(GORE)
Trudging through the blazing remains of the city, a dark figure gazed out into space before him, seeming oblivious to the flames surrounding him. All around him, debris crashed down into the ashes with a deafening noise, resounding around the ruins. His coat billowed around him in the heat of the fire, which, as if following him as his servant, blazed up everywhere he came. Everywhere his foot fell, the ground smoldered in his footsteps.
Trudging through the blazing remains of the city, a dark figure gazed out into space before him, seeming oblivious to the flames surrounding him. All around him, debris crashed down into the ashes with a deafening noise, resounding around the ruins. His coat billowed around him in the heat of the fire, which, as if following him as his servant, blazed up everywhere he came. Everywhere his foot fell, the ground smoldered in his footsteps.
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In his wake, the ground was covered with corpses, and before him ran the living, trying to find their way through the labyrinth of debris before time ran out. They ran through the inferno as above, pillars of smoke surged into the sky, like titans glaring upon them.
All around them, flames licked through the windows, groping for their victims as they passed by. Almost crushing each other in their flight, many ran through the fire, fearing their pursuer far more than their agony. Pushing and shoving in their rush to escape, they transmitted the fire among the crowd, and the screams among them rose.
At last one of them collapsed, the flames dancing on her back the ritual of her death. Her limbs still flailed on as she tried to crawl through her own ashes. Then she heard the footsteps behind her, and her screaming redoubled as she craned her neck back. He was stripped bare of his skin, a grimace flitting over his raw flesh. Then, as he waved his arm, the fire died down, leaving its victim wheezing in pain.
The Demon once more raised his arm, and the girl's burnt body began to float, flakes of burnt clothing still falling of her charred body. With the little strength left in her, she'd have tried to struggle free, but her limbs just hung limply beneath her. Unable to escape his grasp, she began to whimper. Amid her pain, what was even more unbearable was her fear of the pain yet to come. She tried not to think of what this madman was thinking of doing with her, knowing that it was worse than anything anyone sane could think of.
"Now, you’ll feel what it’s like to be me." The voice was more terrifying than the roaring of the fire. It seemed to turn all sound into something evil by virtue of being its kin. As the poison spilled from the Demon's voice, the whole of existence became hell itself.
At a whisk of the Demon’s hand, a building fell down to block the street before the crowd with rubble. They were soon climbing each other trying to reach across, and screams rose from those crushed underneath. Some ran into the burning houses. The Demon deliberately walked closer, stopping only meters before the crowd to watch them fall off each other. He began to emit the laughter of madmen that is also a sob.
He brought his right hand to his shoulder and pounced, launching the girl’s body into the crowd with such force that it burst its entrails over the crowd. As shrieks rose from the crowd, the Demon swung his hands through the air, and with each motion their bodies were sliced into pieces until only a twitching mass of body parts was left.
A grim smile passed over his face as he watched those that were left and waited for them to climb from beneath the gore. As they came out, he tugged the air and they fell to their knees as their bowels were sucked out of their abdomen. He savored every drip of red he saw spilled, and when he saw his work done here, he soared up to watch over the inferno, searching for anyone else still alive. His lidless eyes glinted in the light of the fire.
“Where are you?”
"Where are you!" he shouted into the night, and with each echo that returned to him he clenched his teeth harder. His flesh began to steam. He clenched his fists over his face and pushed his thumbs into his eyes. As he bent over backwards he let out a long scream, and the buildings around him came crashing down. His flesh kept on steaming until he was out of breath screaming, and then it began to heal again.
He had to find more. He flew to the highest tower to watch over the city, but nothing moved in the streets anymore. Before long he went into catatonia, and knew that if there was anyone left to kill him, right now he would not try to stop them.
It didn’t matter. He felt fulfilled. “This is the happiest day of my life,” he thought to himself, and the best joke was that it was true. He’d vomited out what was left of his sanity, that the thing would leave him in peace at last. For a long time, he stood there to look at what he’d done, yet he became aware that something was still disturbing him, though nothing in the city was left alive… except himself.
Above the city, the clouds of smoke drifted by, and the sky cleared into the brightest starscape he’d ever seen on the colony. The stars were altogether unchanged by all he’d done or would ever do, seeming to trivialize it in a way that only made it all the more meaningless that all this suffering happened. What use to end this world if there were an infinity of others? If he’d die, his body would just return to that infinity, as it ever had.
Curse you, universe. At least I’ll spare myself the sight of the universe, and the universe the sight of this world. Remaining suspended in the air, the last buildings collapsed beneath him, and all around him the city turned into a cloud of dust, sweeping outwards to the horizons. Faults appeared across the earth, and as they swallowed up the city, ash began to spew from its depths.
All around them, flames licked through the windows, groping for their victims as they passed by; fire was flowing from the doors like lava, ready to seize its prey. Nigh crushing one another in their flight, the throng surged on through the streets. Failing to avoid the fire, many ran straight through it, and even when they caught fire ran on, fearing their pursuer far more than their agony. Pushing and shoving in their rush to escape, they transmitted the fire among the crowd, and the screams among them rose.
At last, still jostling their way through the crush, one of them collapsed. Her limbs were still flailing in quivering motions as she tried to escape, crawling helplessly along the ashes as her body was still swathed in flames, dancing atop her back the ritual of her death.
Then, as she held a trembling arm before her as she tried to crawl on with her burning body, she heard the footsteps of the creature behind her come near. Her screaming doubled in volume as she craned her head back and saw how he'd halted behind her. One look at that shape was enough to fill her with the deepest dread. A grimace flitted over his lips as he stared grimly at the flames consuming her flesh. Then, as he waved his arm, the fire died down, leaving its victim in its excruciation. As her body was still smoldering with a hissing smoke, she groaned in pain with a weak wheeze.
The Demon once more raised his arm, and the girl's burnt body began to float, flakes still falling of her charred clothes. With the little strength left in her, she'd have tried to struggle free, but her legs just hung limply beneath her, one of them burnt to the bone. Unable to escape his invisible grasp, she began to whimper. Amid her pain, what was even more unbearable was her fear of the pain that was yet to come. She tried not to think of all the horrendous things this madman could do to her, but she knew that now her fate was in his hands, whatever it would hold would be far worse than she could even begin to imagine.
As the crowd kept on screaming, the Demon slowly stepped on with his prey held out floating before him. Inside, she was screaming for her death to be quick now - but she knew that it would not be. Instead, as she waited for her coup de grace, the seconds of agony went on and on and on. Oh, to leave this dying world of horrors now once and for all - but she was kept in with her pain, like in an iron maiden.
"Now," she heard a dark voice whisper in her burnt ear, "you've got to know just a fraction of what it's like to be me. And so the others will soon enough." The voice so dripped with hatred that it doubled the girl's dread. It seemed to turn sound itself into something monstrous; setting every sound she'd ever heard afire with darkness - from the chirping of a bird to the pattering of a brook, it all seemed to laud hell and devil. In this momentary impression her agony transmuted into something universal. As this poison spilled from the Demon's voice, it felt as if the whole of existence was enveloped in a vault of darkness, the vault of hell.
Then, the Demon once more raised his arm, and the girl's burnt body began to float, flakes still falling of her charred clothes. With the little strength left in her, she'd have tried to struggle free, but her legs just hung limply beneath her, one of them burnt to the bone. Unable to escape his invisible grasp, she began to whimper. Amid her pain, what was even more unbearable was her fear of the pain that was yet to come. She tried not to think of all the horrendous things this madman could do to her, but she knew that now her fate was in his hands, whatever it would hold would be far worse than she could even begin to imagine.
As the crowd kept on screaming, the Demon slowly stepped on with his prey held out floating before him. Inside, she was screaming for her death to be quick now - but she knew that it would not be. Instead, as she waited for her coup de grace, the seconds of agony went on and on and on. Oh, to leave this dying world of horrors now once and for all - but she was kept in with her pain, like in an iron maiden.
"Now," she heard a dark voice whisper in her burnt ear, "you've got to know just a fraction of what it's like to be me. And so the others will soon enough." The voice so dripped with hatred that it doubled the girl's dread. It seemed to turn sound itself into something monstrous; setting every sound she'd ever heard afire with darkness - from the chirping of a bird to the pattering of a brook, it all seemed to laud hell and devil. In this momentary impression her agony transmuted into something universal. As this poison spilled from the Demon's voice, it felt as if the whole of existence was enveloped in a vault of darkness, the vault of hell.
She could not keep herself from craning her neck at the Demon, and her terror redoubled as she saw his face, flayed and bloody, his eyes like volcanoes of malice. From the corner of the one eye which wasn't burnt, she saw how he ominously raised an arm again, and she gasped and held her breath as she waited for what would come next.
Further down the street, as the crowd was still trying to find its way through the sea of flames, from the air before them at once materialized a high black wall spanning across the street. A chorus of screams of despair rose from the throng as they pushed against it and crushed one another against it as they tried to find a way through. Some ran into the burning houses, where they were posthaste consumed by the fire, but most remained where they were, scrambling across each other and squashing each other beneath in confusion like a nest of ants. Here and there, one of them caught fire, and still they pressed on, burning everyone they hit and carrying it over to them. The Demon relentlessly came closer amid the arrays of corpses on the street, smiling grimly as he looked over the bedlam.
Just a few meters before them, he halted, and as the crowd's shrieks grew louder, he began to cackle with laughter in hysteria with arms akimbo - the sick mixture of laughter and weeping of a madman.
He brought his right arm behind his shoulder, and the girl's body came behind as he took a throwing posture. She erupted in weeping as she hung there in midair, floating with her dead leg just above his outstretched hand as she helplessly awaited her fate. Then, swinging his hand forward he tossed her at the crowd with such great force that an instant later her body had exploded against the screeching crowd, along with those she impacted upon. Limbs, viscera, and blood - all sprang up and rained down upon them all.
Those who'd avoided her had broken their chest, neck or limbs, and with their crippled bodies they dispersed in mayhem. But soon enough, the Demon lunged towards them, and with invisible knives which seemed to fly through the air cut them to pieces as they fled. Before they'd run twenty feet far, most had perished a quick death.
A grim smile passed over his face as he watched at those that were left with a kind of twisted hunger, ever lusting after more death, more destruction. He tugged as if at an invisible string, and then at one they one after the other stopped and collapsed to their knees as their blood burst from their abdomen as it was sucked outwards. He savored every drip of red he saw spilled as he finished the last of then - and when he saw his work done here, he took off and soared up once more to oversee the black ruins all around; searching, hunting for more. In his eyes glinted the insanity of an endless and objectless hatred.
But above the smoldering ruins of the city, the hunt went on. Prowling for victims from in the sky, waiting for anyone fool enough to show just a glimpse of himself before he'd tear them to bits in boundless fury, he flitted through the air. Breathing hard in frenzy, he darted his look around through the streets, hungering for more death and destruction.
Where are you?
"WHERE ARE YOU!" he shouted, it resounded around the emptiness of the dead-silent ruined city, burning and smoldering everywhere he looked. He panted as the echoes of his scream returned to him. He had to kill. Every moment without seeing blood was one of agony. Where - where - where?
He let out another scream, and as he punched in the air around him what was left of the few towers still standing promptly collapsed at his command, crashing down the burning houses at the other side of the street. He reveled in the destruction as he saw the explosion of thick dust.
…
"Sylvan, what the hell are you doing?" he was asking himself as he was rummaging through his drawers, shoving through wads of papers and littering his room with them. Eventually he also started shoving the drawers themselves from the chest, but the item he was searching failed to show up.
Where the hell had he lain the thing? It was so long ago he'd hidden it. Much as he tried he could not remember where it could be, and ransacking his own house hadn't helped much.
He looked around at the disarray his room was in. Breathing hard, he cursed through his teeth and tumbled a bookshelf, more out of frustrating than to find what he was seeking.
Standing in the middle of his room, he breathed hard and tried to remember, but every second he was losing was racking his nerves. And yet, it was already too late - it had already happened. The noise had died out hours ago, and all that time he'd been lurking here in his room, which for some reason had been spared by the flames.
That didn't seem coincidence, for when he watched through his window he was pretty sure every other house in the city had been burnt down. And yet, when the flames reached his doorstep, they suddenly stopped, in a perfect half circle around his house. He hid here from the fire for hours, but it seemed like days.
Now, he couldn't bear to wait for a second longer. And he certainly couldn't bear to remain this vulnerable.
Where was it? Where had he lain it?
He'd been just a child. He'd found it in the aftermath of a riot, between the corpses of the rebels. He passed the street where the drama had taken place on his way back home, ignorant of what had happened. The stench of burning flesh and the gazing faces of the bodies frightened him for some reason he did not fully understand, but he was far too young to understand what had happened here. He'd thought they were tramps sleeping here, and only when he saw the red paint on their clothes did he have the feeling that something was wrong. What had been the meaning of those cries and bangs only a few minutes ago, which echoed through the streets all the way to here?
He felt scared, and continued to scrabble over the bodies, but tripped over the arm of one of the soldiers and fell. Close to where he'd nigh fallen, he saw a strange object. As he got up, he grabbed it in curiosity and glanced at it. But just then, he heard one of the officers in the distance shout at him. After what had just happened here, the officers were skittish, and weren't it for his small stature, he'd surely have been shot. But when they saw he was a child, one of them just shouted "Get away from here!"
He scrambled to his feet and ran home. To his relief, his mother wasn't there. The vixen would probably find fault with him coming home with this thing, even more so considering where he got it from.
He looked around, and when he saw the coast was clear, he fished the item from his pocket and observed it. It looked a bit like a fancy iron pipe, but it had only one opening. As he looked into it, he continued to fiddle with it, unwary of any danger. Then at once it went off and made a loud bang, and the bullet whizzed past his ear. At first, he didn't understand what had happened, but then he turned around and saw the hole in the wall. Seeing what he'd done, he panicked. Knowing that when his mother would come home, she'd surely ask about it, he sought some place to hide it as quickly as possible.
When he later learned what it was and what it was for, he felt a pang of fear every time he thought of it. If his mother would find out about it, she'd be sure to let him find out what it was for first hand. As a result, he hadn't touched it for two decades, ever since he'd concealed it. He did his best to forget about it, and so it had lain there all that time in…
Sylvan started . Of course! He thought hard for another second, then looked around at the floor. Just beneath his feet, there was a loose tile. Right under my very nose.
He scrabbled at the tile and with some difficulty lifted it. And there it was, lying half-buried in the dust underneath: one of the first nanopistols in modern history, it shot blobs of nanorobots through a coil gun, which were themselves magnetically charged. The nanorobots were shot in fluid form, but they hardened as they were fired. Because of their computers, just before their impact they could reform to a molecularly sharp shell, and just upon their impact reform to a molecularly sharp disc. The former transformation allowed optimal axial penetration of the flesh (perpendicular to the skin), while the latter allowed transversal penetration of the flesh (parallel to the skin), so that insertion was easier and extraction was impossible. Worse still, the nanorobots then spread over the entire body, wreaking havoc in every cell, and only if the body already had nanorobots of its own could it be saved.
Sylvan felt it in his hands. Since he'd found the nanopistol as a child, he'd never carried a gun again… And now, he was so mad to try to use it to kill a mass murderer, who had destroyed an entire city with his own hands - or, rather, with his nanorobots' hands. As his rage made place for fear, he started to feel intimidated by this crazy idea, but he wouldn't let fear take hold of him and, trying not to think about what he was doing, he clenched his fist and tramped towards the door.
Yet as he stepped into the ashes which layered the streets and were still raining down from the grey sky like snow, he couldn't help but ask himself: "What the hell are you doing?" Yet as he went out and looked upon the smoldering ruins of his home city, his fear turned into rage. "What I'm doing? Simple," he answered himself, "I'm going to kill my brother."
Yes, his brother. Or, rather, his half-brother. When she caught him in bed with a stranger, her insane love for their father, which had survived in the face of all his vulgarities, had finally turned into hate. Sylvan himself had been the victim of that hatred all his life, for he, as his father's child, was a last memento she got from him and could not throw away - at least, most of the time she couldn't, though once, when he was just seven, she'd thrown him out and didn't allow him in for a whole night. He'd waited for hours in the snow, but when she still didn't open by midnight he eventually stayed with a friend.
Without the knowing of his mother, he'd sometimes visited his father, more because he was less nasty than his mother than because he liked him. Indeed, he later came to bear a strong loathing for him, and his brother was little better off in this regard: he'd hated him all his life. He was petulant pretty much every time he saw him, and despite his arrogance Sylvan saw him as weak. In his tantrums he'd often burst out in tears, especially when he was young.
And yet, it was this "weakling" who had now destroyed an entire city in just a few hours. Who could have known he could do such a thing? Sure, Cervolas had always seemed weird to him, but this… this was insanity of the clearest water. He could have known the guy had gone mad. He'd almost never seen him over the past years, but once, a couple of months ago, he'd been so lonely that in his desperation he actually sought Sylvan's company. When Sylvan rebuffed him, he had a fit of anger and smashed everything in sight to bits. He'd never seen him like that before. When he stopped, he was shaking, and literally foamed at the mouth. As he plundered his room and Sylvan stood nailed to the floor, and by the time he had even thought of doing something he was done destroying everything in sight. All of a sudden his normally lackluster appearance became so frightening that it was as if the devil himself had come to his home, and the words he spoke only added to this impression. In his outpourings he gibbered about the whole world just being a giant virtual torture chamber simulated for the particular use of tormenting him.
As he trudged through the streets of what had once been the most beautiful city in the world, he reminisced about how these very streets had looked yesterday, and every year in June - it was in stark contrast with how it looked now. It was as if hell had moved to the heaven Kendila had been just yesterday. Where had once been flowers, there was now ashes, and the deep blue sky was now ashen gray.
Looking around at what the city had become, he slowed his tread and eventually stood still in horror. He looked up at the buildings which towered above him, but soon felt a mote of ash fall in his eyes, bowing down and putting a finger in his eye. He cursed and coughed violently, and found that as he wheezed for air, puffs of ash came from his mouth. Before he went on, he tied a kerchief around his face.
Holding a hand before his eyes, he looked up again. And as his gaze became fixed on one of the blackened towers, he felt how his brother was out there somewhere, watching him. He felt nervous, and looked around at every window and every building he could see. All of them were apparently empty now, and at most there were some bodies in them… and yet in one of them, his brother had to be there. How could he possibly find him? What had he been thinking? To find his brother still at home?
Though he couldn't see him, he couldn't help feeling like his brother was seeing him. Then at once, he was proven right, when he heard a voice boom out. The sinister laughter seemed to come from everywhere, and yet nowhere in particular. And no matter where he looked, his brother was nowhere to be seen.
When the laughter died down, he waited for a few seconds, but all remained dead quiet. Sylvan breathed hard, coughed and wiped the sweat from his brow, which had mixed with ash to form a blackish slick. Perhaps he'd been dreaming, he thought, feeling how the stress was draining him. But then, as he watched at the tower he had just been watching, at its top he saw a bright flash of light. The eerie light seemed to beckon him, like a lighthouse - a beacon.
For a couple of minutes he remained unsure what to do. "All right," he whispered to himself. "If you want to play games, I'll play along." He knew very well that he could be tricking him, leading him to a random other building. But he had no other choice, for he hadn't the slightest idea where to look.
The tower was down the hill he was standing on, and from this vantage point he could overview the entire city - what was left of it. Before him stretched a ghostly panorama: everything was overcast with the dark grey of ash. Everything was covered with it, filled with it, saturated with it. And everywhere lay the wreckages of cars and aircrafts, still burning and smoking. Some of them were stuck into the facades of houses. Aside from the whistling winds of ash and the soft crackling of fire, not a sound was to be heard.
As he walked down the path into the lower urban areas, a thick black mist began to cloud his vision of the towers above. Only this morning, they'd shown against a clear blue sky; now, they were vague black shapes rising from a murk of ash.
The air became hard to breathe, and Sylvan's breath started to shudder. "You're insane," he whispered to himself between two fits of coughing. "It must be hereditary." And as he said this, he suddenly felt how it had to be like to talk to oneself all day, as very lonely people sometimes do. He felt he had to break the silence somehow: it felt so oppressive to go through this hell all alone.
But then, as he stood still and stared thoughtfully at the tower from which the light had come, the silence was broken once more by the voice he'd heard earlier, seeming to echo within his head.
"It takes a bit too long for my taste, brother."
The same moment, he felt the ground vanish beneath his feet, and as he watched with a gasp he saw how the street fell deeper and deeper below him. All of a sudden, it was as if he was lifted upward on an invisible cloth. He desperately tried to struggle free, but it was too late: as he was flying off farther and farther into the sky, he saw how the whole city now lay far beneath him, and before long its buildings disappeared in the murk of ash.
He was going to drop him! As the thought occurred to him, he was still hopelessly kicking and trashing about in agony, knowing that even if he could break free from whatever bonds were holding him, he could never survive his fall. But as he continued to soar through the dark sky, he saw the tower where the flash of light had come from loom up amid the darkness ahead - and he was flying straight toward it.
Before he had time to face his fate of being smashed against the tower, he slowed down - but not before he was flung through a large opening in one of the walls. He fell headlong on the floor and felt his body scrape the floor. When his flight was braked by the wall, and he lay there groaning for minutes in a bruised heap. When he got up, he felt his forehead, and saw the blood dripping from his fingers. As it trickled beside his eyebrow, he examined the rest of his body under his torn shirt. His chest and belly were chafed, and some of his ribs felt bruised. But the worst pain came from his shoulder, where blood was streaming from an ugly deep gash. The ash which was filling the wound wasn't helping. He winced, and clutched at it in agony.
As he looked back through the opening through which he'd just made his rough landing, he once more saw the view of the city, bleak and lifeless. The towers rose from the darkness like crumbling pillars, like monuments which had survived from dark ages many millennia past. The only source of light which could be seen were the many fires still scattered through the city, and he could not see whether it was day or night.
How had this happened? It was as if the entire world had been ablaze for months. Looking at the horizon, the blackness seemed endless. It was as if it stretched into infinity, as if beyond this darkness nothing existed. With the power this madman possessed, there was nothing which ensured that there was a place on the world which had been spared from this hell. After what happened anything which was horrible seemed possible. But as this wild thought occurred to him, he tried hard not to believe in it.
As his eyes strayed to the floor in these dark reflections, in the gloom he discerned his gun. Amazing. Somehow, rather than releasing it, he'd been holding on to it throughout his maddening flight.
He picked it up, and tested it on the wall opposite the opening. When the projectile had hit the wall, he pressed a second button, and part of the nanorobots flew back into the gun. With a push on a third button, those that remained in the wall just melted it.
Why doesn't he kill me? He could have been dead ages ago if he wanted that, and it'd give him the opportunity to take out all the loathing he'd felt for him all his life at once.
When he walked into the hall, he was unsure where to go. But before he even had time to think about it, at one end of the hall he meant to see something. On the spur of the moment, he shot at it, but saw there was nothing there. For a moment the shot resounded through the building, and then all was silent again. Now he'd surely know where he was - or had he somehow been watching him all along?
He followed the hall, and it led him into a long empty chamber. At both sides, there were long glassless windows spanning across the wall from ceiling to floor, looking out onto the city's dark ruins.
Without knowing why Sylvan felt deadly nervous as he walked through the dark hall, as if he could literally bump into his brother at any moment. Just as he thought this, he heard the voice again.
"What a pleasant surprise!" This time, the voice didn't just come from nowhere - it was real, and not just generated by the nanorobots around him. As it echoed around the hall, he nervously turned around as he struggled to hear where it came from.
"I noticed movement through my utility fog - and look who's there! My own brother! Well met indeed."
Sylvan looked around, but all he saw was darkness. The smoke was so thick here, still rising from lower floors, that even in the faint light that shone through the curtains of smoke by the windows he could barely see anything.
Laughter pealed around the hall - the bitter, hateful laughter of a madman, so dark that it sounded worse than a scream. Sylvan gasped for breath in dread. "Where are you!" he shouted, but all he heard in response were the echoes of his own words.
Then, finally, he heard footfalls close by, and he aimed his gun at where he thought them to come from and shot. In the gleam of the shot, he saw the deathly face of his brother emerge from the darkness. Sylvan felt a surge of panic shoot through his body. After an instant the vision was gone, and Cervolas became invisible once more in the darkness which enveloped him. For a second Sylvan breathed hard, knowing that he could still be there in the darkness just before him.
Had he missed him? Sylvan quickly pushed a button to explode the bullet, but all that happened was that he saw a faint glow just before him, and in its brief light he saw it came from a wound in Cervolas's abdomen.
In his confusion, he rapidly fired a dozen more times, each time seeing a glimpse of the face of his brother with its zombielike look, filled with loathing and yet untroubled. It showed amid the darkness like a phantom, every time filling him with more and more fear.
"Disappointed?" he said in a low voice which quivered with hatred. A haunted expression passed over his face, somewhere in between a grin and a grimace. "Never thought my own brother would try to kill me. But there's no need to, brother: I am already dead."
Monstrous. How could he survive that? It had to be those nanorobots in his body. It seemed like nothing could harm him with those damned little things.
At once, the darkness was driven away by a flickering white light, when Cervolas became engulfed in a halo of ghastly silver. As it illumed his face, he saw how it was stripped of its skin, baring the bloody flesh underneath. And as the faint glow winked in the dark, Sylvan now saw his eyes boring straight into his with that look of black hatred, a look which seemed not to be his, but that of a demon from hell. And in those eyes he saw where all the pain he did to the world came from - it was his own. It was as if he saw all the horrors he unleashed upon the world stored in that haunted face. In that accursed soul death and turmoil had been forged by years of hatred. It so frightened him that he just stared at him, with an aghast expression of hopeless horror.
"Afraid of me, brother?"
He backed away a few steps in response, and Cervolas calmly followed him until Sylvan hit with his back against the brittle wall between two of the windows.
"You think it makes any difference if I'm a thousand feet away or next to you?" he whispered darkly. "I just wanted you to see my face one last time before you die." He grinned grimly. "Pretty, isn't it?"
Sylvan did his best to stand the grisly sight without feeling Cervolas's painful wounds on his own face. It looked so terrible that it reminded him of the anatomical drawing he'd once seen in his doctor's office.
"But I want you to see something else before you die," he said as the ghost of a grin passed over his macabre countenance. "You're going to see the face of the planet become just like mine is now."
The grin widened now, and he chuckled quietly. The low sound of his laughter carried such abomination that it was as if the universe were filled with it. And from his eyes, black as tar, radiated such hatred that it seemed something almost cosmic. Was this the same Cervolas who had once been his pathetic and sentimental brother?
He was still training his gun on him, even though he knew it could do little. "Oh come on, drop that old plaything." He didn't even think of doing any such thing, but instead only held it tighter. But the next moment he screamed, and he dropped the gun as it turned red hot in his hands. He looked at his burnt hands, and then at the gun as it was melting on the floor.
And as he smelt the stench of the steams rising from the fizzing pool of fluid metal, he realized with a shock that he could do just the same to him at this very moment if he wanted to.
He chortled, and turned away from him and towards the window, contemplating the smoking ruins. Sylvan scrambled towards the other wall, as far from Cervolas as he could get, and as he crouched by the window looked for some ledge or other - nothing. Before him stretched such vast depths that he felt a wave of vertigo.
"Don't you like what I've done to the place?" Cervolas said, as Sylvan was still staring into the deep ravines between the buildings. In his dread, he thought of jumping, so that he could be spared of whatever awaited him, but when he looked down, he drew back in fear. "Look at those towers, belching smoke like flues… look at that ash, wrapping the city like fog…" he went on. "It's not just destruction… it's art. What you see before you is just how I feel - and just how things are meant to be."
Sylvan looked back at the silhouette at the window, his outline still shining with a greyish light against the curtains of smoke rising behind the window. Perhaps this was his only chance… He got to his feet, and sneaked towards him.
"Before long, this will be what the whole world looks like."
There was no telling what tricks he had in store for him, and he held his breath in tension as he approached. If he'd seen him even at his door, he could surely see him behind his back - but was he watching? With a few more steps he leapt towards him as Cervolas kept on muttering his dark soliloquy. But even then, something inside him already seemed to tell him his attempts were hopeless, that no matter what he'd do Cervolas would remain unharmed by it.
"And you will still be around as the last survivor on earth," he went on just as he grabbed him by the shoulders, "to watch upon it before you choke!" Sylvan screamed in agony. Just as he shoved him through the window, his hands stung as if they'd been burnt, and as he looked at them, he saw how a layer of a grey fluid covered his hands and seemed to soak into them, searing the flesh on its way. It was agonizingly painful, but the greatest pain was how he saw what he saw between his opened fingers: he had failed.
Outside the window, Cervolas was floating like a specter in the smoke as it rose upward, his tooth bared under his black lips in a wide grin.
He flew a few meters from the window, his cloak billowing around him in the heat of the flames beneath. "Your turn."
Sylvan felt his body sucked out of the building as if by a whirlwind, and the next moment he found Cervolas holding him by the neck as they were spiralling upward above the city. Sylvan saw the background switch from the dark cloudscape above to the black cityscape below as he heard Cervolas's voice ringing in his ear. Sylvan was so terrified that the words seemed to come from elsewhere, a noise coming with the howling of the whirling wind.
"I wanted you to know something, and to tell the world what you know. Tell them that the world I'll give all the pain it gave me back to it. Tell them that life in this universe is going to end, and that I will be the one to put an end to it!"
As he shouted these words, Sylvan felt how he was flung head over heels through the sky. As he flew into the pitch black darkness at a blistering speed, the last thing he was aware of was the ash filling his lungs.
…
"Are the seven of us to kill the Demon? They're insane!"
"A too large group would attract his attention far to quickly, Sylvan," Lancet whispered. "Even now, chances are his nanorobots would find us before we find him. In that case…" she gulped.
Not wanting to think of what would happen in that case, Sylvan changed the subject. "So how is this weapon working anyway?" Sylvan asked, nodding at the large, bulky gun he was holding. It looked quite impressive, a very thick tube set with lights and dials, and Sylvan thought for a moment it'd belong very well in a flash sci-fi movie. But the futique look of it did little to add to Sylvan's low confidence at the moment. "I can't believe the HQ didn't even explain how it worked," he added.
"But they did!" Lancet hissed in a whisper, as if afraid of being heard. "They disarm foglets, if you recall from the briefing."
"Well, yeah. But they didn't say how they did. They refused to tell me back in the ANTI."
ANTI, the Agency for Nanotechnology Intervention, was too deal with any abuse of nanotechnology, as well as with the new threat they were now facing, known to the ANTI only under the code name "the Demon.” No one knew that he was his brother, but when he convinced them that he had confronted him, they accepted his appeal to join their first squad (when they said it was the first, as if they didn’t expect this one to make it, Sylvan swallowed). No one was supposed to know of the existence of the Demon: the witnesses had had their memories wiped. The existential danger the Demon was very real, and it was feared that if word went around, riots would break out.
"All they've said," Sylvan argued on, "is that this one button is to make the clouds of nanorobots separate and the other is to disable them."
"You mean foglets.”
“But they’re nanoscale, right?”
“Yes, but foglets are capable of flying.”
"… And of assembling to knives that could cut through your spine in a nanosecond," Mallory put in, having overheard that part of their conversation. Lancet shot him a dirty look at this, clearly not liking him discouraging the squad.
"Right. So foglets have a specific function, that's still basically the main difference."
"So," Sylvan coughed, "How is this thing" he hoisted the machine, which was quite heavy, "supposed to keep that from happening?"
"Well, as you know, it's got two ways of fighting the foglets. The first one - which makes them fall apart - fires charged particles, much like those in solar winds which can disable radio communications: same principle, but because the nanorobots are much closer to each other than, say, a spaceship to a satellite, of course we need much, much more charged particles. When they get between the foglets, they haven't a clue where the other foglets are, so that they can't assemble."
"The other one - which disables them - uses an electric discharge. It's a bit like when lightning strikes and all the VR crashes. Ever had such a thing? It's quite scary, y'know, fucking Thomas Marvel and then all of a sudden all goes dark."
His sympathy for Lancet suddenly dropped. This was exactly what he, as well, hated about society -- its decadence. Wasn't it that they shared such a grim situation here, he'd have cared enough to walk away from her.
And then he remembered what his brother had once said to him during the time he'd gone mad: "We have something in common, Sylvan. We both loathe the world as it is now.
He stared at her, and wondered if she was wallowing in the memory to forget about the danger they were in for a moment. "Bet he'll find it quite scary too, losing all his powers all of a sudden," she added, staring grimly in front of her at the foresight.
"Lancet, do you think it'll work?"
"I dunno," she said, looking over her shoulder once more. Sylvan found he couldn't help imitating her even when she looked back in front of her. Nothing. Just a dark empty street filled with dark mist, same behind them as before them. Which way should they even go? Chances are, the Demon would notice them before they’d notice him, or it. Maybe they should stop talking. The other seemed to think the same, but it only made their footsteps sound louder.
They came close to another alleyway crossing the street, and the squad routinely checked around the corners as stealthily as possibly if there wasn't "someone" in there, not sure whether they should be relieved they didn’t find him there — that’s what they were here for, after all. If they wanted not to find him, the hunter would become the hunted.
It remained silent until they came by the corner of the next street, where they were to turn right, towards the tower at the end where he'd last seen his half-brother. There was little chance that he’d still be there, but still a sense of foreboding came over Sylvan.
"Why don't we go through the alleyways?" he asked nervously.
Lancet stared at her, stunned. "Are you mad? Sylvan, have you been listening at the briefing at all?" she said, loudly.
“I'd been rather distracted, you know,” he says quietly, not daring to raise his voice anymore. “Can you imagine what it's like actually talking to a creature like that? You've never even seen him. The very sight of his eyes is like poison dripping into your mind."
"Great," she sighed. "You should have told that earlier, you idiot!"
"I was able to follow most things!" he averred, but to his dismay he wasn't too sure about that himself even when he said that.
"Right. Well, if we'd go through the alleyways, most of which are blocked by debris anyway, there could be cave-ins any moment." There was another rumbling behind them, and for a moment they all pointed their guns at where it'd come from. "See? That was another one."
"Yeah, I've noticed them now and then. That was the loudest so far, though, you're sure if-?"
"No, it wasn't him," she said, shaking her head. "So you see, most of the smaller alleys are blocked, and the rest are death traps. Besides, we can’t hide. He’s hacked the satellites. If he wants to see us, he will. He probably sees us right now, waiting for us to come closer.”
"I see," Sylvan said quietly. He stared at the tower again. "How are we to find where he is anyway?"
Lancet stared at him, alarmed. “You were supposed to guide us.”
“Only towards where he was before. He may have bouts of catatonia, but he’s not rooted to the place. But let’s hope we’ll find him when he’s catatonic, though. He’d just let us kill him without resisting.”
“The psych profile says he’ll probably stay in a place where he can overlook the city anyway, to dwell on his work. Nice fellow, that brother of yours.”
"Don't you ever call him my brother again!" Sylvan says, looking down as if to avoid tripping on the rubble. "We don't even share the same surname.”
At once all of them started when they heard a deafening noise behind them. All of them were training their anti-foglet guns at a dense brown cloud of dust which was coming from a large hole in a blank wall. For a moment they just stared, nailed to the ground and waiting in suspense for whatever would happen. They were so thunderstruck no-one did anything in those few horrible seconds.
That immediately turned out to be a mistake. All of a sudden, the dark shape of a man had appeared amid the cloud of dust. Mallory fired first, but at the same second his body was thrown back, his severed torso flying twenty feet farther than his legs. He let out a terrifying scream, and at the same time so did Andrew as his face was sprinkled with Mallory's blood. He shot a jet of electrofog at the Demon, and the others followed suit in an instant. Just as the greyish wisps of nanorobots drew near, they hit the electrofog, and fell apart. A flash of lightning followed, and the dim shine of the nanorobots faded.
The next moment the group fell apart as they all fled in panic. Sylvan, Eve, Andrew and Helk went to the left, Ockran and Fellis went right.
"Stick together!" Sylvan still cried. But it was too late. In the darkness he could just see their dark shapes turn into splattering explosions of blood and viscera.
"Run!" he said, and the other didn't need to be told that twice. Without anyone covering them, they sprinted to the nearest alley. Panting, Eve checked the nanorobot concentration on the dial of her nano-disperser as she held it in the air, ready to fire if it'd suddenly become alarmingly high.
Sylvan was more concentrated on the screen. The machine had a camera which could detect nanorobots and was currently also pointing up. He strained to see any white masses entering the screen. Sylvan shivered: if that would happen, that'd mean they'd be coming in assembled form, their most dreaded form.
Finally, they did. They'd come from above fast as greased lightning, and Sylvan pointed his gun up at once to fire, but not before Helk was falling in two beside them. He was cleanly severed from head to toe so that his body emptied all its organs, the brains falling on Eve's foot. She shrieked, and Sylvan immediately shot at the body. It turned into a roasted mass in a second. He was panting rapidly as he glanced at the screen: CLEAR, it said.
"Let's get out of here!" And they darted out of the alley. Sylvan felt the greatest pang of fear he'd ever felt rush through his veins as he saw the dark silhouette of Cervolas just a few meters away from the alley. Second button - he fired a bolt of lightning at him at once, but Cervolas parried it easily with a shield of nanorobots. The nanorobots were disabled immediately by the lightning, however, and before Cervolas knew what was happening all three of them had fired again.
The three streaks of lightning were all fired straight at him, but somehow all of them shot past him. In a flash Sylvan saw why: they were being deflected by shields of nanorobots - they all exploded in a rain of sparks as they were hit, but they just kept coming. No-one knew what would happen next, if their own anti-foglet guns or the foglets themselves would be the first to get exhausted. And then they didn't need to worry about the answer anymore: all around them the walls of the buildings had started to shake.
The all knew what this meant. In a fraction of a second Sylvan knew what to do.
"Get away from here!" he shouted, over the loud crunching noise that was already coming from the buildings. With the panic that had taken hold of them, they didn't need to be told that twice: they all sprinted away at once, and as Sylvan looked up he saw how the outer walls were already starting to fall down above them. They ran on, but now their anti-foglet guns no longer offered them protection - and then he heard it, a hiss that had nothing to do with the collapse.
Somehow he knew exactly when to do it. In a second he pushed Eve on the floor and fell upon her, and Andrew followed suit just in time as a large piece of debris the size of a boulder swished over him. With a deafening roar the buildings crashed down, and in a moment thick clouds of dust engulfed them. The noise lasted for a long time, and it had not fully subsided, neither had the dust fully settled, when they got up again.
Eve coughed savagely. "Quiet," Sylvan said. "He'll think we're dead. Maybe we can catch him by surprise."
But Eve didn't stop coughing. Sylvan gave him a nasty look. "If you can't stop making that warning signal of yours that we're still alive, take some morphine or something. I'm sure you'd have some with you even here."
"Are you mad?" she said through her coughs, but even as she said it was glancing at her pocket. "No, not yet. I have to stay alert. Maybe when I'm facing my certain death…"
"You are facing certain death, Eve," Sylvan blurted. "That's what we're here for."
"Wait - where is Andrew?"
They both faced the enormous pile of rubble at their side at the same time. When the dust was settled, they saw Andrew's head face-down half-buried in the debris.
Sylvan at once started to dig in the rubble, and Eve unwillingly copied. "Shouldn't we just leave him here? Surely he's dead?"
But Sylvan knew she could tell herself that he wasn't. And just at that moment, Andrew had opened his eyes.
"Get me out of here," he croaked. "Please."
"How curious," Eve began nastily, and stopped digging. "Weren't you always the one who prattled about self-sacrifice? 'The mission comes before all.'" Sylvan could hardly blame him. No matter how brave any of them were, on a mission like this everyone was afraid of what the Demon might do to them.
"'The lives of innocent citizens takes precedence over our own, eh?' "Well, maybe we should just leave you here, you filthy little…"
Sylvan had enough. With all the stress that was building up with him, he couldn't restrain himself any longer. He slapped her across the face. "Shut up and dig!"
"You have no idea what he did, do you, you idiot? He left my boyfriend in a burning building in a mission when he was still the leader of the team, and said he did so because he couldn't still save him. The truth was we could, but the freak wanted him dead because he wanted me!"
Sylvan made a dismissive gesture. "Water under the bridge," he said indifferently. But she kicked against Andrew's head, and he let out a scream that anyone in the neighborhood could have heard in the silence of the city.
Sylvan flung her wildly on the rubble. "Be quiet, you little vixen! You know in what danger we all are now? You want us to die just a little quicker?"
That was it. He'd vented his distress just as she had on Andrew, and he felt lighter. With no psychotic brother around to hunt at the moment, he just needed someone to take his feelings out on, even if it was someone upon whom his life could still depend.
"What does it matter anyway?" she said bitterly. "You saw what happened to Helk?"
Sylvan tried not to listen, but was busy trying to hoist Andrew from the rubble as he groaned in pain.
But just then, his body was electrocuted in their hands. They each let go in an instant as they got a violent jolt, gasping in pain. Still half buried in the rubble, Andrew turned to ash before their eyes.
"Arveil!" Sylvan cried, as he at once turned to face to the top of the mound of debris. In the darkness he could see his silhouette black against the grey sky.
"Hello, brother. Have you returned to admire my work? Look around, Sylvan, for its the last thing you'll see before you die. This is my revenge against God! If it likes how I suffer so much, let's see how it'll like what I will do to the world."
For a spell Sylvan and Eve had stood nailed to the ground, hoping that if they wouldn't flee just yet he would talk on, so that they could win time. But now at once as a large boulder flew just between them, they fled at once to the sides of the street, into a small alleyway which lay across it. They realized with a shock that now they had been separated there was no way they could still reach each other. For a few seconds they looked at each other from each side with a look of panic. Then, at once, Arveil stood between them, facing Eve.
For a second he turned to his half-brother, and with a wave of hand fired a couple of fist-sized stones from the rubble at Sylvan. Eve cried out as she saw them hit him hard in the torso and flung him back, and one of the stones hit him on one temple, where it made a wide gash across his scalp. In the dim light of the Demon's nanorobots which still took hold of the stones, she could see how it gushed blood over his face as he lay on his side in the ash.
"You first," he growled. "I want to do my brother the honor to be the last to be killed."
She turned around to flee but let out a gasp: the alleyway was narrow and went on for at least a hundred meters, far longer than she'd be able to run before he'd have sent a billion nanites straight through her body. It was up to her gun now.
In a moment she'd raised the anti-foglet gun and shot, but was surprised to find the ray of ions going only a few meters to Arveil before it disappeared in thin air. The ray exploded just in front of her. She realized the nanorobots had gotten really close, and if she'd waited for just a millisecond longer she'd have died.
But the place where the ray exploded was coming closer. It wasn't working: the nanorobots were still communicating with one another.
"Blown away by that eh?" came Arveil's raspy voice. "So are those ions of yours, it appears. Your weapons are pathetic. Did it never occur to your 'scientists' that as soon as I knew the nature of your weapons it'd be easy to find a way to make them useless? What's happening before your eyes is simple optic levitation: the ions are blown away by photons, photons from diffuse lasers from the nanorobots. There is no way you have any chance against me."
All the while he'd been talking he was drawing closer, as were his nanorobots, up to a point that she could feel the heat of her own ion cannon, and through the veil of ions between them she could see the Demon's hollow eyes flickering in their light.
She backed away, running away as fast as she could backwards. The ray was getting longer before it exploded in the air between them. It appeared she was keeping the nanorobots off, and the Demon was forced to keep at a walking pace behind them. She kept on walking, hoping that she could reach the end of the alley and then flee. She had to be quick, but she was tense at every step she took.
But then it happened. As she kept walking backwards over the rubble, she tripped. The nano-disperser flew from her grasp, for a moment still shooting a ray of electricity into the air as it arched over her. She fell hard on the debris face down, and when she looked up again she saw the shimmering cloud of nanorobots flying unhindered towards her through the alley. She glanced at her gun, which lay two feet from her, and clutched at its handle. But it was to heavy to lift with one arm, and she frantically got up to reach it.
The ghostly light of the nanorobots was nearing like the coma of a comet just before her, and she thought she was just too late when she pulled the trigger as fast as she could. There was a flash of light, and with disbelief she saw that she'd saved her life just in time.
She walked back again, this time taking care to step over the large pieces of rubble. She almost fell again over a huge chunk of masonry, and she had to fumble about it and climb over it with one hand, her other hand straining to keep up the gun and keep off the nanorobots. Adrenaline was rushing through her. She could not fall a second time.
Eve was panting. But the Demon remained motionless like a dead man, a sardonic smile playing about his colorless lips. She just went on firing, hoping to just put off her death a little longer - she could see in the Demon's face that it would be a slow, painful death.
With every step she took backwards, she came closer to the wall where the alley bent to her right, and with heavy steps in the sand the Demon came along all that time. And then at once, with a gasp she felt her back against the wall. Flakes of ancient paint rained down upon her as she hit it.
And still the nanorobots kept coming, and clashed with the ions from the anti-foglet gun. But its energy was starting to run out, and she was watching in horror as its digital counter rapidly approached zero. She was still trying as best as she could to repel the nanorobots, but they came from everywhere, trying to get past the ray. Weren't it that through her special glasses she could detect them through the magnetic fields they generated, they'd long have bored their way through her.
But as the elite of the squad she had gotten the best training the ANTI had to offer. She thought quick and acted quick. She could not use the same sophisticated technology as the Demon, but she could make use, at least of the laws of physics. And she had foreseen something the Demon had overseen: as soon as she saw that the nanorobots were holding the ray off, she diffused the ray into a wide funnel. What happened was that as the nanorobots repelled the ions, they formed a shield around her.
But any moment now the diffuse ray would vanish, and then the foglets would be upon her in a moment. And just as she imagined against her will what would be left of her body when they were done with her, she saw with a wave of panic that the counter was nearly at zero.
She closed her eyes in terror when all of a sudden there came a flash of light. But when she opened them she saw it came from beyond the light of her own nano-disperser. The Demon screamed.
Sylvan!
"Forgot all about me, had you, brother?"
The Demon fell to his knees, and gasped with an expression of such agony that Eve almost smiled.
He let out a gasp, and fell on his back on the ground. The three of them that were left went to his body at once and fired again and again until his entire body became a charred heap. It was a grisly sight: his blackened skin was corrugated everywhere. His arms looked skeletal, like there was little flesh left to the bone, and in one arm they could actually see something white stick out of his hand.
Finally satisfied that they had killed him, the let out a sigh. Now the sound of their guns had died away, they could hear just how hard they were breathing. It was like they'd just run a hundred miles.
"So…" panted Eve, "that's done it, right?"
"Just take a few photographs for the HQ," Andrew muttered, "And we're out of this goddamn place."
His hands trembling, he took the photographs, and Sylvan was contemplating the black mass that had once been his brother. It was all over, at last.
It was strange: his eyes were the least damaged of his whole body. Looking into them, he could still see the dreamy gaze of the dead…
"OK," Lancet said at last. "Let's get the hell away from here."
And off they were, leaving the Demon's body behind them in the middle of the city he had destroyed.
…
Beneath the moaning, his heavy footfalls resounded through the building.
Why have I come here?
Curiosity, he told himself. How could he help himself, but as soon as he'd entered the sanctuary, a storehouse where the population was put on life-support once retired, a cable plugged into their pleasure centers sustaining an artificial orgasm. But it felt more like an undead crypt, inhuman, zombielike moans echoing through the building. This is where they wanted everyone to end up, including himself.
"What about beauty?"
"But this is beauty! Pleasure is beauty. Beauty is just a stimulation of your reward centers, sir."
"The basic idea of our kind of beauty, sir, is that an electrode inside the brain stimulates the reward centers, such as the ventral tegmentum, mesolimbic pathway, the nucleus accumbens,…"
"The nucleus accumbens? The ‘addiction center’?"
"That's right, sir. That's how we knew it worked - when our test subjects kept wanting more and more. They couldn't get enough of it, that's how pleasurable it was. They'd have starved themselves if we'd have let them.”
"Then… if you'd put off the machines…"
"They'd go bonkers. They’re here to stay. That’s why we keep the tanks shut in case of a blackout. Not that they’d really be able to go anywhere, of course. Pleasure is the only thing their brains are still capable of producing. Scans show every region in their brain has, ah, adapted.”
“Meaning, atrophied?”
“Simplified.”
Reaching the exit, he vomited in the gutter.
…
"You idiots!" Sylvan blinked as Ermin flung the grisly photographs at him, each showing him the burnt body of his brother. He scowled back at Ermin's round balding head.
"You idiots!" he repeated. "Have you heard nothing of what I've said? What did I tell you?"
There was some silence. "You told us to ensure that he was, well, dead dead," Eve said. "Well, we did as you asked!"
"I told you to blast him to bits!" Ermin shouted.
The survivors of the squad looked at one another.
“What for? We were running lest any nanorobots were left.”
Elsewhere, nanorobots were sewing the Demon’s wounds shut.
…
As he overlooked what was left of the city, he gloated at what he'd done to it, with the same kind of satisfaction he'd always had when he'd watched the blood come out as he cut himself - but now, it was so much stronger. It felt euphoric.
He could not help erupting in long, loud laughter. It resounded around the city, the peal of his own laughter cast back to him like his image from a mirror. The echoes came back from the buildings as though they reciprocated to his laughter. The gloomy sound of its reverberation was the sole sound to be heard all around, and it made him aware of how alone he was here. His lips twitched into a grin: yes, alone with the countless corpses scattered across the streets. By now, everyone else in the city was quite dead. He laughed again.
Oh, what relief! He felt free for the first time in his life, divested at last of all the hatred that had dwelled inside him all his life: now, this hatred lay no longer in his heart, but before his eyes: it had burst out of him like flames. It had been turned into destruction.
"Oh, this is the happiest day of my life!" he spoke to himself, his dark voice oozing with the deepest sarcasm. The best joke, he thought, is that it's true. Despite the torment he had put himself through along with the world, what pleasure had come along with it - the pleasure of death. Mixed with the deepest suffering was the greatest delight: a feeling of letting go the whole of one's soul. He spit out all that was left of his sanity, that the wretched thing would leave him alone for good.
A long, long time, Arveil spent standing there and looking at what he'd done, his cloak billowing around him as he stood still at the top of one of the towers still standing. But as he did his face darkened, when he became aware of something which disturbed him. In the entire city, which had once abounded with life, there was now not a single living thing except for himself. Now, the infestation was gone - this place had been sterilized. And as far as the eye could see there was nothing but annihilation. And yet even here, not all seemed done. It felt incomplete, even though all that was left of the city was but a monument to pay tribute to death.
But above the silhouettes of its towers, the clouds were drifting by, and in the rifts between them he saw the stars twinkle. And as the sky cleared, it turned into a marvelous vista of scintillation, each star coruscating with its own quivering light. As he beheld their light, it seemed to pierce through his soul. Now every light in the city and the nearby cities was down, the sky was so clear that thousands of stars could be seen now that the smoke was gone. Before him, above the dreary ruins, lay the most beautiful sky he'd seen in years.
The stars above him were so pristine; altogether unchanged by everything he'd done and anything he'd ever do. They'd always be there in the above the planet, immune to anything any mortal could ever undertake. And he saw the meaninglessness of his work. After everything he'd done that day, the beauty of the sky above him seemed to minimize it. It felt as if everything he had done was trivialized by the vastitude of the universe he saw before him.
What was the use to end this world if there were an infinite others? He could merely rid this one single planet of life, and no more. Oh, how he'd like to undo the whole of existence; if there was a switch for existence, he could just turn it off for good. But the universe was unending. How hopeless was his quest for nothingness if everything was?
He grimaced as if in pain at the sight. He felt so exposed that it felt as if his soul was breaking down in acid. Inside, as he watched the starry night sky, his mind was dissolving in emptiness. He squeezed his eyes shut and shielded them with his eyes as though they were burning. He had to do something! This hideous sight…
He moved back inside - or what was left of inside - and turned towards a window at the other side. Here, the sky was still dark and clouded. But as he stood there and still breathed hard in agony, behind the cloud deck showed a faint white light. Arveil asked himself what it could be, and then the next moment he knew. Horrified, he watched as the clouds made space for it, his gaze seeming to be fixed to the sight in terror. And then there it was, in all its glory - a golden gibbous moon, shining so brightly that it looked as if it was made of the purest refined silver. It had often filled Arveil with a deep sense of wonder - now, it was so agonizing to him that it was too much for him to take.
He stepped back from the window and looked around, but everywhere he saw the same abominable beauty - the beauty he'd for so long been unable to appreciate, which even when it lay before him seemed unreachable, infinitely far away from him. For a moment the memories returned to him of how he'd once been overwhelmed by the beauty of the stars, and it stabbed through his heart like a thousand swords.
He fell to his knees and brought his hands to his temples as if his brains were burning. He panted rapidly, and then at once let out a horrible scream. And as he stared upward, through a large hole in the ceiling he once again saw the night sky.
Curse you, oh universe. Remaining suspended in the air, the buildings collapsed beneath his feet, and all around him the city turned into a cloud of dust, sweeping outwards to the horizons. The nanorobots spread from the surface throughout the crust sprang into motion, and faultlines appeared across the earth.
At least I’ll spare myself the sight of the universe, and the universe the sight of this planet. As the abyss swallowed up the city, ash began to spew forth from its depths.
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