YUUKI - To Move Forward: Prelude 1
Chaptee 13: Heart of the Inferno

Log #18: Kingdoms

Teams of Slayers, or Squads, are composed of five members chosen from a group of thirty students per class. After graduation, the vast majority of Slayers choose to remain as the group they had been in during training, while the rest (save a very select few) disband and find more... fitting groups for them. Whichever path a Slayer chooses, they are highly encouraged to never drop below five members, which sometimes includes recruiting those lone Slayers, wherever they may be, when a member is lost. It is important to remember that “Slayer,” as well as the other classes of “Warrior,” is a job title, despite the loose limitations. Having a specific number of Slayers in every group is as much for their own safety as it is avoiding complications when deciding the payment for that group. Lone Slayers are rarely government-paid, instead relying on clients to pay them for other jobs, such as bodyguarding and hunting specific Shade. Lone Slayers should beware, however: targeting people is strictly forbidden, and earns that Slayer the title of “Hunter,” which is a topic that will be covered at a later date.

-General Elvira Ramos

480 BPE

In front of me roared the most terrifically brilliant display of destruction my eyes had ever seen. The two-story house that I lived my most important years in, the home I was cared for in, the residence my family loved and protected was currently drowning in veils of mystical waves of fire. There was little hope of recovering the building, and all I could do was sink to my knees, watching eight years of happiness go up in flames before me. The Twin Beaks were somewhere; I wasn’t really paying attention to them, and as far as my thoughts rendered, I was alone, a prime view of the horrific event unfurling in my home.

Oh god, no. Please...

Each flame was alive; they moved independently from another, sometimes to seek out new destruction, and sometimes to fuse with one of its companions, just to split apart at some point or time. The all-consuming flame was entrancing; I couldn’t tear my eyes away from its brilliance, while at the same time I was hopelessly petrified. Watching the inferno was bringing back some painful memories, dreadful memories—memories I was not ready to return to anytime in my life. The sounds of five voices screaming for mercy from an unforgiving blaze, the feeling of my stiff body as I watched from a safe distance, the unbearable feeling of guilt crushing my soul...

How... could this...

A scream broke me from my trance. It was a girl’s scream, maybe one a few years younger than me...

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That was...!

I listened more carefully, and confirmed my greatest fear. Rosa must have been trapped within the vortex that ripped apart my home, and Dad was probably with her, too. The memories that forced me to my knees battled ferociously against the adrenaline that desperately charged towards the cries of my little sister. Each emotion was equally destructive, and I found myself rolling around on the concrete, screaming as my sanity refused to take a side in the internal war. My crutches had been abandoned long ago, and I felt the cast crackle and rip amidst my struggle. Rosa needs me, my adrenaline begged. There is nothing I can do to help, the memories sobbed. It was a bloody struggle, and my body soon began to bleed due to my violent seizures, staining the concrete; still the fire raged on, oblivious to my struggling. I was useless, just like back then...

What... should I do?

The screams grew louder. I wanted so terribly to charge in there heroically and get my family out, but sense reminded me of how woefully unprepared I was to handle such a situation. I thought I could make out sirens in the distance, but everything was a blur, and nothing seemed real anymore. The world was tilted in every direction, and my life was hanging on the poles, nothing but the vacuum of space to catch my fall.

What can I do?

A little girl with twin hazel ponytails smiled at me, extending an arm. She smiled, like everything was going to be okay. Like she was still alive.

Suddenly, everything rushed back into reality, and I saw the fires, still obliterating my home, but this time they raged with less fury. For some reason, their original demonic terror was gone, and I felt nothing, nothing but a strange sense of déjà vu. Almost as if this feeling had possessed me sometime before, in some parallel world. I got up from the bloody pavement, and before my mind could bring forth any objections, I walked directly into the inferno surrounding the house. The only sound that reached my ears were the echoing vibrations of my numb footsteps. Once inside, my mind returned, and the adrenaline was pumping once more. All around me, tables were collapsing, tentacles of fire were twisting through the rooms, and smoke was thickening the air around me. Everywhere I turned, there was some piece of furniture on fire, some painting burning up. It was as if Hell had come to pay a visit, and decided to crash for the night. Ignoring the pain in my limbs and the burning of my lungs, I hurried through the smoke, and tried to best locate where Rosa was hiding.

Where are you?!

Every minute I inhaled more and more smoke, so I held my breath as much as possible. Even still, my vision blurred with tears and smoke alike. I looked in every cabinet, under every chair, through every door. It felt like hours drained away in minutes. As I fled a third, empty room, I felt a sharp pain erupt from my forehead, knocking me to the floor. Through my smoky tears, the wall in front of me had blended into the background perfectly. Reaching forward, I grasped the same wall, and stumbled to my feet. Something was dripping down my face, something heavier than sweat. I pushed past the pain, gritting my teeth painfully hard, and walked forward.

That was the last downstairs room... Don’t tell me...!

There was one last place to look. Without wasting another raspy breath, I fled up the stairs, and almost tripped on one or two in the middle. I reached the last stair, and looked around through the smoky air. We had three doors through the hallway upstairs, and the first two held my room and the bathroom. The one farthest from me, at the end of the hallway, was occupied by all of Rosa’s belongings. Her screams had all but died out, and my sight was beginning to follow. Gritting my teeth, I sprinted past the first two doors, assuming and hoping that she would hide in her room in this sort of situation. I hesitated on the door, and felt the door with the back of my palm.

It was warm.

I don’t have time for this!

I unsheathed Twilight’s Fury, and raised it to the door. With trembling arms, I swung the blade at the wall next to the door, cleaving a chunk of it apart. Fire immediately rushed out of the opening, and I opened the door safely. Taking a shallow yet heavy breath, I stepped into my sister’s room, and gasped when I saw her, passed out on the ground with magical flames and smoke revolving above her.

The gasp sent more smoke into my lungs, and I fell to the ground, desperately coughing out as much of it as I could handle. Slowly, my breathing stabilized, so I got back to my feet. In the center of the orange carpet, my sixteen-year old sister lied on her side, facing me. She was completely unconscious, and almost appeared to be sleeping peacefully, if one ignored the soot tainting her face’s purity. The window behind her was blocked by a snapped support beam, something I could never hope to lift out of the way. A dark column of smoke circled above her rapidly like a twister, magical flames flickering within the smoke. All around the room laid the wreckage of the inferno’s violence: bookshelves were knocked over, the bed was broken and burning, and papers and books were strewn everywhere. This room seemed to be where the fire had originated, but for some reason the air was unnaturally breathable. After taking in my surroundings, I turned my attention to my unconscious sister.

The cloud was moving as if it were a sentient entity, or some sort of artificial intelligence. It wasn’t advancing towards me or Rosa, but something about its consistent movement told me that it was perfectly capable of doing so. I assumed automatically that fighting it with my weapons could only possibly make the situation worse, so I attempted a different, slightly less sane approach.

“Hey, are you... a monster, or something? I mean, can you speak English?”

The smoke continued to revolve, but more slowly this time, as if it were listening to my words.

“Can you speak any language? Can you understand me? Is any of this getting through to you?”

The cloud slowed more, and then something I could only describe as mystical occurred. The flames within the smoke all receded to the side of the column closest to my face, and morphed into some sort of image. After a few seconds, the image clarified, and I jumped back, away from the massive eyeball that had appeared before me. The size of my entire head, it had to have been entirely made out of the magical flames, or some sort of life form within them. Whatever it was, it all but confirmed my “sentient being” theory. It didn’t speak, but its pupil contracted slightly as if listening intently to every word.

“O-Okay, I’ll take that as a ‘yes I understand you but no I can’t speak.’ In that case, can you communicate through images in that smoke?” It immediately responded by evaporating the “eye” and morphing the flames into a thumbs-up sign. I couldn’t stop a chuckle from escaping my chest at the emoji composed of magical flames, but immediately stopped after smoke began to fill my lungs again.

“That’s so cool, I bet you can understand other languages, too.”

Despite the whole situation, I was fascinated. A bit amused as well, to be honest, or perhaps it was just my lightheadedness that made me so talkative. I shook my head to clear away the distraction, and looked back at the thumb, serious.

“Alright, that’s enough small talk. So are you a hostile creature, or just a wandering spirit?”

Not that I particularly believed in “wandering spirits”, but the entity in front of me clearly resembled nothing I’d even remotely heard of before.

The emoji vanished, and a menacing claw formed from the smoke. It retracted in and out of the cloud, opening and closing.

The message was clear.

“Oh. Are you here to kill us, warn us, or just to mess things up?”

The claw dispersed, and a finger pointed to Rosa, with a broken heart above it. That was all I needed to see, and my heart began to pound uncontrollably. I drew my sword and rushed at the cloud with an enraged yell, ignoring the smoke that irritated my skin and throat. Every swing phased through harmlessly, just as it would through regular smoke. The images of the finger and broken heart had also disappeared, and the smoke was once more decorated with flames throughout the column. I was now in the middle of the cloud, wildly swinging in every direction, while the smoke filled my lungs and the flames singed my skin. My leg was burning especially, and I hardly noticed the cast that was unravelling in the smoke.

A blind fury had stolen my body and mind.

My vision flickered, and a cough bellowed throughout my body, causing me to stumble back a few feet. Reflexively, I released my grasp on Twilight’s Fury, and flipped onto my belly, vomiting out digested food and condensed smoke alike. Strangely, the entity refused to follow and suffocate me further. Ashamedly, I shook my body and mind. My recovering leg was aching with excruciating desperation, and it was obvious that another round of angry swinging would only ruin it further.

All that I could do was calm myself again, and try my hardest to match the entity’s maturity. I slowly got to my feet, still shaking irrepressibly from the shock. It took a few moments of silence for me to find my voice, so I chose my next words carefully.

“Thanks, I guess, for not killing me right there. You... aren’t here to kill us, are you?”

It replied with the return of the thumb.

“That includes my sister?”

Another affirmative.

“So, a warning? Or a message?”

It recreated the eye, blinking twice. I took that as a double-yes.

“I wonder who sent you, although I doubt you could or would show me... Woah!”

This time it created an image with far greater detail than any before. A human face, a complete replica: the crease marks and pupil size perfectly matched the one face I could never forget. It was almost exactly like he was staring me in the face, if only his skin were made of flames. An involuntary shudder ran through my spine, and I clenched my fists.

“Francis.”

The name escaped my raspy lips before I had known it was there, and the Francis-face grinned in response.

“You aren’t that great of a mercenary, if you give away your client to the enemy, you know.” I mirrored the grin of the sentient cloud. Behind that grin, my blood was boiling hotter than the flames around me.

The face’s grin disappeared, and the image dissolved, returning to its original form. Just then, a thought occurred to me, and the concern had barely reached my lips when the ground beneath me gave way, and I fell down into the fire-razed kitchen. I had completely forgot about the inferno devouring my house, and by the time I had finished communicating with the entity, my house was nearly demolished, the basic structure barely remaining intact.

Thankfully, I didn’t land too hard on my leg. However, the house I was trapped in the middle of was far from stable, and just as I was about to go back for my sister, she fell from the broken bedroom, straight towards me. I took a step back, and clumsily but successfully caught her in my arms. A pillar behind me broke, and the wood grazed my shoulder, singeing the skin deeper than before. A cry of pain tore loose, and the reality of the situation sunk in completely.

The world I had grew up in had become a deathtrap.

Not wasting another minute, I hurried as fast as my wobbly legs and wheezing lungs would allow, which was about the speed of a two-year old crawling in a sandbox. My eyes were stinging brutally, and tears evaporated in my face, obscuring the view ahead of me. Despite the hindrances, my corpse lumbered on, determined to somehow find the exit. As if on cue, the wall next to my collapsed, providing the perfect doorway out of this hellhole. I limped towards the gateway to freedom, numb to all feeling.

A relieved smile formed beneath the soot, and as I felt the cold sting of fresh air, the unstable structure behind me collapsed, the crushing weight of falling planks and beams knocking me down me to the dirt.

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