A little foreplay before the main event

Knowing what Ryou was sacrificing to buy us time, we practically sprinted up the next flights of stairs. I knew it was a bad idea to wear myself out before facing Aki, but I couldn’t let a second of Ryou’s time go to waste.

The skyscraper’s layout was somehow corporately monotonous and utterly bewildering at the same time. Staircases randomly ended at certain points, forcing us to cross more and more random hallways. Some floors seemed to have completely unused spaces with no rooms, while others contained so many rooms and turns that they felt larger on the inside than the outside. The whole building felt more and more off the further in we got.

As we reached the halfway point, this came to a head.

“What the fuck…” I muttered, as I came to a complete stop. Fuji and Nabiki’s footsteps stopped right behind me.

On the hundredth floor, we were yet again met with a dead end and a hallway. But this wasn’t the same boring grey hallway we had seen on every other floor. At least not entirely. What remained of normal space seemed to look that way, but only some of it was even there. The rest of the hall had… nothing. No walls, no ceiling, even the floor beneath our feet was limited to one haphazard path. Everything else was just an inky black expanse, filled with absolutely nothing at all.

Nothing except the series of screens floating around the expanse as if completely untethered by gravity.

“Fuck is this? Is space just falling apart or something?” asked Fujiko.

“No. This is intentional.” Time jumped down from my shoulder and stepped out onto the thin and jagged path. “This was done by Space.”

“Glad to see you still recognise my handiwork, sister.”

A tall woman in a pure white dress descended from the void above us. A white cat on her shoulder. A halo on her head.

“Aki.” I spat as I watched her float down to ground level.

“I must say, dear, I really didn’t expect you to leave your friend behind like that. Not what one would envision from the brave hero of the revolution, no?”

“What, you get tired of waiting and decide to make this quick for us? I’m happy to punch your teeth in now if you want.”

“Oh, calm yourself, dearie. There’ll be time for that later. I just thought you may want a little update on how that friend of yours is doing.”

She drifted over the endless void and moved her hand across the top of one of the screens. As she did, the screen flickered to life on the feed of a security camera. There was a figure close to the camera that I immediately recognised as Ryou. And stood across from her…

“No!” I tried to run towards the screen, but Fuji grabbed me by the arm and held me back.

“Get it together, Toki. She’s trying to get in your head.”

“I know, but it’s… it’s them, Fuji.”

“I know. But Ryou knew what she was getting herself into. Have a little faith, yeah?”

“I-” I tried to pull away for a moment, but her words sunk in and I managed to calm myself down. “...I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“Thank you.” Fuji turned her attention towards Aki. “For someone so confident in her own power, you seem pretty eager to try and wear Toki down. Kinda seems like you’re scared to me, Ms High And Mighty.”

“Oh? That’s what the little electric lady thinks, is it?” Aki hovered around us in a circle, out of stabbing range but close enough to be obnoxious. “This is just the appetiser, honey. A little… foreplay before the main event, shall we say?” Her low chuckle reverberated around the empty space, as if there were echoey walls all around us. “And don’t get too jealous of the icy one you left behind, dear. Your time will come soon enough.”

“Say that to my face, bitch-”

Before Fuji finished her taunt, Aki and Space simply rose up into the void and dematerialised. They were mocking us, the bastards.

“As… disquieting as that was, we’ve wasted quite the bit of time,” said Nabiki. “We should keep moving.”

“Y-yeah…” I crouched down to put Time back on my shoulder. “Let’s get this over with.”

We got moving once again, running along the narrow path over the endless void below.

The screen with the camera feed went dark as we passed it.

…I’m sorry, Ryou.