The hum of the golden portal gnawed at the silence, a low, resonating thrum that promised either salvation or a final, grotesque undoing. Shmuel, his body a map of fresh cuts and bruises, stood beside Kamina. His mechanical hand trembled slightly.
Kamina, meanwhile, stared into the swirling vortex. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, but the fire in his eyes remained.
"How about we jump into it?" Kamina said, his voice raw, yet laced with a dangerous thrill that made the suggestion sound less like a question.
Shmuel shook his head. "It's dangerous. Not because it's something unknown to both of us, but because we are out of stamina and had just stop bleeding some few minutes ago."
The City didn't reward recklessness. It simply consumed it.
"BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT..."
"No, but we are going to die if we step inside the portal, Kamina," Shmuel cut him off, his voice rising with a frantic urgency. He gestured to their surroundings, to the carnage and ruin. "We can't risk being Office-wiped at the moment. How about waiting for others to get here?" He glanced toward the entrance, half-hoping for an unseen savior.
Footsteps echoed from the ruined corridor behind them. The Docent, his white uniform unmarred, stepped into the ruined laboratory as if he were attending a formal exhibition. A faint smile played on his lips.
"You are still alive. What a surprise," the Docent said.
Kamina's grin widened. He met the Docent's cold gaze, his own eyes burning with a hot and manic joy. "The 'others' you were speaking of is here, kid," he said, the words a challenge thrown into the face of death itself. "And it looks like if we don't jump into the portal, we won't survive here."
The last words to escape Kamina's lips as they vanished into the swirling chaos were a flippant dismissal of the artist who had come to paint their end.
"See you later, weird art guy."
The moment they vanished into the golden torrent, the world ceased to exist as a physical space. There was no sensation of falling, no resistance, no air to cleave through. There was only a maelstrom of light and a sound that wasn't a sound at all–a ringing in their very core, a resonance that vibrated through bone and blood and memory.
Fragments, a thousand shimmering shards of something else, flew past them. Glimpses of faces they didn't know, cities they hadn't seen, lives they hadn't lived. It was a dizzying torrent of a million shattered things, an unbearable flood of a history that was not their own.
Then, clarity. A single fragment, larger and more stable than the rest, coalesced around them. The dizzying chaos of the Corridors solidified into a single, worn room.
They were still in the portal, but the portal now acted as a window. Or perhaps, it had drawn them into the ghost of a memory. A small, cramped room, half-lit by the weak glow of a single hanging bulb, revealed itself. The walls were scarred, the floors stained, and the very air tasted of neglect and cheap, synthetic dust.
In the center of it all, two little girls sat at a small, chipped plastic table. One was a vision of timid vulnerability, hunched over, her small frame a study in fear. The other shone with a brilliance that made the dim room seem bright, her smile a beacon against the gloom. She held a doll in her hand, its plastic face a silent echo of her own joyous expression. The cowardly girl, meanwhile, barely touched the dolls. Her hands were folded on the table as if afraid to make a mark on the world.
The bright girl's laugh, a clear, bell-like sound that seemed impossibly loud in the silence of the memory, broke the stillness. "You should play with the dolls too, you know! Don't you want to be the princess everyone admires?"
The timid girl looked up, her gaze meek, her voice a near-whisper. "Sis... promise you won't laugh at me when I say this, okay?"
The shining girl's smile widened, a galaxy of stars in a single, fleeting moment. She leaned forward, her voice a conspiratorial whisper full of warmth. "Of course. You are my very, very best of the best sister. Why would I ever laugh?"
The timid girl's hands, so carefully folded, now twisted in her lap. "Because… you look so happy playing with them. Your smile looks as bright as day, so why would I take away your dolls when I could just play with the dices instead?"
The shining girl's eyes widened, a flicker of something unreadable passing through them before her laughter returned with a joyful roar that filled the memory-space. "You dummy! This isn't a zero-sum game! Now let's play the family game together with dolls!" She reached out and placed a doll into her sister's hands. It was an act of grace that made the cowardly girl's eyes glimmer with a watery light.
The scene flickered and dissolved, giving way once more to the blinding, chaotic storm of the golden portal.
The shattered memory dissolved, replaced by a jarring, disorienting return to the present. Kamina and Shmuel found themselves standing on a floor that felt solid beneath their feet, but the space around them had been radically transformed. The squalid orphanage room from the memory was now a vast, cavernous hall, its bare walls stretching up into a darkness where a ceiling should have been. The single hanging lightbulb was now a single, impossibly bright point of light suspended high above them, casting long, distorted shadows. The worn plastic table and flimsy chairs from the memory, now colossal, stood in the center of the room.
The air, however, was filled not with the stench of the City or the memory, but a new, sickeningly sweet odor–the scent of rotting flesh and something acrid, like old oil. A guttural squelch echoed in the vast silence as two figures emerged from the gloom.
Kamina's eyes, still adjusting to the strange light, narrowed. "Those things look... quite ugly."
Large, four-legged beasts with bodies crisscrossed by a network of pulsating, vein-like patterns. Their long, flat tails dragged behind them like a salamander's, and large, bony bumps grew along their spines, culminating in a heavily-wrinkled head shaped like a shield. One bloodshot orange eyeball bulged grotesquely from the right side of the head, a single, malevolent point of focus. From their heads, two scrawny hands made of twisted flesh emerged, writhing like a double helix.
Shmuel, his mind already racing to categorize the threats, nodded. "There are two of them. This is manageable." His eyes, however, were on a more crucial discovery. He could feel the familiar weight of his mechanical arm, its joints no longer stiff or grating with fatigue. He flexed his hand, the movements smooth and uninhibited. He looked at Kamina, who was likewise testing his own limbs, a look of profound surprise on his face. The cuts and bruises from the earlier battle were gone, and the dull ache in their muscles had vanished.
"Don't know which of these freaky circumstances caused this, but alright, getting healed is better than getting none," Kamina said, a grin slowly spreading across his face.
Kamina charged forward, his katana a blur of motion. The first creature, a hulking mass of pale meat, barely had time to react before the blade slashed through its exposed neck. It hit the ground with a wet thump, its form dissolving into a foul-smelling mist. On the other side of the room, Shmuel's mechanical fist met the second beast's head with a bone-shattering crack, its shield-like face crumbling inward as its body crumpled into a pile of foul-smelling, decaying matter. The creatures were dead. Too easily.
Shmuel, his brow furrowed with a mix of relief and suspicion, raised his voice to Kamina. "Aren't they too easy to kill? Something is going on here, something we don't know yet. This is a Distortion, but I know barely anything about Distortions, let alone how to deal with one."
Kamina, wiping the blood from his katana on his pants, tilted his head. "What about the one from the White Circle case?"
"We just got lucky there," Shmuel explained, his mind racing through old files. "Alexy reported it as a ZAYIN risk level enemy. I read the 'Guide on Abnormality' made by the L corp before they collapsed... I remember it said: 'With little to no aggression, ZAYIN Abnormalities will cause the least harm to the agents.' I think Abnormality risk levels could also apply to Distortions, so I went with that since I had no other source to work with."
Kamina, already bored with the technical explanation, waved a dismissive hand. "Yeah, yeah, whatever."
Kamina and Shmuel stepped out into a hallway. It, too, had been remade. The walls were a pristine, eggshell white, and a soft, warm light emanated from unseen sources. The floor was a dark, polished wood, reflecting the light like a still pond. But what was most startling was the sound. The hallway was alive with the soft patter of tiny feet and the giggling of children.
Dozens of children, all dressed in simple, clean clothes, ran up and down the hallway, playing a game of tag. Their laughter was a bright, joyous sound that seemed foreign in this world. Kamina's face broke into a wide smile.
"Quite a lively place,"
Shmuel, however, was on guard. His eyes scanned the hallway, searching for the source of this sudden and unnatural cheer. His instincts, honed by a life of paranoia, screamed that this was wrong. The sudden, pristine environment, the children, the strange calm—it was all too perfect.
Then, from the bottom of the grand staircase, a new sound began to ascend. A soft, shuffling scrape, like worn leather on stone. From the shadows beneath the stairs, a dozen hunched, shadowy figures emerged. They were humanoid in form, but their bodies seemed to absorb the light around them, their features indistinct and shifting. In their hands, they held blunt, heavy objects that resembled rusted hammers and pipes. Without a sound, they began to stalk toward the children, their pace slow but relentless.
One of them raised its hammer and brought it down on a child's back with a sickening crack. The child crumpled to the ground, a whimper escaping its lips before it dissolved into a puff of black smoke. The other children, oblivious to the violence, continued to play, their laughter echoing a moment later.
The sight, the sound of the unthinking, casual cruelty, sent a jolt of white-hot rage through Kamina. His wide, carefree smile vanished, replaced by a snarl that was all teeth and fury.
"That's enough,"
Shmuel, already in motion, agreed. "Their form isn't solidified," he muttered, "and their movement is clunky. They have no combat experience."
Kamina charged, his katana a glint of polished steel in the bright light. He didn't bother with finesse. He simply brought his blade down in a wide, powerful slash that bisected a shadowy figure, causing it to dissipate into nothingness. On the other side of the hall, Shmuel moved his fist, his leg, his elbow strike tore through the shadowy forms, rendering them into puffs of smoke. They were, as Shmuel had noted, easy to kill. The two of them moved through the hall like a hurricane, clearing the figures from their path, their movements a stark contrast to the clumsy, brutish attacks of their enemies.
It took only a minute for the last of the figures to be gone. The silence that followed was jarring, only punctuated by the sounds of the children playing. But as Kamina and Shmuel turned to look at the little ones, a realization settled over them.
The children were gone. The sounds of their laughter, the sight of them playing, the very memory of their presence–it all vanished, as if it had never been there at all. The pristine hallway was now utterly empty, silent and hollow.
The two fixers stood in the sterile silence of the hallway, their bodies screaming with a phantom exhaustion that was now a mere echo in the face of their full recovery. The children, the sound, the ephemeral quality of the whole scene had left Kamina's mind reeling and his temper a ticking bomb.
"If what we are seeing are the past, then..." Kamina began, his voice laced with a confusion he rarely displayed.
"Yes. It happened, and our actions here change nothing because this is the past," Shmuel finished, his tone flat, pragmatic. His eyes, however, held a flicker of something close to pain. "It's just how the City is. Cruel. Heartless. It will always find a way to eat its own."
The words were a bitter pill, a poison to Kamina's core philosophy. He raised a fist, not at Shmuel, but at the injustice of it all. He slammed his hand into the pristine wall with a bone-shattering CRACK. The wall, impossibly, did not crack, but gave way with the resistance of cheap styrofoam. It crumbled, revealing a hidden space within the wall where a shower of golden coins cascaded down from the ceiling, clattering like rain. A trail of them led, impossibly, toward a door with a polished brass plaque.
Orphanage Director's Office
Shmuel, his heart hammering in his chest, reached out and pushed the door open. The sight within was a sickening confirmation of their worst fears. The room was large, a more opulent version of the hallway they had just left. Cabinets lined the walls, their doors now swinging open to reveal a single, horrifying secret.
From every cabinet, from every drawer, from the director's massive, mahogany desk, a torrent of golden coins spilled out, covering the floor in a shimmering, unholy carpet. The shadowy figures, now revealed to be more solid than before, moved with a macabre grace, their indistinct forms filling the room. They weren't hitting children. They were methodically opening every cabinet, every desk, every container, and harvesting the contents within.
Kamina and Shmuel stood frozen in the doorway, their minds struggling to comprehend the scale of the horror before them. Kamina was the first to speak, his voice a low, guttural growl that trembled with a cold, contained rage.
"Killing all the innocent... just for... money?"
Shmuel, his face a mask of weary resignation, simply closed the door with a soft click, shutting out the horrifying scene.
"This is this," he said, his voice quiet, "and that is that."