"Perimortem"
Chapter Two: Bad Bad Things
Warnings: Detailed Gore, Visceral bodily destruction, a metal skeleton being mean, this one actually isn't that cw-y.
Hi. Welcome to Chapter Two. Do me a favor okay? Mind the content warnings, I'll try to do them comprehensively on every chapter. Mind the tags, if you want to find story posts easily, search 'Perimortem Story,' every post will have this tag. If you like my work please reblog I guess, I'd like people to read it. <3 Thank you. >>>>>>.
Wind howled and rushed past her, and she just… let it, unaware of where she was, what was happening. It could have been a dream… it felt like a dream. Was she dreaming?
So bright… her skin ached, feeling dry and irritated and…
The stink of smoke was so, so… so strong. Her clothing was gone, completely. It was definitely a nightmare. She'd had nightmares like this all the damn time, as a kid, when her sister told her that if she misbehaved, that if she failed her father, she would be cast from the sky into the sand.
That nightmare had always come after she disappointed Nisal, or-
Her eyes snapped open, and she regretted it immediately, screaming and going blind - they were too close to the lightlace, the crystal light source that traced its lacework along the 'roof' of the main 'floor' of Hell.
The pain was, bizarrely, irrelevant - she was terrified, confused, and-
Shot. Shot in the head, shot through the torso a dozen times, shot… shot and…
"Yeah, I'm still here," The Thing You Can't Defeat said, chuckling. Only then did she become aware it was clinging to her back like a hot metal spider, her skin sizzling against its apparently steel body. Stranger yet, she barely felt weight from him, if at all, as if he wasn't FULLY there, mass wise. "Because you need to do one more thing, while you're still high up. Come on and get your broken, scorched body together. Exercise some rage, and force yourself to regenerate - or like, you know, do spells."
She didn't reply - couldn't. It had given her a gift, however, or a disease? Things were still foggy, its head still aching… a bullet-
"One bullet is still inside your think meat. Have some stones. Get a finger in there, freakshow. Rip it out," it ordered. She'd done nothing her entire life but follow orders, and not think about who the fuck they were coming from, or what a normal- "Sort your trauma later, assfucker. Get the bullet out of your fucking brain. I am saving your life, not manipulating you like your FREAK sister."
She reached up, unable to even feel her arms moving fully, and felt her head with a hand that was kind of like… a wooden prosthetic she had seen in a museum, articulated, capable of motion, but was not animated. Her fingers were useless things, clumsy, but…
"Nisal is sitting in her office, drinking a cup of tea while she day dreams about how, in approximately two hours, she is going to shoot your father in the head and chest," the reaper said. "Does that make you… angry? Hmmmm?"
Her father.
Did it?
She didn't have time to care if it ought to or not, because it did. It did piss her off. Her father… he'd shown her kindness so many more times than Nisal ever had, had been softer on her when she needed it. He was the only reason she became an operator at all, given her… squemish nature.
"Don't throw up on me," it added.
With renewed vigor and elevated rage, she plunged her fingers into the open, weeping hole on her fucking head. Her fingertips closed around the bullet, and in a motion as quick and smooth as could be, tore it free of her brainmeat. If she waited, all the… messy, incorrect data blasting through her head, and the agitation of her torn, exposed neurons…
She threw up, and in the spinning, twisting motion of falling miles from the sky, some of it DEFINITELY got The Thing You Can't Defeat.
With the bullet still clenched in her fist, and her rage stoked, her brain started healing - regenerating? She was able to think, and could feel the neurons lacing back together as an indescribable conceptual itch. Horrific memory blasted through her skull, the frozen image of Koka's head and shoulders sitting on the damn floor…
The taste of their iron and gore in her mouth…
"You're hurtling towards the execution pools twelve miles outside of Outer Vaingloria, you half-dead crispy tender. If you hit the lava, even my gift will not save you - and if you drop into radar range too close, when you do land, you'll be imprisoned, and then destroyed when they find out what you are - or worse, if they find out WHO you are. Figure it out," The Thing You Can't Defeat said, softly, excitedly.
Magic had been a necessity, and the magics she specialized in were…
Cowardly, pathetic, useless - piercing illusions, penetrating wards, deweaving curse traps and-
"Simpler, you fucking box of rocks with hair taped to it - well, not anymore, your hair burned off, but still," the Death hissed.
Redacted ran through her options. Pyrokinetics? Useless, probably. Telekinetics?
Force projection? Planar distortion?
"You're annoying, you know that?" TTYCD muttered. "You need to deflect from a downward course. You're going extremely fast, and have mild experience with… luxen constructs," it said, slowly, so sarcastic the words practically dripped with insult, indignant at having to interact with such an utter failure.
Luxen constructs. Telekinetics.
It started coming together, and she rolled over, waiting until the darkness came - her eyelids grew back, as did her eyes in kind - but her back burned as if the reaper itself wasn't there. She opened her fresh eyelids, and stared downwards. The sand was a blur, the heat distortions completely obscuring everything…
She closed her eyes again, and started focusing. Working without diagrams was difficult, so she created one - using thaumiostable meki particles, she built out a spell that would save her fucking life, or… at least save her life from being charbroiled.
"You would splatter, actually. Lava is dense, you're made of water. You'd splatter, then sizzle," TTYCD corrected. She rolled her aching eyes, then opened them, staring at the luxen construct built below her. It was huge, an enormous plane that she had formed. Luxencrystal could be ritually designed, but lightworkers like her…
They could manifest it. She'd not practiced much, but a simple shape was doable - and with this plane falling along with her, she could see the black lines of her semi-real diagram properly. Tweaking, planning, took time… and the pain was starting to matter again.
"This is going to hurt," TTYCD said.
"Yes, absolutely," she rasped. "But it'll turn a lot of this vertical momentum into horizontal."
"Clever, if you'd thought of it yourself, dumbshit," it grunted.
Malla ignored it, and set to work. The plane's shaping was critical. Luxencrystal was stable only so long as it had magic to feed it and light to devour and incorporate into its structure - light wasn't an issue. Magic was - but her well felt deep, deeper than she'd ever felt it before, and grasping this wellspring met her with the odd sensation of cold, of… a kind of void-touch, as if she brushed against the bitter shores of the Last River.
With this well of power, she shaped herself a lovely, long ramp. It was nice and smooth, luxencrystal damn near frictionless when made correctly. Her Death chuckled.
"Brace for impact, meat crayon."
Sighing, she rolled onto her back, focused on the ramp, and stared into the diagram made of meki particles, feverishly checking her work - and then, she triggered it. The ramp began to rise towards her, telekinetic forceplanes pushing it upwards towards her, gradually decelerating it until-
Stage two.
Nisal's eyes bored into her in her mind, staring down at her, with a pistol aimed. Her body hit the first telekinetic forceplane that awkwardly, painfully reoriented her onto the surface.
Stage three. The ramp rapidly stopped, the telekinetic counterforce required enough to really test her magical limits - but she accelerated, absolutely SHOT down the slick ramp.
"Oho, creative," TTYCD whispered, laying on top of her, essentially, weightless but still there. The ramp deteriorated, flooding the air with wylde magic, and as she sailed gracefully off the end…
Ahead of her, there came a sudden, sharp distortion in the air. Thunder rolled over them, as they raced towards a massive sphere of contracting hard light. It was taking everything, EVERYTHING that she had, to maintain it. In its forming, it had sucked them violently towards it, accelerating her enormously.
"Oho…" TTYCD said, chuckling. "You can have this for free - this is very clever. The whole... gas compression vaccum sucky orb thing? Very smart."
The orb of luxencrystal, pale pink in color, raced towards them - and she shoved it, with all the TK she could muster, downward.
They passed over it. Layers of hard light wove themselves under her.
Phase 4. Explosive decompression.
The orb dissolved, in an instant.
It might have been deafening, and it shattered every luxen shield she made as it expanded, but she already couldn't hear anything but the rushing of the air and TTYCD, when it spoke. The shockwave hit her, and she felt things go wrong inside - it didn't matter. She couldn't just dodge the pools, she had to…
She had to dodge the people manning them, too.
"This high up, folk aren't likely to notice an explosion… or will assume it's… a virrak and a clovus fighting. Happens… all the time. Read… an article, somewhere," she panted, finding it hard and strange to speak when she couldn't hear her own voice. It was all she could do to build out another plane of hard light, and then force her arms through it, locking her in place. It'd glide, at least a little… and let her rest.
"I did already understand that, yes, stinky. Unlike you, I've been down here before," it drawled, laughing. "Remember, my newborn friend. Drink some fucking people, as soon as you can - unless you like a ruptured spleen, half-liquified eyeballs and a heart that doesn't work. Drink… eat your fill. You will have to EAT."
Consciousness was, at that point, a limited resource. Redacted kept fading in and out, losing the thread of what was happening and then reacquiring it somewhere unfamiliar, in color and texture. Every time she slid back into the waking world, the Death was there, rasping in her ear. It had become something of a comfort, something less frightening.
Finally, she rasped, "are we there yet?"
"For what it's worth, you managed not to hit a building or road," it replied, and she took that as a-
