The Second Age of Metal

[Academia Nut]

The call had been sent. Now it was just a matter of when it would be answered, no longer if. There remained no choice in the matter, the issue had been decided. The broad strokes were now inevitable, all that remained was to discover the fine details, no matter how long it took.

Time had ceased being an issue long ago.

[B4UTRUST]

I sat there, watching Them.

There they were again, those skittering things, clawing their way up and over my walls, on my ceiling and in it. I don't know where they kept coming from, because I was sure I hadn't let that many of them loose from me. They must have been breeding. That made sense. Everything breeds, everything reproduces. These things did too, somehow.

I watched them move, even while they watched me. I knew I had brought them here, or at least I think I did, and I wasn't sure how to get rid of them. They whispered to me, sometimes, in the night. They whispered to me in that scratchy clicking hissing language of theirs'. Unintelligent and unintelligible. But I understood them on some more basic level. They were hungry... They were always hungry; ravenous things whose appetites held no end. I could feel their eyes on me, even as I watched them moving. Their long spider-like legs being pulled into their body as their legs stepped off the wall, only to regrow from the front of them as they went to step down again.

They moved like fluid shadows, smoke, intangible things that flowed readily like liquid, graceful and elegant and full of death, of woe. Those dark empty eyes shifted across their bodies, never leaving me even as they moved, never missing a step, all their hunger directed to me, at me. I felt it, and knew what they wanted. The foods of flesh and matter would not satisfy. And in their hunger, I felt another hunger within me. They sought to feed on me, to dine as only they could, on the stuff of memories and dreams. I knew they would have me, would take from me. I felt their fangs sink into me, break open my thoughts and drain them from me. The memories of foreign countries visited as a child ripped away, of my first crush, of my first kiss. And when they were done gorging themselves upon my mind they left me, a horrible dark lover who caressed me, used me, fucked me and abandoned me when I needed them most...

That was when I felt it within me. I looked downwards to my arms and watched my skin move and crawl, as if something unseen dwelled beneath that cover of flesh. And now I knew. This was how they bred; in me. They stole from me and took from me and left me to harbor them till I let them free. I watched it crawl up the inside of my arm, skin stretched taunt, threatening to rip as it moved into my chest. I felt it, claws piercing my lungs, my heart, red hot needles of pain shoved through me, only to pass quickly as it dug its way into my other arm.

I went to the kitchen and there found what I needed. I watched my flesh move as it moved. I could hear it in my head, that strange language filling my mind as it wanted me to let it free. I pressed the cool blade against my skin and pressed downwards. My skin parted, stretched as it clawed its way free from me. I watched it birth itself from my flesh and skitter away to join its fellows.

I felt light headed. Giving birth to these things always wore me out, made me sleepy and cold, as if I had used parts of myself to make them within me. I never understood how, or why, but there they were, running around my body like it was a NASCAR track. I knew that the rest would want free too. It would be so much easier to let them all out at once. One more press of the blade gave them an opening in my body big enough to do that...

[rhoenix]

I felt so tired then, but I knew it didn't matter.

The enemy which we faced had found a way to reset the world into a world where other possibilities had occurred, possibilities he'd prefer happen rather than the silly human progress we've made on accident so far. Both he and I knew that while I agreed with him on almost all his points, I still couldn't let him do it. Even if it meant I'd never get to see the results.

With my friends and allies at my side, we fought valiantly and unflinchingly. The battle was brutal, with no breaths for pause, so fierce was the fight. Dust rose from the ground at our efforts just as blood fell to the ground from the same. The strange place that was our battleground was the crossroads of reality, he'd said.

I think he knew he wouldn't be able to do it. I think he knew we'd stop him before he could pull it off. But, he tried anyway, since that was his path, now - it's what he had committed himself to. For a soldier, that's a powerful thing, particularly one who'd served in the Japanese military. Even if that cause was revealed to be flawed, incorrect, and wrong, he'd still follow through with it - because it was his path.

I unleashed Amon for this battle. I felt Amon coalescing out of me, I felt my body seem to become light before it became Amon, standing tall. With Amon's power, with the determination of those who fought at my side, we took him down.

But, then the curse claimed me, as the adrenaline began to fade from my bloodstream, as I released Amon back into the depths of the Graveyard of my mind, watching the world around me seem to become more ghostly, watching my friends shouting and pointing at me, growing smaller - I realized that I was the one who was rising into the light above, and fading away as if a breeze.

This is the fate of a Godslayer, it seems. I claimed the power of some of the gods themselves, proved myself worthy of using their strength, and I used it to prevent one cataclysm by causing another one, twice now. And now, here at the end, here I fade into nothingness, into the featureless grey mists that now surround me. I can no longer see any remaining bit of my body, but if I concentrate, I can remember what an arm looked like in my jacket with the tiger claw made of starmetal atop it for quick-release in a fight.

The time for vicious assaults was now at an end. The Harmonixers were perhaps too...dramatic for the world now. Despite the advent of civilization, Harmonixers reminded those who knew of them that there were still dark things in the world, things that should remain only in cutesy fairy tales.

I felt myself letting go, happily, willingly. I've done my part. Now I can rest.

[Academia Nut]

There was nothing. Then there was something, one thing.

There was a tiny, tinny buzzing noise, like a sound sped up to the point where it was no longer discernable to the ear. Slowly, ever so slowly, it grew louder and more structured. As its volume grew it became evident that whatever the noise was, it was slowing down, its frequency shifting down into a range audible to humans. Still, for the most part the buzzing was just... maddening, nails drawn across a blackboard, high pitched and devoid of meaning.

pesrmiclpesrmiclpesrmicl
pleseeminalplasreaicampeaermanclm
pleaseremaincalmpleaseremaincalmpleaseremaincalm

please remain calm please remain calm please remain calm

Please remain calm.

Over and over the phrase repeated, driving the listeners mad despite its requests to behave otherwise. Finally when it reached an appropriate tone it ceased, and sound was replaced by other sensations.

Warmth and wetness and a lack of discernable pressure. Warmth, the temperature of the human body. Wetness, thick and viscous. No discernable pressure, more than just floating, but floating with simultaneous suspension. As they became aware of their bodies and their limbs they discovered that if they attempted to move there wre restraints that bound them, that kept them beneath the surface of the liquid. It was like being wrapped up and dropped in a container of freshly shed, partially congealed blood, floating just beneath the surface.

They could not see, they could only hear and feel. They could hear the slight whir of machinery and motion within the liquid, and they could feel... feel...

It was like having a multi-metre long parasitic worm pulled from out of a large vein just beneath the skin, only happening simultaneously across a dozen places on their body. They could feel the retreating ends of the things exitting them caressing the insides of their bodies, sliding away from the heart, lungs, gut, and brain. It was an intensely unpleasant, if painless, sensation.

At around that point the large tube shoved down their throats became evident, as it too began to retract, first a fractal section shoved deep into their lungs drawing out via the nostril while another branch that had resided somewhere in their duodenum exitted from the . Again, there was no pain associated with the process, but a long suppressed gag reflex came to the fore, trying to expediate the process of removal but unable to do so as the restraints allowed no unpermitted movement. They were tight enough that they did not even allow enough room to breath.

As the last of the tube slipped past their jaws, the fluid descended past their noses and lips, such that that they did not inhale any of it. Open air caressed their skin for the first time, causing the eruption of gooseflesh as the warm liquid was replaced with cool atmosphere.

At that point the now quite evidently tight restraints began to release, allowing each man to autonomically inhale deeply, filling their lungs with life giving oxygen. The nature of their exhalations were up to them though, especially as the straps that restrained their heads loosened, giving back to them sight.

Each man was alone, in a 4x4x8 box faintly illuminated from nowhere and everywhere by a cold, blue light. Smooth, hard, featureless plastic surrounded them on all sides, giving no indication as to where the tubes that had penetrated them and the restraints that mummified them had come from, nor where the liquid that had enveloped them had gone.

After but a moment the lid of the sarcophagi that contained them slid open, revealing to each man their own private tomb. The same faint blue light suffused the air, seemingly coming from the walls without any particular point to definitively say where it actually originated from.

The walls, ceiling and floor were covered in strange glyphs and unknown yet strangely familiar, oddly expressive geometric designs that were often repeated, interconnecting circuit diagrams with no known symbols. Around the walls but not actually touching them were smooth, featureless rectangular boxes with no readily apparent function. And array about the sarcophagus each man woke up in were... statues. Horrid things, humanoid in basic shape but not in the details, things whose moulds had been carved from nightmares and then cast in dull, matte metal.

At some point each man also discovered that their limbs, and by extension their bodies were not their own. They were deathly pale, albino things, their veins and arteries showing up darkly beneath their nearly translucent skin. Their muscles were horrifically atrophied, their flesh practically hanging off their bones, and even the proportions of their skeletons seemed off.

[rhoenix]

As the...tubes receded, Yuri thought inanely that he had lost his struggle long ago, and was now trapped in that one Chinese scientist's lab - but the surroundings were wrong. There weren't blood-spattered white tile walls, there weren't screams echoing from various floors of the tower, sounding like a mad symphony of pain in the dark.

No, this was worse.

As his eyes adjusted to his surroundings (it was almost as if...these eyes had never been used before, which was a disquieting thought), he saw grey statues around him. Worse yet, he had only ever seen these faces and figures in the Graveyard, locked deep within his own mind - or so he thought.

Though made of a dull grey substance, the statue of Amon was instantly recognizable. The tall, muscular figure was frozen into a crouch, the large, clawed hands sunken into whatever passed for ground here, its face the same glaring expression he knew, and its wings - its huge bat-like wings were wrapped around it - but it didn't move. The slumbering creature powerful enough to resist and combat the powers of a god - and it was now locked, motionless, slumbering once more.

Nearby was a voluptuous woman's figure with huge feathered wings sprouting from the sides of her head, her gigantic mouth full of shark-like teeth open wide, as if preparing to take a bite of the world itself. Yuri knew this one well - this was how the Seraphic Radiance looked as it began to destroy Shanghai, those years ago - before he had somehow defeated it, slipping into a coma in the process. This being had been within him ever since - and it was only right before his last journey to take down he who would be a god permanently that he at last tried to claim her power. His friends always described him as looking dark, angelic, but still himself when he assumed her form - looking nothing like that huge, terrifyingly unearthly creature who had begun to destroy a city with fire and storms in the mad enthusiasm of being freed from her prison at long last. Seeing this creature here now, alongside Amon, Yuri began to wonder exactly what was going on.

Behind those two were the six Elementals that Yuri had carefully gained the power of, one by one - they were the ones who had helped him reach and defeat Amon, and survive most of the things the world had thrown at him, twice now. The strongest Fire elemental, looking like a powerful armored fire demon holding a greatsword coursing with blue flames; the eldest Earth elemental, resembling a great bear with chitinous armor and great silver claws; the most ancient Water elemental, resembling a great serpentine water dragon in the rain; the wisest Wind elemental, resembling a cross between a dragon and a hummingbird, so quickly did it move; the most resilient Light elemental, resembling a glowing white humanoid figure with golden wings, whose very touch could cure the most virulent poison or most horrible disease; and the most conflicted Dark elemental, which resembled a combination of all the horror stories one had been told about demons of nightmare and Hellish places, whose very presence caused widespread panic and unreasoning terror.

All six were there, frozen in a greyish stone-like substance, just as he was tightly bound in this...transparent prison illuminated by blue, as if in contrast to the blood-like substance from shortly before, and some indeterminate time after he'd died. He'd been brought back forcefully, and was being confronted by things he'd never told anyone else about, except Alice. Well, and except Roger Bacon, but then again that little ancient imp seemed to know damn near everything anyway.

But here..."here" was a mystery, among many others immediately apparent.

[Academia Nut]

The statues were still and silent before Yuri, unwilling to answer what their presence actually entailed, why they were here. Was this his grave, where he had been entombed for countless centuries, the statues erected to honour his victories? But, no, that did not make sense. Some of these images were his and his alone. Who could have carved them, or rather in the case of the statues, have cast them?

The symbols on the floor about the sarcophagus he found himself offered up perhaps a few clues, for it seemed that many of the more geometric of the designs created a general pattern that might suggest some form of barrier around the sarcophagus. But was it to keep him in or to keep something else out.

Other symbols however offered up tantalizing clues for they seemed achingly familiar yet alien in several senses. They almost looked like a weird mishmash of European alphabets with a few Japanese...ish... possibly Chinese symbols thrown in seemingly as punctuation. On the immediate surface it almost hurt to look at them because possible meanings danced just beneath the surface of the gibberish, but there was also a subconscious knowing of the symbols.

But just looking at it, it was just like any other alphabet: lines and dots.
__adsf_$%^#@+___[size=0]..as/:~52tuwe@1nmadl]]]^*___[/size]///`]__***
[size=0]That which is dead may eternal lie,
and in strange aeons even death may die[/size]$!...--/lk1~v}3df&&3234...[size=0]fg8##!@##$%&^$@#$!@#$#!#
%7312~~~///___[/size]@$%^!#$%bkv!/\z^^^4235[size=0]~'/|\'~[/size]

[B4UTRUST]

I awoke frozen in an moment of time unending. Dark bodies surrounded me floating in that darkness, with no sight of light ever given.

I attempted to move, to look, to peer further into that impenetrable darkness, but found myself unable to, held captive by some unseen force, a death grip upon me with unfelt hands holding tight to the nothingness that I must surely be in this eternal night. And I then realized I had no memory of how I ever got here, or even where I was. Imprisoned in this world without memory.

Unconscious or am I conscious. Torn from my life I must surely be dead, be damned. This is my fear. Trapped, and bound eternally, eternally bound, eternally in this great nothingness, held captive by nothing and left with nothing but my thoughts, my screams. Every corpse I had ever had whisper maddening thoughts to me as I walked through cemetaries told me of this, begged me to free them from this very thing, this hellish nightmare existance of an eternity alone without anyone to talk to or see. Buried, forgotten, words whispered above shattered lifeless bodies that still contained their intelligences and slowly went mad throughout the decades...

Then I felt them moving in me once more. Something sharp and deadly, filling me with that darkness and life and all the sweet nothings that only death offers. Jerked free, their cold clinical embrace left me, leaving me feeling empty for my skittering friends and knowing that they weren't that far gone...

The darkness was leaving me too. Everything, everyone left me in the end. Nothing was real, permanent. It was all an ever changing thing, my life, full of surprise and newness that never let anything get old. That saddened me sometimes. That I could never hold onto anything. It was all fluid, dynamic, a million miles an hour. Just like now.

Those darkened invisible hands released me and suddenly I was able to see again. The wrath of a brilliant sun flared to life all around me, surrounding me. I tried to touch the sun but the brightness burned my eyes, blinded me.

Unconcious, or am I concious. Alive or dead. Burning in Hell, frozen in Heaven? My eyes were stabbed with needles of light as they fought to adjust to the blue illuminance of my resting place. Smooth and unmarked, unfeatured and all the more brilliant for it. I was trapped in a still sea of nothingness, that aweful blue light surrounding me, engulfing me and soon to be consuming me I think.

When the lid opened I fell forward and outwards. I fell the sky like a star, sure that my passing left trails of azure and cobalt in its wake. I landed hard and rough on the smooth surface of my tomb, for thats what this place must surely be. The same pale sapphire luminence came from the walls, the floor, the ceiling, highlighting horrible glyphs and sigals that seemed to squirm and twist beneath my gaze, crawling into my brain and tearing themselves new homes within.

I slowly turned in place, looking at the strangely marked tomb I had awoken to. And then I saw them. The statues, if thats what they were suppose to be, writhed and flowed, moving in that slow graceful way one has in the water. Tentacles twitched and oozed along through the air in a slow dance as mouths snapped open and show, letting forth growls of rage and disgust. They were cruel things, weird things. Beyond definition of words as if trying to hold them to those letters would lessen them, take something away from their magnificence and horror. They were things of far to many eyes and not enough. Of creeping flesh and bone, oozing dark fluids around razor-sharp claws. And all those eyes contained a dark and malign intelligence to them, filled with that cold knowledge that I was nothing to them, and they were everything. I knew not what they are or once were, save that they were old things that spoke do a distant part of my mind, whispering damning words of insight and madness to me, dark secrets that should never be known. And part of my understood that they were a part of me. Their lies and secrets and lores spoke to that darkness that had creeped into my heart following her leaving and had taken residence there.

Even as I looked down at myself I knew this axiom. They were a part of me as much as I was a part of them. My flesh was pale and weak, hanging loose about my bones. My friends the spider-things, those damnedable things had bred me and fucked me and fed from me until they had consumed me. My empty flesh felt wrong around me, an ill-fitting set of clothes that should have been discarded. Which I suppose they did when they abandoned me and had used me all up, left me empty. But even as I thought these things i knew it wasn't true. I could feel then in me, burrowing deeper into the darkest parts of me where they would grow and claw their way out once more.

[Academia Nut]

As the men feebly explored the weird rooms with their pale, emaciated bodies, a certain peculiar sensation began to scratch at their minds. It was almost like the noise of rats or mice clawing and gnawing upon the wood within the walls... but the walls here were all metal and were suffused with a soft blue light.

The boxes? The statues? Or within their own minds? Where was it coming from? What had been sealed into their tombs with them?

[rhoenix]

Looking around, Yuri was increasingly annoyed by the symbols, and the utter lack of sense they made. So, he ignored them for now, and stretched to get life back in his limbs...a second time.

The...sensation that there was scratching, scrabbling, gnawing nearby was somewhat maddening in its intensity. Slowly walking over to the statue of Amon, Yuri tried to see if those things, frozen as statues, were tormenting him as they usually did before he gained mastery over them.

[Academia Nut]

[size=0]Release[/size]

Yuri gazed at the face of Amon, frozen in metal. How long had that face stared out at this room, this unchanging tomb? How long had he stood guard over the strange sarcophagus Yuri had awoken to?

[size=0]Release[/size]

Approaching more closely, the scratching and scrabbling became more insistent, more incessant, almost as if Yuri brought his ear to Amon's lips he could hear the words being whispered by the unmoving statue. As he approached, he also noticed that the dull metal was also inscribed by tiny symbols eerily similar to those that adorned the walls of the tomb. They were only visible up close, with the nose practically pressing against the statue they were so small and fine.

[size=0]Release[/size]

Looking at the statue, there was a half remembered... something. To call it a memory was to give it to much substance. A memory of a dream perhaps? It was incongrous, and impossible, of Amon kneeling obediently before him while a city burned in the background. Yuri was saying something, but no reminiscence of words reached his ears.

Release

[rhoenix]

Release, the dream's words seemed to say.

Yuri may be brash, but hard experience had taught him to not be too brash. The vision...of Amon as his servant while cities burned - all this was well within the abilities of Amon. But this was why Yuri was glad at this moment that he was a Harmonixer - that he could defeat and hold these horrors back from the world. It was his contribution to the cause of good and justice, he supposed, locking all of these horrors away within himself so that they couldn't wreak havoc within the world. Just within his own soul.

However, he'd saved the world as he knew it, twice over now. The first was an event few would remember, and the second nobody would. His very existence had become a loop in time, ending and beginning with the instant he and Susano-O slew one another. With Karin...sweet, redhaired, buxom, five foot eight of luscious German officer Karin as the woman he'd almost given his heart to, even after Alice those years ago - but he'd found out the cruel truth. That Karin Goebel had become the "Russian" lady his father had fallen in love with, giving birth to him, and knowing the whole time what her fate would be - destined to die protecting him as a boy from bandits, and dying.

"Release," his voice didn't say.

He'd now given everything he had to help save a world he didn't feel like he belonged in. Mostly because he had little better to do, and a whole lot worse he could be doing.

"Release," his voice didn't say yet. His jaw clenched in anger, and it reminded him how frail this body of his was right now.

Yuri was tired of fate playing with him. If it meant he'd command the horrors within him to do his bidding, so be it.

"Amon," a cracked, sandpapery voice he barely recognized as his own said, "I release you."

[Academia Nut]

Thank you master a voice said in his mind as the metal seemed to relax ever so slightly before the statue came free from its base and with a slow, fluid step, the creature took a step down before kneeling like a vassal before Yuri.

It then asked in a voice that was not Amon's, a voice that sounded of metal and lightning, "How long have we slumbered master?"

[size=0]You don't know this language[/size]