Love like Fire

April 1st 2102

8:12

The highway into Rukia was dead silent.

Not the usual quiet of abandoned zones. The wrong kind.
Like every sound had been scooped out of the air and buried.
Even OB’s hum beneath the steering wheel felt uneasy.

Ukira snored on the sofa, twitching like he was still dodging debris in his sleep. Sanguchii, one elbow resting out the open window with a can wedged between his knees, slowed the van as the world shifted from junk wasteland into, something colder.

The hexagonal beacon still pulsed in the clouds ahead, brighter now.
Like a heartbeat.

“Been a while since I’ve seen one that bright,”

Sanguchii muttered.

“Either we’re lucky… or extremely, stupidly doomed.”

The road funneled into the skeleton of an old highway checkpoint;
busted concrete cubes, rusted scanners, a gate twisted upward as if something had bitten it.

As they rolled through, OB stiffened.
A soft rattling went through the dashboard.

Danger.

The voice wasn’t spoken.
It throbbed inside Sanguchii’s head like someone brushing their fingers across his thoughts.

“Yeah, yeah, I feel it too,” he murmured.

Because Rukia wasn’t empty.

It was waiting.

Tall shapes drifted behind the mist that clung to the broken buildings. Dozens of them. A conglomerate of people, beasts, yokai, spirits. Any and everything. Moving with slow, synchronized precision: like puppets pulled by the same invisible hand.

Sanguchii tapped the brakes.

Ukira shot upright so fast he punched himself in the chin.

“Huh— wh— ARE WE CRASHING?! DID NOX COME BACK?!”

“Calm down,” Sanguchii said.
“Just… don’t say a word.”

Ukira rubbed his face, bleary and confused, then froze.

“What… what is that?”

They stepped into the open.

People.

Former people.

Bodies of every race, gender, species. Fused together into a single towering mech of flesh. Bones braided into plates like an exo-suit. Other sections patched with chunks of Old World scrap. A huge, pulsing megazord of skin and metal.

The creature moved on two makeshift legs built from two entire buses, held together with fleshy cords and jagged braces of metal where overflowing stardust had forced itself into solidity.

Above those monstrous trunk-legs sat… a house.
A small, crushed one; its walls caved inward, fused with quivering flesh like someone had glued meat to it and hoped for the best. Two long, uneven arms dangled from the sides, attached only by masses of stitched skin and bone.

And its head,

A gigantic feline skull, the size of a compact car, its empty sockets shimmering faintly with stardust.

The proportion of the creature was entirely wrong: a nightmare assembled by something that didn’t understand anatomy so much as it understood hunger.

It lumbered forward, scanning the ruins.

Searching,

Hunting.

A Kasha’s handiwork.
A scavenger beast too weak to fight alone, so it stole corpses and wreckage to build itself a bigger, nastier vessel — something powerful enough to attack anything worth devouring.

The engine stalls and comes to a stop. Ukira sits up leaning over the edge of the sofa staring at the back of Sanguchii’s broad silhouette.

What now?

Ukira moved closer to the sin.

“..Sanguchii?”

No response.

Sanguchii’s fingers tighten around the steering wheel. Not in fear, although Ukira had never truly seen that expression on his protector, he was sure this wasn’t it.

This was calculation.

Like a predator sizing up another;

In this moment the Lion of Gluttony was facing off against the Feline Kasha of Rukia. A ‘strong’ opponent. Not necessarily for a sin, but for one whose trying to make a scene this surely was a challenge.

The towering flesh mech stumbles towards OB; its left bus leg scraped and screeched across the trash and rubble covered road way, the chewing gum skin stuck to the floor like hot tar stinking the area up like cooked bacon.

A sound to deliberate and clear, announcing the titans presents. Like the roar of the lands alpha.

It knew they were here.

Ukira’s voice cracks:

“What do we do now?..should I summon a Pyrone? Should we run?.. SANGUCHII PLEASE ANSWER ME!”

Sanguchii raised a finger to his own lips.

Silence.

Ukira slammed his jaw shut so fast his teeth clicked and creaked.

The cat-like-skull snapped in the direction of the gang. With the jaw falling and dropping off, stopping upright, with its jaw cracking upright as the impromptu fingers leaning down and pick the jaw back up.

A deep dark wailing and scream lets out of the colossus’s face, not a single noise, but multiple, the scream of a hundred people echo out its mouth. The revering wallow forces Ukira to cover his ears and Sanguchii stands in place letting his ears bleed, any chance to look for a weakness on the creature.

Then more sounds followed

Click,

Clack,

Screeched and clank.

Like the sound of a drill piercing the heavens, the cables wound the limbs tighten and release echoing the use of muscles, letting the creature continue to search around the environment for food.

Sanguchii exhaled slowly, like someone bracing for a punch.

“OB?.don’t move.”

Ukira blinked twice,

“Why are you telling her not to mo-“

And then he understood, the Kasha wasn’t looking for them, it was looking for movement. In practice it seems the creature acts exactly like a T-Rex, as long as you don’t move or make noise, it can’t see you.

Every time something shifted - dust, wind, even the world itself. The skull spasmed towards the sound.

It was blind to a degree.

Ukira swallowed, sweat trickling down his forehead down to his chest.

He shifted his foot the tinniest bit. Creating more problems as he stepped on that same old picture frame he flung at Sanguchii’s head a few hours ago.

The glass cracked, mimicking the crack that currently is leaking shit on Ukira. The Kasha snapped his head turning towards the van staring it down like a Mexican standoff. A dozen mouths along the body of the beast opened in unison. Giving Sanguchii the last bit of information about the Yokai he needed.

The creature is semi blind, and effectively a hive mind of people controlled by a ‘queen’, it isn’t stable or held apart by any actual skeleton like a real creature but instead loosely held by debris and corpses.

“Don’t. Move”

Sanguchii’s voice was like a fine razor cutting through the silence in the van.

Ukira froze mid-breath

The creature leaned in.

Closer

Closer

Its stardust sockets were like laser pointers clearly showcasing the line of sight on where the being was looking.

As the creature ached closer.

VMM-

A distant sound echoed along the wasteland in the nearby area. A groan from the steel joints caused by the creatures own weight. The skull whipped towards the noise, cracking the bones making the jaw yet again fall off.

It roared.

A horrible, grotesque layered choir of souls screaming out in agony, forced to be subjected to the torture caused upon them by the spirits will bellowing around the surrounding areas as if being spoken directly into a megaphone.

It sprinted towards the noise, falling onto all fours, its true primal desire to hunt taking over. Sprinting towards the noise, shaking the ground as it fled.

Dust rolled over the van, like a dirty tsunami, shrouding OB in a cloak.

Ukira collapsed backwards onto the sofa falling down hitting his head against the window above him.

Sanguchii surprisingly did the same thing, except with a lot more grace then the Zodiac did. Cracking his knuckles and reaching down to his can to get a sip. His addiction never stops. Ukira stared in bewilderment, they have to be laced with at least one thing.

Acting as if the giant mecha was a minor inconvenience. Maybe it was?

“Your telling me that was just a Kasha, that thing was huge”

Ukira blurted out.

“No, that was seemingly multiple, I believe that was three, which is why the vessel was so intact and not to mention large”

Sanguchii said in response while cracking his neck, grinning.

“And that noise it fled too, that’s where we’re going”

Yet again Ukira started at him, horrified

Sanguchii twisted the radio dial to 98 and a huge harpoon shot out of the roof expanding and transforming itself out. Sanguchii honked the horn and it fired, directly into the backside of the fleeing kaiju. Ukira began to really question the legitimacy of the actual radio even working since it seems to just be a menu for gadgets, which Sanguchii surprisingly seems to of memorized.

OB bounced around the roads, like a person paragliding on the back of a motor boat.

“WOOOOOO-HOOOO”

Sanguchii let out while steering with his feet while drinking more Cola.

Ukira strangely again bounced around the insides of the van crashing into the walls.

“YOU NEED TO INVEST IN SEAT BELTS”

The van continued hitch-hiking acting as the tail of the cat, as Central Rukia grew larger and larger on the horizon.

The Frankenstein Kasha began to become under fire of some sort of projectile, and as these arrows, bullets, really whatever would fly. Collide with the beast, OB detached and flys into a nearby mound to cushion and slow down its speed and fall, the once seemingly mighty creature deconstructed infront of there eyes. Torn apart by the artillery.

OB reversed out the heap after some assistance from Ukira climbing out the back window to melt some of the metals down and Sanguchii teleporting the larger pieces away. Continued on its drive towards the district.

The first set of walls didn’t have any sort of checks or protection, the second had a vehicle inspection and the third had a full on pat down. All making Cogtonn look like the slums, which it probably was.

The final gate opened and OB rolled in, continuing down the streets of large houses, maybe 2-3 times larger then Hiyokanata Inn, in the middle of the inner most walls was a giant square, dark blue with a yellow logo on the top corner, “Rukia” the place they escaped bandits and beasts to arrive at, was a Swedish furniture shop.