wrapped her arms around Toyo, a single tear running down the side of her cheek as her voice cracked.

“Yeah… I guess we were.”