Twisted Steps

Yuusuke tied the final knot, his hands shaking; all three wouldn’t be able to move a limb with this much rope. He was asked by Akihiko to tie them up and set them in a circle.

In the meanwhile, the teacher did nothing but sit down: eyes closed, hands and legs crossed, and whole-body shivering. He looked… disconnected.

Questions infested Yuusuke’s mind, but he knew better than to expect an answer.

Akihiko finally stood up, looked at the three disciples and recited something. In flashing immediacy, their body made small insignificant movements that together seemed alive.

Yuusuke let out a sigh of relief that he would have rather kept hidden. His moment of rest was cut by Akihiko: “Heads up! It’s just starting.”

The small movements eventually turned to ugly struggles, as thought something inside was terribly irritated. The first to scream was Shouta who cried in pain.

“What do I do now?” asked Yuusuke.

Suddenly a black substance comparable to ink in colour and consistency emerged from the crazed children’s mouths and nostrils. It flowed out steadily, and after one final wave of screams and struggles, all three went calm again and slowly regained their consciousness.

Akihiko told Yuusuke to watch over the three victims and was gone before anyone could argue with him. Finding Inori was his excuse.

Thicker kept the fog growing, with it the task of distinguishing reality from dream harder. A smell of rot filled the earth as worms and maggots ascended to the surface, being of the first living things to welcome the group in that forest.

The entire domain of the forest drifted from its certain state of reality into something more liminal that challenged senses from the outside and turned the against each other from the inside.

Yuusuke’s moment of solitude did not last very long, as a concerningly harsh coughing sound came from where Seishiro laid. “Have some water,” Yuusuke handed him a bottle and helped him get on his feet.

“Thank you.” He drank half of the bottle then used the remaining half to rinse sweat and dirt off his face. Then he continued speaking, concern—no, fear—filling his expression. “Did you find Inori yet?”

Yuusuke shook his head.

“I see.” He answered, he then took another bottle from his bag and heartlessly emptied it on the faces of the other two waking them up in a similar state of the one in which he was not long ago. “Himawari, put some food and clothes for Inori in your bag, we’ll leave the rest here. Shouta, take your cell phone.”

Lost, Yuusuke asked what Seishiro had in mind, beginning to understand what Himawari said about him.

“We’ll look for Inori; she was taken by someone when we got attacked… I-I saw her, yet I couldn't do anything about it.” He zoned out for a second, but quickly and efficiently regained his composure. In the meantime, Yuusuke watched him as his every action evoked one word: “reliable.”

Leaving almost everything behind at the campsite, they parted to the thick woods: eyes open, minds sharp. Seishiro had very little information, but he knew Inori was smart and he trusted she would find a way to tell them where she is. However, they had no luck finding any sign of human presence, and it was no easy task to remain focused with the putrid smell filling the whole place.

Then Seishiro got an idea—though to call it an idea is an exaggeration, he had so little clues that anything—even that smell—could be a lead. He got on his knees and touched the soil. It was moving, full of insects that crawled right at the surface. “They must have been driven up by something” he thought, and confirmed his theory when he found out the ground was wet, not with rainwater—not in this summer—but with a black liquid similar to the one Akihiko extracted from his body. The implications of that were terrifying: The insects were flooded by this liquid even underground.

Seishiro did not explain his findings until Himawari popped his bubble and asked him.

“And why is that so bad?” asked Shouta.

“More insects are rising over time… I’m afraid not only does whoever did this have enough power to produce hundreds of cubic meters of this substance…” he paused.

Himawari encouraged him to talk, “But?”

“If I’m right, then the fact that insects keep rising in larger numbers means the liquid level is rising as well… unless we hurry, we might drown.”

Realising how valuable their time got, they walked at a much faster pace, carefully trying not to drain their drinking water, especially since they had to leave some for Inori whose state they knew nothing about.

They walked and looked for any sign of conscious life, but they had no destination. They knew wandering around was only going to take them so far, one thing that was certain that they needed a plan, a good and quick one at it.

Tired of all the aimless vagabonding, Seishiro told them to stop, sit down and think of a more rational way to solve their problem.

Shouta—to everyone’s surprise—suggested, “Let’s try that one differential something sensei talked about the other day.”

“Differential diagnosis? Could do, weird coming from you.” Himawari corrected.

“You’re just jealous I thought of it before you.”

“Alright,” Seishiro cut in, “I’ll lead the discussion.” Everyone nodded. “Our only clue so far is this black liquid, do we know where it comes from?”

“Magic,” said Yuusuke who finally got a chance to participate.

“Yes, I think we all agree, this one is ruled out.” He thought for a moment before following up with a second question: “How does magic work again?”

The answer to the second question was as late as that to the first one was immediate; none of them knew all that much—if anything—about magic.

“He told us a lot of stories; there must be something we can use. Try to recall some details about magic in the stories.”

Every story about magic was the same: someone offering their loyalty, they go through something that tests their belief, they almost lose hope, then IT whispers something in their ear and they unleash a power that pierces through every difficulty they face. Very often did Akihiko mention how good and evil had no meaning in such stories, as a lot of them were just made-up tales the Guards used to improve their image.

There was a distinction to be made as not all spells worked the same way. In all stories, Awako whispered to the mage before they performed magic. In most stories the mage would speak something they could not fathom, and thus a spell would stun all the observers with its power. In some stories, however, the narration would differ. Awako would whisper “Kirae” and lit got the dark tunnel, “Feshta” would light up a small campfire and when the mage screamed “Veruka” a shield kept them safe from any harm.

Suddenly, Seishiro stood up. His eyes lit up, and despite the situation, he could not hide the smile of pure excitement born from the womb of human curiosity that filled the boy’s soul. He tore his sleeve apart, took a chunk of the black wet soil and squeezed it inside the piece of cloth. “Do we have any more empty bottles?” he asked the confused crowd of three people to which he performed, but they shook their head in denial.

“Here,” he handed Yuusuke a water bottle; other than the two they decided to leave for Inori, that one was the last. “You must be tired of all the lifting. Drink what’s left and give me the bottle.”

Yuusuke did accordingly.

Seishiro tightened his grip around the cloth and—drop by drop—squeezed every last bit of the black liquid from it—a process that would prove very important. He marked the level of the liquid and emptied the bottle from its liquid, and the cloth from its dirt. He ran as far as he could without losing sight of his group—which is not all that far in such a thick forest—and repeated the same process marking another level on the bottle. He did the same thing one last time getting a total of three markings. He went back to the group and used the closest thing he found to a pen and paper—a camp knife and a tree trunk—to draw three circles and a big ‘X’ mark where they intersected.

“Care to explain?” Said Himawari.

“I have a good reason to think that the liquid is not rising vertically, but rather spreading horizontally. The same reason makes me think that the centre of this spread is where we have the best chance at finding Inori.”

“So?” She asked.

“If all the liquid is coming from one point, you’d expect the dirt to be more wet the closer you get… the rest is just taking three different points and some simple maths to find where all the liquid is coming from.”

They did their best to keep up with his explanation, but they were not exactly excited to hear more. The one thing they knew for sure was to rely on Seishiro.

“I’m leading the way, follow me.”