Wretched Joy 41

Happy New Year!

-VB-

Wretched Joy

Chapter 41

-VB-

They didn’t let Missy come to the Endbringer fight. For some reason, she really wanted to, and knowing what I did, she might have been trying to prove something, but her superiors and parents (on the phone) were adamant about it. And Strider wasn’t about to risk his neck for a single Ward, no matter how powerful she was. 

After being teleported in, I looked out to see the sunlit city of Canberra. The sky was completely free of clouds. The blue sky told the average Jane and Joe that today was supposed to be a good day.

Except it wasn’t, because even now, people could see the Simurgh descending toward the city. 

Unlike Leviathan whose waves and rain covered his entry until he was right up against the shore and thus prevented the vast majority of the people from seeing it coming, the Simurgh always descended down from the sky where everyone could see it. 

That was bad manners that.

I cracked my shoulders and neck.

Someone came up to me to offer something. 

I didn’t even look at them before teleporting up. 

And up. And up. And up.

Until I was no more than a hundred meters from where the Simurgh. 

She didn’t realize I was here still. I grinned. The Anti-Thinker Necklace (one that Missy had noticed immediately) worked. 

Which meant that she couldn’t stop me. 

“Won’t you join me in darkness?” I cooed as I allowed the Sickles to exert themselves again. 

Almost instantly, a thin black ring formed around us, creating an area closer to the size of a city block.

And then expanded into walls of a ball that engulfed both of us. 

---

Legend looked up from where he had been hovering above the volunteers. 

When someone teleported up, he had been ready to stop them, but the speed of teleportation had been faster than he was able to think outside his light form.

And when he recognized who it was. 

“Joe…!” 

Then it appeared. 

An empty black-lined circle that encompassed both the Simurgh and Joe and so much more around them. It had to be half a mile in radius. 

And then featureless black walls emerged from that thin black circle from both ends, each tidaling over one half of a sphere. 

When the black walls enclosed it all in a sphere, a heavy and deep rumble erupted out. The sound wasn’t so much a physical wave as it was a deeper mental one. 

The sound existed and yet it didn’t. 

Legend hung in the air along with other flyers. 

Alexandria and Eidolon flew over to his side. 

“What now?” Eidolon asked with a grunt. 

“I don’t know.”

Now, a black moon hung over Canberra.

But more importantly, no one was hearing the Scream. 

---

… She couldn’t see anything. 

Her postcognition and precognition returned nothing for her to process. 

Whatever had caught her in its grips wasn’t doing anything, however. 

She was simply floating in space. In fact, she wasn’t even fighting against gravity anymore. She was simply floating with no external force working against her. 

Except perhaps the temperature. 

The temperature of her current surrounding - which she could not see - remained a constant warm temperature for the local host species. 

“Simurgh” as the local host species called her slowly turned herself around this way and that. 

Nothing was restraining her. Curious. 

Since she could not use her precognition and postcognition, she reached out with her telekinesis. The shard simulating telekinesis streamed its data to her and … it found nothing. She kept reaching and kept finding nothing. 

The temperature remained constant. 

She flapped her wings. 

The temperature remained constant.

She froze. 

The temperature remained constant. It shouldn’t be constant. In nature, there was no such thing as a constant; such a thing was merely from the perspective of host species whose senses could not tell anything apart except in macro. For her and other engines who had continent-spanning shards, she could detect every change, even the small miniscule percentage of molecules that possessed higher energy. 

Temperature could not be constant. 

Yet her sensors were telling her that the temperature around her was constant. Unchanging. Unending. 

She clapped. 

For a split second, the “air” around her spiked in temperature from the speed of her hands clapping. 

And then the energy in those heated molecules dissipated back to the constant temperature. 

Where was she? 

“Hi.”

She heard the sound but didn’t know where he was. She couldn’t see him still. 

“Who are you?” she vibrated the air in front of her mouth. 

“Everyday Joe.”

Everyday Joe? That was the name of the possible-host who …

Who she had lost track earlier this week.

She had thought that he had died. 

Apparently, this was not the case. 

“Where is this? How does the temperature remain constant?”

“... I don’t need to answer that,” he replied blankly. His words carried no emotion. “But I will tell you what this is. This is a prison. It is an isolated pocket dimension filled to the brim with … emotions, let’s say. But you are a machine and can’t feel the emotions. So until the day I make something that can kill you, I’ll be keeping you here. Away from Earth. Away from humanity. Away from everything that you can hurt.”

No… no, she will not be imprisoned. Not when [Thinker] was finally dead.

“I am not killing because I desire your deaths.”

“Oh, I know. High Priest, right?”

Her processors stuttered. How did this host know the name of [Thinker]’s (Crown)? 

“Don’t worry. I’ll remove that pesky shard from Eidolon soon enough.”

She still couldn’t pinpoint where the voice was coming from. The air vibrated as if he was in front of her, but she knew he wasn’t! She’d been swiping the air in front of her for a few minutes now! 

“No. Let me go. I have not harmed you.”

“... No. You’ll be here until the day I kill you.”

And then it was gone, leaving her alone in this lightless and lukewarm nothingness.