Cracked Codex II

  AERIX

  “Remember it’s very dry in there and they said to be cautious of the Realm Wiper that lives here, as well as shadlings, needlers and snatchers. Temperatures can get extremely hot, too, so it’s best we move quickly, yeah?”

  “Sure.”

  “Geez, mate, don’t sound so excited.” She turned the handle on the door and pushed with a considerable amount of force until it swung open unexpectedly.

  Quartz held out a hand, expectant. “I’ve had lot’s more mechanical ideas thanks to you, I’ve got something to show for it too. Hand me the glowing stone you had a moment ago."

  I obliged her request, and she slid the stone into a socket on her watch and numerous concealed LEDs that I had not noticed before lit up one by one along her backpack and wristband. The light that spilled out perfectly drank up the darkness around us, a white gleam teemed the edges of Quartz's clothes. "There we are," She huffed triumphantly. “You aren’t only good for chatting about history and experiments, you know.”

  "Is the light really necessary?"

  "No, but I like to show off a bit." She tossed her hair back emphatically.

  Quartz stepped into the room, cramped with pipes and machinery, it was a poor substitute for Index 2 and far less appealing. Pipes dripped and spewed steam; machinery rumbled and whirred with the sounds of an overly full laundromat. I took a tentative step onto the dry, cracked floors; dusted rust piled under old husks of furnaces. Wires hung along the ceiling, sparking occasionally and upsetting the particles that otherwise sat dormant along the edges of the floor.

  We made our way through the boiler room with our personal bubble of brightness, occasionally dragging the light on some decrepit contraption that was coughing out their lasts fumes in a squeak of steam. Periodically, clumps of swirling black orbs could be found in the darker crevices of some of the rooms. Quarts pointed to a group scuttling over cracked, moldy tiles. “Voids. Read about them in the archives. They eat away at matter slowly.”

  “I don’t think they could tear through my skin, the only thing I know to damage it is concentrated blunt force, razor-sharp blades, or explosions,” I surmised.

  “You have fun finding out.”

  “How about: No.”

  Quartz considered this a moment before walking past the group of voids and deeper into the boiler room, where she began more closely inspecting the machinery. I squatted down next to her as she ripped pieces of metal apart with her discs, I then took the cuts of steel and iron, and began condensing them in my hands. In the silence that follows I find my gaze magnetized to Quartz’s eyes, which were distant and cloudy, despite her dismantling the furnace in a precise and efficient manner.

  “Quartz?” I snapped my fingers in her face.

  It took a minute for her to get out of her headspace and acknowledge reality, but eventually she noticed I was there. She set down her discs and rested her hands on her lap, the frigidity in the air lessened significantly.

  “You know I still have dreams about her,” She put out abruptly.

  “About your girlfriend?”

  Quartz seemed to weigh a sarcastic response and decide against it.

  “Yeah, I relive that day in my head; mind you it’s not out of an irrational guilt or me thinking I could have changed the outcome. I just can’t seem to let go of the past, it grows with me and weighs me down.”

  “No one’s making you let go; in the end you get to choose what parts you want to keep. What was her name, I didn’t forget it did I?”

  Quartz laughed with little effort at that. “No, I just hadn’t told you yet. Her name is… was… was Lacy.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Beautifully awful. She was the kind of person that everyone loved and hated, because while she was very kind, she was good at everything she did; so naturally people treated her poorly out of envy. I, myself, was also jealous of her, but out of everything the most I felt for her was admiration and respect for that relentless ambition she had. She was what sped up my heart long before I could quicken my own time.”

  Nika’s eyes sparkled with sorrow and pride, a duality in the same way people had seen Lacy before she was buried under tons of debris.

  Quartz jerked back on a piece of metal; it peeled away with a shriek in an unpleasant zigzag. “Just gotta push through, innit.” She raised her fists.

  “Might wanna stand back this one.” She focused her power on the furnace. It chugged on hollowly despite having significant damage to its outer shell. I raised a quick concrete blast shield in front of myself, and Nika threw her hands outward like a conductor on the last note of a song. Quartz scooted behind my stone wall as the furnace began to rumble and shake violently, clanging against the ground or nearby pipes.

  “What did you do?” I asked skeptically.

  “Big kaboom.”

  “Oh, you’re jo-”

  A blink of orange and yellow flashed at the ends of my vision; smoke gathered around us, dampening the lights on Quartz’s backpack. The air turned rough and scratchy, especially for me, being several feet taller than Quartz. The noise of the explosion turned to a high pitch whisper as the echo travelled through the halls. Shreds of metal scattered across the floor; a ring of scorch marks interrupted by the mound of concrete that spared us the damage of the blast.

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  “Bloody hell.”

  “Yeah, that’s what happens when you do dumb shit. Grab what you need because most likely were going to be well within the range of any demoryns that may have heard it.”

  “I think it’s a bit late for that.” Quartz motioned to listen, making me acutely aware of the panting in the depths of the room. shadlings. And a lot of them too.

  Something then flickered in the corner of my eye: fluttering wings. I was a fan of ghosts and cryptids and things of the sort, however, given the circumstances I don’t think there was room for me to appreciate the anomalous life here. And this needler was the size of a large dog, with the quick, instant movement of a normal needler.

  “Getting real sick of this ‘Let’s gang on the weirdos.’ It’s sort of shit.”

  Quartz hoisted a disk and struck before the needler could, the edge of the disk clipped the needler’s exoskeleton and arced back to her hand, she look at me helplessly. “Yeah, that’s a needler.”

  I grabbed Quartz’s hand and dragged her into one of the corridors, she sweeps her hand in a wide arc and several boilers rupture at her command, hopefully slowing our pursuers. I see a glob of some substance I’ve never seen before dart towards me, I spin out of its path, releasing my grip on Quartz. Some of the goo splashes on my arm, sending a spasm through my nerves, the smell of burning settles in my nose. “Ahh!”

  “What is it? What’s happened?” Quartz looks down at the minty green liquid seeping into my arm. “Oh, acid’s what happened.”

  “We need to go! We can deal with- Agh!”

  “Mate, you’re not gonna last one second, you’ll bleed out if you don’t get help,” Quartz leveled with me calmly.

  “So, let’s go then!”

  “I’m going to try something a little odd, best-case scenario: Your arm won’t rip off.” She held out the disk from her left side, holding it towards me like… actually I wasn’t sure what it was like, people don’t really own objects that have need to articulate your hands in the way Quartz was now; her middle finger was slotted in the small hole in the center of it, with her other fingers pressed against the back of it.

  I was acutely aware of the smallest details around me, loopy from the pain, I started losing sight of what was important. Quartz grabbed my arm for some reason, I pulled away sluggishly; she smacked me in the shoulder and said something to me, drawing out a giggle. She turned her hand, and I felt my arm almost locked in place for a moment, until The Echo of Time mumbled something I couldn’t quite pick up on and my arm could move freely, but the acid was burning much slower than it had been.

  “What did you do?” I said, trying to keep from slurring from lightheadedness.

  “I slowed down time but only around your arm, but because the flow of time is different throughout the rest of your body, if you moved too quickly your arm would have come clean off.” Quartz gave me a detailed explanation about her time fields and how if the difference in flow is too drastic the edges of them act like a blade. She had once stopped a car from crashing into her, by rending it with slower time.

  “Why can I move my arm now then,” I said hurriedly as we continued moving through the hall, needlers and shadlings still in pursuit.

  “I anchored the field to your arm, usually the fields stay independent of physical matter, because they operate on a separate plane of existence. Your arm is aging at a slower rate now though, almost like tanning with clothes on, but at least the acid will melt through your flesh a lot slower. For now, I wouldn’t-” Quartz sliced downward with her disk as a shadling barreled out of one of the doors in the hallway, removing its head and several liters of blood; we ran past its toppling corpse. “-recommend using that arm to manipulate your concepts, it will work at a much more delayed speed.”

  “This way!” I swung Quartz around a corner in an intersection of the hallway. just as a needler spat more acid at us.

  “Watch who you’re throwing around, bruv,” Quartz protested.

  I ignored her. “Turn off your lights, the needlers are drawn to it.”

  While Quartz fiddled with her watch, I snatched a chunk of obsidian from my bag, tossed it on the ground, and brought my foot down on it. It spread outward and grew along the walls, coalescing in on itself, starting to form a barrier. I raised my right hand to try and hasten the process, my left arm throbbed limply at my side.

  “Since when does obsidian grow like crystals?” Quartz asked me, stupefied.

  “Since when does time bend to the will of mortals?” I retorted.

  “Touché.” Quartz watched uneasily as the obsidian spread at a tantalizingly slow pace.

  “That’s not gonna work.” She unslung her railgun and hopped into the center of the intersection. She held up her disk toward the barrier and cranked it forward while simultaneously firing bursts of rounds into the oncoming hoard. The obsidian began to crawl more quickly, slowly covering Nika from my vision. “You owe me a drink after this.”

  “No, stop being stupid and get back over here,” I implored.

  “Aerix, I’m not sacrificing myself; they’d never be able to catch me, anyway. I’ll see you in a short while.” The obsidian barrier closed off, separating me entirely from Nika.

  “Let’s go, you mingers, I’m gonna rock your shit!” One last muffled sentence before the sound of abnormally fast footsteps recedes down the hall on the other side of the barrier.

  She drinks? I thought belatedly.

  A small sigh escapes my body, I lean against the wall to steady myself, sure I’m close to losing consciousness, the acid was interfering with my nerves. I don’t have high pain tolerance, my lack of concern usually is just misconstrued that way because of my hardened skin. I’m aware of the damage but it doesn’t trigger any pain that isn’t severe, because of the nature of my physiology.

  The pain now was bad, though. There were occasional throbs at intervals that lasted longer than they should have. The manipulated time must have lengthened each pulse of pain, so while it was preserving the integrity of my arm, it burned for much longer. I needed to find somewhere to rest.

  I set my sights on a custodial closet across the hallway and made my way to it. I was about halfway there, then a rumble rocked the boiler room; I watched chips of obsidian tumble down the temporary wall alongside dust and other miscellaneous particles. I hurried my hobbling to the closet, only slowing to glance at the cracks spreading in the surface of my glossy barrier. When I reached the door, I practically had to drag myself inside, for the weakness in my legs greatly altered my mobility. I was sweating profusely, and my breathing was ragged and short.

  The damage done to my nervous system was taking a toll on the entirety of my body. If something came for me, there would be no chance of self-defense. I brought out a chunk of bedrock, a rarity in my reserves, and placed this against the door. It spread similarly to the obsidian and pooled around the door like icing on a cake. I don’t sit down until I’m confident the door is secure.

  The closet was a small space with shelves of oils and bleach, and the lighting was adequate at best. It was not the most comfortable place to stay, but Nika and I had left our Gatekeepers with the computer.

  I cleared out one of the bottom shelves and tucked myself into the space; I curled my knees to my chest and closed my eyes. Before I knew it, pain and fatigue brought me to a temporary escape from the ever-demanding reality of my life. My dreams were not much to remark on this time, just glimpses of what was to come, most of which I had expected anyway.

  But there was one that never in my life had I expected, partially because I never thought about it, since it had almost nothing to do with me. But I also would not have expected it, had I ever even chosen to think about it. There were only three images that stood out to me.

  Long blue hair.

  Short silver blade.

  Torn white fabric with raspberry red bloodstains.