Thanos: I already hated the guy.
True to his name as a god of death, he had to keep his minions looking nice and dead. They rotted, they smelled, they everything-ed that was decaying and fleshy.
For some reason they were winged as well.
It felt like all of heaven was converging on me when red colored, plain bodies that looked like Kiki when I first met her, came flying out at me while breaking through the clouds to grace the land with tendrils of light. They weren't all humanoids, but also ungraceful monsters. They had horns and tails, claws and weapons. All of them were armed in some way with something that looked extremely dangerous, the tattered clothes on their backs bleached the color of a volcano's fire, their feet eternally black from walking around their master's hellish dungeon for so long.
There were hundreds of them. It felt like Thanos's entire personal army was coming down on me...wait, it was.
Like a funnel, even if they were all far away from me, they shot towards my flying body all of a sudden. It looked like I was being closed in on all sides, about to be done in, until I ruined my form. Instead of continuing to fly straight up like I was, I flipped so I was holding my knees with my back to the ground, stopping my momentum almost suddenly. The trail of steam I had left from flying impossibly fast through the rain died out, and I generated a widespread mana bomb in between my arms. Just when the first challenger reached me, I set it off.
My arms flew out, spreading the mana net I'd created far into the distance. Throughout it, there were little mana bombs that would set off if anything touched it...and the saliva of a monster in the Larjulias passage with Kera. That monster's specialty was trapping its enemies and never letting go.
The monster almost always succeeded. Why almost?
Because when it met me, its reign of terror ended. Running around for three days as a naked human child without any racial traits in the forbidden land proved fruitful in some ways. I picked up a lot of cool stuff while wandering the ruins of the valley, since it had been so advanced. It was just my luck that as advanced as it had been, they had knives and swords and stuff too, not just guns and other fancy tech I had not the know-how or the energy to utilize. So, I raided something that looked like a museum and went hunting.
The bombs went off suddenly, and all the challengers screamed the same scream, like their vocal cords had all been replaced with the voice of a goblin. It was a screeching one, lost in the noise of the storm picking up as all of them all of a sudden got obliterated. Their voices from that split second ceased, the purple light that had went off in a flash concluded.
Pieces?
My mana bombs didn't allow things like that. They always finished the job...was that too sad for the enemy?
Well it wasn't like they had any families to go back to or anything. They'd likely been dead for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. People stopped trying to attack the gods for fame, favor, or fortune, and instead chose to revere them a while ago. I couldn't let them contaminate the world anymore than they already had when their lives were already long over.
All the bodies burned to ashes that even burned down further while I remained, completely fine, in the air. It had all happened so fast that I was still in the place I had stopped moving, about to drop down again. I solidified a wind that was passing by and grabbed it by my hand, getting whipped around to the side like an awesome rollercoaster as we flew for the clouds. Just below it, I let go.
The light show that had been created when those things broke through the clouds had been closed up, but I created a singular hole with the force of my jump as I streamed above the gloom, no longer feeling the rain on my face as I stood in the light. There was a solid layer of mist at my feet, one that stretched on and on for miles upon miles, kilometers and pouriks into the distance. It was one solid line, looking unnatural for a storm since they were supposed to be turbulent. I almost didn't believe that it was a bunch of clouds calm on top.
It had been created, quite obviously, by a god. It wasn't that hard to create an earth-shaking storm, you just had to say the right words for the spell. Or, think it, really.
Probably [Create Storm] for the Main, [Resource Loop] and [Eternal Rain] to keep it going. I didn't really pay attention too much to Mains, Shares, and the like. I actually forgot how the whole system worked because I never used it. Maybe that was bad...I was supposed to start school in four months, after all. I really didn't know how I was going to fight my way out of that-
Oh wait. I was no longer in the de Libellule family, what was I thinking about? Of course they couldn't force me to go to school. Maybe that was the one good thing that came out of my leaving them. If I stayed away long enough, before trying to reconcile, maybe they wouldn't force me to go amidst brainless, emotive noble children...
"Thou art the one that had angered me so long ago, art thou not?" a feminine voice said from far to my left, closer out over the sea than me, who was standing straight over the square in the street.
A lady, a regal and tall one, asked me that question. She was dressed full in battle armor, looking like a living jewel as she turned to me. It was old armor, more decorous than anything.
Could I find a good fight anywhere without someone trying to look beautiful?
Keir, anyone? Hello? He couldn't stop trying to pour out sex appeal failingly, and suddenly I had that thing in front of me more decorated than an Egyptian queen.
Hopefully Thanos was decent. And, actually, why weren't they attacking me together, exactly? [Radar] was telling me that although I'd obliterated all his minions, he still wasn't coming out to play. In fact, he wasn't anywhere within a ten thousand pouriks of Severo, which was strange.
"I'd assume so," I said, looking at the goddess. Her hair was bound behind her head in a bun, but the straight cut bangs she had were in gold plating. How she managed to accomplish that, I had no clue. Did it not hurt when she jumped up and down? "You looking for a fight?"
"If thou hast scorned me, I will give thee no less." She pulled a spear from out of nowhere, along with a perfectly round shield. "Come, peasant. Show me thine skills."
"Come, bitch. Show me thine power," I repeated, mumbling under my breath. She wasn't meant to pick that up, honest. I didn't intentionally curse even though I lectured everyone else for doing it.
"I might as well teach thee manners whilst I'm endeavoring as such!" She threw her spear, aiming for my chest with the force of wind behind it from the power of her storm. I could've ducked, caught it, hit it away, anything-
I stopped it. With the tip of my finger.
Ummm....She was like, level forty-two or something, right? I could barely beat thirty-five. Was this supposed to be easy in comparison to Keir? Even she looked confused for a moment there.
Hm...I guess that acquiring a reservoir over six times your original mana amount let you jump a few spaces. I thought that the higher up you went, it was harder to beat deities on the God Scale because the chasms of strength in between each ranking stretched more and more.
Or not...because I was suddenly sent flying. Ugh, I saw the look on her face right before, too...
Takuya was taking a moment to laugh at me while nudging Kaya, to get her out of her mood. She'd hardly reacted since we were last in the Itsuki house. The comparison shocked her more than the three of us, it seemed.
As I flew backward through the clouds, wondering where the heck Thanos was and thinking about how powerful he might be, I looked up towards space. You couldn't see it then because there was a spell being cast at me that was blocking my vision, but we were high enough that you could make out some stars even in daylight.
I popped back up again and made a shield, deflecting whatever was thrown at me upwards. The sky went into full bloom as pinks and blues, aquamarines and teals lit up the surroundings. It looked like the aurora borealis was brought over from the mountains, then whipped around to bring light to the world.
Since it seemed like I would need a weapon to fight, I pulled something from my storage. I still was more of a hands-on fighter or magic, not weapons. I kept telling myself that I'd insist that Thérèse teach me when I remembered to, but I never got around to it. For sure, when the fight ended, I'd go home and ask. More like beg, but still.
For the moment, I merely pulled out one of my disposable swords. It was one of those fancy looking things, the type a hero would use in a story with gauntlets to match and everything. For the sake of not losing the sword, I put them on. They had gravity magic applied, after all. The sword would zip right back to the gloves...and hopefully not vice versa. I'd never really tried them out after looting them in the forbidden land. I really got a lot of cool, confusing stuff there.
Her spear appeared back in her hand again, shield on her left arm looking way too small to block anything when looking at my sword - more of a decoration, like the rest of her. I knew not to underestimate her however, when I prepared for the clash.
Kill the gods.
We flew at each other, streaks of our overwhelming auras and mana trailing out behind us as we met in the middle, sending out a shockwave that blew the clouds away and swirled up excess mana into the atmosphere. I thought I saw it freeze, but I was too focused on the she-warrior at the moment as she blocked off my sword and raised her spear from below to stab me in the gut. Blocking it with a mana shield, I bent the tip of it and knocked it out of her hand. Another shield of mine appeared behind her, preventing her from kicking off of my frontal shield to go back for her spear, and she hit her back. The metal in her bangs flew up, revealing a brilliant forehead, and the bun unraveled when the clasp fell out. She gasped in a breath, eyes filling with rage. The battle had been wordless, but intense, with cutting exchanges of magic and weapons.
Ricocheting off, she came back with enough force that I already had my sword prepared to pierce her through. She saw through it already, rolling off to the side as I threw it after her.
The first injury of the fight was scored, then. She must've thought that nothing could injure her, that all of my puny strikes from the little amount of mana I had been using would not reach.
It was a fatal mistake. My sword glanced off her side because I suddenly used a tremendous amount of mana, ten thousand, and it pierced through her side. I drew it back almost immediately, since I knew she would tear it apart if I didn't. The swords humans used, no matter how strong, were always inefficient. The gods had the real weapons, using extremely rare ores and woods from places inaccessible to regular people. Buried at the bottoms of ultra hard dungeons, probably.
But...something felt wrong. As intense as it was, it felt strangely...lacking.
The battle was nothing compared to Keir...it was a bit weak. He really pushed me to the edge and he was only thirty-five. Forty-two felt more like when I first battled fifteen, so long ago, and I was still five years old back then. Well, I was six while battling Seer, but I had a major mana level up with the Bhemuses. Something was strange.
I remembered that one time Keir told me even Tiyana couldn't get rid of his darkness, and that he hated fighting because it was too much work. Was it possible that he only had a low rank because he didn't fight often, so they didn't evaluate him higher on the God Scale? That he was actually really high in the rankings, and I had been tricked into fighting that guy thinking he was only a bit higher than the others? Because I was not too happy about that theory.
If Keir wasn't really thirty-five and Seer wasn't really forty-two, then I didn't really know where I was on the God Scale myself. I didn't know what my own estimated number would be, or if the next person I encountered was accurately evaluated, or a hidden trap card like Keir. When I battled my first gods - ranks eight, fifteen, twenty-one, and twenty-nine - I could feel the clear jumps in between each time. It was steady, a stable rise in strength as they were appropriately ranked and each gave me a hard time as I grew by being pressured by them, but jumping from twenty-nine to thirty-five felt more like twenty rankings had been passed by rather than six. Keir wasn't even the least bit hurt when we finished our first fight, and he was only looked slightly winded after our second fight while I was cooked both times. Just because he had some scrapes and bite marks didn't mean he was seriously hurt - he was probably just careless sometimes or didn't mind it too much, like I did with my own injuries.
Something was either wrong with the God Scale, or with Keir...but I was beginning to think it was the God Scale itself if Seer was that weak. Twenty-nine to forty-two had to be more significant than what I was experiencing, or else she hadn't fought in so long that she was rusty after divining for nothing all day and all night. Paivla had said that Seer was no pushover and didn't just waste her time doing that, but I couldn't be sure about anything at that point. What if Thanos also didn't match his ranking? I was worried if he was too far below because it would prove the scale was really messed up, and I was worried it was like Keir because if he was far too strong for me...
But then again, I did manage to give Keir a bit more of a run for his money the second time we fought, dragging the fight out that long. If he hadn't just been entertaining me or himself, then that proved my half-Dragon form was at least somewhat capable in being a trump card that I should've sparingly used.
The spear appeared back in her hands, and somehow she turned up behind me, stabbing at my back. It glanced off again, the spear flying straight down to the sea. It sunk beneath the water, making a mini whirlpool because it had been spinning as it went down with a plop. There was a circle of light shining over the sea from the midday sun, and it didn't seem odd if angels started swooping around everywhere because it looked like a beautiful scene only nature could create...probably.
The next second, it was gone. My face didn't have time to register the shock of when my [Radar] started screaming at me that Thanos was there.
I'd been floating in the middle of the air, halfway between sea and sky, when all of a sudden I got blown away. And not just blown away, but smacked down so hard into the sea by such a major spell that my body was left in shambles at the bottom of a crater, decimated coral and sizzling ocean life all around. Everything that had been living on the seafloor or dropped there was destroyed, not even a remnant left for miles on the cracked floor. The water that had been forced out and up from me was boiling hot when it came back after the heat blast ended, one that had come from so far up and with so much speed that I didn't register it was there until I was lying on the bare ocean floor. I had to look at the ground I lay on, my eyes sliding over barely, to see if I had landed on cobblestone in Severo or the actual sea floor because I was so unsure. The gauntlets that had been on my hands were in pieces around them, the sword thrown and unable to come back because the signal was cut.
That freaking-
"THANOS!" I yelled out, looking up above me to see that guy with maroon hair, looking down at me from space where he'd hidden just to get that one little surprise attack in. The uncaring look on his face just succeeded in angering me even more. My voice rang out across the turbulent sea, and my eyes were wild. My skin was burnt but healing quickly, while my clothes were toast. I replaced them without a thought while they seeped with new blood from my wounds. My fingernails were broken and cluttered with dirt as I grabbed the remnants of ocean life scorched underneath me, shaking in pain. My lungs were filling with liquid and my eyes were blurring red - from rage or blood, I couldn't tell. The water was rushing in as I was still pinned to the ocean floor, and I was soon to be scalded by what hadn't evaporated. I hadn't seen the light or heard anything until after I'd ungracefully returned to Tasega. "YOU'RE NEXT!"
He turned his face away from me, as if I was unworthy of his attention. He looked like the kind of guy to have a fiery attitude with that red mane and battle armor, so to see him so silent was odd.
Just as I was about to get up and fire a spell at him with a careless conglomeration of mana, out of nowhere, I got stabbed in the back. And then, while my vision started blurring from the extreme wound, the front.
I raised my head slightly to look at my stomach, seeing the lance run through. White shirt starting to seep with rich, red, thick blood, I could sense Goddess Seer beneath me. When my shaking head turned to the side, I could see the faint glow of a barrier that was emanating from below the ground.
She didn't swoop her spear up and disappear, but rather dove beneath the seafloor to hide there when chasing after it. No wonder she didn't just use a telekinesis spell.
They were planning this. They were prepared for me...
The frontal piercing was through my chest, which would've made the normal human gasp and start choking, but I just stared at it as the blood rose in my throat and started spilling out of my mouth. Thanos had thrown down a sharp object of his own, sinking it into the ground and piercing me there the moment I fell.
"I didn't know the gods were such cowards, teaming up to take one little girl down," I sneered, spitting out some a mixture of bodily fluids from my mouth. The edge of the lance was quite sharp, thinking about it, and the end was driven up so far that the metal shaft was stuck through me and the wrapped handle was visible protruding from my tented shirt. Unless I broke the shaft, I didn't see myself moving anytime soon. "You aim to pierce my heart and hope I die!"
"One such as yourself has no right to speak," the goddess's voice rose sanguinely from the ground.
Well, they seemed surprised I was even speaking in the first place, unaffected by the fatal injuries inflicted upon me.
"Says the one with mud for a face," I grunted, reaching up for the sharp tip in my stomach. There was only one thing I could think about, when seeing a blade those days. It felt like everyone was trying to prove theirs was better than mine. "And by the way...even though I don't have it out," I channeled all the muscle strength in my body to my hand, making it glow. I tapped on the blade with my finger before bringing my hand down on it. "Mine's sharper."
Not that you'll live to see it or anything, my Dragon tail.
I slapped the blade. One might've thought I would've cut my hand on the edge, or sprained it from hitting it with that amount of force, or even be stupid for thinking that would do the job. No, the blade instead did what the gods were not expecting.
It broke into a million pieces.
I kid you not. It didn't just shatter; it turned to dust. That, my friends, is the equivalent of having a strength stat of 380,904. And no, it wasn't way easier to up your strength level than your magic when you can go up one thousand MPs everyday, I still have no clue as to how it got that far up. Before I became a Dragon and after I became a Dragon, it was way too different.
Thanos showed his first emotion since we "met" and I was grinning when my eyes identified it from so far away: shock. And with that, caution. His face barely twitched for either of those, but the mana he started spewing out in an attempt to put up a self-made armor was no joke.
"Finally going to take this seriously instead of just trying petty attacks?" I scoffed, looking up at him as I reached up and pulled out the weapon he'd thrown down to pin me to the ground. The water was starting to converge again, and soon I would be buried at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
Who said they weren't serious?
This seems pretty serious to me.
Kaya and Takuya both decided to talk, glancing around at the surroundings and the serious faces on the gods, Seer just popping out of the ground gracefully and appearing by Thanos.
When I saw her make a subtle gesture with her hand as if to grab his, I understood.
"Lovers, huh?" I looked on at them. Thinking about it, every god I'd learned about until then had a significant other. "Weak unless they're together."
Keir had Angelina, Paivla had Arion, Zuelis had Tiyana, Thanos had Seer, the other gods I killed seemed to have a faint connection to someone else. All the gods and what they represented went hand in hand, so of course they had to stick together or faintly do business.
If even Paivla the loner goddess and Tiyana the formerly odd one out both had someone, then some other god had to be the new odd one out. There was an uneven 101 god count after all.
...Teria, she had no one. I felt no "faint connection" from her that led to someone else.
Unless that person I'd heard say, "Granted, Shuon," counted as her other. But she had no connection with that person, as far as I could tell.
I must've struck a tender nerve somewhere, because without any warning after my words they attacked.
I threw away the weapon in my hand, making it also shatter as it hit the floor, and I flew out of the waters just before they came in over my head. That whole scene had lasted, maybe, twenty seconds? Hitting the bottom and sending the large amounts of water far into the distance, speaking quick words, taking out a weapon or two, then flying.
I aimed straight for the couple, not caring which one I hit as I summoned a weapon at the last moment and tried to run them through. One flipped over me and tried to stab from behind, the other staying in place to stab me through in front.
Too bad I disappeared right before then. Well, it wasn't me that disappeared, but rather the [Double] I created as I really teleported behind Seer and stabbed her through the heart. The chain links from her fancy armor were stripped to pieces from the knife that could penetrate and destroy everything, as far as I knew. She may have been fairly proficient in fighting, but she confirmed something for me when I proved to be faster than she could realize: the God Scale was not to be believed. I already knew as such having her before me, as well as Keir, and Paivla as well. Paivla was somewhere at the top, but how, when she couldn't fight? How, when she needed me to do the dirty work?
Neither of them had time to react when, all of a sudden, she truly disappeared that time. The pole of her lance disappeared as well, into my storage. I could use that later, the ore and the magic imbedded in it. Maybe if I found the million-pieces-of-shattered-tip, I'd use that too.
I hid the dagger Paivla had given me quickly, waiting to use it again on my next prey.
She gasped, body rocking as it hung in the air. Thanos turned from where he'd been attacking nothing, searching for me. Their eyes made contact as I stood behind her, seeing the body begin to break apart. He came closer, reaching out to her, as she clasped her hands over her heart. There was no blood; the body was no longer one of flesh, but the mana she'd used to keep on that world, and it was crashing down to the core.
"E-Ethan-"
"What?" Thanos breathed in quickly, seeing the woman fade away into blue-green particles, a beautiful face showing that she registered slight shock on her face before flowing up in the sky and away. His own eyes were searching her up and down, trying to find out what was going on. Horror on his face, then realization, and then a last attempt to grab for her but there was nothing left. No, nothing there, but me who'd been standing in her shadow. "Lora-?"
A major mana source, I could feel, disappeared. Her mana was absorbed into the dagger in no time at all, undetected as its presence was hidden, but her soul was gone from Tasega.
The other mana source in front of me, however, grew even larger. It was colored red quite obviously, looking like the flames of hell as they spiked around his body and blew me away. I raised my arms to defend myself, flinging chunks of the metal gauntlets around as the rest of the gloves fell off, and backed away.
I was not expecting that. The strongest force to ever hit me appeared in my life, besides the pressure of Arion on my soul.
The damage that had been done before, just a few moments ago, was nothing compared to what happened after. I steadied myself and braced my arms, cast defense spells that reminded me of Flo's weak attempt to block me at my first birthday tournament ever a few years ago. The look on her face flashed through my mind as I realized it was becoming my expression as well.
I flew as my forearms broke inwards where they'd been protecting my face. I did more than fly; I was punched so hard that I cut through the air and bounced off the water once, then twice, redirecting my trajectory as I bounced up tens of miles later in less than a second and smashed into a mountain. It caught me as a crater of impact formed around my hardened body, the sound of grating rock churning all around my head as the force continued on farther and blew out the other side of the mountain.
Just when I was gaining my senses from that, Thanos appeared in front of me again. It seemed like we were frozen in the air, but it didn't even seem like time had passed before his fist collided with my stomach that time. That time blood didn't just dribble out of my mouth, it spurted out so that it hit the angered god's face and got on his startlingly red armor. He didn't care, his eyes aflame, as I flew away from him again from the momentum he created. Gravity was not working in my favor that day.
The mountain came down faster than raindrops in a stormy sky...I could compare, since it was raining there too. Severo was far in the distance, having almost disappeared from our normal sights.
The second punch made contact with my face as my arms were too broken to defend again, making my eyes roll back briefly as I was sent spinning into the next island. There was no space between those things, hardly any time to heal. Again and again, he pounded me into the mountain and let loose a furious barrage of vengeance, so sweetly cultivated and so quickly set free from his rational mind. I didn't see a consciousness in his eyes, he was so blind with rage.
Maybe I should've killed that one first.
The first mountain to have been destroyed finally all came crashing down, sinking over the shores and burying whatever might have been there under thousands of pounds of minerals, tons of ores, rocks, dirt, and greenery. It was like mother nature decided to whip up the storm of a lifetime, because the other two Smile Islands were ripped through mercilessly as well and the even higher mountains there, were made to all fall down.
He got in one last punch before settling down and standing over me, looking down at me crazily with my blood splattered all over him. His aura wasn't calming down at all, and it seemed as if rationality had taken over for only a brief second before he raised his hands again, grabbing my arm. The rain was pounding down harder, like a pressure washer was being shot my way, and it was all that kept me awake besides the ringing of my [Radar] telling me that strong enemies were nearby. The cold chill contrasting with his aura was like the cold of space on one side and the heat of the sun on the other. His grip on my arm, where my sleeve had been ripped to shreds not even five minutes after being replaced, was strangling.
"You've taken from me something that can never be replaced," he announced, his mane blazing like hellfire. The world was storming worse than before, falling apart, and I wasn't sure if the storm really had been made by Seer anymore. It was responding to his emotions more as the waves and wind and clouds all moved harmoniously to mimic his wrath. He reached down, losing sense and emotion. The handsome face of a god was altered by the eternal concepts of vengeance and harm. "So I shall do the same to you."
I was hardly breathing as he stood above me, feet on either side buried in the sludge. A ghastly aura was floating around him from his blood-lust, one that had me shivering in its presence. Arion made me fear like I was trapped in a blizzard bleeding to death, but Thanos? Thanos, with those eyes losing rationality, losing restraint, losing his grip on reality?
He made me fear like I was going to die. There were fates worse than death, and there there were fates that led to them. I knew that he would kill me ultimately, seeing the fading anguish pushed aside by the persevering vehemence in his scrutiny, but not until he'd made me wish for it with every mana particle of my body and soul.
For the first time since I had started receiving the flurry of hate, I saw nothing but red. Those thousands of punches and kicks and slams and the like hurt like hell, far more than Tear Fang's spars ever did, but getting my arm ripped off was a first. My chest throbbed, my stomach was likely punched out from my abdomen or permanently damaged, but those wounds felt like flicks to the forehead compared to the agony of getting my arm ripped off.
The bones creaked. Then, my muscles screamed. It was an unnatural feeling, far different from just your shoulder being dislocated. It wasn't just twisted back and forth, it was pushed and pulled, trying to find the easiest way to rip off the whole thing instead of just up to the elbow. If it was the elbow, it was no good. He wanted the whole thing. He stepped on my chest with his boot, grinding dirt into the wound while pulling on my left arm like a leg off a roasted chicken on the dinner table. Maybe after that arm, he would take off the next. Then, my leg. My other leg, too, if he wanted.
And then my head.
Ripping me limb from limb, letting me bleed out on the mountain, watching the tears pulse from my eyes, victim to his insane emotional unrest.
The look in his eyes-
It reminded me of something. As I screamed, feeling my throat, previously clogged with blood and bile, set itself free, I could see something in his eyes. A flame, a fire, a beautiful clarity in his insanity. He looked perfectly sane, but I knew he was not. If that blank, resting expression had appeared to me on my neighbor's from across the fence, I would think it was an ordinary day to have an ordinary conversation about how well he grew his garden or how clean I'd managed to keep my house.
My mind was entering a dark place as I froze, unable to completely comprehend what was happening.
I was seeing flashes of the past, of a dog chain twisted on my ankles cutting off my circulation, of knuckles imprinted in the side of my head, of my arm in a sling after getting x-rays at the hospital.
I was seeing myself fall into the pond of my grandfather's house out in the countryside as Mitsuhiko pushed me and watched toddler me drown, seeing Naritsu holding his first smart phone over me to take a video while I cried about how he cut my hair off my head, seeing Sumika taking my first paper birthday crown from me and shredding it in grade school.
I was seeing Sumika's friends taunting me on dark street corners as I hurried to the train station from cram school, seeing my stepfather reach for me when I was about to escape into my room, seeing Mother ignore me while shifting through my final grades to reprimand me when she found anything less than satisfactory and making light of everything I'd studied so hard for.
The fear built up. I was back in that place, back on Earth, and Naritsu was there. He was holding his curtain rod, throwing his bag onto his bag, and bracing it against my neck while my back was to the door. Cherry blossoms of spring were stuck in his hair as he'd taken his girlfriend through the park on his way home.
I still remembered it, thirteen years later, what I'd said.
"Please," I'd cried, reaching for the door handle behind me. "Please don't hurt me, Onii-sama."
But I knew what was coming regardless, just like I'd known every other time. The cherry blossom tumbled off his shoulder and landed on the end of the pole that was lightly pressing under my chin, at the junction of where my head became my throat. Naritsu lightly pushed it up against me, swaying backward and forward, leaving me to anxiously anticipate when he would press it hard enough for me to choke. I stood on the tips of my toes, hoping. I didn't know what it meant to pray, but I probably did that too, being that young and terrified. I didn't know why they did what they did, not until I got older. Even then, sometimes...
The look in their eyes made it impossible to tell. I'd never known if they were sane or not, if it was normal or not, because it was normal for them. It was normal for us. It was normal for me. I knew that it was wrong, but I was so terrified of them. I didn't know how to speak up. I was too dumb to fight back because I'd been raised to not put up a resistance. I did five things, and those were all I was allowed to do in that house.
Eat, sleep, breathe, study, and stay silent.
That feeling was in me again. I'd forgotten it after so many years, so many other troubles piled on, but something made it resurface. It felt like Firea-Madeline de Libellule was just some dream and I was only just waking up in my hospital bed from the medically-induced coma they'd put me in from the shock of the bomb. I was Itsuki Kaya, and I was at a loss for what to do as the curtain rod was shoved up against my throat and my feet were off the ground and I was choking. I was crying and I wanted to scream. The look in his eyes, the blankness of his face like it was perfectly normal for him to be doing that, everything.
"Onii-sama!" I cried, screaming it at the air when the rod came down and I could feel how heavy my body was as oxygen struggled to reach my brain. The rain was hitting down like bullets, and my skin felt torn from the pressure. "Onii-sama!"
It was so cold. I felt so lonely and hopeless, tumbling over the edge and sinking through the murky waters. My arm was burning so terribly as the fibers of muscle tore apart and blood rushed out. I was underwater, I knew it, but I could breathe somehow. As bubbles went up, as I kept calling out, stop, please, onii-sama, big brother, please, stop, I fell. I couldn't tell what was hurting, who was hurting me, or anything. It felt nice to just fade beneath the surface and not feel anything. I could smoothly slip away like that, I knew how to do it. It was an acquired skill from being Kaya.
Something brushed my back. It was smooth, there, and then not. The water swished around me while I opened my eyes and looked up. It touched my hand and brushed softly, reminding me it was there when the darkness made it so difficult to see.
I was weak, closing my eyes. The pain didn't register anymore as half my body was on fire, and the other half was probably gone.
You're not weak, the little Dragon grabbed on with its claws, pulling me towards it. Sometimes you just forget how to be strong.
I raged.
The scales on my legs and remaining arm and back and chest and neck and cheeks were growing as my tail whipped around from under me, the sharp blade glinting in the blinding light of the red aura Thanos was still emitting. It looked evil, ominous even, and my dark blue scales looked black as my horns appeared, arching back out of my bluing hair as my eyes turned to slits. The wounds in my stomach and chest did not heal as fast because my magic was canceled, as magic always failed when I was in that form and for three days after, and blood continued to pulse from them. My left arm didn't grow back, simply because I did not let it; the only arm that belonged there was the one he had.
And I was going to get it back.
The mountains and hills, trees and other things, slid into the sea. It was a major landslide for just one island, so all of them all going down together caused the ocean currents to stir like never before. The water was turned thick and murky from mud, the screams of dying and trapped animals along with the cries of nature as it was destroyed were deflected away from my brain; they weren't important enough to register at the moment. The landslides, humongous as they were, did not stop even underwater.
We all learned from Takahashi-sensei what landslides create: tsunamis.
A large wave was forming on one island, then the next, and seeking the horizon and some distant place to release its full force on as momentum built. It was facing the northern seaboard of Zueltina, the way we'd come from. The waves were starting to pick up, starting small. They grew larger as I sucked in a breath, feeling the oversized fangs in my mouth click together as I narrowed my lips, channeling and blowing out blue fire with a soft exhale that was a prelude of what was to come. The flame got Thanos's attention from my sudden transformation, turning his hateful face back over to me after throwing my arm away into the distance. It spun away and hit the damaged and cracking ground, showing the inside of it to display the torn muscle limply hanging out, the bone scrambled inside from the heat of his grip.
I launched at his neck, thick gray smoke streaming from my jaws as I latched on. His face had been badly burned from my proximity, the handsome looks gone. His hair had fallen away from there, and he looked half bald as his eyelids were melted and ear on that side returned to nothing after charring black and falling off like dust on a shelf. His neck was starting to show his spine inside, and the outline of his skull was very much apparent as I sucked out his lifeblood, his ichor, his mana, his energy, his soul.
It was highly possible I may not have fallen completely in the Dragon pool, but had an arm hanging over the edge and dipped on the other side.
A playful, drunk smile lit upon my lips as I pulled back, golden blood streaming down my lips and dripping off my chin as I sat on his chest vertically in the air. It went down my neck and my chest, spilling on the ground as the earth continued to rumble around us. It was an earthquake. The plates under the sea were shifting in response to our impacts.
My arm fell off the side of the cliff, the former edge of a hill. I thought there were burial stones there, but it didn't matter. They were gone soon enough.
Thanos looked up at me, only just seeming to see what I really was at that point. A monster, one that he knew he could beat but not one that would go down easily. Entertainment...
Rage was still apparent in his eyes, but when he looked around him and saw the destruction, he felt nothing. He cared not for the citizens of the world, more for the power they granted him. There was his own blood mixing with mine on both of us, pooling on the ground, and his body healed. His armor was melting beneath the mixed liquid like it was somehow toxic. Just seeing that...
Made him smile just as gleefully as me. Fights like that didn't come by often. Vengeance...could wait.
The look in his eyes turned glassy. The one eye that was melting out the side of his skull from our combined heat reformed and fixed itself while he reached up to grab and throw me away.
What loyalty.
We clashed. The engagement went on as the ground slid away beneath us, revealing earth that had been untouched for thousands of years and artifacts that may have been hidden there, hidden caves with broken stalactites and underground monsters screeching as they were crushed by the caving rocks. There were many corpses already there, having been the first to go when we landed on the island.
"Come, Dragon! Let us fight!"
There would be plenty more corpses after that...be it by land or sea.
"Hai hai," I grinned, biting my lips and licking the sizzling blood there. I lifted my hands and grabbed at the pole on my neck, throwing the imaginary thing away, and letting myself breathe. The cherry blossom that had been on the end of it spiraled away into the wind. "Onii-sama~"